ziomal.biz

You live your life at 2.4GHz. Your router, your cordless phone, your Bluetooth earpiece, your baby monitor and your garage opener all love and live on this radio frequency, and no others. Why? The answer is in your kitchen.

What We're Talking About

Before we charge too far ahead here, let's run over the basics. Your house or apartment, or the coffee shop you're sitting in now, is saturated with radio waves. Inconceivable numbers of them, in fact, vibrating forth from radio stations, TV stations, cellular towers, and the universe itself, into the space you inhabit. You're being bombarded, constantly, with electromagnetic waves of all kind of frequencies, many of which have been encoded with specific information, whether it be a voice, a tone, or digital data. Hell, maybe even these very words.

On top of that, you're surrounded by waves of your own creation. Inside your home are a dozen tiny little radio stations: your router, your cordless phone, your garage door opener. Anything you own that's wireless, more or less. Friggin' radio waves: they're everywhere.

Really, it's odd that your cordless phone even has that 2.4GHz sticker. To your average, not-so-technically-inclined shopper, it's a number that means A) nothing, or B) something, but the wrong thing. ("2.4GHz? That's faster than my computer!")

What that number actually signifies is broadcast frequency, or the frequency of the waves that the phone's base station sends to its handset. That's it. In fact, the hertz itself just just a unit for frequency in any context: it's the number of times that something happens over the course of a second. In wireless communications, it refers to wave oscillation. In computers, it refers to processor clock rates. For TVs, the rate at which the screen refreshes; for me, clapping in front of my computer right now, it's the rate at which I'm doing so. One hertz, slow clap.

The question, then, is why so many of your gadgets operate at 2.4GHz, instead of the ~2,399,999,999 whole number frequencies below it, or any number above it. It seems almost controlled, or guided. It seems, maybe, a bit arbitrary. It seems, well, regulated.

A glance at FCC regulations confirms any suspicions. A band of frequencies clustered around 2.4GHz has been designated, along with a handful of others, as the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical radio bands. "A lot of the unlicensed stuff—for example Wi-Fi—is on the 2.4GHz or the 900Mhz frequencies—the ISM bands. You don't need a license to operate on them." That's Ira Kelpz, Deputy Chief, Office of Engineering and Technology at the Federal Communications Commission, explaining precisely why these ISM bands are attractive to gadget makers: They're free to use. If routers and cordless phones and whatever else are relegated to a small band 2.4GHz, then their radio waves won't interfere with, say, cellphones operating at 1.9GHz, or AM radio, which broadcasts between 535 kHz and 1.7 MHz. The ISM is, in effect, a ghetto for unlicensed wireless transmission, recommended first by a quiet little agency in a Swiss office of the UN, called the ITU, then formalized, modified and codified for practical use by the governments of the world, including, of course, our own FCC.

The current ISM standards were established in 1985, and just in time. Our phones were one the cusp of losing their cords, and in the near future, broadband internet connections would come into existence and become magically wireless. All these gadgets needed frequencies that didn't require licenses, but which were nestled between the ones that did. Frequencies that weren't so high that they sacrificed broadcast penetration (through walls, for example), but weren't so low that they required foot-long antennae. In short, they needed the ISM bands. So they took them.

Why 2.4?

Now, there are many, many frequencies that qualify as "unlicensed," but only a handful get used in our phones, routers, and walkie talkies.

In the case of something like phones, which are sold paired with a specific base station, choosing the right unlicensed frequency is a pretty straightforward calculation: A 900MHz system will be more easily able to broadcast through a multi-floor house, but a 2.4 GHz system will have a longer range (if unobstructed) and generally requires a smaller antenna, which keeps the phone's size in check.

Wi-Fi routers started as proprietary, paired systems operating on all manner of frequencies, only settling on a standard—5GHz—with the codification of 802.11a. Then the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers agreed that 2.4GHz, with its wide channel selection and range/penetration/cost potential, was a safer bet. Today, some Wireless N routers can operate on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands concurrently. Routers could function just as well at 2.3 or 2.5GHz, but they're not allowed. It's the rules. The 2.4GHz band, which runs from about 2400 to 2483.5Mhz, is where routers have to live.

For this, they can thank the microwave.

Microwave ovens heat food by blasting it with, literally, microwaves. (It bears mentioning that in terms of electromagnetic waves, microwaves, the wavelengths of which range from a millimeter all the way up to a meter, aren't particularly "micro".) At certain frequencies, such waves cause something call Dielectric Heating in water and fat, while passing straight through other materials, like plastic or glass, without exciting them much at all. (Metal, on the other hand, gets too excited.) For a full explanation of how dielectric heating works, click here, but for the purposes of this article, just know this: Only certain materials are susceptible, and only when bombarded with waves of a certain frequency and power. One of those frequencies is 915MHz. Others fall at 5.8 GHz and 24GHz. But the one that proved to be both effective and relatively cheap to achieve was 2.45GHz. That's the frequency emitted by your microwave, right there in the kitchen.

So, when the FCC got around to establish just which frequencies unlicensed gadgets could broadcast on, they had a lot of things to think about. First, they had to consider which frequencies were already in use by stuff like radio and TV. Those would be off-limits. Then, of the remaining, usable, unallocated frequencies, they sought out the ones that were already being used by existing equipment. One thing they noticed? Microwaves were popular! They'd been around commercially since 1947. And generally, they operated at a specific frequency: 2.45GHz. Despite heavy shielding, microwave ovens' powerful emissions could sometimes interfere with neighboring frequencies, so it was decided that they should be given a few megahertz of space in both directions. And so the 2400 to 2483.5Mhz ISM band was born.

That these free-for-all frequencies could one day get overcrowded was always a possibility. But the FCC's primary concern is minding the frequencies it licenses; everyone working in ISM frequencies, then, must fend for themselves. And they do! Your microwave and your router might emit waves in the same frequency range, and this might screw with your router's connectivity a little bit. Generally, though, the router companies have been able to minimize interference by boosting signal strength and writing more intelligent firmware. And outward emissions of microwaves are at least supposed to be minimized. (That perforated metal shield in the glass door of your microwave? It's a shield—the holes in it are smaller than the physical width of the 2.4GHz wave.) In the end, things work.

That's not to say that the 2.4GHz band isn't getting crowded. Many routers operate at least in part on the 5GHz band, and a quick survey of your local Best Buy will find wireless phones at 900MHz, 1.9GHz and 5GHz. But the King of Frequency mountain, the band loved by billions of wireless connections around the world, be they Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or nonstandard RF remotes, is my band, your band, our band, 2.4. And all because we wanted to cook our food a little faster.

Original art by guest artist Chris McVeigh (AKA powerpig). You can catch all his work at flickr.com/powerpig, and follow him on Twitter. (@Actionfigured)

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

Gizmodo is the world’s most fun technology website, focused on gadgets and how they make our lives better, worse, and more absurd.

These 29 essential PC skills define the core competency of any power user

Do you consider yourself a power user? It’s a tough question. After all, where do you draw the line? Hardware hacking? Command-line skills? Unix?

As we sat down to answer this question, the possibilities seemed endless, making our task feel more daunting. Windows registry hacks? Networking know-how? Upgrades? We even asked you, our readers, to contribute your suggestions. We received a bunch of great ones, but this only further broadened our pool of ideas.

Illustrated Merit Badges by Jim Kopp

Undeterred, we took a step back to consider the very essence of a power user. Eureka! A power user, we reasoned, is not a simple state of being. It’s a path, filled with accomplishments and achievements and failures and applied knowledge. And merit. We imagined a Boy Scout sash, filled with badges indicating various acts of heroism and knowledge, as well as empty spaces where future achievements will eventually reside.

On the following pages, you’ll learn what our version of this path is. Enjoy!

Setting Up Your PC

The first few hours of any new PC’s existence are critical. Set things up right and you’ll enjoy years of stability and longevity. Get things wrong and… well, you know how that goes. Every mistake, oversight, and wrinkle introduced during a new PC’s inception will compound itself over time. Here are the essentials to getting it right.

Install Windows the Right Way

You already know how to install Windows—pop in the disc and watch an episode of The Office—but what do you do when it’s finished? The first step we take is to fire up Windows Update and install any and all applicable patches. You’ll most likely have to reboot your system, at which point you should check Windows Update again.

When that’s finished, head over to your motherboard maker’s website and download/install the latest chipset drivers specific to your mainboard. Next, install the latest graphics driver for your videocard, and then finish things off by updating any other components, like your soundcard and/or network adapters. Windows’ default drivers will handle most components in a fairly stable fashion, but you’re going to get the best results from native drivers.

Banish Crapware from a New PC

PC Decrapifier is ideally suited for any PC purchased from a retail outlet or online vendor. Goodbye, crapware!

Trials and toolbars and links, oh my! As a way of generating revenue from software vendors, OEMs often shovel all kinds of performance-hampering crapware onto your new PC. You can spend the first 30 minutes hunting down uninstallers and restoring your system to pristine condition, or knock out the bloat with a single blow using PC Decrapifier, a free utility that detects and uninstalls whichever programs you select.

Manage Power Usage and Sleep Better at Night

Navigate to the Control Panel and select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. For portable PCs where battery life is a priority, we build off of the Power Saver profile. Similarly, choose the High Performance setting if you’re working with an enthusiast-class rig. Once you have a starting point, tweak the individual settings by clicking Change Plan Settings and then Change Advanced Power Settings. Here are our favorite toggles:

• Hard Disk - You can configure your HDD to switch off after a set period of inactivity. If you own a modern hard drive, chances are it already comes with several power-saving features built in, so don’t expect any miracles here. And if you own an SSD, any potential power-saving benefits go right out the window because of a lack of moving parts.

• USB Selective Suspend - When enabled, USB devices will stop drawing power while in an idle state. This is done at the driver level, so not all devices support this setting.

• Processor Power Management - Notebook users looking to extend battery life can set the Maximum Processor State to a value less than 100 percent. The obvious drawback here is that you’ll lose performance when performing CPU intensive tasks, and since today’s processors come with all kinds of power-saving features already built in, this is of dubious value on modern machines.

• Display - A brightly lit LCD drinks electricity like it’s going out of style, and what’s the point if you aren’t even looking at it? Notebook users should configure the display to dim after a short period of inactivity, or better yet, turn off altogether. Desktop users won’t see much benefit, but hey, you’ll sleep better at night knowing you reduced your carbon footprint.

When you’re finished configuring your power options, look for any problems using Windows’ Powercfg utility. To do this, open an elevated command prompt (right-click on cmd and run as an administrator) and type powercfg -energy -output c:\report.html. Windows will then observe your PC for 60 seconds and spit out an energy report at the location and filename specified.

Set Up Three Displays

Before shuttling those old LCD monitors to the landfill, consider filling your desktop with a triple-display setup instead. In most cases, you’ll need a second videocard to make the magic happen, but it doesn’t have to be gaming grade—a PCI card will work just fine. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 isn’t likely to cough up a hairball in this scenario. Once installed, go into Display Properties to finalize your configuration options. For even more control, we recommend running UltraMon or DisplayFusion to squeeze out additional features, like multiple taskbars, from your three-headed monster.

Use Benchmarks to Expose Shoddy Settings and Busted Hardware

There’s more to benchmarking than just bragging rights. It’s also an ideal way to gauge whether your components are firing on all cylinders. An unusually low benchmark score could be indicative of a misconfigured setting, or even a faulty piece of hardware.

Before you begin your first benchmark run, prep your PC to eliminate any outside variables. Disconnect from the Internet, turn off your screen saver, turn off auto update, and disable your antivirus and any other background tasks. It’s also a good idea to defrag your hard drive (but not your SSD). Finally, reboot your PC.

Far Cry 2's built-in benchmark allows you to measure your new system's real-world performance. It's a great way to gauge whether your rig is running in a healthy manner.

Use a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, starting with Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage Suite to get an overview of your system as a whole. To suss out your CPU, fire up Maxon’s Cinebench 11.5. You can benchmark your RAM with SiSoft Sandra’s built-in benchmarking tools, and for your GPU, we recommend a variety of tests, including Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage and built-in game benchmarks, such as the one included with Far Cry 2.

Stress testing is a little different than benchmarking, in that you’re primarily testing for stability, not performance. Running Prime95 will let you know if your overclock is stable (select Run Benchmark from the Options menu), while Memtest86+ does an excellent job at exposing defective RAM. To use the latter, download either the bootable ISO or auto-installer for USB keys and boot directly from either one. Let Memtest86+ run a full pass on each stick individually.

Three Smart Ways to Protect Your Data

Stupefy Hackers with Strong Passwords

While using your girlfriend’s name as a password qualifies as a heartfelt gesture, it’s also a boneheaded security risk. Avoid using passwords that are easy to guess and instead use a mix of alphanumeric characters and symbols. At the very least, use symbols and numbers like @, 3, !, or 0 in place of the vowels A, E, I, or O. If what you’re trying to password protect is mission-critical, use an online password generator such as this one from PC Tools.

Lock Down Your Router Tighter Than Fort Knox

Without a password in place to protect your wireless Internet, you’re not only a sitting duck, but inviting trouble. Keep bad guys out by using a unique SSID and by securing your router with a password. To access your router, type 192.168.1.1 into your browser (or check your router manual for an alternative). You’ll be prompted for a password—type “admin” for both entries, or consult your router manual if this doesn’t work. Now, navigate to the security section. This will vary by make/model—if you own a Linksys router, for example, head over to Wireless > Wireless Security and choose the strongest encryption your network adapters support, such as WPA2. Type in a strong password mixing both letters and numbers, and either write this down (temporarily) or commit it to memory. You’ll need to punch this in when prompted on any PCs or Internet-connected devices that tap into your router.

Secure Your Sensitive Data

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a deleted file is gone forever. All any two-bit hack has to do is Google “data recovery” to find a list of apps that promise to resurrect files already emptied from the recycle bin. Use Eraser when you need to securely delete files. If you’re getting ready to dispose of your hard drive, KillDisk decimates any traces of data. And finally, put your trust in TrueCrypt for on-the-fly encryption.

Next Page: Network Windows >>

---

Network Windows

Being able to dig below the surface of Windows is an essential skill. The faster you can access your data—from any location—the more enjoyable your life will be. The ability to quickly help your friends and family via remote access is pure power user.

Map Network Drive

You'll save time and energy by mapping a frequently used network directory to a drive.

Mapping a network drive in Windows 7 is both quick and easy, once you know how to do it. Open My Computer and highlight the drive you want to map. Select Map Network Drive from the toolbar. In the pop-up window that appears, select a drive letter for your mapped drive. Click the Browse button to drill down to the folder you want to map and be sure the Reconnect at Logon box is checked. All that’s left is to click Finish. You should now see the mapped network drive in the My Computer window.

Create Secure Remote Access

It’s an indelible truth of being an advanced user: Our loved ones need our help when things go wrong. Quite often, it’s nearly impossible to provide that sort of help over the phone—the entire process often becomes counterproductive, usually eliciting a great deal of frustration rather than resolution of any kind. So what ends up happening? You get in your car and drive far too many miles only to discover that your mom simply needed to disable some pop-ups in “The Windows.” What a waste of time and gas, and now you’ve got to stay for dinner.

OK, we’re digressing. The next time you’re at mom’s house, do yourself a favor that’ll save you some gas, time, and grief later on down the line. Head over to www.logmein.com, download the free software onto mom’s computer, and create an account. The next time you receive a distressed phone call, you can hop on your own PC, take remote control of mom’s desktop, and address any simple fixes she needs from the comfort of your own home. 

LogMeIn is easy to download and install, and will allow you to remote access your desktop from virtually anywhere with an internet connection.

Once the software is installed on the computer you need remote control over, taking the reins becomes as easy as logging into LogMeIn.com (which only requires a username and password, all free). The open-source software allows you to perform almost any task you normally would using your PC, over the Internet. You can save and make changes to files, reorganize the desktop, and adjust system settings—more than enough capabilities required for what’s usually an easy fix.

Incidentally, LogMeIn has a wide range of uses that extend far beyond remote controlling a desktop. With the right software iterations, you can remote control any given desktop from a smartphone or tablet PC, too. For a more in-depth look at LogMeIn, go here.

Create Secure Remote Access

In the old days, setting up a home network with printer and file sharing was about as fun as watching a train wreck… from the conductor’s seat. With Windows 7, Microsoft has removed most of the headaches associated with sharing files, thanks to the advent of HomeGroups.

HomeGroups only work with PCs running Windows 7, leaving Vista and XP users to go pound sand. To set up a HomeGroup, navigate to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options. Mash the Create a HomeGroup button and check the boxes for the types of files you want to share, including Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, and Printers. In the next step, you’ll be given a case-sensitive password. Write this down—you’ll need it when adding other PCs to the HomeGroup.

To connect another PC to the HomeGroup you just created, follow the same path as before and press the Join Now button. Enter the password you jotted down and Windows will take care of the rest.

You can quickly and easily set up file sharing across your entire network through this screen.

You may not want to share the same files and folders with everyone in your HomeGroup. Maybe you’ve recorded some, ahem, special-interest videos that would place little Johnny in therapy for the rest of his life if he viewed them, or confidential documents detailing your secret identity as a spy. Whatever the case, it’s easy enough to selectively share files with others on your network.

To detach an entire folder or a single file from your network, open it in Windows Explorer, select the Share With pull-down menu, and click Nobody (you’ll also find the Share With option in the right-click context menu). Alternately, you can give your HomeGroup just Read or both Read/Write permissions in this same section, or share the folder with only specific people in your HomeGroup. In the case of the latter, select Specific People from the Share With pull-down menu and select only those you want to have access to your file or folder. Next to each name, you can grant specific levels of access; for example, you can restrict little Johnny to only viewing your vacation photos, and you can give everyone else both read/write privileges.

For even finer control, bulldoze your way back to the HomeGroup section in the Control Panel and select Change Advanced Sharing Settings. From here you can set up different rules for Home, Work, and Public networks, as well as troubleshoot connection issues. If someone is unable to access your network shares, they might be using an ancient wireless adapter that doesn’t support 128-encryption. If that’s the case, scroll down to File Sharing Connections and select “Enable file sharing for devices that use 40- or 45-bit encryption.” You can also turn printer sharing on/off, as well as several other self-explanatory options.

15 Essentials Windows 7 Shortcuts

When it comes to Windows, the shortest distance between point A and point B isn’t a straight line, but a keyboard shortcut. Commit these to memory and you’ll work faster:

• Win+Home Minimizes all inactive Windows, not only giving you quick access to the desktop, but hides what you’ve been up to when the boss strolls by.

• Win+Left/Right Arrow Docks the active Window to either side of the screen.

• Win+Up/Down Arrow Maximizes or minimizes active window.

• Shift+Win+Left Arrow Shuttles the active Window to an adjacent monitor.

• Win+Number (1-9) Launch or toggle to the corresponding program in the taskbar.

• Click and Shake Window Minimizes all other Windows (and strengthens your forearm).

• Win+Tab Initiates Flip 3D, which renders live thumbnail images of open windows in a 3D view.

• Ctrl+Win+Tab Initiates a persistent Flip 3D display so you don’t have to hold down the Windows key.

• Ctrl+Z Undoes an action.

• Ctrl+A Selects all items in a document or Window.

• Alt+Delete Displays the system menu (Remote Desktop Connection).

• Alt+Home Displays the Start menu (Remote Desktop Connection).

• Ctrl+Shift+D Clears the calculation history (Calculator).

• Numlock+Asterisk on Numpad Displays all subfolders under the selected folder.

• Shift+Right-click a file Adds a Copy as Path entry to the right-click context menu.

Next Page: Maintenance and Prevention >>

---

Maintenance and Prevention

PCs, automobiles, and human bodies all have one thing in common: Performance tends to degrade over time. Real power users know how to ward off the effects of old age. Here are some key strategies.

Stay Privy to Software Updates

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can prevent most malicious attacks by keeping your software up to date. That’s easier said than done when you’re juggling dozens of programs, but you don’t have to go it alone. Secunia Personal Software Inspector (www.secunia.com) scans your system for outdated apps and plugins, and then arranges everything in a handy report complete with direct download links to the latest patches for each program.

It’s best to let Secunia PSI constantly monitor your rig for unpatched software, and if you’re intentionally using an older program for compatibility reasons, simply set up a rule to ignore it. Fire up the advanced interface by clicking the Advanced link in the upper right corner. Select the Settings tab and click Create Ignore Rule. Give it a name, and in the Rule box, enter the path to that program, like C:\Program Files\App\app.exe.

Eradicate Malware with Extreme Prejudice

Before you throw in the towel and reinstall Windows, update your antivirus definitions and run a full scan, or if you’re fixing a PC that doesn’t have any AV software installed, use a cloud-based scanner, like Panda ActiveScan. Any IT tech worth his salt will also carry around SuperAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes in his toolbox.

Depending on how bad Aunt Mabel messed up her PC, you may need to escalate your efforts with HijackThis. HijackThis combs through registry and file settings where malware is most likely to hide out, but it doesn’t discern between good and bad entries, so don’t go blasting away settings willy-nilly. When in doubt, get a second opinion online by copying/pasting the log contents of a scan to www.hijackthis.de or http://hjt.networktechs.com. It’s also a good idea to carry around HijackReader, which is the online version of the log analyzer in case you’re unable to access the web.

Clear out the Cobwebs

A year’s worth of accumulated dust in your rig is pretty much the equivalent of outfitting each of your components in a custom-knit wool sweater—not good. A tiny bit of maintenance every now and then can ensure that your system breathes easy. Your main weapon in the fight against dust? Compressed air. Here are some tips:

• Remove all wires from your rig and unplug the main power supply.

• Make sure you’ve got a nice, bright light while you’re peering at your computer’s innards. Besides helping you find clots of dust, this will help you notice any faulty wiring or other minor problems on your mobo.

• Remove a side panel to expose your components. If possible, remove both sides so you avoid simply blowing the dust around the inside of the case.

• Hold the can upright and spray in short, controlled bursts. No need to hose your computer down. You should have more than half a can left after you’ve finished spraying your components.

• Pay close attention to fan-based components—your case fans and heatsink often accumulate dust between the blades.

Disk Maintenance

The conventional wisdom is thus: As drives fill up, they get slower. Access times get longer, and files get fragmented because they have to find space where old data has been deleted. Therefore, you have to defragment your disk regularly in order to keep your machine at its best. But does that still apply?

If you’re rocking a mechanical hard drive on Windows XP or earlier, yes. You should defrag your drive every month or so—more often if you’d like. We like Auslogics Disk Defrag or Piriform Defraggler. Vista and Windows 7 automatically defrag mechanical drives by default, so you’ll probably never have to worry unless you’re working with very large files. If you have a solid state drive, though, do not defragment! Because defragmenting involves moving data around on the disk, it’s write-intensive. And that can and probably will diminish the lifespan of your SSD. Again, don’t do it. 

 
If DisableDeleteNotify = 0, TRIM is enabled on your Windows 7 SSD.

Solid state drives are susceptible to slowdowns as they fill, but they require a different approach. Modern SSDs support the TRIM command, which enables the OS to continually keep the SSD optimized. You’ll need an SSD with firmware that supports TRIM, Windows 7, and Microsoft or Intel’s AHCI drivers. If you don’t have all those things, you’ll need a garbage-collection utility. Check your drive manufacturer’s website or use an SSD-optimized utility like PerfectDisk 11.

Not sure if you’ve got TRIM up and running on your Win7 machine? Open a command prompt and type fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify and hit Enter. If Windows returns DisableDeleteNotify = 0, then TRIM is running. If not, type fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify = 0 and hit Enter.

Back Up Your Data the Right Way

Your water-cooling loop just sprung a leak, and liquid is spraying everywhere. Sparks fly and your HDD catches fire, melting like a popsicle on a hot summer day. It’s bad, but not disastrous because you’ve been backing up your data. Right?

Let’s start with that presentation you’ve been working on. Your boss won’t be any the wiser to your water-cooling woes because when you show up for work tomorrow, you’ll pull the PPT deck off your Dropbox account, which offers 2GB of free online storage. 

 
Use Dropbox to store and back up important docs.

On your way home, you’ll pick up parts to rebuild your PC and restore things to the way they were by loading an image you took with Acronis True Image. Pop in the bootable restore CD you created with Acronis (see page 32) and you’re off and running. 

 
AcronisTrue image is your complete back-up choice.

Crisis averted, right? Sure, so long as the fire didn’t spread and take out everything you own, including your external hard drive. In that case, it’s a good thing you backed up your mission-critical files, gigabytes of family photos, and a video of little Billy taking his first steps to another hard drive that you keep at your parents’ house or other offsite location.

Next Page: Create a PC First-Aid Kit >>

---

Create a PC First-Aid Kit

No matter how well you take care of your PC, sooner or later something will go wrong. This is fact. But you don’t have to let it take you by surprise—here’s how you can make a simple emergency kit that can save your bacon when things start to go wrong.

Create a USB Thumb Drive Toolbox

To start you’ll need a suitably large USB thumb drive. We’re going to load it with some apps that will help you troubleshoot your PC, fix problems, and recover from disaster. A gig or two will be plenty to hold all of the apps, but in the worst case scenario you may be using this thumb drive to hold data that you recover from a damaged hard drive, so bigger is always better.

Here’s the list of apps we recommend for your toolbox:

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, Super-AntiSpyware, and Combofix: One of the most common causes for a misbehaving PC is malware—viruses and other malicious apps that spy on you and slow down your computer. Unfortunately, no single app can find 100 percent of malware, so we recommend keeping at least these three cleaning programs in your toolkit. Run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and SuperAntiSpyware first, and then Combofix if the problem persists. 

 
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is great, but you should run multiple anti-malware programs.

CCleaner and Revo Uninstaller: Another way to speed up a beleaguered PC is to declutter the hard disks. We recommend CCleaner for general housekeeping (removing useless files, registry cleaning) and Revo Uninstaller for targeted removal of unwanted programs that are too sticky for the standard Windows Add/Remove Program utility. 

 
Revo makes getting stubborn programs off your computer a breeze.

ZoneAlarm Free: When dealing with a poorly maintained computer with lots of out-of-date software and potential malware, it can be hard to tell what data is being sent from or to the PC. A good first step to getting things under control is to throw up a good, free firewall, such as ZoneAlarm.

ZoneAlarm is a great first line of defense against web-based attacks.

Create a Recovery Image

Of course, you want to be able to fix every problem without losing any of your data, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes you have to cut your losses with a bad PC, and when that time comes nothing will make your life easier than a good recovery image. You can make a recovery image at any time, but the absolute best moment is immediately after you perform a fresh Windows installation and install your must-have apps. That way, whenever you need to, you can reload that image onto your drive and be back to a pristine environment with just the apps you need. Of course, you’ll still need a backup solution for your important documents and data.

Normally, we like to find free software solutions to all of our problems, but backup and recovery is one area that’s so important we think it’s worth paying for. Acronis True Image Home (www.acronis.com) makes it incredibly easy to make a recovery image and to keep your important data backed up, and it’s available for a very reasonable $50 (or less, if you catch it during a sale.)

Next Page: Upgrades (and Downgrades) >>

---

Upgrades (and Downgrades)

Real power users don’t attempt to upgrade their PCs. They simply perform the task. We humbly present our guidance for upgrading the parts, performance, and functionality of your system.

Upgrading Your CPU

Can we boil down how to upgrade your CPU into three paragraphs? Yes. First, don’t make the rookie mistake of assuming that because you have a square opening, any square chip will fit in it. If you have an LGA775 board, upgrading your chip will require a heavy amount of research before you can pull the trigger.

OK, so you know your board will physically work with the new chip. Now make sure the BIOS will, too. Many rooks drop in the new processor, turn on the power, and scratch their heads when their board won’t POST. Another hour is then spent trying to troubleshoot when the issue is likely a conflicting or outdated BIOS.

More importantly, mind those pins. On AMD chips, you can easily recover from a bent pin. On any LGA-based socket—in use on all modern Intel boards—a bender on the motherboard can spell permanent disaster.

Upgrading Your Videocard

Like a CPU upgrade, the GPU upgrade isn’t solely about spending your tax return on the fattest GPU you can find and hitting the power switch. Today’s top-end GPUs are hot, heavy, and gulp power like a Lamborghini Murcielago motoring down the interstate. Single-card upgrades are simple but still require some foresight. 

 

First, is your power supply up to snuff? To run Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480, you’ll need a minimum of a 600-watt PSU that can supply 42 amps on the 12-volt rail. A Radeon HD 5870 needs a minimum of 500 watts and 40 amps on the 12-volt rail. Since you don’t really know what other new components you’ll stuff into your system down the road, we recommend buying more power supply than you need. A 750-watt unit is probably the sweet spot for price-performance.

Finally, power-hungry GPUs produce more heat than most CPUs, so factor that into your upgrade. You need adequate airflow to keep the card and the surrounding components cool post-upgrade.

Adding More RAM

Adding RAM isn’t always as straightforward as you’d think, but here are the fundamentals:

• LGA1156 and LGA775 users should add RAM in pairs. The RAM should generally match, but most motherboards are smart enough to deal with DIMMS that don’t have the same timing.

• Because of their reliance on the ancient front-side bus, older Intel chips with 8MB or 12MB of L2 cache aren’t greatly affected by running in single-channel. So if you want to add just one DIMM for financial reasons, you can do so without suffering much of a performance hit.

• Chips with integrated memory controllers, such as any Core ix, Athlon II, or Phenom II, should run in dual mode. Of course, LGA1366 boards should be run in tri-channel mode if possible. We say if possible because some budget-oriented LGA1366 boards have just four DIMM slots. That fourth slot could be used to add RAM, but memory in that slot would not be running in tri mode.

Upgrading Your Boot Drive

There are many reasons to upgrade your boot drive: Maybe you’re running out of room, or you’re switching to SSD, or your boot drive is failing. Regardless of the reason, there are several ways of moving into the new digs.

First, consider backing up your documents and performing a clean install. It’s good to make a fresh start on a fresh drive. If you don’t have OS recovery disks or installation media for your programs, though, or you’d just rather not go through the hassle of reinstalling programs and drivers, you can use free trial software to copy your entire OS partition to a new drive. 

 
Partition Wizard Home Edition is one of the few free partitioning programs that works with both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows. You can use it to resize your boot partition if you’re upgrading to a smaller, faster drive.

You’ll need the trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2010 and (optionally) a partition program like Partition Wizard. First, defragment your current boot drive. Then run True Image, select Utilities from the left-hand menu, then Clone Disk. Select the Manual button, then your source and destination disks. Depending on the size of your old and new drives, you may wish to use either the As-is or Manual option and manually resize your partition later with Partition Master or Partition Wizard. Start the image. You’ll be prompted to reboot, after which Acronis will complete the image and let you know when the drive is ready. Then just swap it in and go! Acronis even copies the boot sector for you.

If you’re switching from a mechanical drive to an SSD, you might have to use the partition tool to shrink your old boot partition to the fit on your new drive. You may also have to use a tool like SSD Tweaker to make sure your new drive is optimized. Don’t forget to turn off defrag for SSDs.

Flashing Your BIOS

Motherboard vendors frequently release BIOS updates that add support for new CPUs (even whole new architectures), as well as enhance certain features and improve stability. Because flashing your BIOS can potentially brick your board, most vendors only advise it if your rig isn’t working, probably to cover their own butts.

Different mobo manufacturers dictate different methods. Some offer a tool that lets you flash the BIOS from within Windows. Some offer executable files that automatically flash the BIOS when you run them, while some require booting from a floppy or USB. You can find instructions and downloads on your mobo manufacturer’s website.

Improving Your Cooling

Proper airflow is important. In this case (Corsair’s 800D), air from the PSU never enters the rest of the case. Cool air is drawn up from the bottom of the case into the main compartment, then exhausted at the case’s top and rear. A separate fan cools the hard drives, then routes behind the motherboard tray and vents at the case’s rear.

Upgrade Your Router's Firmware

Your router is outfitted with a CPU, memory, and an operating system, just like your PC. The router’s OS is known as firmware, because it resides in and executes from flash memory. Over time, the company that manufactured your router will likely release updated versions of that firmware to fix bugs and increase performance. With few exceptions, you should take advantage of these releases.

Third-party router firmware sometimes delivers better performance and might even expose entirely new features of the hardware that the manufacturer, for whatever reason, decided to hide or ignore. In this example, we’ll replace a Linksys WRT-600N’s factory firmware with the free alternative firmware DD-WRT (download from www.dd-wrt.com). 

 
First-party firmware updates will boost performance, while third-party updates may unlock new functionality.

Take care when updating your router’s firmware, and always use a hardwired network connection to reduce the risk of bricking your router. The first step is to reset your router to its default values by inserting a paperclip into the reset hole in the back of the router. Then, open your router’s web user interface by typing its IP address into a web browser. Since you’ve reset the router, the login-ID and password will have reverted to the factory default value (admin/admin in the case of the WRT-600N). The firmware update field is typically located in the router’s Administration field. Once you’ve found that, click the Firmware Update button, locate the new firmware file, and click the Start Upgrade button.

It’s critical that the update process not be interrupted—don’t unplug the router, click the brower’s back button, or anything else that might prevent it from completing. Many routers will display a message when the firmware update has been successfully completed. When the update is finished, re-enter the router’s web user interface and begin exploring any new features that have been added. You might also need to re-establish wireless security and any custom settings you made to the previous firmware.

Use Network Jumbo Frames

Enabling jumbo frames can significantly increase your network’s throughput while consuming fewer CPU cycles. This applies mostly to performing file transfers within your network. But you can only enable jumbo frames on gear that has a gigabit Ethernet interface, and any devices on your network in the path of the file transfers—your router, your PC, your NAS box, and any other switches in between—must all be capable of passing the same size frames.

If most of your network traffic is Internet-related (file transfers, email, web browsing, etc.), there’s not much value in enabling jumbo frames because you don’t have a gigabit connection to the Internet. If you use your network primarily for latency-sensitive traffic, such as VoIP or online gaming, enabling jumbo frames could cause performance issues because these apps generally perform better with smaller frames.

Click the Windows 7 Start menu and then right-click Computer and choose the Manage option. Click Device Manager in the left-hand column, click Network adapters in the center column, and then right-click the network adapter you’re using to connect to your network and choose Properties. Click the Advanced tab and look for Jumbo Frame in the Property window. Now, choose the MTU size you wish your NIC to operate with. You’ll probably want to experiment with these values by benchmarking how long it takes to transfer a large file. If you get a bump in speed at 4K, try 9K. If performance degrades at that size, dial it back until you find the optimum value.

If you want a better understanding of how jumbo frames work, check out this story.

Next Page: Special Projects >>

---

Special Projects

Ambition—the desire to boldly fly your PC into the computing stratosphere—is one of the dividing lines separating the normal from the hardcore. To qualify as a true power user, you’ll need to possess knowledge of at least one of these three special skills.

Install Linux from a Live CD

Understanding Ubuntu is more than a source of pride; it’s the quick path to rescuing a damaged OS or an outdated system

One of the quickest ways to prove that you’re one of the high-tech hardcore is to run an alternative operating system. In case you can’t figure it out, we’re not talking OSX here—we’re talking about Linux. Despite its reputation as being only for the most advanced users, Linux is actually remarkably easy to install. Here are the steps we take to get up and running.

Create a Live CD

There are other ways to install Linux, but we’re going to show you how to install using a live CD, which is both the easiest and most useful way to go. Simply put, a live CD is a bootable version of an operating system contained on a CD. Almost all Linux distros can be installed from a live CD.

There are tons of distros out there, with different advantages and disadvantages. As usual, we’re going to use Ubuntu as it’s the most popular, and also the most user-friendly of all the varieties of Linux. To download the Ubuntu live CD, just hit up www.ubuntu.com and click Download Ubuntu. Select the version of the OS that you want (32-bit for more compatibility, 64-bit for a modest performance boost) and download the .iso file.

In Windows 7, all the necessary tools to burn the .iso image to a CD are included in the operating system, so you can just double-click the file you downloaded, insert a CD, and follow the instructions. If you’re still on an older version of Windows, you may not have image-burning software. If that’s the case, we recommend ImgBurn, which is powerful, lightweight, and free.

Install Ubuntu

Once you’ve got your live CD burned, just pop it in the tray and restart your PC. You should be given the option to boot from this disc. If you aren’t, you’ll need to go into your BIOS and change the boot order so that your CD drive is ahead of your HDD. When you boot from the disc, you can choose to install right away, or to try using Ubuntu without installing. If you choose to try it out, you can begin the Windows-like installation wizard at any time by clicking the Install Ubuntu icon on the desktop.

Install Linux from a USB Drive

Live CDs are a convenient way to run or install Linux from any machine, but there’s a problem: If a new version of your preferred Linux distro is released (which happens pretty frequently) you’re going to have to burn a new disc.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this: Use a USB thumb drive. As long as your computer supports booting from a USB drive (most modern PCs do), installing from one is a convenient, easy and economical alternative to using a live CD. 

 
UNetbootin makes creating a USB drive installer a one-step process.

To do it, you just need a small application called UNetbootin. Download the application and run it. UNetbootin can make a live USB key from an .iso image, such as the one you downloaded to create a live CD, or it can download a distribution automatically from a long list of Linux options. Select whichever you want, point to a USB drive, and click OK. That’s it! Now you just need to plug your thumb drive into a computer and restart.

Overclock Your CPU

It’s easier to accomplish than ever, but amplifying your CPU’s clock speed is still one of the last frontiers of the power user

Even if you don’t overclock, as the tech expert your friends and family turn to in times of need, you should know the fundamentals of the process.

Overclocking is literally running your CPU out of spec. Isn’t this dangerous? Sure, the usual caveats are voiding your warranty, risking data corruption, and even blowing up the CPU. OK, the PSA’s over. Let’s get on to the fun.

We all know that many new AMD and Intel CPUs can run at far higher speeds than they’re rated at for retail, but for sales and marketing reasons, they’re locked at lower speeds. Unlocking this free performance is the goal. So how do you do it? There are three major platforms in circulation today: Intel’s LGA1156/LGA1366, AMD’s Socket AM2+/AM3, and Intel’s slowly fading but still quite popular LGA775 Core 2 series.

Despite amazingly dissimilar designs and microarchitectures, these platforms all overclock the same basic way. Each CPU features a clock multiplier. This is a ratio that sets the clock speed when the machine is booted. It’s usually something like 20x or 18.5x. In all CPUs except for Intel’s Extreme and K chips and AMD’s Black Edition chips, this is locked so you cannot increase the multiplier to overclock.

Whether you’re tweaking the base clock, host clock, front-side bus, or reference clock, the process of overclocking is amazingly similar on the Core i7, Core 2, and Phenom II platforms.

The second half of this equation is the base clock, or bclock, for Intel’s Core i7/5/3 chips. (This is equivalent to the front-side bus in the Core 2 parts and the reference clock setting for AMD chips.) Our example will utilize the 2.66GHz Core i7-920 chip. This chip has a multiplier of 20x and a bclock of 133MHz. Take 20 and multiply it by 133 and you get 2,660MHz. Get it? To overclock this chip, we go into the BIOS and slowly increase the bclock. For even the oldest Core i7-920, we can run the bclock up to 160MHz for a total overclock of 3,200MHz. That’s a moderate overclock that will likely never give you any problems.

The same concept can be applied to Core 2 and Athlon II/Phenom II processors. AMD chips, however, have a few other settings you need to pay attention to such as HyperTransport speed and north-bridge speed. Since you’ll be increasing the reference clock for your overclock, you may unintentionally overclock the Hyper Transport or north bridge to unstable heights. To keep these from becoming problematic, you may have to manually set the HyperTransport and north bridge to lower values.

Memory speeds on all three platforms may also rise beyond what your RAM is rated for as you overclock. On Core ix, Core 2, and Athlon II/Phenom II, you should be able to manually lower your RAM clock speeds to keep the modules within a stable range.

Voltage

Here’s where it gets sticky. Not all CPUs overclock equally—even within the same product line. And some will require additional voltage increases to the chip to get to higher levels. A bclock/FSB/reference overclock poses almost no danger. Adding voltage, however, is where you can screw things up. 

Many midrange and enthusiast motherboards allow you to overclock from the comfort of the operating system.

For the various chipsets and motherboards, you may also have to add a little voltage to the north bridge to hit those higher clock speeds. We recommend that you add voltage judiciously. To find out how much, it’s best to learn from others’ experiences. Search MaximumPC.com’s forums and other enthusiast sites to see how much voltage other people had to add to hit their overclocks. It’s likely that someone else out there has already overclocked your system configuration.

Install and Operate a Virtual Machine

The ability to safeguard your system via virtualization can be invaluable. Here’s how you make it happen

A virtual machine is exactly what it sounds like—a machine (a computer, really) that doesn’t have its own hardware. Instead of having a hard drive, the virtual machine writes to and reads from a single file on the host machine’s HDD. Since it doesn’t have its own processor or memory, it also borrows those resources from the host.

So why would you want to run a virtual machine on your system? For one, because the virtual environment is totally self-

contained, anything that goes on in the virtual machine cannot affect the host environment. This makes it an excellent sandbox for trying out software or operating systems that you might not feel comfortable running on your primary system. If you suspect a document might contain a virus, for instance, you can clone a virtual machine, transfer the file onto it, then read the document. Whether or not there’s a virus, you can just delete the virtual machine, and your real machine is safe. 

 
VirtualBox can show you detailed stats for all your virtual PCs.

Another cool feature virtual machines permit is the ability to support “guest” operating systems. In other words, a virtual machine running on your Windows PC can provide a Linux environment for you to use, without the need to dual-boot or restart and boot from a live CD. Of course, this works the other way, too, so you can use virtual machines to run Windows applications on a Linux desktop.

Installing VM Software

Numerous virtual machine solutions are available online, though many are really only for businesses, and most aren’t free. There are several popular free offerings, but we’re going to focus on VirtualBox, a totally free VM program maintained by Oracle. Getting a virtual machine up and running is easy:

First, visit the VirtualBox homepage and download the free application. Install it using the default install settings.

Once installed, run VirtualBox. The window that opens will be mostly empty at first, so click the New button to create a virtual machine. You’ll be asked what operating system you want to install, and how much memory and hard disk space you want to allocate to this virtual machine. Allocating a greater amount means better performance and storage space (respectively), but at greater cost to the host system. 

 
Just like a real PC, you have to install an OS on a virtual machine.

Once your virtual machine has been created, it will appear in the VirtualBox window “powered off.” Click it and select Play. VirtualBox will start the virtual machine and run a wizard designed to help you install the OS that you specified when you created it. Generally, this is as simple as pointing VirtualBox to the drive that includes the install CD for your operating system. This can be your Windows install disc, or a live Linux CD, but it has to be bootable.

At this point, you’re essentially doing exactly what you would with any new computer. Click through the OS installer, and you’ll find yourself with a brand-new virtual PC. When you have the VirtualBox window active, all your keystrokes and mouse movements will be “captured” by the virtual PC, rendering you unable to control your host PC. To switch back to the host PC, just press the “host button,” which is Right-Ctrl by default.

 

For this week’s installment of Old School Monday (but actually a Tuesday because of Labor Day) we’ve got a little HTPC Before-and-After. The After, of course, is our recent feature on how to build the ultimate 3D home theater PC. You should check out the article, but the long and the short of it is that we set up a beast of a system, able to play video in 3D, play and record up to 4 TV channels at once, and stream pretty much everything under the sun from the internet.

So what’s the Before? It’s this beauty, from The October 1996 issue of Boot (our predecessor): 

 

 

In 1996, the idea of a living room PC was still on shaky footing. The article cites a survey that says half of adults would be interested in TV/PC hybrid, but as we know that market never quite materialized. High-end TVs are becoming more computer-like, with web-enabled overlays and widgets, but the real incursion of the computer into the living room is coming via PC-like consoles and inexpensive streaming boxes.  

Still, it's an interesting bit of perspective, so check it out:

 

We appreciate all the wonderful (and sometimes not) comments we've been receiving from our weekly "Photo Awesome" series, but in the interest of narrowing the gap between us and, well you, our loyal readers, we thought we'd have a little competition and let you decide the outcome. 

So we picked our best and most awesome t-shirts, brought them to work, and want YOU to tell us which is best (because we bicker enough among each other as it is). 

 

"My shirt should win so that sad hecka skeleton can be magically transformed into a happy hecka skeleton: full of win." 

-Amber Bouman

 

"My shirt should win because it harnesses the incredible power of nostalgia.  If it also had a Tamogotchi and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on it, I'd be a shoo-in."

-Alex Castle

 

"Edward James Olmos wins.  End of story." 

-Nathan Edwards

 

 

"I know what you're thinking:  'Whoa, kick-ass breast pocket bro'.  I know, I know.  $1.99 at Walgreens." 

-Alan Fackler

"My shirt should win because I just ate five Jack in the Box tacos and really couldn't care less about anything else right now except not being sick.  And, by the way, did you know they no longer make Monster Tacos?" 

-Gordon Mah Ung

"If I don’t win this T-shirt contest it’s because of a vast, multi-national conspiracy to squelch the free flow of supercool, kick-ass T-shirts. But let’s pretend the conspiracy doesn’t exist, and my shirt has as good a chance as any. So why should it win? I’ll give you a three-part answer. First, my shirt is mad geeky-funny-ironic. Sure, Nathan’s T-shirt is ironic, but its irony responds to all that vampire hullabaloo, and that’s just annoying. Second, my shirt is about cars, and cars are cooler than any of the other subject matter you’ll see on my competitors’ shirts. Third, my shirt is black, and black goes with anything, and is sort of “formal” within the scope of T-shirt design. In other words, I can wear this shirt at a semi-fancy restaurant, and if I lay low and avoid making a scene, I stand a good chance of not getting kicked out. So there you have it, folks: The explanation of why my T-shirt wins. I will thank you in advance for your generous vote."

-Jon Phillips

You can buy the shirt Jon is wearing here. 

And now, a special guest appearence from Kate Byrne, Future's VP of Tech and Living. 

 

There you have it.  Who wins?  Let us know in the comments will ya?  And, while you're at it, have yourself a great weekend!

John Carmack needs no introduction - since 1991 he's been the main engine development guy for id Software. Shortly after his 40th birthday, we caught up with the tru engineer for a quick 8-question Q&A.

 

Do you have a target performance level or specific platform in mind when you begin planning your engines?
For this generation, we picked the 360 / PS3 as the target platform, knowing that the PC platform would be well past that performance level when we were done.  I am thinking about the next generation now, which is rather difficult because we don’t know much about what is being considered for future consoles.  I may just try to see what I can do with a state of the art PC platform in research mode.
                                          
What’s been the most challenging aspect of building the id Tech 5 engine?
The enormous virtual textures have been challenging for both the workflow and runtime code, but that was the core bet that we made for the project.
 
We’re curious to hear your take on hardware-accelerated tessellation. Any thoughts?
Tesselation has been expected to be “the next big thing” for the last three hardware generations.  It hasn’t been.  Extreme geometric smoothness is needed for movie rendering where it is common for a character’s face to occupy the entire screen for extended periods of times, but that isn’t common for games.  In most cases, the additional vertexes needed for the control mesh on traditional geometric patches could be better spent on additional interesting triangular detail.
 
With the very latest generation of hardware, we may finally be at a point where displacement mapped surfaces are a credible design target.  It has been possible to do it for a while, but it only makes good sense when the average triangle size gets down to only a couple pixels, which used to waste large fractions of the fill rate on GPUs.  Good anti-aliasing is also required to prevent all those tessellated and displaced edges from turning into a ton of noise on screen.
 
If it doesn’t turn out that some form of ray tracing can cut it for our next gen game engine, my fallback plan has always been to extend the current megatexture architecture and workflow to support unique displacement maps on the entire world.

 
What kind of system have you been using to work on the new engine?
I have been using an eight core intel system, but I am upgrading to a 12 core/24 thread system this week.  A 64 bit OS is now mandatory for our development tools.
 
Will we be able to benchmark using Rage / id Tech 5?
We haven’t added specific benchmark code yet, but I’m sure we will before shipping.  It will be a little more complicated because of the dynamic streaming nature of the texturing, so we will probably have to offer a “locked page file cache” option or possibly a “no texture updates” option to give repeatable results.
 
A lot of attention has focused on how id Tech 5 is more developer-friendly. Beyond this, what other features are you most excited about?
The combination of designed-for-60fps gameplay and the character that the world has with the unique art everywhere are the prime things that the technology has enabled.  Every aspect of the game is damn good, but my involvement in performance and graphics biases my views.

 
What’s your take on PC gaming these days? Last year, people were saying it’s dead, which was clearly an exaggeration. The category feels like it’s picking up now, however.
We expect to be successful in the PC market, but the consoles are still the dominant targets for an action game.
 
As you approach your 40th birthday, do you have any reflections on some of the gaming-related tech you’ve helped kick-start -- the first person-shooter genre; 3D acceleration; etc – or PC gaming in general? Are you still playing games?
I did go through a period where I had pretty much stopped playing games, but in recent years I have been playing regularly with my son, which has been a good thing for my engagement with my work.  I’m proud of what I have done, but I almost never reminisce about the past, because I am so excited about the present and future.

Just how popular are add-ons to Mozilla Firefox’s Web browser? A usage survey taken by Mozilla as of one year ago revealed that one-third of all Firefox users—at least—use add-ons in some capacity. That’s a pretty big deal, but not quite as eye-opening a number as the raw statistics from Mozilla’s official add-ons page.

According to the company, more than two billion add-ons have been downloaded since Firefox’s started tracking statistics back in August of 2007. There are currently 125 million add-ons in use as of this article’s writing, with more than 890,000 registered users attached to Mozilla’s official add-ons directory. I won’t bore you with any more statistics; suffice, there’s a lot of neat stuff you can install into your browser. And it appears that many are indeed doing so.

But what?

Where does one begin?

These are both questions that hit to the core of the Mozilla add-on experience. Simply put, your browser is only as good as the extensions you choose to install, and trying to get a handle on the ever-increasing world of Firefox add-ons can be as difficult for a first-timer as it is for an experienced add-on enthusiast. So we’ll make it simple. We’ve scoured the Web to come up with a listing of must-have add-ons for any Firefox installation, period.

And, even then, did we mention that we’ve found twenty?  Download them here as part of one, honkin' Maximum PC extension collection!

 

Stylish

The developers put it best: “Stylish and userstyles.org are to CSS as Greasemonkey and userscripts.org are to JavaScript.” But if that doesn’t help, please allow me to make the comparison even simpler. Stylish allows you to take ugly websites, apply the power of your mind (and styling skills), and pretty them up as far as your CSS abilities will take you.

Building your own style for any site or domain is as easy as clicking the “S” icon in the lower-right corner of your browser. From there, all you need to do is fire up the included “Write new style” feature and—assuming you know CSS coding—you’re off to the races.

If you don’t have a lick of skills with CSS, don’t fret. You can also tap into the power of a community of styles, created and shared by a batch of users, which you’ll access via a link off of the “S” menu as well. Making the Web a bit prettier couldn’t be easier.

 

NoScript

Browser security is important, yo. More importantly is the sanity that you can preserve by using NoScript to keep your browsing session devoid of Javascript and other executable content that you just don’t want or need to see. I kid but, really, this add-on is as simple as that. Once you fire it up, you’ll find that any and all scripting on the various pages you frequent has been turned off by default.

When such an instance occurs, a little drop-down bar will appear and ask you whether you want to permit or deny said site from running its scripts. You’re presented with a variety of options for limiting access: You can permit or deny the various scripts on a temporary or permanent basis and, even better, you can change your mind back and forth on a whim. A built-in whitelist feature allows you further fine-tune your preferences to let the good in and keep the bad… out!

 

Adblock Plus

Hey, we didn’t need that advertising revenue, right? No, the beauty of Adblock Plus is not that it permanently eliminates all advertising throughout your journeys on the Web. That would be silly. Instead, this add-on is useful for the degree of control you now have over said displayed advertisements. Block and whitelist sites that annoy or otherwise entertain you, so you can thus reward your favorite places with a little supplemental cash while simultaneously blocking sites that attempt to pummel you into submission with their revenue generation tricks.

The nice thing about Adblock Plus is that it’s totally newbie-friendly as well. If you have no idea what you’re doing, just use one of the add-on’s downloadable filters to make most of your anti-advertising decisions for you. And, like NoScript, you can enable or disable Adblock Plus’ technology on specific sites or domains at the click of a mouse. Simple, effective advertising control: You won’t find this in vanilla Firefox!

 

Greasemonkey

One of Firefox’s most popular add-ons, by far, is Greasemonkey. But the add-on is hardly as useful at its core as is the vibrant community built around this single, seemingly simple extension. To put it bluntly, Greasemonkey allows you to make Web pages better. And if you can’t do it, there are a whole bunch of custom-designed scripts over at userscripts.org that’ll likely do it for you.

What do I mean? Greasemonkey allows one to insert customized HTML elements directly into a Web page. And more importantly, these changes persist over time, effectively altering the page for as long as you have the add-on (and subsequent user script) installed. To list the number of changes that you can make to any Web page under the sun—including adding the fabled “dislike” button to Facebook—would take the rest of this article’s word count. If you can’t alter or add it with Greasemonkey, it doesn’t exist.

 

Firebug

Web developers take note: Firebug is your solace for on-the-fly fixes for the pages you design. And simple Firefox users take note as well: This add-on allows you to investigate how the code of a page correlates to its displayed elements and, more importantly, it gives you the ability to alter a page’s display on a whim just to see how HTML and CSS interrelate.

Okay, so those two descriptions are somewhat similar, but that’s really the crux of Firebug. Install the add-on to get a fun little window at the bottom of any page you view, which details said page’s HTML and CSS code in an easy-to-read, clickable fashion. Identifying the code that displays a particular screen element is a snap. And, as mentioned, tweaking a page’s CSS on-the-fly to see how changes can ultimately affect (read: botch) design is a far more elegant solution than continually re-uploading your CSS file and hitting refresh over and over.

 

Xmarks Sync

How do I love thee Xmarks Sync, let me count the ways. No, that might take awhile, because the sheer number of my Firefox bookmarks that this awesome add-on syncs up into the cloud is far, far too lengthy. You’ll be hard-pressed to find add-ons as useful and as comprehensive as Xmarks.

That’s because, at its core, Xmarks fulfills an extremely valuable function—saving bookmarks in the event of an OS crash or Firefox reinstallation. But that’s not all. Install Xmarks onto any supported browser under the sun, and you’ll have access to your common set of bookmarks from wherever you happen to be. You can set up different profiles for home, work, and other named bookmark collections, and you can even encrypt the data you send back and forth to the Xmarks servers. Need anything else?

 

Read It Later

If you’re a connoisseur of the Web, you’ll know that oftentimes, you likely have more pages or stories you want to read versus the time it takes to read them all in one setting. Solution: Add all the pages as bookmarks, right? Wrong. Fire up Read It Later, a helpful little add-on that allows you to save pages in a separate listing to check out at some point in the future. Once you’ve started to chug through your backlog, you can mark off each individual page akin to a checkmark on a box.

But, even neater than that, you can also have Read It Later download all of your saved pages via an “offline mode,” which you can then use to read your articles if you lack, say, access to a network connection. And if you’re really wild, you can set up a free Read It later account to synchronize said articles to a mobile device (or other system) of your choosing.

 

Automatic Save Folder

Any power-downloader knows that the most tedious part of a binge file-grabbing experience is having to sort through all the different files you’ve downloaded and dumped into a single, solitary “downloads” directory. Or, if you’re lazy, this just happens by default—you spend a few weeks grabbing this, that, and the other off the Web, and your default download directory looks like you unzipped 35 concurrent archives and dumped half a system restore into a single folder. Yuck.

The add-on Automatic Save Folder is, thus, your ticket to organizational happiness. This add-on is very, very easy to use: You set up a list of domains or file extensions and map them to folders on your hard drive. Then, whenever you download a file from said domain (or a file with said extension), it’ll automatically be placed in whatever folder you designated without you having to do so much as copy a single bit of data manually.

 

 

Tab Mix Plus

“I have the power!” you will shout, once you’ve successfully installed the small-yet-awesome add-on, Tab Mix Plus. Many claim that this extension, which allots you increased control over how, when, and why tabs are displayed, should be a staple element of Firefox going forward. I happen to agree.

Here’s why: You can literally take control of all aspects of the “tabbed browsing” experience, from defining how new windows open, to how links from external applications open, to where exactly new tabs open in relation to you other tabs, to what happens when you briefly mouseover tabs… the list goes on. The list goes on for quite a long while, in fact. This add-on is not screwing around: For near-unlimited control over the price method in which tabs interact with your browser—a staple part of the Firefox experience—you must download Tab Mix Plus (in a new tab) right now.

 

WoT – Safe Browsing Tool

Look, we’re all fairly Web-savvy individuals, right? It’s usually not that hard to pick out a malicious link from, say, a Google search result. But what about those few—very few—times when you’ve been tricked into clicking something you probably shouldn’t have? And I’m not even talking about some malware-dropping bomb of a Web entity. Perhaps you just clicked on a link that seemed like a legitimate result, only to find that it was just some lame spammer page that told you absolutely nothing about your topic.

Wasted time stinks. Web of Trust, a community-driven security add-on of sorts, gives you a stoplight-series of ratings for the sites that pop up in the various searches you make. I’ll leave it to you to decipher what green, yellow, and red means—but just in case you click on the latter, indicating that a site has failed WoT’s ranking mechanisms, a little interstitial page will warn you that you’re about to head into rough waters. Steer clear, safe browser!

 

 

---

 

 

Download Statusbar

I’ll be the first to admit it: I’ve never been a huge fan of Firefox’s download window. The last thing I need to do, when clicking on a file, is to have some ugly window pop-up in my face and refuse to go away until I manually click the big close button each time. Yuck.

You can imagine my joy upon finding Download Statusbar, a handy little aesthetics-driven add-on that transforms your Firefox download window into a tiny little bar at the bottom of your browser. Grab a file and up pops the bar with a pleasing little visual display of how much time is remaining on your download. Once the file finishes, the bar goes away.

A host of other options with the add-on allow you to have the bar ignore downloads of specific filetypes, as well as define exactly how the bar is cleared of previous downloads after they’ve completed. Heck, you can even set up a post-download virus scan just to play it safe.

 

LastPass Password Manager

If the aforementioned Xmarks Sync is the best-ever add-on for keeping track of your bookmarks, then the LastPass Password Manager is like the cooler cousin who always used to hang out with you during your teenage years. This add-on is the end-all be-all for password management across multiple systems, as it synchronizes your (encrypted) login credentials for most sites to a centralized, secure location. As long as you remember the single master password for your account, LassPass will do its part to automatically log you into any sites you’ve designated during the initial saving process.

Modifying and accessing your “master password” database, or password vault, is rather simple via the handy, Web-based tool. That said, the site also presents a wealth of options for customizing how LastPass itself works, including: notifying you for saving new credentials, how the add-on parses separate-but-identical domains, and blacklisting certain sites from any of LastPass’ many features.

 

 

FoxyTunes

Rocking out while you browse has to be one of life’s finer pleasures, but why should you have to switch out of Firefox just to select your next track or playlist in an alternate program? Pshh-aw. FoxyTunes brings the musical capabilities of your player of choice directly into your browser—technically, into Firefox’s status bar.

The beauty of this add-on comes from its sheer extensiveness: It works with more audio applications than you’ve likely ever heard of, including the standard iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, and MediaMonkey, to name a few. Super-tiny buttons allow you to skip through tracks, pause and play your jams, control your volume and—good gosh—even auto-post what you’re listening to directly to a Twitter account. A thousand curses on those who enable that last feature. We implore you to make use of the add-on’s info panel, album art, or search tool s instead. Far more useful; Far less annoying.

 

WebMail Notifier

There’s no reason why you should have to surf on over to an individual site just to check your email—not when you can do so via a tiny little button in the corner of your browser, that is. I’ve long since enjoyed using the add-on Gmail Notifier to do just that with my Google account. However, this add-on has since expanded to include a plethora of other Web-based email clients as well (and, if you’re truly hardcore, any other POP3- or IMAP-based host you want.)

Install the add-on and configure up your various email services. That’s step one… and, really, the only major step. A little number will then appear in the lower-right corner of your browsing screen to show you just how much unread email you have throughout all of your accounts. The add-on can even pop up a little alert window or play a sound to let you know that something new just came in. It’s that easy.

 

VTzilla

Kick your own personal security up a notch by integrating Virus Total directly into your browser. This super-useful Web tool normally requires you to go to its website and upload a file before the contents of which can be scanned by more antivirus and antimalware applications than you ever thought existed.

Of course, that’s kind of a bulky way to make sure that everything you’ve downloaded passes muster. The VTzilla extension gives you the power of Virus Total—on command—directly via Firefox’s download prompts. After you’ve installed this add-on, you’ll find a new option floating in between the typical “open” or “save” commands that appear whenever you click on a file. Select the “Scan with VirusTotal” option and you’ll know whether a file is safe for consumption before it touches your machine, not after.

As well, you can send current pages URLs and potential hyperlinks to VirusTotal’s page-scanning engine to better protect yourself against suspicious content before you even fire up the page.

 

Morning Coffee

Everyone has their morning routines, and every true geek has a digital version of the daily water cooler run/coffee slog/bathroom break. But isn’t it annoying to have to type in the same-ol’, same-ol’ websites that you like to check as soon as you get to work each day? Wouldn’t it be nice for Firefox to automate this process for you in a way that didn’t require you to make each site the start page of your browser?

The add-on Morning Coffee does just that: You specify a list of sites, by day,that you want to pop up when you hit a particular button on the browser. As it happens, this button is the icon of a rather large cup of coffee, and it rests precipitously close to your address bar. Click the mug and—presto—your sites for the day pop up into tabs.

Do you have to manually enter each site you want to fire up? No. You can also click on the icon to add any current site to a series of daily lists (which can be individual days or sets like M/W/F, T/Th, et cetera).

 

Find All

The default “search within a page” feature of Firefox, otherwise known as the “Find” command, is a bit lacking. The “highlight all” feature just does that—it applies a color to all instances of a given word or phrase, but it’s up to you to scroll throughout the page to manually identify all the potential uses of your search term. Hrmph.

Find All is a short-but-sweet replacement of this boring “highlight all” option. Instead of just a pretty page of colored text, the Find All add-on displays all instances of the searched-for phrase in a window that expands into the bottom half of your browser. Clicking on any of the text links within this video takes you right to the source of the phrase and—better still—you can see exactly how many results were found on right on the search bar itself. It’s a simple, but useful Firefox tweak!

 

HTTPS Everywhere

HTTPS Everywhere isn’t going to dramatically change your browsing life. However, it will do its part to ensure that—whenever possible—you’re always accessing a given page using a secure (or https) protocol. Many sites have such a connection available but, for whatever reason, might not default to https. If you don’t type in the URL as such, you’ll perpetually surf over the normal, less-secure connection.

Remember, unless your browser is showing a little lock icon in the bottom-right corner of your browser, you aren’t rocking the https connection, merely http. You aren’t benefitting from the security of an encrypted connection to a page, and you could potentially face snooping or sniffing attacks from nefarious folk. Supported sites include Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, amongst others!

 

Personas Rotator

With so many Firefox personas within arm’s reach now, it’s nearly impossible to pick just one. Or two. Or twenty. There are just so many cool designs out there, how could one ever decide on a single, isolated favorite with which to splatter across one’s Firefox browser forevermore? It’s an impossible dream, I tell you!

Thankfully, Personas Rotator fits the bill as one of those add-ons that probably should have been included into the default Firefox program from the get-go. If you haven’t figured out what the extension does by name alone, allow me to clarify. Personas Rotator pulls from an online directory of Firefox skins—sorted into a whole nest of categories—and automatically rotates through them at whatever interval you’ve set.

Don’t just assume that this add-on picks random personas from a sea of thousands. You can also set up your own personal category of favorite skins if you want your browser to remain exclusively cool.

 

Lazarus: Form Recovery

Oh crap. There you went, typing out a page’s worth of vitriol on your favorite political or technological Web site and poof! Your browser crashed. A thousand curses to Mozilla, eh? Looks like you’ll be typing out that freight train of dialogue and insults all over again.

That, or you could grab the add-on Lazarus: Form Recovery which, as its name implies, does a great job of preventing moments just like the one I described above. If your browser should happen to go out for some unforeseen reason, Lazarus gives you the option to recover the text of what you were typing in any web form on a particular page.

The add-on not only automatically saves the contents of a form as you type (in an encrypted database, mind you), but it makes one last-ditch effort to preserve your text whenever you click the button associated with a Web form. Take that, browser crashes!

It's a sign of the strange times we live in that even death isn't quite as absolute as it used to be. Everyone still dies eventually, but their carefully-crafted online personae live on. These digital remains can be a nice memorial or a disturbing remnant, depending on how well a person has prepared.

So it's worth taking a few minutes to think about what happens to your online life when your real one's over. To help you out, we've put together a 12-step guide to getting your virtual affairs in order. It's a little macabre, yeah, but if you can get over the heebie-jeebies, it'll be time well spent. 

1. Start Taking Inventory

Starting now, write down every password protected online asset that you use, as well as the passwords used to access them. If you're using a password manager such as KeePass, this job shouldn't take long. Include email accounts, website hosting passwords, social networking log-ins, online banking security questions, etc. Collect this information for a week or two, perhaps as long as a month, depending the size of your online presence.  Make sure the information that you collect is secured on an encrypted flash drive or zip it with a password and send it to yourself attached to an email. At some point you'll have to assign an executor to look after everything, but for now, concentrate on getting the information in one place.
 
2. Get Your Finances in Order

Most of what you do online is free. One thing that isn't is also the one thing that you might want to have outlive you. Websites cost money every year, both the hosting and the domain name registration. Even if you don't set someone up to maintain your sites, the hosting and registration will likely be on auto-renewal. Planning for this now will make all the difference between being able to keep your cool domain name for perpetuity or losing it forever. OK, you won't care, but your kids might!

Most web hosting and domain registration fees are charged to a credit card listed with each account. If you have the sense to prepare for your death by recording the password and log-in information, then it's simply a matter of changing the credit card information online with the hosting company. Charges will now be put on another card and the site will roll along peacefully. If you don't work out all of this beforehand, then your executor might find it too difficult to work through the maze of death certificates and legal issues that will confront them and both your site and your dot-whatever-name will vanish into the void. Even if you don't want to maintain the site, and you have a cool domain name, your executor could theoretically sell it and distribute the funds among your heirs.

So much for paying money out. What about funds that come in (such as from ads on a site you run)? If you have given out the passwords to your executor, it's a simple matter to change the account information with Google or whoever else is paying out the dough on a simple ad revenue site.

However, if there are items are being sold and a credit card company or Paypal is involved, it's vital that you sort all of this out with your financial institution beforehand. This is where a real will is needed to divvy up the money after you die. If there is going to be continuing income for someone, figure out how you're going to give them access to the website and to the money that the site generates.

3. Compose Your Famous Last Words

Now is the time to reflect on friends and relatives and attempt to say in words what they all mean to you. Notes, emails and written documents are welcome and probably will be treasured for longer than you might think. Jot down a list of the important people in your life, write a personal message to each one and lock it all up in email drafts or in a folder in your documents. Pass the information on to your executor and relax. Hopefully after this is done, you'll actually live a bit longer. Happy thoughts add years to your life, right?

4. Avoid Awkward Situations

While you might be right up there with the Dalai Lama in purity, almost everyone has things they'd rather have die with them. Before you give someone else access to all of the details of your online life, get rid of anything that might create some frowns when you're gone. References to anyone named Bambi should probably be ditched now. If you're a member of any sketchy websites, adjust your email settings for them before they have a chance to blemish your wholesome reputation. Think of marking updates from these sites as junk-mail to keep them out of your inbox. We're just sayin'.

5. Maintain Your Websites

The hours that you've spent tuning your meta tags and keywords will all be in vain unless you pass on the torch to someone else before you permanently lose your connection. To avoid the dreaded 404, write down all of the hosting details, passwords, renewal dates, etc. With a major hosting firm, the transition will be seamless, provided that your successor has all of the necessary information. Ad revenue must also be considered. A joint bank account helps to keep this seamless as well. Remember to save any templates and resources that you used to create the sites. Maintaining and updating your sites will be much easier if your designated designer has all the information they need. Maybe some cash for a web design course for your executor wouldn't be out of line either.

6. Prepare Your Facebook Account

If you get to know the privacy settings in Facebook, you can tune your final exit now, leaving your executor the simple task of tagging and adjusting the settings after you're gone. Write your message in a note, scroll down to "Note Privacy" and set it to 'only me'. Once you've signed out for good, have your executor reset the privacy, allowing the pertinent person or persons to see your note. Maybe you could do a final photo album. Create it, lock it up and let your executor take care of it.

6.b. Dealing With Someone Else's Facebook Account

If you have missed the boat you won't be reading this, right? But if someone you know, a relative or a close friend, has recently died and you can't face seeing their profile languish unattended, here's what you can do. Head over to this URL. You'll find Facebook's 'Report a deceased person's profile' form. Fill it out, making sure you provide the link to an obituary or a news article that confirms the death. The friendly Facebook folks say that "Memorialising the account removes certain sensitive information and sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the Profile or locate it in search. The Wall remains, so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance."

If the thought of some gibroni at Facebook rummaging through your profile (as if they don't already) scares the hell out of you then this is all the more reason to get your act together and start this whole process yourself.
Myspace will do the same thing : http://tiny.cc/5w9s6 but you'll need a death certificate or obituary and be 'next of kin', not just a friend.

Google, and all of their linked sites and services such as Gmail, Orkut and Google Chat, offers something similar : http://tiny.cc/dev9h but you must prove that you are the legal representative of the deceased person.

Do you see a pattern here? Instead of letting someone else manage your profiles for you, get off your ass and figure out what you want done with them while you're still chatting it up here on earth. If you prepare everything, then your friends and family don't have to deal with nasty things like death certificates and the legal red tape that is involved with proving someone is dead.

7. Record Your Final Rant on YouTube

If you've got fans and subscribers on a video site, record a video that sums up what you're feeling about them, the world in general or anything else that comes to mind. Adjust the privacy settings and have your executor publish it after your last 'Cut'! You might want to disable comments,too, in case some wise ass says something stupid. Just hope that it doesn't go viral. 

8. Create a Safe Email Account

Just in case your executor is tempted to send out emails pretending to be you, create a neutral account, and move your contact list over to it. Write some draft emails to different contact groups, mark them accordingly and put the account password with full instructions in your package. You might want to send a pre-death email from this account to everyone on your list, with an explanation, of course, in order for everyone to mark the new account as safe and not junk. Remember to update your contact list on a regular basis.

9. Keep it current.

Once you've got everything organized, emailed and zipped, make sure that you keep everything current. If you've made changes to anything in the chain of things that are you on the Internet, update your storage every now and then to reflect the latest versions of what was deemed important when you began. If new websites or accounts have been opened, make sure you add these to the mix.

10. Zip it and Encrypt it.

The final step in this exercise is to encrypt all the data that you've organized. Depending on the size of the files, you can email them to yourself at the neutral email account you've created or you could make hard copies. Passwords can be printed out and filed in a secure location, such as a safety deposit box with your will, but it might be better to lock them up on an encrypted DVD. Using TrueCrypt, burn a DVD every now and then which will reflect the current status of everything that you've decided to pass on when you pass on. Make the password something that is easy to remember and make it known to your executor in your will.

11. Are There Other Options?

If all of this is too much for you, don't despair. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to planning for your afterlife life. Some very smart people have set up websites that will guide you through the process...for a fee. Please read the disclaimer at the end of the reviews before you sign on the dotted line...so to speak.

One of the nicer sites we came across was based in San Francisco. Legacy Locker takes you through the sign up process and all succeeding steps in a direct and helpful manner. Sure, you still need all of the information just as if you were doing all of this yourself but with Legacy Locker, you are prompted for each detail. Overall, we liked the feeling of Legacy Locker. Fees for a lifetime membership are $299.00. This premium level gives you unlimited assets, beneficiaries and 'legacy letters' as well as both document backup and video uploads. A word of warning here. Legacy Locker's SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate showed as being expired for about a week during our research.

Wouldn't it make sense that a site which states a concern for its users safety could at least keep an SSL to date?
Deathswitch is much simpler in its approach. Through the use of regular emails sent to you, Deathswitch waits for you not to respond. After a predetermined length of time without an answer from you, Deathswitch sends out your drafted emails, with attachments if you want, to a maximum of thirty with up to ten recipients each in the $19.95 per year premium plan. This approach seems best for anyone who doesn't have a large online presence. Deathswitch does not take into consideration things such as stroke or coma. What if you weren't dead, only disabled? After a certain period of time, everything you have collected to be sent out on your death is emailed on your behalf. Should you come back to an appropriate level of mental fitness later on, you might have a lot of explaining to do. Deathswitch also has a free account which will send one email, but no attachments, after your death. Because this system is based on non-response, no death certificate is required.

The Last Email, based in Spain and Brazil, had the slowest website that we've encountered in a long time. If you have minutes to wait for a page to load, check it out. Prices are in Euros and the most expensive plan allows for unlimited emails but only five megs of online storage.

My Last Email is an online obituary and memorial site which is based in England. Prices are in British Pounds. The website provides space for an online memorial, accessed by password only, as well as an online obituary which is open to anyone who has been given the link. We found the space very limited here, although you are allowed to upload a video that could run 'about ten minutes'.

My Web Will is only interested in your social networking life after death. For a fee, right now it's $9.95 per year for the 'beta' version, My Web Will will make the changes to your account that you have requested. You decide if you want to deactivate the account, change some information in it or transfer it to someone else. The only security breach possible with My Web Will is that your social network passwords and/or email passwords, should you decide to include them with your account, could be compromised. My Web Will works with all major networking sites including Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Wordpress, etc. You will need to set up two verifiers. They will have to provide My Web Will with a copy of your death certificate before any changes are made to your various profiles.

12. But...

With everything from outdated security certificates to payments through Paypal, it seems that online merchants of everlasting virtual life want you to play a game of Who Do You Trust? Before you send a few megs of your data off to any of the companies mentioned here, take some time to think about the consequences. Remember that we're not talking about a hotmail password here. We're talking about substantial details of your personal life as well as financial data, in some cases. Are you ready to bundle all of this stuff up and send it off to a site loaded with Google ads and vague promises of 25 year guarantees? Hell, the Internet itself isn't twenty-five years old yet!

In researching this article, we were appalled at the lack of professionalism displayed on the various company websites mentioned here. Poor navigation, limited information, incredibly slow servers...these sites had it all. If you've seen the Explorer 8 'Greater Offshore Bank & Trust' ads on TV, you'll get the gist of what we're talking about.
Of the group, Deathswitch stood out because they don't handle much personal information. Their service is simple, affordable and, except for the Google ads on every page, the website is about the best of the bunch. For now, however, it might be better to wait. Two things could happen. One of these companies will take the lead and become the go-to outfit for these arrangements or a major software company will create some cool app that will walk you through the steps just as Quicken and Quicktax take care of your personal financial needs.

The End.

This isn't a one-size fits all guide to preparing for your own demise, but it should make you think about what's important to you. Hopefully, you will take some steps to eliminate problems for your family and friends after you shuffle off your mortal coil. Death doesn't have to be as final as it used to be.

It's the vicious cycle of modern life. The more important and established you become, the more email clogs your inbox. Google is out to help with a new Gmail feature called Priority Inbox. This new interface, which will be rolling out to users in waves over the coming days, will present messages more likely to be important in a separate  area at the top of the inbox.

Gmail decides what is important with a good old fashioned Google algorithm. Mail similar to that which you frequently read or respond to will be marked as important an promoted to the priority area. Users can alter this sorting process, and teach the Priority Inbox what's actually important by flagging mis-categorized items. This new inbox view also makes better use of the starred mail label by creating a starred mail area right below the Priority box.

The jury is still out on how effective and useful the new system is. We just got access to it ourselves, so it's hard to say how it will work out. As usual, Google has a cute animation explaining the feature, which you can catch at the source link. Have you had a chance to use Priority Inbox? How well is it working for you?

 

Time for another Old School Monday - this week, Online Reviews Editor Michael Brown takes us back to boot May 1998's cover story, 3D Cards of Champions:

 

This article is about 3D graphics cards, circa 1998, but it also shows boot Senior Editor Andrew Sanchez at the height of his editorial powers. No one could have guessed that Andrew would tragically leave this world less than a year after this story hit newsstands.

As for the 3D cards of that era (we didn’t call them videocards back then), 3Dfx was the undisputed king of the market; but since their Voodoo 2 chipset was 3D-only, you had to buy a second card for everything other than games.

Rendition took second place in this roundup, but the innovative company flamed out a year later and was purchased by Micron (where the company’s third-generation product—the V3300—was promptly cancelled). 3Dfx went bust in 2000 and Nvidia (whose Riva 128 didn’t do all that well in this story) picked up the pieces.

Take a look at the feature chart in this story: Most of the cards in the roundup had only 8MB frame buffers, and the maximum supported video resolution was 1,280x1,024 pixels. ATI’s All-in-Wonder Pro took first place in terms of features by virtue of having a strong 2D/3D chip (the 3D Rage Pro) and an excellent TV tuner on the same card. AMD acquired ATI in 2006 and announced today its decision to retire the ATI brand altogether.

Intel hoped its i740 processor would convince graphics-card manufacturers to switch to AGP from the PCI bus. AGP would eventually have its day in the sun, but when it came to the i740, Intel had effectively turned left as the rest of the industry turned right: Game developers began producing games that relied on very large textures. Since the i740 stored textures in system—versus local—memory, as the competition’s 3D accelerators did, the i740 delivered extremely poorly benchmark performance.

Meanwhile, 3DLabs was probably wondering why it even decided to enter this market: The Permedia 2 chipset on the company’s FireGL 1000 Pro card finished last in each of Andrew’s benchmarks. 3DLabs sold its FireGL product line to ATI in 2001, and Creative Labs bought the rest of the company the following year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week’s Freeware Files come courtesy of podcast aficionado (and mother of the epic dream date winner from podcast #36) R. Ellen Ferare. Or, rather, you can thank her for the idea. We got to talking this past weekend and she noted that she’s been having trouble finding a legitimate way to search through her desktop for this, that, and the other. Obviously, Windows’ built-in search functionality just isn’t cutting it—and I don’t blame her for thinking so. It’s slow, it’s bloated, and I’ve personally found that it just doesn’t quite get the job done compared to other applications out there.

“Other applications,” of course, is just a code phrase for what’s really on everyone’s minds: Google Desktop. But it would sure be boring to just write 75 words saying, “Don’t use Windows Search; Use Google Desktop. Eat a cupcake.” There’s more to life than what Google bestows. And, in fact, you might have legitimate privacy or performance concerns when using Google’s great—but not deal-breaking—search utility. For example I hate that the service only indexes your drive when your system is idle. That doesn’t do me a lot of good if I need to quickly search through new contents I’ve added to a particular location.

So, grievances aside, what does one do if one doesn’t want to use Windows built-in search tools or Google Desktop to sift through one’s computer for information? Solution: Try out one of the five freeware apps buried below the jump. They vary in format and features, but all are designed to fix some aspect of system searching that, right now, just isn’t being fulfilled by the two big aforementioned apps.

Let’s begin.

 

DocFetcher

Google Documents has a fun little quirk whereby one can actively search through the contents of files—I’m talking about that-which-is-displayed in either a Word or Excel document—instead of just searching your drive for a particular file name (which, to be fair, it also does). But if you don’t want to deal with Google, or a mass-index of your entire computer, or any of that nonsense, then DocFetcher is the super-trimmed-down application you’ll want to use for your searches. It does create an index on a destination folder prior to your search, but you can specify this—and the exact kinds of files you’ll be looking for—prior to your entry into Searchland. After that, finding contents within your files is as easy as typing your desires into the search box and hitting enter.

Download it here!

 

FileSeek

I mentioned the indexing process above. In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s what I’m talking about: applications like Google Desktop run throughout the entirety of your system to build a working repository of information related to its contents—the index. Using the index to perform searches is much, much faster than running through your whole drive with each and every query. On the flip side, perhaps your one-shot search item doesn’t really need a full index—building one from the ground up does take time, after all. And what if you can use parameters to better restrict the search, which could ultimately increase the list of files that your app doesn’t even have to consider?

Enter FileSeek: This non-indexing search tool comes with a plethora of options for defining your search in the most explicit terms possible (that’s “detailed,” not “naughty”). Better still, it integrates directly into your right-click context menu in Windows; you’ll never need to use the boring ol’ Windows Search ever again, trust me.

Download it here!

 

Everything

Well, it’s named appropriately, that’s for sure. The beauty of Everything is that it dumps the power of a desktop search into a completely portable application. That’s right—slap this little one on a USB key to bring real-time search results of a given system (or specified folder) to any system you want. The super-speedy tool allows you to drill down your search for files by filtering the results using specific letter cases, words, or file location. And, as mentioned, it’s super-easy to include or exclude locations you don’t need to look through.

And did I mention it’s portable?

Download it here!

 

Index Your Files

While it’s easy to boast about this app’s useful, Windows Explorer-like interface, and filtering capabilities for your searches, and things like that… these features aren’t all that different from those found in the applications I’ve already discussed. At some baseline level, a good search tool has a pretty standard set of functions: Index Your Files is no exception.

Where the app differs, however, is in its use of multiple indices to speed up the searching process. That’s right—you can index more than one location at a given time, which is an especially helpful feature if you’re looking to quickly search a specific folder on your system and, say, the contents of a single drive elsewhere on your network. Specificity, specificity, specificity! That’s how this app rolls.

Download it here!

 

File Name Tag Explorer

So, I’ve covered a number of different ways you can go about performing a real-time search across your system or networked contents. Now, let’s flip the equation around a bit and consider things from an entirely different angle. File Name Tag Explorer presents just such a paradigm shift (yes, I hate that phrase too). Instead of searching for the contents of files, or file names, this app allows you to slap Flickr-style tags on as many files as you want. You’re searching by topic now—click on the “freeware” tag, for example, and you’ll be given a list of those files with which you’ve previously bestowed this identifier.

Now, I get a headache just thinking of having to tag all the files on my drive before being able to reap the benefits of this application. For what it’s worth, File Name Tag Explorer does assist you in auto-tagging files—it’s not perfect, but it’s not like you have to manually enter every tag, eh?

Download it here!

 

David Murphy is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. He enjoys searching for files as much as he enjoys searching for buried treasure. Yarrrr.