PC

8 Free Apps to Boost Your Online Productivity

Ashley Marcin — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 19:00:09 +0000

I feel fortunate to be in my thirties. In my opinion, it's the sweet spot for all things related to technology. I'm old enough to remember life before computers took over entirely. Yet, I'm young enough to quickly adapt and learn new things that make my life happier and more productive. No matter your age, however, you could be using your computer (and time) more effectively and efficiently. (See also: 6 Tools That Stop Computer Distractions and Keep You on Task)

Here are some free applications you can download today to do just that.

1. Inbox Tamer

There's no greater distraction than those little email notifications popping up at the bottom of your screen. I used to waste a lot of time checking email whenever I'd get anything new. Eventually, I tried closing the application entirely, only to find I'd forget to check and miss important messages. Well, now there's Inbox Pause, which delays the notifications so they won't interrupt your workflow.

2. Social Director

There are a lot of tools out there to block social media and other programs while you work, but Cold Turkey happens to be free. You can even customize the settings to block certain pages during certain activities through specific groupings. There are upgraded versions with scheduling capabilities, the power to identify certain users (for parents), etc. — but the basic version gets the job done.

3. Blue Light Blocker

I downloaded f.lux just last month, and I already see it's the beginning of a beautiful relationship. The software makes the colors on your screen adapt to the time of day. If it's late and nearing bedtime, it'll filter out the blue light, which can disrupt sleep patterns, and replace it with an amber glow. You can customize how little or much you want your display to shift, but I'm already falling asleep much faster after firing off articles before my head hits the pillow.

4. Message Wrangler

If you use Gmail, Boomerang is your new best friend. It lets you draft messages now and schedule to send later. It reminds you if you don't hear back on that important email you sent last week. And it even lets you clear out your inbox — and mind — temporarily and return the messages when you're ready to read them.

5. Time Tracker

Do you know how you're spending your time on the computer? RescueTime can make it a lot easier to track. The Lite version (it's free) enables you to record your time on websites and in different applications and set goals for yourself. The application also provides you with a weekly email report of your progress (or lack thereof).

6. Program Launcher

Have you ever wanted to open your programs with just a few keystrokes? Launchy lets you do just that. You'll forget about your menu, the icons cluttering your desktop, and even your file manager with this smart application. With over 120K users, I'd say it's working well for the masses.

7. Image Manipulator

Can't afford the leading image manipulation software? Try GIMP for your photo retouching needs. You can paint, add text, create layers, rotate, scale, and much more. This application will save you time on creating images for your presentations and give you some powerful tools for personal use as well.

8. Password Keeper

Over time, all those passwords can get quite hard generate and remember. And keeping them in a book next to your laptop isn't exactly convenient — or safe. Enter LastPass — the last password you'll need to remember. The application manages all your login information for different sites and autofills for you. You can even streamline your online shopping experience by setting up secure payment accounts. Best of all, LastPass helps create unique passwords that follow the best security practices.

What's your favorite (and free!) computer productivity hack? Please share in comments!

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This article is from Ashley Marcin of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

6 Easy Ways to Spring Clean Your PC

Linsey Knerl — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:06:31 +0000

With all the hustle and bustle of the new season, it may be easy to forget about one important item in your home that could really benefit from a good spring cleaning — your PC! Before you go another day with clutter or dirt dragging your performance down, check out two of the six tips we shared at My LifeScoop to help you clean up your act!

Clean That Screen

Don't wait until a stranger at the airport asks about the menacing blob on your laptop screen before you do something about it. Take time weekly to shine it up the right way: Mix ½ part distilled water and ½ part white vinegar for an affordable alternative to the store-bought stuff. Spray a clean rag (old T-shirts work well) lightly with the solution. With your PC turned off and disconnected from an outlet, gently buff the screen until all the gunk is gone. (Note: Plasmas may have special considerations to prevent voiding the manufacturer's warranty. Consult the manual for the details.)

Trim the Temporary

Every time you visit a website, your browser may be holding on to various files and data paths that you'll probably never need again — and each of these can take up valuable space on your computer. If you cruise the web often (more than an hour or so a day), get into the habit of clearing all temp files, cookies, and cached pages at least once a week. Each browser will have slightly different methods for getting the job done, but most likely you'll find a "Tools" drop down from your browser command bar that can get you headed in the right direction. (Google searches for the name of your browser and either "Delete Files," "Delete Cookies" or "Clear Private Data" should get you adequate info to do the job right.)

Looking to finish the job? We have all the tips in one place (including a nifty how-to video), over at the full My LifeScoop article.

This article is from Linsey Knerl of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

The Make You Wanna Holla Presentation

Jabulani Leffall — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:36:49 +0000

I can't speak coherently and I can't write at all -- let alone stay on topic.

Subsequently, I’m already prepared for the electronic picket signs and the “haterific” rants about selling out, wasting time or "dummy-it’s-called-an-I-pod" responses.

Or maybe I’m just feeling myself and the readers of this post may indeed have imbibed their “acc-rite jooce,” before reading this, in which case I have nothing to worry about.

Today’s subject, kiddies, is how to throw a boss summer patio party or eclectic dinner party in the technological age - I mean really do it up – without digging in the crates.

It occurred to me, shortly after myself and a then prospective female No. 1 companion were exchanging YouTube links and trading songs via e-mail. It was a veritable, “well, what do you know about this," contest where she hit me with everything from the soul stylings of Tyrone Davis to old recordings of Chicago and Muddy Waters. I put her up on Average White Band and hard-to-find Isley Brothers recordings as well as grooves from Marvin Gaye she never heard. Gotta love technology and what Roger Troutman would call "Computer love."

The metaphoric Sylvania danced above my head. Party Time.

The ingredients: a PC or MAC – laptop or desktop will do -- with a plug-in port for a large LCD screen or an up-to-date TV set and Internet access.

I’m not inventing the wheel or even thinking up an original idea here but why get a Bose wave radio and thumb through your I-pod. Like the man James Brown says, “get involved, get into it.”

You can go from Beethoven to Coltrane to Snoop Dogg to Eric Clapton with a quick search without digging in the crates, calling XM Radio tech support or getting carpal tunnel syndrome setting up random music joints on a CD changer because the disc holder decided it doesn’t want to slide out for you.

Three keys to a YouTube party.

1) One-Upmanship is the key. Find a unifying theme (i.e. Jazz Night, Vanilla Ice, Retrospective, Tantra, uh John Tesh anyone? ) Have fun wowing and surprising each other.

2) B.Y.O.D (Bring your own document with the links to your jams already in it -- Excel and Word files will do).

3) Rotate, Rinse Repeat: (The host should have a list, where they designate a typist for 20 minute intervals to jot down their own jams. This is wilding out interactive style to elicit groans or “oh snap” reactions).

For you dweebie html-jocky hipsters who wear Converse All-Stars with tweed thrift shop pants (don't trip, I love the pants), here’s how you can save your links and embed them for repeated use in a prepared file.

In a realm where the DJ is dead and many spend more time texting and e-mailing than talking, defeat the Borg with a little bit of imagination. Plus if you've got your joint on a reliably-fast free wireless network, it costs no money me hearties.

Have fun, but just don’t let me see anymore headlines like this: Family beaten after YouTube party invitation. That situation -- where a “teenager was airlifted to hospital and his father left with a broken nose after 100 teenagers gate-crashed a party where an invitation appeared on YouTube – was unfortunate.War is not the answer, only love can conquer hate. That’s Marvin from the 1971 title track to the seminal soul album “What’s going on?” You might want to get your game right before you try this at home.

This article is from Jabulani Leffall of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Quick Vista Hack to Get You Browsing at High-Speed Again

Linsey Knerl — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:00:58 +0000

I’m not a Windows Vista fan. In fact, my new PC runs on XP, but uses OpenSource applications for most of my business needs. So why do I even care about a trick to get sluggish Vista browsing back to an acceptable speed? My mom uses Vista, and I love my mom.

I’m also no techie, so I’ll preface this piece by acknowledging that this won’t work for everyone. There are lots of reasons why Vista is a good choice for some; my mom has few qualms with the operating system, and I’ve even adjusted to using her PC for quick tasks when I’m away from home. One thing that just wouldn’t do for me or my mother, however, was the horribly slow browsing in Vista. Sites that should have taken little time to load were met with the white screen of death, or a notoriously lingering blue circle that signaled the page was still loading. A check of the connection supported my theory that it wasn’t anything else but Vista. Here’s how we fixed it – for good.

PC Magazine’s May 2008 issue held the key to our problems. Its Ask Neil column featured our problem, and the answer was simple: Disable Vista’s “Auto-Tuning” feature, which may not be (in our case it wasn’t) compatible with certain routers and networking devices. To turn it off:

At the Start menu type command, but don’t immediately launch the command prompt. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Type this command:

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If this doesn’t help, do the whole process again, but this time substitute this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

Viola! You should be cruising now! (By the way, I had to go through the whole process, using the last command to get it going good.) If it works, you should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If it doesn’t work for you, and you feel the need to put things back the way they were, you can type this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Good luck, Vista users! (And if you’re looking for some additional reading, check out all the green topics covered in this month’s issue of PC Magazine!)

This article is from Linsey Knerl of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Boost your computer's RAM in seconds. Very easy.

Paul Michael — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 07:28:32 +0000

This may sound like a tech-heavy article but trust me, it's not. My own technophobic dad could do this one (and he'd better after I tell him). All you need is the good old Notepad accessory and, let's say, about 30 seconds of your time. Ready? Let's begin.

First up, why do you need a RAM booster? Well, it's not so much a question of why because we all want a faster PC. This is more a question of when. If you've been running a large application (or several large applications, maybe a game, Photoshop, something like that) the RAM can get taken up quickly. Even when you close down these programs, RAM can still be eaten-up.

You'll notice this effect at the end of the day. When you first power-up your PC it's running smoothly, by the end of the day it's as sluggish as teenager who's just eaten a whole pizza. Now, you can get various applications to solve this. Some cost a little, some cost a lot. But personally, I like free. Especially when that free is really quick and easy.

So, here's what you need to do. It works for both Vista and XP.

Step One: Open up Notepad (it's in Accessories)

Step Two: Type in MYSTRING=(80000000)

Step Three: Save the file as MEMORY.VBE (or RAM.VBE if you like...just remember the .VBE)

Step Four: Make sure you save the file to your DESKTOP.

Step Five: Just double-click the newly created file on your desktop whenever your PC seems sluggish. It will give your RAM a much needed boost.

If you have less than 128mb of RAM (is that possible these days?) change the 80000000 to 160000000 and it should work the same.

That's it. Quick, simple and a real time-saver. By the way, don't ask me how it works, I have absolutely no idea. A close friend far smarter than myself gave me the tip. I tried it, it worked like a charm. Let's go to work.

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This article is from Paul Michael of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Build your own computer...submerged in oil.

Paul Michael — Sun, 13 May 2007 18:09:41 +0000

It's one thing to build a PC. Pah, everyone's doing that. But imagine the look on your friends' faces when you show them a computer in an aquarium filled with mineral oil. I'm still taken back by it, and I've seen the video...twice.

This all came from a post I did recently on case mods . I found the article but just couldn't bear to let this one sit in with the other modfications. It's just way too cool.

WHY AN OIL-COOLED COMPUTER?

Apart from looking ace, the guys with the huge brains over at Puget Systems explain it all here in their own words...

"We built this system because with all the oil cooled projects out there, no one built a system that looked good and functioned well! After seeing all the other projects, we had a lot of ideas of how we could do it better and more easily. Many projects used vegetable oil, which would go rancid after a short time. The mineral oil does not have this problem, and is completely clear. We also wanted to use an appropriate enclosure -- the Toms Hardware system used a clear acrylic case, and they had to painstakingly seal each rear connector to keep the oil from leaking. We wanted to put the ports on top to solve that problem the simple way. Other people have built systems in aquariums before, but they were always oversized and square. When we found the Eclipse System 6 Aquarium, we were excited to see an aquarium that was absolutely perfect in size -- you couldn't go any smaller. In addition, we had questions about performance and long term effects. Our initial tests, which we go over below, answer the questions about cooling performance. We'll post a follow up to this page in a few months to let you know how a system like this performs in the long term."

Equipment needed is standard (apart from the fish tank and mineral oil). Everything you need to know is on the Puget Systems site. So, without without further ado I present the 'Making Of' video...awesome. And if that's not enough, Fat Boy Slim's Weapon Of Choice accompanies. Double-good taste.

This article is from Paul Michael of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: