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!

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.

If you are a Firefox power user like I am, then you probably have dozens of tabs open all the time. After trying a number of different options, I’ve finally settled on using multiple rows of tabs as the best option.

To set this option, you must have the Tab Mix Plus extension installed. Assuming you do, open up the Tab Mix Plus options dialog via the Tools menu.

Choose the Display tab/icon on the top, and then make sure you have the Tab Bar tab selected.

Change the option for “When tabs don’t fit width” to “Multi-row”, and then check out the multiple-row goodness.

If you are facing problems with your computer, especially the blue error screen coming up again and again, or your system is only booting in safe mode, then there is a strong possibility that your computer is having a faulty device driver.

Now how to identify a faulty driver, if you look at the list of drivers, you will find more than 100 drivers, and its not easy to find the faulty drivers from that list, neither it is possible to reinstall each one.

Microsoft provides you with the solution by providing a little tool called Verifier. This allows you to check which driver is faulty and a error message that will help you know which driver is faulty and you can then replace it or reinstall it. Here is a look at the use of it.

1. Go to Start –> Run and type “verifier“.

2. Select first option of “Create Standard Settings”, click Next, and then choose the option according to the problem you are facing. If you are technical enough, you can select “Select drivers name from a list”, and choose the driver which you think is responsible for the problem. If you are not sure then you can select “Automatically select all drivers installed on this computer”. and then Click Next, and Finish the process.

3. Now Reboot your computer, you will see the list of drivers to be verified at startup, and if you have a faulty driver, then you will get a blue screen, with the error message. You can get the faulty driver from that and thus can reinstall it or can be rectified.

4. After this when you have recognized the faulty driver, login back in your windows and you need to stop this service. To do this, Go to Start –> Run and type in “verifier /reset“. This will stop this service and you will not get the verifier window at startup again.

Most of us don’t make a real difference between worm, virus and Trajan Horse or refer to a worm or Trajan Horse as a virus.

All of us know all are malicious programs that can cause very serious damage to PC. Exist differences among the three, and knowing those differences can help you to better protect your computer from their often damaging effects.

A computer virus is a program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes. Some viruses cause only mildly annoying effects while others can damage your hardware, software or files. Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program. A virus cannot be spread without a human action, (such as running an infected program) to keep it going. People continue the spread of a computer virus, mostly unknowingly, by sharing infecting files or sending e-mails with viruses as attachments in the e-mail.

A worm is a program or algorithm that replicates itself. A worm has the capability to travel without any help from a person from PC to PC and have ability to replicate itself on your system, so rather than your computer sending out a single worm, it could send out hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, creating a huge devastating effect.

A Trojan Horse is a destructive program that “working” as a benign application ( (like changing your desktop, adding silly active desktop icons) or can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system. Trojans are also known to create a back door on your computer that gives malicious users access to your system, possibly allowing confidential or personal information to be compromised. Trojans do not reproduce by infecting other files nor do they self-replicate.

Added into the mix, we also have what is called a blended threat. Blended threats combine the characteristics of viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and malicious code with server and Internet vulnerabilities. By using multiple methods and techniques, blended threats can rapidly spread and cause widespread damage. Characteristics of blended threats include: causes harm, propagates by multiple methods, attacks from multiple points, and exploits vulnerabilities. This combination of method and techniques means blended threats can spread quickly and cause widespread damage. Characteristics of blended threats include: causes harm, propagates by multiple methods, attacks from multiple points and exploits vulnerabilities. They are considered to be the worst risk to security since the inception of viruses, as most blended threats require no human intervention to propagate.

Therefore is very important to protect your PC with a good anti-virus software installed on your system with the latest fixes for new viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.

Additionally, you want to make sure your anti-virus program has the ability to scan e-mail and files as they are downloaded from the Internet. This will help prevent malicious programs from even reaching your computer. You should also install a a system that prevents unauthorized use and access to your computer (firewall as well). A good software firewall will protect your computer from outside attempts to control or gain access your computer, and usually provides additional protection against the most common Trojan programs or e-mail worms.

Increased security risk entails being careful while choosing among various web hosting services. A good choice for a webhosting domain is the one with high uptime, adequate storage space especially for the best image hosting and at least a minimal level of security tools for the commonly occurring maliciousness. Keeping in view the same factors, sometimes cheap hosting site is not the choice for many business users and make the standard service providers like dot5hosting or the one that combines the quality with economy such as bluehost a prime selection. One the most affordable yet features-rich names, anhosting, is already standing out among its competitors.

Sometimes if your windows crashes, or if you modify the display resolution settings, you will find that the icon positions on your desktop will change and maybe even your wallpaper, and you will lose the setup you had going. but now you can avoid that easily with IconRestorer.

IconRestorer has been designed to remember the icon setup to avoid the boring job of manually restoring the right icon positions on your desktop.

IconRestorer can be used to place the icons back to their original location on the Windows screen when needed, or even to manage two profiles of icon position.

Features:

* Manage icons position separately for all screen resolutions
* Multiple backups for each resolution
* Backups management: rename, delete, export and import
* New: option to Save and Restore Desktop Wallpaper with Icon Positions
* New: option to move files with unsaved position to special folder on Desktop
* Start with Windows and start minimized to tray options
* Contexual quick help
* Windows Vista compatible
* Check for program updates feature
* Multilanguage: English, Italian , Spanish and Valencian, with support for non latin languages translations
* Free support forum for bugs report or requests

You can download it here.