With the increased use of digital cameras as well as the cameras that are in smart phones, there is a need for photo editing software to take these snapshots and turn them into great photographs.
Luckily there are a number of free software programs that are currently available. These give the user a wide variety of ways to tweak and manage the photos that they take.
Spam, unsolicited e-mail, junk e-mail — whatever you want to call it, has become the scourge of the Internet and a frequent complaint of Internet users. Not only is it time-consuming and annoying, it is an expensive and even potentially dangerous problem for individuals and businesses.
Microsoft has dominated for a long time, but there are some new alternative office suites available. The world of freeware and open source applications has grown.
There are now lots of alternatives that allow users to create documents, databases, and spreadsheets at lower costs. Many of the applications are free. It’s a growing trend for uses that are no longer interested in Microsoft Office Suites.
Finding a way to delete locked files on my Microsoft Windows system has always been a pain. I usually have many programs running on my computer at any given time. At some point I may need to delete a file that is in use by one of the programs, and Windows doesn’t easily provide a method to delete locked files.
A few years ago I stumbled across a small, free application that has helped me to unlock files in Windows so that I can delete those files. The best part about this free application is that it is also easy to use, and seems to have no problem with handling locked files.
I recently ran into a problem where I couldn’t open reports in a Microsoft Access database file. I have worked with Access databases for many years, but have never seen this issue before.
There are times where I use more than one computer at a time. To do this I simply use the remote desktop tool that is included with Microsoft Windows. What I didn’t know at the time, was using remote desktop tool caused the issue with my Access database
Windows 7 was a very well received Windows upgrade, but with any piece of computer software, there are things that can be changed around and tweaked to each individual user’s likes. That’s where Windows 7 tweaks come in. These are great and generally free ways to make your version the way that you want it.
There are many different ways to tweak your OS, but the ones below are all concerned with the appearance of Windows. You can change the way the system is running, but if you don’t know too much about computers then that’s best left to the experts. These tips are great ways to make your computer your own.
The main Web browser that I use frequently is Google Chrome. I have been using this browser most of the time for almost a year, and I have enjoyed using it. I find it quicker that the other browsers, the addition of the sandbox for security is great, and the fact that Google provides a new version each month is fantastic.
As with many of the major browsers that are used today, Google Chrome now supports graphics hardware acceleration. What this does is move most of the Web page graphics processing to the graphics card instead of the CPU. This reduces the CPU usage, while making the rendering of Web pages much quicker. I thought that the Chrome browser had enabled this feature by default, but to my surprise it wasn’t enabled. It is very easy to enable hardware acceleration and I outline the steps to enable the hardware acceleration, as well as some comparisons below.
To enable the graphics hardware acceleration in Google’s Chrome Web browser, use the following steps:
When the browser is restarted, the hardware acceleration is now enabled. You won’t be able to tell that is enabled unless you view something that can make use of the graphics hardware on your computer. Below I show you the difference between disabling and enabling this feature.
Once you enable hardware acceleration, you can search for web sites that provide test that you can run in your browser. Once such site is used by Microsoft to test Internet Explorer’s graphics hardware acceleration capabilities. This site is called Internet Explorer Test Drive and is what I used to test Chrome’s hardware acceleration capability.
For the purposes of this test, I ran it on my home desktop with the following specifications:
To test the acceleration feature, I used the FishIE tank demo under “Speed Demos” from the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Test Drive site.
I chose to use 1000 fish to display in the demo to really test out the graphics capability of the browser. The tests were run at full screen (1920×1080), but with the browser tabs and Windows taskbar, the actual test area was 1920×979. The results of the setting disabled and then enabled are shown below.
As you can see in the above image, with 1000 fish being rendered, and no hardware acceleration enabled, the CPU is pumping out only 3 FPS (frames per second). While the test was running the fish barely moved on the screen, so everything looked choppy. I then enabled hardware acceleration, the result is shown below.
Now that the rendering is being offloaded to the more powerful graphics processors, the FPS has jumped to 46, which produced a smooth animation of the fish swimming. This is a huge improvement compared to when the hardware acceleration was disabled. The graphics card in your computer may have different results than mine, but testing is the only way to determine the performance that you will see on your computer.
If you use Google’s Chrome Web browser, and would like to have the best experience online, I suggest you try using hardware acceleration and then run some of the test I mentioned above to see if it improves the performance of your browser.
With the operating systems available today, using the graphical user interface (GUI) of the operating system has become second-nature for me. It is very easy to copy, move, and delete files through the GUI interface than typing out the commands from a command line.
With all the user interface options in an operating system, there are many times where it can be more efficient to use the command line. In one such case, I wanted to create a simple method of deleting files that were older than seven days from a specified directory. While I could have written an application to do this, I wanted to make it more simple by using a batch file. With an additional executable available with the Windows 2003 SDK, I can easily delete files older than a number of days from DOS.