MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger has a quite annoying feature to me, which is having a popup of Windows Live Today/MSN Today every single time you sign into your account. That might be useful to some, but in my case, I am not using Hotmail, thus making the pop-up not useful at all.

To disable Windows Live Today, simply follow the instructions below:

1. Click on Tools, select Options
2. Click on the General tab
3. Uncheck the Show Windows Live Today after I sign in to Messenger box

Voila, the next time you sign into your Windows Live Messenger, the popup will not appear anymore and all you see is just your contact list.

There are times when I am having a project and it requires me to look for resources from the internet. Most of the time, I will look up on Wikipedia, and it troubles me so much when I copy and paste an article that is full of links to Microsoft Word.

Instead of removing those links one by one, you can try this method, which only consist of two steps, but will remove all links in one go.

1. Press Ctrl+A, which will highlight the entire text
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 (OR Ctrl+6), and you will see all links disappearing within seconds

This method is working on my Microsoft Word 2003, but I have not tested it on other versions.

Most of my wallpapers are found on the internet. Whenever I encountered a decent wallpaper that looks appealing to me, I would right click on it and set it as desktop background—to see if it looks good on my desktop.

Unfortunately, there are times where I was not satisfied with the wallpaper, and want the older wallpaper again, that I did not download earlier, but just set it as desktop background using the right click menu. Therefore, it is only possible for me to obtain the wallpaper again if only I could remember where I encountered it in the past.

One of the easiest way to solve the problem is to simply download the wallpaper to just any location on your local disk. But instead, I prefer to add all my favorite wallpapers to the local wallpaper directory on my Windows XP.

Once they are moved into the directory, the wallpapers will appear as one of the default wallpapers on the Display Properties (Right click on Desktop > Properties). To do so, just simply move your selected wallpapers to the wallpaper folder.

Windows XP - C:\WINDOWS\Web\Wallpaper\
Windows Vista - C:\Users\*User Name*\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\

The next time you want to revert your wallpaper, you can just simply select it from the Display Properties window.

Firefox by default is already very powerful internet browser, but you are probably not getting the most out of it. Getting the most out of Firefox basically means doing more on Firefox with less time. That will definitely increase your productivity.

Speed up Firefox

You have probably seen this else where as it has been posted millions of times on the internet. But in case you are still using the default Firefox settings, then these tips might help in speeding up your Firefox.

Type “about:config” in your address bar and hit enter.

In the filter, type “network.http”.

Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to ‘true’
Set network.http.pipelining to ‘true’
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to ‘25′
Set network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to ‘22′

Now right-click anywhere, select New → Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to ‘0′.

You should see the difference now in website loading speed on your Firefox. There are still a lot of tweaks in this area, you might want to Google for more.

More Room, Less Junks

Now you have a faster loading Firefox, but it’s still time consuming to scroll so much. There are a lot of buttons and menus on Firefox, and most probably you haven’t been using some of them ever since you installed Firefox.

Follow this guide on Lifehacker to eliminate useless items on your Firefox and squeeze all the useful ones together. The difference:

Before

After

From 4 huge toolbars, you will only have 3 compact toolbars now. That’s quite some space restored. What? 3 compact toolbars is still too much for you?

What about auto hiding your bookmarks toolbar when it is not in use? It will appear when you mouse over it, and collapse when you don’t. Like this:

Follow this guide for this awesome tweak.

Handy Extensions

One of the reason why Firefox is so popular is because it has a very large library of extensions. Some extensions will make your Firefox more powerful and resulting in higher productivity.

One of the most useful extension that I think will benefit just anyone:

DownThemAll! - It is a download manager for Firefox that you will love to have. Why? Because you will be pleased to have your download speed to be increased up to 400% faster and download a whole bunch of images or files off a website within clicks. It’s logic that faster file downloading speed will save you more time.

Quick Online Tips has a great list of 50 Firefox Extensions for power surfing. Pick some of them that you think will be handy, or you can alternatively look through the whole extension library.

Hotkeys! Shortcuts! Whatever you call it…

Trust me, getting used to shortcut keys can really save up a lot of time and can lead you into getting things done much faster. Below are my favorite hotkeys that I use frequently:

Ctrl + T - Open a new tab
Ctrl + Shift + T - Open last closed tab
Ctrl + N - New window
Ctrl + W - Close current tab
Ctrl + + - Increase font size
Ctrl + - - Reduce font size
Ctrl + Tab - Next tab (just like Windows’s Alt+Tab)
Ctrl + U - Open page source
F5 - Reload
F11 - Full screen

Middle click on link - Open link in new tab
Middle click on tab - Close tab

For the full list, keyboard and mouse

Do you know any other tips that can make Firefox more useful? Let us know by posting a comment below.

It is always known that strong passwords are hard to remember and vice versa. This is because strong passwords are long and consist of both alphabet and numerical. In this guide, you will be able to create a strong password that you CAN remember.

For example, from “flyingsausage” to “g2u2mhds2dsh4″. It seems impossible to remember it without referring to any notes or hint? It’s possible.

Step 1
Think of a base word that you can remember. I take “flyingsausage” as an example.

Step 2
For “I”, “L”, “E” and “O”, change them to number.

I or L to 1
E to 3
O to 0

So, flyingsausage will be f1y1ngsausag3

Step 3
Move all the keys to the right of your keyboard. For example, the key situated on the right side of “F” is “G”.

And the number situated on the right of 1 is 2, the key right next to 3 is 4 and for 0, it will remain 0 as there is no numbers right next to 0.

So, for flyingsausage:

F to G
1 to 2
Y to U
1 to 2
N to M
G to H
S to D
A to S
U to 2 (right side of “u” is “i”, “i” convert to “1″, and “1″ to “2″)
S to D
A to S
G to H
3 to 4

Your new strong password would be g2u2mhds2dsh4. So how do you remember it? The next time you enter your password, just think of your base word. In this case, flyingsausage. So I will be entering the password one by one slowly, converting F to G, L to 2 and so on.

It really takes time to enter your password for the first few try, but you will get used to it very quickly if you use it everyday and eventually you can type your password real fast.

I have been using this method for my passwords since years ago, and I am not able to write out my password without looking at the keyboard as I don’t remember it. All I remember is my base password.

This is really not rocket science, if you don’t understand at your first read, figure it out slowly. It is really easy, and effective.

Note: For Step 3, you can choose whether to move your keys to the left or right, it doesn’t matter.

Your kids are spending way too much time on a certain website and you are not happy with it? Discover adult websites in the History after your kids used your computer?

If your kids still won’t listen even after all the nagging, you might want to just block the websites you don’t want them to visit. In just 3 simple steps, without any software downloading, you can block as many websites as you want easily.

Step 1
Click Start > Run. Type notepad C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts in the “Open:” field and click OK.

Step 2
A notepad will pop up. Find the line where it says “127.0.0.1 localhost”

Step 3
Immediately under the “127.0.0.1 localhost“, enter the website you want to block by using the format “127.0.0.1 webaddress.com”. For example, you want to block Google and Yahoo from being accessed:

You can block as many websites as you want, just make sure you only enter one URL per line. To remove the blocked websites, just simply remove the line and you are done.

Demo

Click on the icon for a full screen view.

There are several reasons to do so. When typing URL on the address bar on Firefox, a list of website addresses that you have previously visited will appear. For example, you previously visited example.org, and the next time you type “ex” on your address bar, example.org will appear as a suggested URL.

The list is helpful as you can visit the website again in no time by selecting it from the list. But if you don’t want a certain website to appear on that list, be it a mistyped URL or a website that you won’t visit anymore—then you might want to removing it from the history.

Of course you can also remove the URL by deleting the entire history, but that will cause other URLs to be deleted as well. This trick is useful too if you are using someone’s else computer for browsing but don’t want to get the owner notice it.

To delete an entry from your Firefox history, type the URL out on your address bar, highlight it and press Shift+Delete (it works too on my Firefox by just pressing Delete without Shift, but most other guides suggest to include the Shift as well).

(Hover your cursor on the address to highlight)

You will never see the URL being suggested again while typing on your address bar until you visit that particular website again manually.

This guide is for people who removed or accidentally un-installed their Microsoft Paint on their Windows, but now want them back. I lost my MS Paint too two days ago, poking at the wrong place of my Add/Remove Windows Component and there goes my mspaint. It can only be re-installed with a Windows XP CD in my case, but I don’t have any with me.

If your Paint is gone from your computer too, do this to make sure the software really does not exist in your system, and not just the shortcut being deleted. Go to Start > Run > Type “mspaint” > OK. If your MSPaint starts, meaning it is still there, just that you have deleted the shortcut. Just create another shortcut and it will be fine.

I have a Windows XP CD
If you are 100% sure that MS Paint does not exist in your system anymore, there are three ways to get it back. The first way is to install it via your Windows XP CD. You can do so by going to

Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components > Double click on "Accessories and Utilities" > Double click on "Accessories" > Check "Paint" > OK > Next..

I DON’T have a Windows XP CD
The second way is grab a copy of the mspaint file from a relative, a friend or your pet dog’s computer. Copy mspaint.exe from their C:\WINDOWS\system32 to your flash drive, and paste it back to your computer’s “system32″ folder. Create a shortcut of it and place it anywhere you like and you are done.

Worse comes to worst, you don’t have a CD, nor a friend or relative with Windows XP, and your pet dog is using a MacBook, you are left with no choice but to download it. The following folder consist of most System Apps of Windows XP SP 1, and paint is available in it.

Download Windows XP System Apps

After you have downloaded it, move mspaint to your C:\WINDOWS\system32 and Paint will be available again for your computer. Alternatively, you can also download other similar free softwares but more powerful like Paint.NET or GIMP.

Happy painting

Majority of bloggers display their feed subscribers count using FeedBurner’s small chicklet. It is so simple to place one on your blog, you can even choose the color of your choice as well as changing the text inside the chicklet to something else.

But in case you prefer having more control on how to show off your feed subscriber’s count, a WordPress plugin called Feed Count will definitely help. As big as you want, whatever font you like, just anything that you can do with CSS.

Example:

There can be many reasons to style your own feed count, trying to stand out of the crowd that is using the chicklet, or in my case, enlarging the feed count to let everyone know there are only a whooping 6 subscribers at the moment, making visitors wanna take part in increasing the number.

All you have to do to style your own feed count is to download the WordPress plugin here and install it, activate the Awareness API in your FeedBurner control panel, and do the styling. A sample CSS is available at the plugin page.

Happy styling and good bye FeedBurner Chicklet!

No doubt that working long hours in front of the computer screen will cause eyestrain and dizziness. You know you are having eyestrain if your eyes feel irritated and have blurred vision looking at distanced object after a long session of computer use. If working shorter hours is not an option for you, then consider the following tips that will somehow help in reducing eyestrain.

Turn on Windows XP ClearType

If you are running on Windows XP, this tool developed by Microsoft will definitely be very useful. In fact, this is one of the best thing ever installed on my computer. I feel weird when using other people’s computer as the font displayed on their screen looks distorted as compared to mine with ClearType on.

Without ClearType:

With ClearType On:

There are two ways to turn ClearType on, either do it online or download the ClearType Tuner PowerToy to configure it locally on your computer.

If you are turning ClearType on online, make sure you are using Internet Explorer as most other browsers are not supported. When configuring, ClearType will display a few samples of text, and you can select the one that suits you the best.

Increase Monitor Refresh Rate

This trick works only on CRT monitors

Refresh rate refers to the number of times your monitor refresh in a second. Flickering screen is one of the cause of eyestrain. Increasing your monitor refresh rate will decrease the flickering on your screen. Follow the following steps to configure your monitor refresh rate:

1. Right click on your desktop > Properties
2. On the Settings tab, click on Advanced
3. Click on the Monitor tab
4. Configure your refresh rate using the drop down menu. It is recommended to set your refresh rate to 75 Hertz or higher.

Important: Make sure you have the “Hide modes that this monitor cannot display” box checked to make sure the refresh rate you select is supported by your monitor. Selecting refresh rate that is way too high will damage your monitor.

Take Frequent Breaks

Taking breaks frequently away from your screen is one of the best solution for reducing eyestrain. Frequent short breaks are better than longer but less frequent breaks. It is recommended to take a few minutes break 30 minutes or an hour.

If it is not convenient to walk away from your workstation, just simply closing your eyes and lean back will also help.

Exercise Your Eyes

Your eyes, just like your body, have to do some exercise in order to stay in good shape. If your job requires you to face the computer screen for the whole day every single day, you will feel the goodness of exercising your eyes. Your eyes won’t feel as tired as usual at the end of the day. Below are a few links to extensive eyes exercising guides:

• How to Exercise Your Eyes - wikiHow
• Protect your eyes! - Excellent Tips
• Eye Strengthening Exercises - About.com
• How To Do Six Chinese Eye Exercises - DoctorYourself.com