Safari
Apple’s web browser is now available for Windows XP and Vista. Safari had previously only been available on Macintosh operating systems. The browser is certainly quick and uses about as much memory as Mozilla Firefox; however, Safari takes up more hard drive space than Firefox: around 60Mb. Nevertheless, Safari is yet another alternative to Internet Explorer.

You can download Safari for Windows for free from here.

Firefox
There is also a new version of Firefox in the offing. At present it is still in Beta, which means that it is being tested by users and should not be considered to be finished software. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3 uses less memory than the old version - a particular complaint of mine.

You can download the Firefox 3 Beta 5 for free from here. (But be aware this is far from bug free software).

To celebrate six months of Bloody Computer! I have decided to list all the freeware software mentioned here blog so far (partly to prompt me to update the ‘Quality Freeware’ list in the left-hand column - now renamed ‘Recommended Freeware’) So, without further ado, here is the list…

Audacity: audio file editor.

AVG anti-virus free edition: anti-virus software.

Beneton Movie GIF: An application to create animated GIFs from a series of images, like a flickbook.

CamStudio: record what you see on your screen.

CCleaner: removes many non-essential files that Windows and other programs leave on your hard-drive.

dBpoweramp: convert audio files from one type to another.

dscaler: view television on your PC, if you have the appropriate hardware.

Foxit Reader: a fully featured PDF reader and a much slimmer alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

FreeUndelete: a user-friendly program to recover deleted files.

The GIMP: a fully featured image editor developed for linux but available for Windows

IcoFX: an icon creator and editor.

IrfanView: an image viewer with few editing features, and including a batch process…

To celebrate six months of Bloody Computer! I have decided to list all the freeware software mentioned here blog so far (partly to prompt me to update the ‘Quality Freeware’ list in the left-hand column - now renamed ‘Recommended Freeware’) So, without further ado, here is the list…

Audacity: audio file editor.

AVG anti-virus free edition: anti-virus software.

Beneton Movie GIF: An application to create animated GIFs from a series of images, like a flickbook.

CamStudio: record what you see on your screen.

CCleaner: removes many non-essential files that Windows and other programs leave on your hard-drive.

dBpoweramp: convert audio files from one type to another.

dscaler: view television on your PC, if you have the appropriate hardware.

Foxit Reader: a fully featured PDF reader and a much slimmer alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

FreeUndelete: a user-friendly program to recover deleted files.

The GIMP: a fully featured image editor developed for linux but available for Windows

IcoFX: an icon creator and editor.

IrfanView: an image viewer with few editing features, and including a batch process…

If your computer is running slowly you may have been told to defragment your hard drive. This because as large files are saved to the hard-drive they are often broken up into file fragments and stored in the gaps between other file fragments. This increases the time that Windows takes to access your files.

To check whether your drive needs to be defragmented go to My Computer, right-click on the drive’s icon, and select ‘Properties’ from the menu. Go to the ‘Tools’ tab on the dialog box that opens. Click the ‘Defragment now’ button to open the defrag program. Click the ‘Analyse’ button to get a report. Do not defrag yet, even if the software says that the drive needs defragmenting.

In order to get the most out of the defragmentation process it is best to do a little preparation beforehand. Firstly, close all the applications you are running and reboot your PC. When you are logged back in, go to your web browser and clear out the cache of files. Instructions are available on this site for doing this in Internet Explorer and Firefox. There is an excellent freeware application called CCleaner that will…

If you have a large collection of MP3s, WMAs and other audio files, you probably have quite a few where the tag information isn’t set up properly. In other words, they don’t come up with the correct track name or artist in your media player.

Editing these tags manually can be a laborious task, but fear not, the contributers at MusicBrainz offer a solution to your problem. As they say themselves:
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

The website has a number of applications that you can download which access the database. The one I found most useful was Picard, which provides an interface to search the…

vino is VNC server for GNOME.VNC is a protocol that allows remote display of a user’s desktop. This package provides a VNC server that integrates with GNOME, allowing you to export your running desktop to another computer for remote use or diagnosis.

By default ubuntu will come with vino-server so it is very easy to configure to enable remote desktop sharing in your ubuntu machine.If you want to access ubuntu machine remotely you need to login in to your ubuntu system.

Important note :-

Remote Desktop will only work if there’s a GNOME login session.Leaving your computer with an unattended GNOME login session is not secure and not recommended.

Some Tips

1) You can lock your screen using System—>Quit

Once you click on quit you should see the following screen here you need to select lockscreen

2) switch off your monitor when computer is left unattended

…