News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
System Information for Windows tells you most everything about your Windows computer. It’s free for personal use. I suggest selecting the “Secrets” option at the bottom of the “Software” section—you may be surprised at what it uncovers.
Link: http://www.gtopala.com/
(via Lifehacker)
Friday, November 28th is the biggest shopping day of the year. Now you can plan ahead and find the best deals, at BlackFriday.info. The last time I did a Black Friday sale, I arrived at about 6:00am only to find over a hundred people waiting in line already. By the time I got inside the store, they’d run out of the hard drives I’d intended to purchase.
Link: http://www.blackfriday.info/
(via Lifehacker)
Here’s a neat tip—store a spare car key underneath your license plate, using one of the license plate screws to secure it. Sounds better than those magnetic holders.
Link: http://consumerist.com/…
US citizens are entitled to a free yearly credit report from the three major credit reporting agencies. The official site for this is www.AnnualCreditReport.com. Do not confuse this with www.FreeCreditReport.com, which tries its best to separate you from your money.
Link: http://consumerist.com/…
These days, nearly every network adapter has an associated number called a MAC address. This number is (almost always) unique and is defined in the network card hardware—making it permanent and unchangeable. Thus one aspect of wireless network security is to only allow access to devices with specific MAC addresses. And while this is a good practice, it will not keep out a determined hacker. Despite what I wrote above, MAC addresses can be easily spoofed at the operating system level. The linked article explains how to do it in Windows. This is another reason why there is no such thing as total network security without encryption (and even then, it has to be the right type of encryption).
Link: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
Mental Floss is holding a contest for students, where five winners will each receive $10,000 to be applied towards tuition. Even if you’re not eligible for the prize, the site is one that I regularly read and recommend.
Here at the Chad’s News network command center we’ve read lots of online articles that list various performance tweaks for Windows—and we’ve even implemented a few. Turns out that not all of them actually increase performance.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
The linked article has a nice list of add-ons for Windows Explorer. I really like the one that adds tabs.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Web designers have long known better than to use the annoying tag (or even its CSS counterpart). But there are some not-so-good designers who seem to consider the <BLINK> tag to be an elegant and forceful statement. Fortunately the linked article tells how to configure Firefox such that blinking text is disabled.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
The linked article describes various ways to safely clean LCD monitor screens. It was written in response to a situation where grandkids used permanent markers to draw on a monitor.
Link: http://www.komando.com/…
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we plan to continue using Windows XP for a long, long time. But we recognize that some people have purchased new equipment and are pretty much forced to use Windows Vista. The linked article has some nice tips for making Vista less annoying.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
The linked site has a huge library of user’s manuals that you can download and print. For those so inclined, you can also upload documents.
Link: http://safemanuals.com/
(via Kim Komando)
