Convert Pen Drive into RAM for Vista!

Can you convert your Pen Drive or Thumb Drive or USB Drive or whatever you call it into a Random Access Memory for your computer? The answer is NO, you can't! And YOU CAN, if you are using Vista.

You see there is one major Difference between RAM and a Flash Drive. They are built differently, for different purposes. They store information differently. RAM uses volatile memory, which requires power to maintain stored information.In other words, the information the computer stores on RAM is lost once you switch off the computer. Flash Drives on the other hand, like your Hard Drive, is non-volatile storage. What ever information you send to a Flash Drive is recorded so that you can access it later.

There is also another Memory for computer called Virtual Memory. Now you must have seen a temporary file stored on your computer, as you are working with a Word file or Excel sheet. Your computer stores the inactive part of the file you are working on and saves it temporarily on your Hard Drive so that your RAM can be freed up. This is exactly what Virtual Memory does. Virtual Memory uses your Hard Drive and gives an application the "impression that it has contiguous working memory (an address space), while in fact it may be physically fragmented and may even overflow on to disk storage."

Windows Vista takes it a step further. It enables you to use a new technology - ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost works using flash drives. Using ready boost, you can convert your Flash Drive into a cache. I am sure you have heard about cache, on your web browser. It is a place where the browser stores previous responses from a web server. In other words, things like cookies, pictures etc are stored on you Browser Cache so that the browser need not fetch it again as you move from one page to another when you are browsing.

Now ReadyBoost converts your USB Drive into a cache so that your computer can free the Virtual Memory and RAM. This makes your computer work faster than it actually does if you have not enabled ReadyBoost. Now how do you enable ReadyBoost?

• Make sure that your USB Drive is 1 GB or more. 
• Plug it into your computer.
• Scan it and fix it when your Vista prompts you to do so. 
• Go to My Computer.
• Right click on the USB Drive Icon and go to Properties.
• If your Flash Drive can be a ReadyBoost, the second last tab on your Properties Window will read so. [Some old Flash Drives may not be able to handle ReadyBoost]
• Click on the ReadyBoost Tab on Property Window
• Select "Use this device"
• Allocate Flash Drive space or in other words, tell your computer how much space it can use from your Flash Drive.
• Click OK
• Restart your computer and feel the difference

Please note that the space allocated for ReadyBoost on your Flash Drive cannot be used for other storage. In other words you can not save your files  if you have converted the whole Flash Drive space into ReadyBoost.  The trick is to use only half of your Flash drive as ReadyBoost and the other half for storing important files.

Portable Applications: Get essential applications on pendrive

All of us are used to running Applications and Programmes from your computer. What if you can run the same applications from a USB drive or pen drive or thumb drive or what ever you call that cute little thing that you use to store information? The thing is, you can.

Portable Applications are useful if you do not have a lap top and you are using public computers. They are useful if your computer is controlled by an Administrator and you cannot add or remove applications from your computer. You can store your log in data or anything else on the Portable Applications, take them any where and they will work the same way they worked when you had them on last time.

For example, if you use Google Chrome to browse and you have the habit of saving bookmarks and password on your browser, Portable Google Chrome will help you do that on any computer and still have all the data with you. This means, ton a great extend you don't have to worry about leaving your password on a Public PC.

Installing a Portable Application is easy. If you have a USB Flash drive, the installer will prompt you and help you install it on the drive. And these portable applications are not version specific. You can run it on XP, Vista or Windows 7. [I have not tested it on Linux or Ubuntu]

I would like to share with you a few portable applications that I use.

1. Portable Google Chrome
2. Portable Google Chrome Beta
3. Portable Mozilla Firefox
4. Portable MSN Messenger 
5. Portable Skype
6. Portable Thunderbird 
7. Portable Open Office
8. Portable Yahoo Messenger 
9. GnuCash Portable
10. Sumatra PDF Portable 
11. VLC Media Player Portable 
12. Cool Player Portable 

I use a 4 GB Pendrive. These 12 applications do not even take half of that pendrive. I have converted the rest of the space into a folder that will allow me to save important documents that I want to take along when I go somewhere.

The best music gadget on your desktop!

When Google does things, they do it in such a way that you will instantly love it. Google Desktop is one good example. It makes life easier by enabling your PC to perform the way you want it to perform. Of course there are several issues about Google Desktop, including the space it takes on your C Drive when it index your files. But that is some space I am willing to give Google Desktop for making search on my desktop easier.

As I was searching for Google Gadgets that would enable me to make my PC more useful, i stumbled upon their music gadget. It is a plugin that indexes music files and bring them together on your desktop so that it is easy for you to search and play songs as you are on the move.

There are several limitations to many of the music players that are available today. One thing is that they are incapable of searching your files out and bring it for you when you need them. If you have too many files on your system and that too in different places, it is difficult for you to locate them. The Music Player by Google Desktop automatically adds all your music files to the library and all that you got to do is type in the song you want and presto, it is there for you.

As you see in the image, it categorizes songs Artist, Album and Track wise. You can add the song of your choice to the play list. Or the album of your choice to your playlist. Or the artist of your choice to your playlist.

What I like the most about this gadget is that you have one button less on your taskbar!

Windows Live Writer: Blogging made easier!

I always used to wish if I could take my own sweet time offline to write a post and publish it once I am done. That was not possible till I found Windows Live Writer.

To me blogging was always something I did online. From typing a post to proof reading it to publishing it. Typos used to creep in and I always had to go back and edit a post even after I published it. I tried a few Offline Blogging Applications. But none of them was worth the bargain. They were very basic and I don’t think any of they really understood what a blogger wants. I think Windows Live Writer understands a blogger better than many of the blogging platforms available today.

Live Writer provides a blogger with many options, options that many blogging platforms, including blogger can not give you. The best thing about Live Writer is the Preview Option. Live Writer downloads your log template so that it can show you the post as it is going to appear in the blog. From hyperlinking to inserting pictures to embedding maps to you name it and it is like Live Writer has it. Following the Google and Firefox steps, Microsoft has also allowed others to develop plugins and addons for Live Writer.

It makes blogging easier is one thing.It also makes blogging much more interesting than it was!

How to Quick Launch folders from Windows Vista Taskbar?

Computers make life easy and hard to live at the same time! The easier it makes your life, you find yourself wondering why it doesn't make your life easier than what it is actually making it now. That makes life a bit hard to live and we always end up wanting more.

We want things done as quick and easy as possible. And I know how hard life can be if you have too many files and folders to live with and you always grapple with the idea of finding your files when you need them quickly and easily. Sometimes you wish you had some files at your fingertips. Now, I found a way to put my favourite folders on the Quick Launch of my Taskbar on my Vista and it made my life a little easier than it ever was. And I keep all those files I think I may need often in the folders on my Taskbar and now they are available to me at a double-click.

How did I do it? Let me demonstrate. For example, let us say, I want to put a folder named "Start Menu Test Folder" on my Taskbar Quick Launch. What do I do? Look at the picture below:

Step 1: I go to the place where the folder I want to put on the taskbar is located. I right click on the folder. In this case it is the "Start Menu Test Folder" I right-click on. I right-click on that and send a shortcut to my desktop.

Step 2: Once I am sure I have the shortcut to the folder on my Desktop, I go right-click on the Taskbar. Your Taskbar is locked usually. You are right-clicking to unlock it. Yes, right-click on the taskbar and unlock it.

Step 3: Once you have your Taskbar unlocked, it is easy. Click on the folder you want to be on the Taskbar and drag it to the Taskbar Quick Launch. Drag and drop the folder on your Taskbar Quick Launch. The folder will appear on your Taskbar. If you want to change the name of the shortcut, you can right-click on it and rename. Once you are done, right-click on your Taskbar and lock it again.

To avoid clutter and confusion, make sure that you don't keep more than one or two folders on your Taskbar. I am not sure if you know, you can put your favourite programmes on the Taskbar this way.  Right clcik on the Programme you want on your taskbar and click on "Add to Quick Launch" You can also pin to on your start menu, if you want.

I am not sure if the same thing can be done on Windows XP. I request the readers to try this on their XP, if they have one, and tell me if you can do it.

Google Crome Crashes: How did I solve it?

It was not so long ago I wrote about Google Chrome launching an OS. I was so excited about the news of COS coming up to conquer the OS Market and going to take it all to the web and give cloud computing a new dimension. I was happy to know, soon I would be using my browser to run any application that I want to run. The next day something happened to my Chrome Browser, that almost made me rethink what I wrote. [No, I haven't changed my mind about trusting Google when they say their OS is going to be the best!] My Chrome Browser started crashing!

It started crashing every one minute. Start, crash and restart! This looked to me like running a fluorescent tube light when there is low voltage! Those of us who live in India would know what I am talking about. When there is low voltage [a common phenomenon in India] the tube lights start blinking like mad that you always give up and go to sleep no matter what you want to do. This Chrome Crash was like that.

I'd open the browser and type in a web address. When the page loads, Chrome would crash. Initially I thought, it might be a security procedure by Chrome and I was browsing a web page that might have sent some malicious code to my system. But when the crash recurred when I was browsing Google owned pages, when sometimes I was doing nothing on the browser, I realized there was something wrong. My Chrome browser was just not willing to listen to me and every other minute it crashed telling me: 'Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed.'

One good thing, during this whole drama of Chrome Crash, was that the browser was willing to get me back the pages I was browsing when it restarted. I managed to search the solution out, after an exasperating half an hour of start-crash-restart. Of course, Google had a solution. This is what Google asked me to do:

Solutions

Try restarting the browser.

Whenever possible, Google Chrome will restore webpages from your previous browsing session.

Check whether you need a new browser user profile.

If you see this error message repeatedly, your browser user profile may be corrupted. First try moving the Default subfolder from your User Data folder to see if that fixes the problem:

1. Go to Start menu > Run.
2. Enter one of the following directories in the text field, depending on your operating system: Windows XP: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\ Windows Vista: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\
3. Click OK.
4. In the window that opens, rename the 'Default' folder as 'Backup.'
5. Move the 'Backup' folder from the 'User Data' folder up one level to the 'Chrome' folder.

If you continue to see the error, try creating a new user profile to replace your current one.

Check for problems with protected system files.

1. Go to Start menu > Run.
2. Enter the following: SFC.EXE /SCANNOW (make sure there is a space between SFC.EXE and /SCANNOW). This initiates the Microsoft utility that will scan and repair problems with protected system files on your computer.

Try opening Google Chrome and see whether the error message still appears.

IE6 Must Die: The new On-line Movement!

Look at this screen shot from Twitter. I was so surprised to see the slogan "IE6 Must Die" trending on Twitter, yesterday. I think the trending began on Twitter with Ben Parr posting 'IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On' on Mashable.

Ben Parr wrote on Mashable:

Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser:Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft experienced superior market share – up to 95% at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8. So why is 15 to 25 percent of the world’s browsing still done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)?

Long ago, in 2007, David Walsh gave '6 Reasons Why IE6 Must Die'. Even at that point, I don't think anyone disagreed with him. But the post did not see the whole World Wide Web rising against IE6, probably because many end users could not really see the difference. Most of what David wrote was technical. Probably people didn't care what programmers went through. David wrote:

"millions of ignorant internet users will stick to using IE6 which will result in programmers dedicating valuable time to fix IE6-caused bugs and will hamper pushing websites to the next level."

I took a look at how browsers are used across the world on Wikipedia. I found that Internet Explorer owns 65% of the browser market share. And according to Wikipedia's June 2009 Report, IE6 owns 12.78% browser market share. According to w3schools.com, by June 2009, IE6 owns at least 14.9% browser market share. 12% or 14%, why is the internet all of a sudden showing a trend against IE6?

All of a sudden we have major websites like Facebook and You Tube trying to force users drop IE6. All of a sudden we have Internet trending on "IE6 Must Die". "What the Trend?" is asking for an On-line Movement against IE6, encouraging people to tweet the Mashable post title "IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On". I think it is all because, HTML5 is on the way. Its first draft appeared on web in January 2008. Now, WHATWG is working hard to make HTML 5 a modern reality. I think once HTML 5 is a reality and all major websites drop IE6 support, we'll see the death of the browser. Asa Dotzler, predicts that IE6 will die by the end of next year if the present trend continues.

Let us all join our hands together to help Internet Technology move and grow further. If IE6 does not die on its own, we must kill it. I thought, as a part of that I would provide a list of links to help you find the new-age browsers. You can choose the one you think you will like. Here is the list:

• Firefox
• Opera
• Chrome
• Internet Explorer 8
• Safari

Of all the browsers, I prefer Firefox and Chrome. I prefer Firefox for the kind of cool add-ons it gives you to make your browsing experience great. I prefer Chrome for its simplicity and security.

Google Operating System: Soon to be a reality?

I love most of what Google does! One thing I like the most about all the Google Services is the fact that they gel into each other very well. Another thing is the fact that they let every one who can contribute to make the web a better place join hands officially or unofficially with them. [I'm talking about the space Google provides for developers to collaborate.]

The Google Guys are incredible and if there is one site that I always go to, it is Google.  And I use most of the services offered by Google. And I went straight ahead and started using Google Chrome, when they launched it. I was using Firefox till then and my hobby was to download and try and add as many add-on to my Firefox Browser as possible. It was fascinating to use Firefox, though the add-ons slowed down my browser and it always had 'starting trouble.'

When Google Chrome came people were wondering, why another browser. People thought, it is browser war. But Google proved them all wrong when they announced their Google Chrome OS on 7 July 2009. Google Chrome was not the beginning of a browser war. It was something beyond browsers and I wonder if Microsoft saw that coming when they were busy launching their cheap imitation of Google Search, Bing! C'mon guys! A picture that keeps changing on the home page and an option to fetch and display content from the sites in the search list does not make Bing, Google! I don't care even if they both give pretty similar search results!A cheap imitation is always a cheap imitation!!!

But look at Google and how beautifully they dream and strive to make that dream a reality.

Google says: "Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS." 

And those are the three things everyone wants these days when it comes to Personal Computers. Google Chrome is fast enough not to make you feel sit and hate yourself for using it. It is simple enough to not to get you confused about what you should do when and how. It is secure enough to warn you about what can harm your computer. I am talking from a layman's perspective, all you computer wiz kids out there! So I think these guys are going to do it when they say they are going to make COS [Chrome Operating System, aah! sounds good!!] quick, simple and secure!

Google reminds me of the Theory of Evolution. Unlike Microsoft, who started with OS and stayed on OS till it was too late, Google has evolved like a living being does. From Search Engine to OS, I am fascinated to witness this evolution. They are gradually taking everything away from Microsoft. First they had this search engine that grew to Google Books  and Google Reader and gradually made libraries and encyclopedias obsolete. Then they had this Mail that changed the way people communicate and gave a new dimension to real time communication through Google Talk. Google Docs made me almost stop using the other Office Software Packages. Google Chrome made me forget and hate the other web browsers I was using so far. And now here is COS to take my breath away!

I really really wish COS is a reality soon!!

Now, my computer can listen to me !

I bumped into the Microsoft Speech Recognition Package on my Windows Vista  accidentally.  And I am fascinated by the fact that now I can talk my computer into doing many things. It listens and almost listens well.

This is what I did: I opened my Start Menu. I went to Control Panel and clicked on Speech Recognition. I was taken through what ever I had to do to help by computer capable of listening to what I say. And then there was a tutorial, which helped me understand how my computer listens and what I must do to make it listen better.

I am an Indian. So I have this accent that native speakers may not understand and my computer speaks English the way a native speaker would. Initially, I had trouble making it understand what I am trying to say and often made me feel frustrated. That was when I noticed an option that helps me train my computer to understand my accent. I trained my computer for sometime and realized that it was getting better the more I used Speech Recognition to interact with my computer.

I am told two things really matter when it comes to using the Speech Recognition on Vista. One, you should have a good microphone. A microphone that picks less background noise.  Two, you should speak clearly. Not too fast and not too slow.

I am also told that you can add words to the Speech Recognition Dictionary. I tried this. I went to Speech Recognition and clicked on Speech Dictionary. There you get a link to add a new word. All that i had to do was to click the link, add the word and teach my computer how I pronounced it. You can also decide if you want the word to be always start with a capital letter or only sometimes with a capital letter.

Initially, it was fun making my computer listen to me. But then as days went by, I realized that this function has such power that it can change the way you look at technology. [Make you more lazy, I mean ... !!] Now i use Speech Recognition to dictate my mails to the computer and what not. It's really making life easy!!]

Guys, guess what, you can install this programme on your XP too. Try visiting the Microsoft Speech Site.