A device driver is a piece of software that tells the operating system (Windows XP, Windows Vista, etc) how to communicate with a piece of hardware. For example, Windows XP is installed on different hardware depending on whether the computer is made by HP, Dell, Sony, etc and so in order for Windows to work with all of the hardware, it needs a piece of software that tells it what commands it can give and what kind of responses it will receive back. It is very important to continually update your device drivers because sometimes the instructions are not clearly defined or the operating system does not recognize them and that’s when you end up with the blue screen of death or computer crashes.

And it’s also a good idea to have a backup of all of your drivers just in case you have to reformat your computer or because you don’t have your original restore CD that came with your OS. Also, if you’ve updated many of the drivers after you bought your computer, you don’t want to have to revert back to the drivers on the original CD anyway because they are old!

At first I was going to write a post about how you can update your drivers by yourself, but for those people who do not want to go and download lots of drivers or don’t understand how to do it, there is software that can automatically backup and update your device drivers. First I’ll mention a free software that backups your drivers and allows you to restore them, but unfortunately does not have an update feature. The automatic update feature is only in the paid applications.

DriverMax for Windows Vista and Windows XP is a free program (you will have to register though otherwise you get a splash screen, but registration is free) that takes care of making sure you drivers are backed up. It’s a small piece of software and backs up drivers fairly quickly. It found all of my drivers and even ones I didn’t know I had, so I felt confident that it got everything.

Click Export Drivers and the program will first find all of your drivers and give you a list that you can review. My list was quite long and I checked it to make sure it had found everything and it did!

Click the Select All button and click Next. Choose a location for your driver file and then save this file somewhere off your computer. You can choose to create folders for each driver or create a zip file. The process takes a little while because of the large number of drivers, but it gives you a progress bar. The file was only about 20MB, 40MB uncompressed.

There are also some software apps that backup, restore and automatically update your drivers. These might be worth the small $30 to $40 fee since updating the drivers is the most important aspect to maintaining a smooth running computer.

Here are some of the sites:

1. Driver Magician - Only $30 and it has a built in database of drivers that is updated through an Internet connection. Nice feature is that you can create an .exe file of your drivers, so that you can re-install them without having to install Driver Magician.

2. My Drivers - Does about the same thing, but is $39. Has over 58,000 drivers in database. Also backups some other useful stuff like Outlook, Outlook Express, and your IE Favorites. It also has a driver compatibility test before it installs a driver, thus reducing the risk of computer failure after a driver update.

These two seem to be the best at the current moment and definitely will give you more options than Driver Max for a small price!

If you are in the habit of bookmarking every interesting page you find on the Internet, your browser bookmarks might be a mess by now, just like mine. And often I bookmark the same page multiple times without knowing it already exist in my collection. That’s why I use a wonderful application called AM-DeadLink.

AM-DeadLink is a free tool that checks your browser (IE, Firefox or Opera) bookmarks for dead and duplicate links. Once the scan is completed it will display the full results of each and every bookmarked link and their status – alive or error 404. Click the button “Sort bookmarks with errors to top of list” to quickly view all dead links. Then select all the dead links and delete them all at one go.

Finding duplicates and removing them is even easier. Click on “Find duplicates” and it will show you all duplicate entries. Now click on “Select all duplicates but one” to highlight all duplicated entries except one. For instance, if you have bookmarked the same page thrice, AM-DeadLink will select two while keeping one enabling you to quickly remove extra bookmarks.

AM-DeadLink also has an inbuilt browser allowing you to quickly open and view pages. Additionally you can download FavIcons for all your bookmarks and save them on your hard disk.

Are you looking for a way to make YouTube videos load up faster on your computer? This could be a problem if you have a slow Internet connection, which can cause videos to “freeze”. This is caused by the fact that the video is being downloaded into the buffer.

There are a couple of ways you can ensure that videos from YouTube are loading faster and steaming with fewer interruptions, so read on to find out what.

Method 1: Add stop button to YouTube video player. By default, if you press the Pause button on a video in YouTube, the red bar will continue moving, meaning that the video is being buffered. This is fine for fast connections, but will cause the freeze issue on slow connections.

Using a Firefox script, you can add a Stop button to a video which will prevent it from buffering the video. In this way, you can have multiple videos open and watch one while the rest are stopped.

You need to install Greasemonkey and then install the stop script. You should see a button above the video now:

Note that this script is useful when you have multiple videos open in different browser windows. If you are just watching one video, pausing is better because you can let it buffer a good amount of the video before pressing play.

Method 2: Download and install the SpeedBit Video Accelerator software. The cool thing about this program is that when you watching a video on YouTube, it will open up multiple connections to the video on the servers and download different parts of the video at the same time.

So instead of just starting the download from the beginning and moving towards the end, SpeedBit will download the video like your BitTorrent client downloads torrents, different sections all at once.

It will significantly reduce the video freeze and buffering issues with YouTube and will also accelerate YouTube videos that are embedded in other sites like MySpace, blogs, etc.

Method 3: Another way to load YouTube videos faster is to use the Fast Forward feature. Just click anywhere on the player bar and the video will load from that position.

Pretty simple trick, but I didn’t know this for the longest time! Definitely helps when you have a longer video and only want to see a latter part of it.

Method 4: Download the video to your computer. If none of these are working and you are still having issues, then it might be better to just download the video to your computer!

There are a million ways to download YouTube videos to your computer, but I’ll only mention one and that is Vixy.net because it lets you download and convert to another format such as AVI, MOV, MP4, MP3, or 3GP.

That’s it! There’s really nothing else you can do to load YouTube videos faster other than getting a faster Internet connection! Enjoy!

Some worms, such as the Blaster worm, use known bugs in Microsoft Operating Systems to force the computer to shut down itself. you may also get the shutdown command by inadvertently ending a system program in the Task Manager. You can create a shortcut on the Desktop for a command that will allow you to quickly abort any un-wanted shutdown commands you might get.

Simply right-click on an empty space on the Desktop and select ‘New->Shortcut’. In the Location box type in ’shutdown.exe -a’ and click on the ‘Next’ button. In the Title box enter any name you want for the shortcut then click on the ‘Finish’ button.

Whenever you see the shutdown command appear on your screen, simply double-click on the shortcut to abort the forced shutdown.

Spyware is not a miracle or magic. But it makes you feel so. When does it enter into your machine, you actually have no idea of it. And you find things happening automatically as if someone is really keeping an eye on you and specifically monitoring your works in the computer. You are apparently right regarding the spyware threat but not exactly correct in your interpretation.

Know the doors that allow spyware in.

It is after all your fault that you don’t notice that an intruder is peeping in and slowly crawling inside when it finds that the route is safe to get in. this is exactly how the spyware safely makes its way inside your computer system.

The first road to enter is the free download process. There are websites carrying spyware programs. And as soon as you make the click on the particular site, the process of downloading initiates. One of the programs in the site might be the spyware that you did not know was hidden over there. But once you have downloaded the site, you have also invited the spyware to your computer system.
If you have tracked it then without any further delay just install spyware removal software and throw the nuisance factor out. Or else, the creator of the spyware who has implanted it in your operating system will easily steal your documents.

Pay bigger price for your temptations

Most spyware enter because you can’t resist your temptations. Whenever you come across a provision of free download of simple wallpaper or even a screen saver you automatically click it and it’s the spyware again. Pop up ads are the biggest problem creators and can creep in anytime and make space in your system even if you don’t welcome it. As soon as you find such things, it is always advisable to cancel or delete it. Take no risk to keep safety of whatever you are working with.

Install spyware removers as a prevention

The cure for spyware is yet to be programmed but preventions are already available. If your business is to deal with online networking process and that’s precisely your source of income, you must play with risk. You still have time to protect your computer system from the spyware attack by installing a safe spyware removal program. But before you do so just check out the authenticity of the program to avoid any further trouble.

From gaining complete control of your text to keeping your work safe and sound, all the essentials are here. No filler. Just really good tools.

1. Copy Plain Text
This extension gives you complete control over rich text by stripping it plain. Perfect for research or quoting other sources without links and formatting you don’t want or need.

2. Split Browser
Pasting from one tab to another can be cumbersome. This extension makes the process a breeze by splitting your browser window into two (or three, or four) panels, allowing for instant copying and pasting between pages.

3. Resizable Text Area
This extension makes text input areas flexible by allowing you to resize them as you like. Give your writing the room it needs to breathe.

4. AutoCopy
Clever little time-saver which automatically adds text to the clip-board as soon as you select it.

5. ScrapBook
When gathering research for an article you’ll often find yourself cutting and saving snippets of text from various websites. ScrapBook is a simple, bookmarks-style interface designed to make this process quick and painless.

6. Signature
Every web writer finds themselves re-using certain snippets of text again and again — whether it’s your byline or the HTML code you use for that image in every article. Signature allows you to save these snippets and access them at any time via the right-click menu. Lovely.

7. Dictionary Search
Search Dictionary.com from the Firefox search bar. Great for answering that perennial question: does the word I’m using mean what I think it means, or am I about to embarrass myself?

8. Zotero
For more in-depth research work this extension is a slick and powerful way to track sources, references and citations. Also includes refined note-taking capabilities.

9. Text Area Word Counter
An extension for freelance web writers by, arguably, one of the best: Gina Trapani. Instantly retrieve the word count of text in any web form. Perfect for paid bloggers with a word quota to meet.

Here’s an easy way to Rip DVD’s into your computer using only VLC Media Player, which is by the way an excellent excellent play, probably the best media player out there, it has a lot of feature and it pretty much plays all media files known to man

Note that if you have vlc player set so it loops, it will infinitely rip the same dvd to the same file. You can stop it from looping by clicking one of the buttons in the playlist.

If you want to watch the dvd after it’s finished ripping on vlc player make sure you uncheck the stream / save box or it’ll overwrite the rip and start ripping again.