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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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I am sure this will excite the hell out of you especially if you are a beginner and have just started a blog or a website. There are a lot of statistical analysis tools for websites available out there that does pretty much the same job so I am not going to discuss the charts here. I want to show you how you can get ‘real-time’ notification when somebody views your blog or website right on your desktop. Something like this:

To set it up, you’ll need ‘Woopra’ client (available for Windows, Linux and Mac). Here is the step-by-step procedure involved.

1) Go to Woopra.com and signup for free. Provide required information about your website/blog on the site.

2) Download Woopra client and login using your credentials. The details of the website you submitted at the site will get displayed within the application itself.

You will find charts and figures which might very well interest you but here we’ll just discuss how to setup real time notification when somebody visits your website. So once you are done looking at the charts, proceed along.

3) In the left pane, click ‘Notifications’ option.

4) In the right pane, click ‘Create a new Event Notification’ button.

5) In the window that appears, first enter an appropriate label to the notification you are about to create. Click ‘Next’.

Note: You will find loads of options you can set a notification for. As far as this tutorial goes, we won’t be needing them.

6) Click ‘Next’ a couple of times till you get the ‘Edit Notification’s look and feel’ option as shown below.

7) Here, set ‘Country Flag’ as the Notification’s Icon and write a ‘custom notification message’ below. Use ‘Tags’ for extra information like page URL, page title, etc. in the notification.

8) Finally, click ‘Apply Notification’ and wait for someone to visit your site. When your website is viewed, you will get a notification like this:

Once you click the notification you will be able to see the stats of visitor and based upon such information, you can know which part of the information or which posts interests your audience. The best part is, you get all the information real-time.

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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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Have you ever subscribed to a mailing list or commented on a website/blog and check-marked ‘Notify me of follow up comments’ and are now fed up with the thread that always shows up as ‘Unread’? It becomes more irritating when you find the updated conversation has nothing to do with you. But you still want to continue subscribing it because you hope something might just interest you in future. If you are using Gmail, there are two ways to spare yourself the annoyance.

Method #1 – Using ‘mute’ feature

If you find a mailing list conversation irrelevant, you just need to ‘mute’ it and all the future conversations will stay out of your inbox. To mute a conversation, simply select it and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Mute’.

However, muted conversations are simply ‘off’ your inbox and not ‘Read’ mails. They will remain as ‘Unread’ mails and you can search for muted conversations by typing 'is:muted' in the search box.

To unmute the conversation, select the muted conversation and click ‘Move to inbox’.

Method #2 – Using Filters

You can manage such friendly spam with ‘Filters’ too. This will require you to have a bit of common sense.

1) First, select the conversation and click ‘More actions’ > ‘Filter messages like these’.

2) The ‘Filter options’ panel will be displayed on top. By default, the email address of the sender is already entered in the ‘From’ field. You can tweak the filter by using a ‘unique’ word from the subject line of the conversation and entering it into the ‘Subject’ field. Click ‘Next step»’ button.

3) Now, checkmark ‘Mark as read’ and ‘Also apply filter to xx conversations below’ options and click ‘Create filter’.

Once you make a filter, all the future additions to the conversations won’t light up as ‘Unread’ mail. It will still remain in your inbox but will less annoy you.

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Google Docs, an online word processor, spreadsheets, presentations and forms creator just keeps getting better. The guys at Google Docs are frequently putting in new features may be because a similar service called Office Web Apps have been initiated by Microsoft.

Google Docs have added a new feature using which you can export your documents into a ZIP archive and download it on your computer for offline use. Till now, a 3rd party utility called GDoc Backup was used for the purpose. But now with the introduction of the ‘Export as ZIP Archive’ feature, you won’t be needing any 3rd party applications.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Login to Google Docs and select all files you want to download as ZIP archive.

2) In the menu above, click ‘More actions’ > ‘Export’

3) A new frame window will appear. If you notice it properly, there are options for file conversion before downloading. If you don’t want to convert files then simply click ‘Continue’.

4) After it finishes making the ZIP archive, you will be able to download it on your computer.

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It’s October 2009 and Microsoft has already released Windows 7 a few days ago. People all over the world has embraced the new operating system but there are some who are still nostalgic about the operating system that ruled the world for 7+ years – Windows XP. Apart from all the good things that Windows XP had, it had those really beautiful games which you grew up playing them. Now we are on a highly advanced OS called Windows 7 which has the super stylized version of games that featured on Windows XP. But here is your chance to play the same old versions of Windows XP games on Windows 7 without much hassles.

The thing that makes this task easy is the simplicity with which these small applications (like games) were incorporated into Windows XP. In Windows XP, such applications need just an executable file and a dll file to run. Here I am going to show you how you can play the Windows XP version of Solitaire in Windows 7. You can use this method to play other Windows XP games.

Windows XP Solitaire in Windows 7:

You’ll need: Two PCs, one running Windows XP and other, Windows 7 and a USB flash drive.

1) Plug in the USB flash drive in Windows XP machine and navigate to this folder:

C:\Windows\System32

2) Copy and paste the files ‘sol.exe’ and ‘cards.dll’ from the System32 folder to the USB flash drive and safely remove the flash drive.

3) Insert the flash drive in the Windows 7 machine and store both the files in a folder on the local hard disk.

4) Run ‘sol.exe’ and there you are! Enjoy the Windows XP version of Solitaire in Windows 7.

As I mentioned earlier, you can follow this method to play other Windows XP games but I leave that upon you. Enjoy!

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Blogger platform allows changes to be done to its HTML. By default, the fonts of your blog posts for templates provided by Blogger are Times, Georgia, Arial, Trebuchet and Verdana. If you set a third party template then it may set its own fonts. But what if you want to customize just the font of your template without making any substantial changes. My following tweak will give you so much customizability as far as fonts of your blog posts are concerned.

What are primary, secondary and tertiary fonts?

Let’s say you like a certain font and want to set it as your font for blog posts. But have you thought about how the page will look on some other computer on which the font you like is not installed? The page will not look catchy as the browser will display it in some other font available on that computer. This way your efforts will be useless. So to rectify this problem, we will use the concept of primary, secondary and tertiary fonts. Here you will have to select 3 fonts that you like and consider your most liked font as primary and least liked font as tertiary. And we will set it accordingly so that if a computer does not have the primary font installed will check whether the secondary font is installed or not. If it is, then it will show the blog post in secondary font. If secondary font is also not available then it will jump to tertiary font and display the blog post accordingly. The key here is, you need to set the well known font as your tertiary font so that most computers will have it accordingly.

For example, in this blog, I have set the following as my fonts:

Primary: Segoe UI (which is available on all Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers; very decent; Looks very good)

Secondary: Century Gothic (found almost everywhere from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 but I am doubtful on Linux OSes; somewhat decent; Looks not that bad)

Tertiary: Helvetica (one of the widely available fonts; not so great; Looks average but better than others of its kind)

So without much ado, I will show you how to set your fonts.

1) Go to ‘Edit HTML’ subsection and search for ‘font-family’. You will find many instances of ‘font-family’ in your blog.

2) Set the ‘font-family’ code as shown below:

font-family:Your primary font, Your secondary font, Your tertiary font, sans-serif;

Some time ago we discussed how one can surf the Internet privately using different options provided in web browsers. Today we are going to see methods to block ads that appear on websites on different browsers. Blocking ads has advantages. Needless to say, blocking ads with rich multimedia content can save loads of bandwidth and you can view the website’s content with much ease and simplicity, without getting distracted.

IE8:

Blocking ads in Internet Explorer 8 is darn easy. Just activate the InPrivate Filtering option (Shortcut key: Ctrl+Shift+F) as shown below.

Here, you will also find the ‘InPrivate Filtering Settings’ option using which you can customize the ad blocking options. I really like IE8’s ad blocking feature because it is almost automatic. Overtime, IE8’s InPrivate Filtering option will build a list of content to be blocked and eventually you will see reduced number of ads.

However, if you are really impatient and want to block ads right away, you can do that by importing a predefined XML ad list (created by me, thank you) that need to be blocked. Follow below mentioned steps.

1) First download this RAR file and extract the XML file contained within on your desktop: IE8 Ad List

1) Open ‘InPrivate Filtering Settings’ in IE8 and click ‘Advanced Settings’.

2) In the window that appears, click ‘Import’ and browse for the XML file you extracted. Click ‘Open’ and the list of ads that will be blocked from now on, will get populated. Click ‘Close’. Now ads will get blocked right away.

Chrome:

Blocking ads in Chrome got a lot easier with the support of extensions. So, fire up Google Chrome and go to this site: Adsweep.org and click ‘AdSweep.crx’ link and install the extension. More details can be found on the site itself.

Mozilla Firefox:

For Mozilla Firefox, a very well known ad blocking add-on is available which is by far the best: Ad Block Plus. Once you install it, follow these steps.

1) In the Add-ons window, click Adblock Plus ‘Options’ button.

2) In the window that appears, click ‘Filters’ >> ‘Add filter subscription…’

3) A new window will appear. Here, select ‘EasyList (USA)’ and click ‘Subscribe’ button and you’re done.

Opera:

Blocking ads in Opera is similar to that in Chrome. Go to AdSweep.org and download the ‘AdSweep.js’ file. Follow the steps mentioned over there on how to block ads in Opera.

Safari:

Ah Safari! How can we forget you! Well, blocking ads in Safari is also not much of a task.The makers of Adblock Plus also made an ad blocker utility for Safari – Safari Adblock. Download and install it for Safari browser.

Now that all major browsers has been covered, I am sure you can very well say a final goodbye to those pesky ads, eh? Enjoy ad-free browsing!

If you own a blogger blog then you must be aware of a navigation bar (usually referred to as ‘nav-bar’) that sits right on top of the blog page. It is quite handy for newbies but many professional bloggers find it disturbing as it appears to be tacky on some custom blog themes. So, if you are one of them then here’s a trick to remove the nav-bar from blogger powered blogs.

1) Login to your blogger account. From the ‘Dashboard’ click on ‘Layout’ link. In the page that appears, click on ‘Edit HTML’ sub-section.

2) Now find the below piece of code (use CTRL+F to find easily)

#navbar, #navbar-iframe {
   ...
   ...
}

#navbar, #navbar-iframe {
   height: 0px;
   visibility: hidden;
   display: none;
}

Firefox offers lots and lots of add-ons developed by enthusiasts all over the world and that is why, Firefox keeps a check whether the add-on you are installing is compatible with the installed version of Firefox or not. This does not entirely mean that the add-on will not work altogether. But some of its functionalities may get compromised and that is why Firefox won’t let you install the add-on in the first place. However, if you still want to try an incompatible add-on on your installed version of Firefox, you need to follow the steps below.

1) Open Firefox, write ‘about:config’ in the address-bar and press Enter.

2) Bypass the security warning by clicking ‘I’ll be careful, I promise’ (duh!). Now you will see a big list of configuration options. Right-click any where and select ‘New’ > ‘Boolean’.

3) In the window that appears, enter the preference name as ‘extensions.checkCompatibility’ and click OK.

4) Double click the entry to make its value ‘false’.

That’s it. You’ll now be able to install incompatible add-ons in Firefox.

[Disclaimer begins]

Be careful, you are now vulnerable to every kind of mess up. You may find yourself fixing your browser for the whole day if you install a really bad incompatible add-on. 

[Disclaimer ends]

Recently, Mozilla published on its Wiki about the upcoming Firefox 4.0. Based upon the screenshots, a guy named ‘SpewBoy’ from DeviantArt made its mock up theme. However many other elements need to be added into it in order to get the exact look of Firefox 4.0.

But before we begin, please note that this tutorial will work only on Firefox 3.5. It will not work on later versions like 3.5.1 or 3.5.2. So it is needless to say, if you want to proceed further with the tutorial and you have version 3.5.1 or 3.5.2 then you need to downgrade to 3.5. Uninstall the earlier version first, restart your PC and then install Firefox 3.5. Once you are ready, proceed with the following steps.

1) Download the Strata4.0 theme here (created by SpewBoy. All thanks.) but don’t install it as of now. Just extract its contents into a folder and then launch Firefox 3.5.

2) Now, in the Firefox 4.0 screenshots depicted by Mozilla, the ‘Stop’ button is at the end of the address bar. So we will too place the ‘Stop’ button at the end of the address bar. For this, right-click just below the address bar and a menu will be displayed. Click ‘Customize’ and a window will appear. We are least concerned with this window. Just drag the ‘Stop’ button to the end of the address bar and close that window.

3) Now open the ‘Add-ons’ window (Tools >> Add-ons) and drag-n-drop the ‘strata40_v02.jar’ file from the extracted folder on it. Install the theme and restart Firefox.

4) Now download an add-on called Personal Menu. Install it and you will have three new toolbar buttons next to the Stop/Reload button. Now if you are on Windows XP then skip step 5.

5) This step should be followed by Windows Vista/Windows 7 users only. Download and install an add-on called All Glass Firefox Mod. This will give a superb glassy look to Firefox.

6) Now we need another add-on called Stylish. Install it and you will see a very small ‘S’ icon at the right most end of the status bar below. Right-click it and select ‘Write new style >> Blank style…’. In the window that appears, enter name as ‘Strata Glass Fixes’ and in the big textbox below, copy and paste all the contents of the ‘glasser fixes.txt’ file from the folder extracted earlier. This will fix the display of tabs. Now the tabs will become crisp and clear.

7) Almost there! Now we will customize the download bar according to the one showed in the Firefox 4.0 screenshots. It will be just a green line below the address bar which looks really really awesome and aesthetic. So, take a deep breath, have some water and download an add-on called Fission and install it. Now go to its options and browse for the ‘loading_progress.png’ image file in the extracted folder. This addon basically changes the download bar and shows an image that is selected in its place.

8) The final step. Now we will merge the address bar and search bar into one just as showed in the Firefox 4.0 screenshots (also like in Chrome). For this, download the Omnibar add-on, install it and restart Firefox. If you followed everything right, this is what you can expect:

Enjoy Firefox 4.0 look-n-feel. All the credit goes to the respective add-on creators.

Google chrome has evolved considerably well and with a fast pace. Soon one can install themes and extensions in Google Chrome just like in other browsers. Chrome has lived up to its impression of being sophistically minimalistic. But I think, some extensions that make browsing more fun won’t do much harm.

Now, we know that Google has bifurcated the development of Chrome in Stable, Dev and Beta versions (officially called ‘Channels’). Stable version is available to public via its official download page. Dev and Beta channels are for testers and developers to experiment. At present, the new features, themes and extensions can be installed only on Dev channel. Also, Google has released only two themes (Camo and Snowflake) and a handful of extensions as of now. Here’s what you need to do in order to install themes and extensions.

1) If you have already installed the stable official version of Google Chrome then you need to download the Chrome Channel Switcher in order to change your existing Stable version into a Dev Version. Download Chrome Channel Switcher here and run it. Close any instances of Chrome, select the ‘Dev’ option and click ‘Upgrade’ button.

2) Now right click on the Google Chrome icon and click on ‘Properties’. In the window that appears, add the phrase -–enable-extensions in the ‘Target’ box.

3) Now open Google Chrome and you are ready to try out the themes and extensions. Here are the currently available themes: Camo and Snowflake. [Open these links through Google Chrome and it will install them immediately]. For installing the extensions, head over to this page.

4) If you wish to uninstall an extension or a theme, then type in chrome://extensions in the address bar of Google Chrome and press enter. You will be taken over to the page where you can uninstall the extensions and themes.

Everyone who uses the internet usually uploads and/or downloads files through file hosting services, email, instant messengers, etc. As internet bandwidth increased overtime, our needs also increased. Now we almost download/upload a minimum of 100 MB of files everyday. But sometimes it gets annoying when you are uploading/downloading a file and your internet goes bad. You have to redo the whole process again. Even those download managers that offer ‘resume’ functionality doesn’t help sometimes. So what if you want to upload/download a huge file with much less hassle. The answer is to use torrents. Torrent is a protocol that is used to share files between two computers. So, there is no intervention of a server to host your file. The downloader will download the file right exactly from the uploader’s computer. Here, I am going to show you how you can share files privately using torrents.

1) Make sure both (downloader and uploader) have a torrent client installed. (eg. uTorrent)

2) Now everything that’s described hereafter will have to be done by the uploader. I suppose you have installed uTorrent so open it and let’s make a torrent of your files.

3) Press CTRL + N or click File >> Create New Torrent.

4) In the window that appears, browse for the file or folder you wish to upload by clicking ‘Add file’ or ‘Add directory’ buttons.

5) Then, in the ‘Trackers’ box, paste the below URL:

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

6) Then checkmark the ‘Start seeding’ and ‘Private torrent’ options. Finally, click the ‘Create and save as…’ button and save the file on your desktop.

7) You will find that the file you just created is very small in size (usually 10-20kbs). Just upload this file to the downloader through instant messenger or by email and ask the downloader to run the file.

8) Once the downloader will run the file their uTorrent client, your original file will start getting uploaded from your computer to their computer.

Advantages of using torrents for private file sharing:

1) There is no third computer/server involved. Even though we are using the tracker service by Pirate Bay, it will just help connect the two computers.

2) The downloads/uploads can be paused and resumed again. And it can be used to transfer GBs of data without worrying about losing the partially downloaded data.

3) As there are only two trustworthy parties involved in the data transfer, there is absolutely less chance of malicious viruses getting downloaded which is not guaranteed when a third computer or a server in involved in the data transfer.

So, next time you want to share a huge file, don’t forget to give torrents a shot! I am sure you will like it.

I am a movie freak. And I know many of you also are. I love to see hi-res DVD and Bluray films on my laptop but many films does not have subtitles and it sometimes gives me hard times to grope up that important word. That’s why I download proper subtitles from OpenSubtitles, AllSubs, DivXSubtitles, etc. There are times when subtitles become inevitable when you watch movies in languages you don’t know.

Here, I am going to show you how to integrate the downloaded subtitles seamlessly and quickly to your video file. The point here is, we are not going to encode the video by hardcoding the subtitles on it. This will degrade the quality of the video and the subtitles will look jagged and tacky. We will use a tool called MKVToolnix to overlay the subtitles onto the video. So first, download MKVToolnix, install it and run it.

1) Drag and drop the movie file in the ‘Input files:’ box. Then, drag and drop the downloaded subtitle file into it.

2) The subsequent box will show the video, audio and subtitle tracks individually. You can keep or remove any of them by selecting/deselecting the checkbox. But you don’t want to do that. Keep everything checked. Once you click on the individual track (say, video) the ‘General track options’ will become active. Set those preferences accordingly. (See the image below)

Note: Set the ‘Default track flag’ to ‘yes’ for all tracks. This will enable subtitles (and ofcourse, video and audio too) to display by default.

3) The next step is to set the destination for the output. Note that the file thus generated will be a .mkv file. Click on ‘Start muxing’ button. For a movie size ranging from 700MB to 1.5GB, it will take upto a maximum of 5 minutes on a decent computer with 1GHz or more processor.

Now you can enjoy the film with decent looking subtitles. The best part is that the video does not get encoded which saves the quality of the video and the muxing time. This is what the final output will look like:

[The above screenshot is taken from the bluray version of Wall·E]

One of my friend and a blogger asked me how to add a favicon to a Blogger powered blog. So I decided to write a post on it so that many others having the same question can get their answers. A favicon is a small (usually 16x16 pixels) image that appears in the title bar when a webpage is being viewed. It has no information value but looks nice and professional. So here’s what you need to do to make your own favicon for your Blogger powered blog.

1) First create a 16x16 image that represents your blog and upload it to any photo hosting sites like Photobucket, Imageshack, etc. The image can be a little bigger but anyways Blogger will display a 16x16 image only.

2) Now login to your Blogger account and navigate to Layout >> Edit HTML.

3) Now at Tech Explorer, we don’t take any chances. So back up your blog by downloading it. Click ‘Download full template’ link. But if you promise to be extra cautious, you can skip this step.

4) Now locate the following code in the HTML:

<title> <data:blog.pageTitle/> </title>

5) Insert the following code immediately after the above code:

<link href='LINK TO YOUR FAVICON IMAGE' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

6) Replace ‘LINK TO YOUR FAVICON IMAGE’ in the above code with the link to your image.

7) Click ‘Save template’ button and enjoy your new favicon of your blog!

Most you must still be preferring Windows Media Player over other music players and why not? It is versatile, organizes your music pretty well, it comes bundled with Windows and does its job quite good. I personally prefer Windows Media Player 12 (which is the latest version in Windows 7) and AIMP2. Many other music players like iTunes can generate auto-playlists based upon Artists, Album, Genre, Play count, etc. Sadly, in WMP you manually have to sort them out and then make a playlist. What if you want to make an auto-playlist of your ‘most played songs’. Here’s a very simple trick.

1) Open WMP and on the left pane click on ‘Music’.

2) Once you get the list of all the songs, right-click on the column title and click on ‘Choose columns…’

3) In the window that appears, check ‘Play Count’ and click OK.

4) You will see a new column ‘Play Count’ is added. Click on it and your list of songs will get sorted according to the number of times a particular song was played. By sorting it in a ‘Descending’ manner, you now have your most played songs listed. Double click on the first song and the whole list will get into the ‘Now Playing’ list. You’re done.

It is assumed that you have already installed Windows Vista and have an internet connection (preferably broadband).

• Connect to the internet and open up Windows Update. Download every update available and make sure to install Windows Vista Service Pack 2.
  

• Windows Vista is much secure than the previous Windows versions but it is wise to install an antivirus software. I recommend you to install ESET NOD32 Antivirus. It is best out there. A very close competitor is Kaspersky Antivirus 2009. However, these are negligibly paid software. If you want a freeware then Avast 8.0 is the best choice.

• Now when you surf the internet, you don’t want to see those useless advertisements that hog up your bandwidth. In severe cases, some ads are harmful too. You need AdMuncher. This is an ad-blocker program which supports many browsers and will not let advertisements to display while you surf.

• If you are too much worried about your security then you may want to install an anti-spyware. aSquared Free is the one I would recommend. However, Windows Defender is sufficient enough.
  

Internet Surfing:

• Before you start surfing the internet, it is necessary that you have all the plug-ins for viewing the latest multimedia content online. Download latest versions of Java, Shockwave Player, Adobe Flash and Silverlight.

• Now comes the most important part - Browser Selection. Most of the world uses Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. But we are not going to use any of them. I recommend using Flock and Google Chrome. More information about Flock can be found here.
  

• For peer-to-peer downloading, you can definitely rely on Limewire. It is available as Limewire Free and Limewire Pro (which is a paid version). You can very well do with the free version. For torrents, there is nothing better than μTorrent. Very light weight and low on resources, yet does a wonderful job.
  

• For Instant Messaging and Chatting, I recommend all-in-one Miranda IM Client. You can chat with your Yahoo!, MSN, IRC and AOL friends from just one IM Client.
  

• When it comes to downloading, there are many download managers available. But I recommend using Orbit Downloader or FlashGet. Both are well efficient with all required features like pausing a download and schedule a download at a specified time.
  

• If you want to download videos from sites like Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace, DailyMotion, you can do that easily by using VDownloader.
  

Audio, Video & Imaging:

• Image viewing and editing is made much simpler in Windows Vista. You don’t need to install any software. Windows Photo Gallery will suffice. However if you want to have an option then IrfanView is a good software. Considering the excellent job it does, you will be surprised by its small foot-print on your computer.
  

• Listening to your favorite music and MP3s is a piece of cake with AIMP2. It is very sad that such a great software is like a violet by a mossy stone. You will be surprised by its compactness and skilled ergonomics. With lots of customization options, a sound recorder, a tag editor and built-in plug-ins, you will get addicted to it in no time.

• Install K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and forget all worries about different AV codecs out there. Use Media Player Classic which is bundled with K-Lite Mega Codec Pack for viewing video files and video CD/DVDs. No need to install any other video player or codec.
  

• For video conversion, there is an excellent freeware utility SUPER. It supports all the video formats out there.
  

Maintenance & Cleaning:

• For cleaning and maintenance, you need CCleaner and TuneUp Utilities. You may also prefer EnhanceMyVistaFree for similar purposes. It is necessary to perform cleaning and maintenance activity every 14 days to avoid cluttering in your computer. [Tune-Up Utilities 2008 Licensed Version is available free of cost with the purchase of December 2008 issue of Chip Magazine (Indian Edition)]
  

• It is highly recommended that you perform defragmentation of disks using Tune-Up’s inbuilt defragmentor every 2 months.
  

CD / DVD:

• For mounting virtual image files you need a stable and efficient CD/DVD drive emulator. VirtualCloneDrive by Elaborate Bytes is the best CD/DVD emulator around. It is light weight and supports numerous CD/DVD image formats.
  

• For CD/DVD writing, the necessary and sufficient choice would be InfraRecorder. It is efficient, low on resources, can create neat Audio and Video discs and also creates CD/DVD Images.
  

Office Tools:

• Microsoft Office 2007 is the best out there. But there are few free options available. I would recommend using OpenOffice. It has the best value for money. It even supports Microsoft Office formats so you will not remain the odd one out when the whole world uses Microsoft Office.
  

• Next comes the PDF viewer. I would recommend Foxit Reader for its immensely small size of just 2mb. After all, if you just want to use a PDF reader once in a month, then resource hogging Adobe Reader is not a wise choice.
  

UI Enhancing:

• Everybody loves eye candy. So why not flaunt your new OS with some goodies that is pleasing to the eye. Download some cool icons from DeviantArt, FreeIconsWeb, IconsArchive, VistaIcons and similar sites.
  

• Once you have downloaded the icons, use them to change the look of your folders. Download IcoFX for converting image files to icons.
  

• Properly categorize your data and software and use proper icons for their folders. Also add your most used folders as links in the Navigation Pane.

• Download high quality wallpapers from DeviantArt and InterfaceLift.
  

Advanced Tweaking:

• Now its time to get your hands dirty. We are about to tweak the innards of Windows Vista for enhanced performance and speed.
  

• As we are using the Tune-Up Disk Defragmentor every two months, it is safe to turn off automatic defragmentation in Windows Vista. Click Start –> Computer. Right click appropriate drive, click ‘Properties’. In ‘Tools’ tab, click ‘Defragment Now’ button. Uncheck ‘Run on a schedule’ and click OK.
  

• Now we will disable some windows features which are not required. Click Start –> Control Panel. Double click ‘Programs and Features’. In the left side pane, click ‘Turn Windows features on or off’. Uncheck ‘Indexing Services’, ‘Remote Differential Compression’, ‘Tablet PC Optional Components’ (if you are not using a TabletPC), ‘Telnet Server’, ‘Windows DFS Replication Service’, ‘Windows Meeting Place’ and ‘Windows Process Activation Service’.

Well, the above tweaking guide is exclusive and not exhaustive and once followed thoroughly will make your Vista run efficiently without any glitches.

Google Chrome has an Incognito mode which is much more like a ‘stealth’ mode I can say, in which, anything and everything you surf does not leave traces on your computer and no history is saved. This is a very powerful option but this mode is not activated by default. Here is a simple (in fact, very simple) tutorial to open Google directly into Incognito mode.

Right click on the shortcut of Google Chrome.

In the ‘Target’ field, just add ‘-incognito’ at the end (without the quotes). Click Ok.

Done. Now Google Chrome will open directly into Incognito mode.

G-mail has been increasingly lovable in the past some months. Many have migrated from their years old Yahoo, Hotmail, etc accounts to G-mail because it is sleek, has lots of features and a little chemical-X too! So let’s say you have created your own G-mail account but all your contacts are still lying there in your old Yahoo account. And you are not that jobless to sit back and copy all the contacts manually from Yahoo to G-mail. Many of you must be knowing the easier way but here it is for the newbies.

1) Open up your Yahoo! account and click on the ‘Contacts’ tab.

2) Move your eyes far to the right and you will see the ‘Import/Export’ link. Click it.

3) In the ‘Export’ section, click ‘Yahoo CSV: Export Now’ button.

4) A ‘Save File…’ dialog box will appear. Save the file on your desktop.

5) Now open up your G-mail account. Click the ‘Contacts’ link on the left pane.

6) Click the ‘Import’ link far to the right.

7) Now you will see the familiar ‘Browse’ button. Click it and browse to the file you just saved. Then click ‘Import’ button below. Done! All your Yahoo Contacts will be in your G-mail account.