Tommy Nation

You just formatted your Dell laptop and popped in that nice little Recovery CD, only to find your computer full of all kinds of crap you never asked for?

Maybe you will like PC Decrapifier - a handy little app that picks up the trash and takes it out for you too.

PC Decrapifier scans your computer and presents you with a list of highly lightly candidates for removal. You select what you want to remove and what you want to keep, and just like that - the crap is gone!

Click here to download PC Decrapifier (external link).

There’s a lot of different tricks and tools that are supposed to improve website loading times in Firefox, but whether they really make a difference or not is often hard to tell.

There are exceptions however, so follow the directions below to make your pages display faster in Firefox as they are loading:

1. In the address bar (where you type in website addresses), type “about:config” and hit Enter to access the hidden settings menu in Firefox.
2. In the “Filter:” field, type “network.prefetch”.
3. Right click the line that says “network.prefecth-next” and click “Toggle”.

If you’re so lucky to have an external hard disk drive that connects to your computer through USB / USB 2.0, then you can get increased performance from your hard disk in Windows Vista. This is because Vista treats your external drive differently than a FireWire (IEEE1394) or eSATA-connected drive, rather more like a USB pendrive. By switching off a feature called “Write Caching” might work swell for a thumdrive, it seriously hampers the performance of your external USB hard disk. Here’s how to disable write caching for your USB hard disk:

1. In Windows Vista, first click on “Start”, bringing up the Start menu.
2. Right-click “My computer” and select “Manage”.
3. On the left-hand menu, click “Device Manager”.
4. Locate your external hard disk drive in the list.
5. Right-click your disk and select “Properties”.
6. Click the “Policies”-pane and check “Optimize for performance” and “Enable advanced performance”.
7. Reboot your computer!

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AnyDVD HD enables you to watch your HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies region-free and over a digital display connection without HDCP compliant graphics card and HDCP compliant monitor or flatscreen TV.

The creators of AnyDVD recently released a new version of AnyDVD HD which enables support for movies with the latest security measures, such as the Transformers HD-DVD, as well as touting the ability to ”Playback your discs on your PC with PowerDVD Ultra, which otherwise do not run (titles released by Studio Canal, The Weinstein Company, Kinowelt, Optimum Releasing)”, as one of the key selling points of their latest version.

Probably the most popular feature however, is decryption of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies. This enables ripping your movie titles for safe storage or to convert them into smaller size portable versions.

Click here to download the latest version of AnyDVD HD (beta) from Free-Codecs.com.

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Right click on the shortcut for Windows Media Player 11 and click on ’Properties’. In the ‘Target’ field, after the ” ends, type ‘/Task NowPlaying’ (without the single quotes).

Example: If the shortcut looks like ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Prefetch:1] change it to ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Task NowPlaying].

How to mark a partition as active using the Windows interface:

1. Open Computer Management (Local)

2. In the console tree, click Disk Management.

Where?
Computer Management (Local) > Storage > Disk Management

3. Right-click the primary partition you want to mark as active, and then click Mark Partition as Active.

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If you managed to go into Disk Management in Windows XP and somehow click “Mark Partition as Active” accidentally, this could render your computer unbootable. If you are so lucky that you haven’t rebooted yet, here is one possible solution to the problem: mark the partition as inactive using the DISKPART tool:

1.  Open up a command prompt and type DISKPART.
2. Type LIST DISK
3. Type SELECT DISK n (where n is the number of the old Win98 drive)
4. Type LIST PARTITION
5. Type SELECT PARTITION n (where n is the number of the active partition you wish to make inactive)
6. Type INACTIVE
7. Type EXIT to exit DISKPART
8. Type EXIT again to exit the command prompt
9. Reboot

If you have problems booting your computer or the above approach didn’t work for you, you could also try what Microsoft suggests on their help page entitled The computer does not start after you change the active partition by using the Disk Management tool - external link, opens in new window. For your convenience, the content of that page is reproduced below:

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