Uninstalling a program within Windows can take a little work. You might have to head off to Control Panel, find the “Uninstall a program” applet, wait for it to display (which can take a few seconds in itself on some systems, as Windows calculates “disk space used” figures and more), then find and double-click your unwanted application.

Menu Uninstaller Lite could make your life a little simpler, though. Once installed removing any program is as easy as right-clicking its shortcut, selecting the new Uninstall option and confirming your decision. Menu Uninstaller will then find and launch its regular uninstall application, which will remove it as usual.

Continue reading →

It is time to sing the praises of prepaid wireless in an economy that is still uncertain. Too often we fall victim to 2-year contracts because one of the big-five US carriers offers the latest in smartphone technologies at a seeminglylow price. You only feel the pain 6 months or a year down the road when the newest Android or iPhone releases and you are still stuck in your contract.

We all remember the days when prepaid was not the choice to make if you wanted a top of the line phone. Carriers like Virgin Mobile or Boost offered great plans with more minutes than most of the big five. The problem was the phones were horrible. Sure, they covered the basics -- you could talk for hours, text, and if lucky, you had some type of a data package to check emails. The phones were not glamorous in form or function and they lacked the service that consumers got from AT&T or Verizon.

Continue reading →

What a week! Just when I thought Microsoft could never be as cool as Apple, bang! Here comes Surface (no, not that Surface) to shatter my preconceptions about the weather in Seattle and its effect on product innovation.

Surface is sleek, sexy, and, dare I say it, kind of cool. It’s got this rockin’ kickstand thingy at the back, a neat-o magnetic keyboard/cover and is made from some cutting-edge alloy straight out of a Star Trek episode (specifically, Voyager -- DS9 would never stoop so low). In short, Surface has all the ingredients of an iPad killer. But while it may achieve some success in the consumer space, enterprise IT shops won’t touch it with a 3-meter pole.

Continue reading →

One of the plus points of Windows 8 is that it can natively mount an ISO image as a virtual disk, allowing you to browse it without requiring a physical disc. If you’d like to have that ability right now, though, there’s no need to wait -- the free ImDisk provides capable ISO handling and a whole lot more.

If you’d like to take a closer look at an ISO file, for instance, then right-click it, select “Mount as ImDisk Virtual Drive” > OK, and in a few seconds the image will be available within Explorer as a new virtual drive. (The program supports NRG images, too.)

Continue reading →

In a recent interview Linus Torvalds, the mastermind behind the Linux kernel, said that the operating system is not as popular as Windows on consumer PCs because it doesn’t come preinstalled. Manufacturers sell the computers they make with an operating system on board, which most of the time is Windows. Why can’t it be Linux instead?

According to Net Applications, in 2011, sales estimates have Linux at roughly 1.5 percent usage share on desktop and laptop computers. Windows on the other hand was evaluated at 92 percent in the same estimate.  The discrepancy in sales points out few of the issues that Linux has to overcome in order to reach a broader market adoption, but it can also provide a solution.

Continue reading →

When carrying out research online you may often find important pages that you’d like to save, and of course you might do this by simply clicking File > Save from your browser. The results can be a little messy, though, with files and folders scattered everywhere, and reviewing the pages later might be difficult.

Local Website Archive tries to help by storing the pages for you. There’s no need to worry about file names or folders -- the program can handle all of that -- and when you’re done you’ll have a neatly presented archive of pages, which is far easier to browse and search.

Continue reading →

English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin… How many different languages can you name? At a guess, probably no more than about twenty, which sounds bad when you consider there are an estimated 7,000 languages being spoken every day somewhere on our planet. The vast majority of these are, of course, virtually unknown, and used by a very small portion of the world’s population.

In fact, according to National Geographic, the 3,500 smallest languages are spoken by just 8.25 million people, and the tiniest of these native tongues are teetering on the brink of being silenced forever. It’s believed that one language dies every 14 days -- as its speakers switch to more common alternatives -- and nearly half of the world’s languages are expected to have been wiped out within a century.

Continue reading →

The massive outage that struck Amazon Web Services last week proved the cloud service is becoming an increasingly vital part of the IT infrastructure of many companies. For better or worse AWS is becoming a standard in the cloud, and its own fortunes are tied to that of some of the biggest web services out there.

Quora and Pinterest are just two services that rely on AWS in part or in full. When Amazon's cloud goes down, these sites will too.

Continue reading →

The new, targeted, high-tech, military grade malicious code such as Stuxnet, Duqu and Flamer dominates security news. So imagine our surprise when an AutoCAD worm, written in AutoLISP, the scripting language that AutoCAD uses, suddenly showed a big spike in one country on ESET’s LiveGrid two months ago, and this country is Peru.

We have seen other small number of infections of ACAD/Medre.A in other countries, but they are all in regions that are near Peru or have a large Spanish speaking contingent. The odd one out in the infection table would be the People’s Republic of China, but not quite so weird when we started to analyze the worm based on this sudden spike. More about China will follow later.

Continue reading →

There was nothing really wrong with Tumblr’s previous iOS app. It offered all the features you’d expect, such as the ability to access your dashboard, create a post, manage multiple blogs and view and reply to messages. The interface was straightforward, intuitive and unmistakably Tumblr.

Version 3.0, however, is just so much better in every way. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up, so is faster, sleeker, easier to use and more in line with its Android counterpart, which itself was updated a couple of months ago.

Continue reading →

FireTrust has today revealed MailWasher 2012 Free, a new version of its popular spam filter. The latest release will provide all the features of the full commercial MailWasher Pro edition for its first 10 days of use, but after that introduces four main restrictions.

There’s no Recycle Bin, which means you can’t browse or restore deleted emails. Preview options are limited, so it may be more difficult to manually determine whether a particular message is spam. Technical support is unsurprisingly reserved for paying customers. And, probably most crucially, the program will be limited to checking 1 email address only, perhaps a deal-breaker for many people.

Continue reading →

The Metro user interface is without doubt the most controversial feature of Microsoft's upcoming operating system Windows 8. When you dive deeper into the criticism that Metro faces, you notice that one argument stands out among the majority of critics: Metro is for tablets and touch-devices and not the desktop.

While it is possible to use Metro with a mouse and keyboard, its big buttons and controls, like the Charms menu and swiping motions, do cater to an audience that uses touch-devices. When you look closer, you will also notice that Metro does not really offer anything that desktop users can't do on the PC or on the Internet as well, oftentimes even better.

Continue reading →

Hometalk, a year-old home improvement-themed social network, underwent a total redesign and re-launched on Thursday in hopes of making its content easier to access, and to keep its roughly 100,000 members stuck to the site longer.

The site is designed for homeowners to share pictures, videos, ideas, and conversations about general design and repair themes, including (but not limited to) topics like flooring, gardening, remodeling, painting, and more. This is done in very much the traditional social networking fashion, with user profiles building up networks of friends/followers, and sharing posts based heavily upon photographs. With this redesign, Hometalk has clearly taken note of Pinterest's success, and it includes a new feature called, simply, "Saving." With this feature, users can save any post or photo from other users on a "Virtual Clipboard," similar in both name and design to Pinterest's "Virtual Pinboard."

Continue reading →

Microsoft’s Hollywood announcement Monday of its two Surface tablet computers was a tactical triumph but had no strategic value for the world’s largest software company because the event left too many questions unanswered. If I were to guess what was on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s mind it was simply to beat next week’s expected announcement of a Google branded tablet running Android. Microsoft, already playing catch-up to Apple’s iPad, does not want to be seen as following Google, too. So they held an event that was all style and no substance at all.

This is not to say that Microsoft shouldn’t make a tablet and couldn’t make a good one, but this particular event proved almost nothing.

Continue reading →

Microsoft on Thursday released the Xbox SmartGlass Software Development Kit (SDK) to partners that have agreements to develop Xbox games and entertainment applications for the Xbox 360.

The device-agnostic SmartGlass application was first revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo earlier in June, showing how users will eventually be able to pair their tablet or smartphone with their Xbox 360 for enhanced content consumption and gaming. Now that Microsoft's Surface and Windows Phone 8 initiatives have been revealed, the SmartGlass project has begun to take clearer shape.

Continue reading →