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Tuesday, December 31, 2013 at 5:31AM New article under what's new! The best way to sell your old gadgets! Great advice on how to get the most money for your used gadgets. Start the year off the right way with a new gadget paid for with money from your old one! Article on left or click here.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013 at 5:25AM
Best sign that your hard drive is dying? Typically, noise, a lot of noise, specifically, grinding or a high pitched screech. Both are definite signs that your drive is starting to fail. Realize that ALL hard drives fail eventually, it's just a matter of time. What to do? Well if preserving your data is important do this. First, shut off the PC. Until everything is fixed, you want that drive spinning as little as possible. Preferably, not at all. You'll have to buy a new hard drive, of course, and install it. That's the easy part. If you want great performance from the new drive, get an SSD drive. The hard part will be recovering everything from the old drive. If you have a complete, up-to-date backup, or you use a cloud-based backup service, congratulations. Your good habits are about to be rewarded. Exactly how well rewarded depends on what type of backup you have. If you have an image backup of your C: drive, you can restore that to the new drive and be up and working almost immediately. Whatever program you used to create the image should have a way for you to boot the computer and restore it. If you backed up your data files separately, you'll have to restore those separately, as well. But what if you have your documents and other data files safely backed up, but never bothered to back up Windows itself? (As far as I know, an image is the only reliable way to back up Windows.) In that case, contact the computer manufacturer and find out how you can restore Windows to the new drive. Once that’s done, you’ll have to restore your programs. What if you didn’t back up? When preparing this article, I seriously considered giving instructions for cloning the dying drive to the new one. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that for anyone except a very skilled professional, that's a very bad idea. Cloning is generally pretty simple, but not when you've never done it before and your drive could die at any moment. Instead, I recommend you contact a data recovery service. These services are expensive, especially for a noisy drive. But that's the price of not backing up. So, PLEASE, back up your drive now, while it is still healthy and simple to do. The longer you wait, the more pain there is. The best-known services are DriveSavers and Kroll OnTrack. PCWorld editors have visited DriveSavers and been impressed with that operation, but Kroll OnTrack and other companies, such as Flashback Data, may be just as good. Data recovery isn't cheap, though, which is why a good personal backup routine remains your best option.
Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 5:06PM Thanks to Greg Shultz of TechRepublic for the helpful guide. Here are the recovery drive options for Windows 8.
A Recovery Drive allows you to boot your system and easily access a number of recovery and troubleshooting tools that you can use to revive an ailing Windows 8.x system. A Recovery Drive looks and works the same in Windows 8.1 as it did in Windows 8; therefore, everything I wrote in previous articles about the tools on the Windows 8 Recovery Drive still apply in Windows 8.1.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 at 12:53PM When it comes to password security, the longer and more complex your password is, the better. That’s whu most security experts will advise you choose long passwords without any dictionary words, and with both uppercase and lowercase alphabets, numbers, and special characters. But those of us who comply with this advice and use such often end up having to retype them multiple times before punching the correct sequence due to some typing error. And since password entry boxes hide their contents, you cannot actually see what went wrong in those 30+ characters, making the task rather cumbersome. If you use Firefox as your primary web browser and are looking for a simple solution to overcome this nuisance, try this add-on called Show / Hide Passwords. As the name implies, it’s a simple, extremely tiny extension that lets you show or hide the contents of password boxes on the fly with a single click.
Check out the screenshot below. Looks familiar, doesn’t it? No matter what web browser you use, you will see those black dots in password fields concealing the actual passwords from prying eyes – even yours. And if you don’t use a password manager of some sort that includes an option to auto-fill the password for you, then good luck typing long and complex passwords whenever you require to log in to an account, even if you remember them well.
The way Show / Hide Passwords tackles this problem is by adding a minuscule button in the password fields in Firefox to let you reveal and hide the password. It acts as a simple toggle to easily show and hide the password on the fly, without requiring to enter some complicated menu or copying and pasting the password from a text document. When enabled, it simply shows the real characters of the password in place of the black dots.
What makes this add-on great is that there aren’t any settings to configure it. Show / Hide Passwords successfully detects almost all password fields by itself, and places the toggle whenever it finds appropriate for the pertaining field.
Show / Hide Password can be grabbed for free from the Firefox Add-on repository via the download link provided below.
Monday, December 23, 2013 at 1:13AM
With all the security breaches we're having these days, it doesn't hurt to be vigilant for any suspicious activity. Your Microsoft account—linking SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Office webapps, Xbox, and possibly your PC—comes with a tool that shows you if any unauthorized parties tried to get into your account. It's much like Google's and Dropbox's "last activity" solution: Microsoft keeps a log of successful and unsuccessful sign-ins, incorrect password attempts, and so on—along with the IP address, a map, and other details of the attempted device. Log into your Microsoft account and click the "Recent activity" link in the left menu to see it. It looks like this: As you can see from this example, someone in Russia tried to get into this account but entered the wrong password. The map tells me this is someone in Khabarovsk, a place I've or you have never been. You would not be too concerned with that unsuccessful attempt. Because it's an unknown device and if you have two-factor authentication turned on—something everyone should do wherever possible—the supposed hacker couldn't get in without your other authenticating device. What would be troubling is if there was a successful sign-in from a location that's not your own. Then you know you've been compromised. You can hit the "This wasn't me" button on that page to tell Microsoft and recover your account. Anyway, like looking at logs of your Wi-Fi router's login attempts, it's nice to remember every now and then that everything is all right.
Monday, December 23, 2013 at 12:58AM So you’ve got multiple accounts on the same web service, let’s say Google, Twitter or Facebook, and you would like to sign into all of them simultaneously while keeping each session separate from the others? If you use Google Chrome as your primary web browser, you can do that with ease, thanks to the simple and highly useful extension by the name of Identity Mask. It’s a small Chrome extension that lets you sign into multiple accounts in conjunction, for let’s say one that you use at work and the other for your personal use, within the same browser window, and you don’t even have to launch a separate incognito mode just for the purpose. Details to follow.
Generally, when you launch Chrome and sign into a website with your account, the browser keeps the you signed in using a cookie, so you don’t have to login again each time you open a new tab of the service. While this is quite convenient for most situations, it hinders the browser from letting users sign into more than one account on the same domain at the same time. While one can easily launch incognito mode in Chrome, that isn’t always convenient, as you lose access to all your regular extensions that aren’t enabled in Incognito, plus no information from your session gets saved so there will be no history of that session left. It is in such cases that Identity Mask can prove to be immensely useful.
What it does is creating a clean session within the same browser window dubbed New Identity. So instead of opening a new tab, all you have to do is click the Identity Mask icon to open a new tab, and then sign into your desired service.
You will notice that after clicking the New Identity button, Identity Mask will open a new tab. But this tab is actually different from your normal tabs because it actually opens as a different profile that doesn’t share the same cookies information as your other tabs. You can easily identify these tabs by the number prefix before their titles in the tab bar. All tabs with the same number are of the same identity, and share session data, which is kept separate across different numbers.
To sum it up, Identity Mask can prove extremely useful should you need to sign into multiple accounts in Chrome without launching separate windows and setting up different native browser profiles.