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Today’s technological scenario is all about integration and making every task simpler and every information easily accessible. Well, similar are the thoughts of UXLabs at Microsoft. They have created a very sleek Facebook client application that brings the complete Facebook experience right on your Windows desktop – Fishbowl.

Although in a ‘trial’ (beta) stage, Fishbowl offers some features that surely will excite Facebook power users. Apart from the seamless integration with Facebook, here are some of the plus points of Fishbowl:

» Fishbowl offers mini-mode which is more fun and less obtrusive.

» Smooth user interface and sleek navigation. It supports drag n’ drop pictures to publish them on Facebook. Furthermore, it can go full screen and play a slideshow of your albums.

» You can update your status, view your friends’ albums, their updates, news-feeds and other notifications.

» “Interest Level”, my favorite feature, helps you filter your stream anonymously in order to avoid boring updates from friends.

» If you are a Windows 7 user, you can monitor your Facebook stream right from your taskbar using jumplists.

If you want to give it a try then click the link below.

Download Fishbowl / 6.6mb

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Instead of exploring new things all the time, sometimes I dig into what I have already got and I always come up with something new. Very few of us might know that Microsoft also offers lots of free games to its users. ‘The Games’ section in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is often listed in the feature lists but rarely anyone plays the games offered. And if you have checked the link in the ‘Game providers’ subsection lately, then you will find that Microsoft now offers 100+ free games to its users. So if you think you’ve had enough of solitaire and minesweeper, I’d say you do the following:

Click Start > Games. In the ‘Game Providers’ subsection, click ‘More Games from Microsoft’.

Alternatively, you can click here: Microsoft "Play Your Game"

And guess what, that’s it. Just click “Play Now” button to play your favorite games. You can also download trial versions of these games. Enjoy!

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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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Last night I was working with my brother on his project and there was a lot of material needed to be copied from websites to Word. It was a tiresome process to copy and paste the required material, neglecting few lines in between, again copying and pasting few lines and so on. It was then that I tried to search for something that can ease this everyday process of copy-pasting. I found the clipboard managers. A lot of good ones.

A clipboard managers does the basic task of storing the information for the temporary period of time during the time you copy the content and paste it somewhere. Now the built in clipboard of Windows stores one entry at a time. This is where clipboard managers come in. They let you temporarily store multiple bytes of information, maintains a history, and lets you paste that content one by one. I used some of these clipboard managers but I’d favor ‘Ditto’ clipboard manager.

‘Ditto’ lets you save multiple items in the clipboard and lets you retrieve them one by one at a later time. Unlimited amounts of data can be stored in clipboard using ‘Ditto’. The most advanced feature of ‘Ditto’ is that, it lets you copy information from one computer and paste it to another.

‘Ditto’ offers lot more features like:

1) Keeping synchronization of clipboard data within multiple computers.

2) Ability to encrypt data when transmitted over the network

3) Foreign character support

and many more…

It may seem like a not so useful utility but let me tell you, you will realize its importance when you’ll truly need it. It is definitely a time saver.

Some other clipboard managers that I came across: Clipmagic (8/10), Clipboard Recorder (8/10), Sanvient (6/10) and ClipTorrent (6/10). Use them and make copy-pasting a breeze! :)

Don’t miss these awesome tips/tricks:

Draw a picture in Wordpad

Password protect your files using WinRAR

Google Image Search made easy

More…

Compression of files using utilities like WinZip and WinRAR is very common technique and has been in use since long. But very few know that you can also password protect your important files using WinRAR to keep them from prying eyes. Here’s how you do it.

1) Open WinRAR and browse to the folder where your important files are located using the drop-down navigation method shown below and click ‘Add’ button on top. Alternatively, if you have integrated WinRAR in your context menu, you just need to select your files in Windows Explorer, right-click and select ‘Add to archive…’

2) A new window will appear. Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab and then click on ‘Set Password’ button. Enter desired password and for better security, check ‘Encrypt file names’ and click OK. Click OK again.

A new password protected and compressed file will be generated. When you try to open it, it will ask for the password. You can use this quick method for transferring sensitive files over the internet too.

Some months ago, I wrote a post on DNS server and how it can change your browsing experience. This time I am providing a list of useful DNS servers which you can use to make your internet reliable, faster and safer.

DNS (Domain Name Server) translates the website address from human readable form to an IP address. If your DNS server goes bad then you may receive errors like ‘page cannot be found’, ‘cannot connect to the page’, ‘error timeout’ etc. By using better DNS servers you can reduce these type of glitches.

So how to use DNS servers? For an end user like you and me, we just need to enter an specific IP address in the Preferred DNS Server field in ‘Network Connections’. Open its properties. [See screenshot below]

Just choose the option ‘Use the following DNS server addresses’ and enter any of below mentioned IP addresses into the two textboxes.

List of DNS servers:

1) OpenDNS

Preferred DNS Server: 208.67.222.222

Alternate DNS Server: 208.67.220.220

2) Scrublt

Preferred DNS Server: 67.138.54.100

Alternate DNS Server: 207.225.209.66

3) DNS Advantage

Preferred DNS Server: 156.154.70.1

Alternate DNS Server: 156.154.71.1

4) OpenNIC

Preferred DNS Server: 58.6.115.42

Alternate DNS Server: 58.6.115.43

5) Other public DNS Servers

Preferred DNS Server: 198.77.116.221

Alternate DNS Server: 198.77.116.223

Once you get properly acquainted with the web, you feel the need for a utility that can ease down your tasks. One such task is to get regular updates from your favorite website or blog aggregated for you. This is where Feed Readers come into picture. RSS Feeds are actually a convenient and hassle-free way to read website and blogs as and when they get updated. It needs to be powerful yet very low on resources, quiet but feature-rich. I have used many such ‘feed readers’ and would like to present the best of them all.

1) FeedDemon :-  My personal best. FeedDemon is a RSS news feed reader which is very light on resources and highly customizable. It is very comprehensive, easy to set-up and has a clean interface.

2) Windows Live Mail :- It is actually a mail program but does the job of an RSS news reader quite well. With just a downside of being a little heavy on the system, it is very stable, mature and powerful RSS news reader on Windows.

3) Google Reader :- Without any doubt the most used, a stupidly simple RSS reader out there. It is very convenient to use and configure. Google Reader is web-based RSS reader so you don’t have to install a separate program for it.

4) Omea Reader :- Unknown but very powerful with top-notch features. Omea Reader is a freeware and it also does the task of a bookmark manager. It also provides browser integration.

5) BlogBridge :- With OPML support, synchronization feature and user-friendliness, BlogBridge is yet another free RSS reader. It has something called Smart Content Processing and has plugins too. It can run on Linux too.

There are also some other paid RSS readers like NewzCrawler, Blog Navigator, etc. but the mere price tag on them deprived them to show up in the above list.

I was updating my installed programs one by one last night and it was a tedious task to do because I have over 50 programs installed on my computer. I thought I should search for a software which would tell me which of my software needs updates. Though I started without much hope, I instantly found a software that claims to do precisely that. Software Informer – A very cool application that keeps a track of your installed programs and whenever its update is available, it not only informs you but also link you to the update page which saves much time.

When I installed Software Informer, it scanned through the installed programs and immediately started searching for their updates. Once it was done, it opened up a page in my default internet browser and listed the programs that needed updates. It shows the current installed version and the latest version available so you can decide whether or not you want to update it. A ‘Get Update’ button makes task much easier as it redirects to the precise update page so you don’t have to search around every time you need to update.

As a value addition, the application also has a floating icon which, when clicked, shows a menu that lists all the installed programs which can be quickly launched from there.  Click here to download Software Informer.