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I must make it clear that this little tip is for beginner’s only. You must have experienced that many of your contacts have multiple email accounts and its quite irritating to see your address book filled with multiple entries of the same person. The reason is, Windows Live Hotmail treats every email address as a unique contact and this makes your address book unorganized and cumbersome to use. However, Windows Live Hotmail offers a feature to counteract this issue.

Here’s how you can either merge multiple email IDs of the same contact or delete all but one of their email IDs:

1) In your Windows Live Hotmail account, click ‘Options’ > ‘More options’.

2) Now, under the ‘Customize your contacts’ category, click ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’.

3) Then click the ‘Clean up duplicate contacts’ button and select a contact from the list.

4) Now you can either select all but one contact details and delete the rest or you can select all and merge them.

There you are. You just made your address book much more clean and well-organized.

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Sometime ago I showed a simple trick how you can minimize Windows Live Messenger to system tray in Windows 7. Based on the similar trick, I am going show you how you can set Windows Live Mail to always minimize to tray.

1) Right-click on the Windows Live Mail icon and then click ‘Properties’.

2) In the ‘Windows Live Mail Properties’ window, click the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Here, set the ‘Compatibility mode’ to Windows Vista. Click OK.

3) Run Windows Live Mail and you will see its icon in the notification area (system tray). Right-click its icon and choose ‘Hide window when minimized’.

Now whenever you minimize the Windows Live Mail window, it won’t appear in the super bar and you can make it appear again by double-clicking its icon in the system tray.

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Recently many users all round the world have been facing this very strange issue where the updrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 stucks at 62%. Users complained that the upgrade just sits there at 62% no matter how long you wait.

However, Microsoft has quickly identified it as some issue with the Windows IPv6 helper service that stops responding during an update which causes it to get stuck at 62% and have come up with a solution.

Warning: Use this solution only if you are experiencing the exact problem. i.e. Upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 stucks specifically at 62%. Do not use this solution otherwise.

Solution:

Click , right-click Computer, and then click Properties.

Thanks to Lee Mathews and Microsoft for providing the solution.

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Now come on face it. You love torrents. You love to download all legally distributable¹ ‘videos’ and music files from torrents. But many a times you can’t control your anxiety and want to grab a sneak-peek preview of what’s getting downloaded. Ya, I do it too and it’s always fun.

However, you know that you are not lucky always. The problem is, even though it seems that the video or a music file have downloaded fairly well, the first piece or the 0th piece is yet to be downloaded. In that case, even if your torrent client has downloaded the rest of the file, it can’t be previewed in your media players because the header of the file (the first piece) is missing. So how to go about it? Well as they say, first thing’s first. Let’s see how you can download the first piece first so that you can preview the file while it’s still being downloaded. We will use ‘uTorrent’ for that matter. Download uTorrent.

1) Open uTorrent and click ‘Options’ > ‘Preferences’.

2) In the window that appears, click ‘Advanced’ in the right pane and search for ‘bt.prio_first_last_piece’.

3) Change its value to ‘true’ either by double-clicking it or by selecting the ‘True’ radio button. Click OK.

Behold, you have cast the spell! Now onwards, uTorrent will try to first fetch the first and the last pieces. However, do keep in mind that, this works optimally only when the torrent has good amount of seeders.

¹TechExplorer.in insists you to use torrents for sharing general public licensed media or media that you own. Discussing piracy is strictly against our terms and conditions. 

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Ever found yourself in quite a baffling situation where you play your favorite movie on your computer but it’s hardly pleasing to eyes and ears? That happens when the audio and/or subtitles is not in sync with the video. Nowadays, you may find rips of DVDs and Bluray discs which are not properly encoded. The result is unsynchronized audio and video. One solution is to have your own video editing software, a technical know how and at least an hour of spare time. If you don’t want any of them, then follow the trick:

1) Download VLC Player and install it, if you haven’t got it yet.

2) Open the video file in VLC Player.

3) Click ‘Tools’ > ‘Track Synchronization’

4) In the windows that appears, you can change the values in milliseconds to get the desired results – right away.

If audio and/or subtitles are lagging behind: Use + to advance the audio and/or subtitles to match the video.

If video is lagging behind: Use – to slow down audio and/or subtitles to match the video.

You can even change the speed of subtitles in frames per second to get optimum results. Most videos have frame-rate of either 23.976 or 25 FPS. The best part is, you can tweak the synchronization on trial and error basis without encoding the video which saves time!

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Many laptop owners complain about their LCD screens behaving weirdly due to the aging of the laptop. One of the most common problems with LCDs is the stuck or burned or freezed pixel. A stuck pixel is easy to identify. It is not actually a dead pixel, which of course is un-repairable. A freezed pixel either shows up on the screen in any color (mostly in red, white, yellow and blue) and persists the same color unless the laptop is shutdown.

I have the ‘stuck-pixel-problem’ on my older laptop and I was searching for an efficient solution to it because I don’t want to spend big bucks on something that I find at least repairable. I am a cheap guy, I know. And I found a great utility that helped me remove almost 60% of stuck pixels. (The laptop had 7 stucked and burned pixels out of which I was able to remove 4 of them). And I hope with some extra efforts I will be able to get rid of the rest of them. Now I am going to show you a software solution to solve the stuck/burned/freezed pixel.

Using JScreenFix

JScreenFix is an applet that runs in your web browser and it helps fixing the stuck/freezed pixels on LCD screens. It is even helpful in solving the dark edges problem often found in plasma screens. The applet is basically filled with rapidly changing pixels which is a kind of an exercise for your pixels. All you need to do is to open this applet in full screen mode allowing your screen to be filled with rapidly changing pixels. Visit JScreenFix website and launch the JScreenFix Applet.

The official website says that you can fix most stuck pixels by using an applet for about an hour. Fixing burned-in pixels of plasma screens may take up upto 12 hours.

Of course you can use the manual handwork solutions that involves turning off the laptop and slightly pressurizing the stuck pixel with a damped cloth and turning ON the laptop at that precise moment. However this method involves much risk of damaging the LCD screen instead of fixing it. Moreover, the method itself is very unsatisfactory. The software solution (using JScreenFix applet) is much more a feasible solution. Isn’t it?

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This happens every now and then. You are watching a really good video on YouTube or any other video hosting site but the only glitch you face is that the volume of the video is really low. The worst part is there is nothing much you can do except for maxing out your speaker’s volume. Most of the times this trick turns out to be a mediocre solution. But here is a quick and efficient way to go about it. For this you need to have VLC Player installed on your computer. I am not sure if Media Player Classic (with K-Lite Codec Pack) can do this job. So, install VLC player and let’s get started.

1) Open VLC Player and click ‘Media’ > ‘Streaming’.

2) In the window that appears, click the ‘Network’ tab. Choose ‘HTTP’ as the protocol and paste the link of the video in the ‘Address’ box. Make sure you does not include ‘http://’ again.

3) Additionally, check mark ‘Show more options’ and you will be able tweak the advanced options like caching and start time of the video. Click ‘Stream’.

4) When the video starts playing, you can increase the volume of the video by 400% just by sliding the volume control of VLC player. Enjoy!

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Don’t miss these posts:

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If you are a little too geek then you must have figured out what I am saying. So a little explanation for the learners: Firefox sometimes have a tendency to leak memory mainly due to a buggy installation or due to some bad add-on. This results in Firefox running like a sloth and usually crashes in the end. This can be stopped by restarting Firefox. Here I am going to show you how you can bring down the Firefox’s memory usage without restarting it.

1) Open configuration utility by writing ‘about:config’ in the Firefox address bar and pressing ‘Enter’.

2) In the page that appears, right-click anywhere and select ‘New’ > ‘Boolean’

3) Write the below code in the textbox and click ‘OK’:

config.trim_on_minimize

4) Set its value to ‘true’ by double-clicking it.

5) Restart Firefox. Now whenever Firefox’s memory consumption shoots up, you just have to minimize Firefox to bring the consumption back down. This is far more convenient than interrupting yourself from your work and restarting Firefox.

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More…

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I have started using Skype (an instant messenger + video chat client) for not so long and am trying to get familiar with the interface. One thing I noticed is that, Skype saves your chat history by default and also logs you in automatically by default. This can get rough if you have many users for the same computer. So, here’s how you remove the chat history from Skype.

1) Start and login to Skype.

2) Click on ‘Tools’ >> ‘Options’.

3) In the window that appears, click on ‘Privacy’ option in the left pane.

4) In the right pane, click ‘Show advanced options’ button.

5) Here, under the ‘Keep history for’ label, you will find options for how long you want to keep your chat history. By setting it to ‘no history’, it won’t save chat conversations from now on. Click the ‘Clear History’ button to erase the chat conversation saved until now.

Done!