It’s always a good idea to wipe clean your hard disk before you pass it on to someone. Can you just imagine the harm that someone could do if they got their hands on all your data? And this is even more the case if you’re passing it on to a complete stranger.

So, how do you get down to it? Deleting your files is a start; but it may surprise you to know that when you delete a file, your computer doesn’t actually delete it; it just deletes a pointer to it and marks the space as available. There are a number of tools on the market that let you undelete files; so you really need something a bit more aggressive; something that permanently wipes the data by overwriting it with garbage. One such product is Drivescrubber, a specialised product that overwrites your data up to 100 times. No way anyone can retrieve your data after that. Drivescrubber is currently on sale for around $10. That’s not a high price to be paying for securing your data.

It is rare to receive a direct report from an error submission report. There is a trend recently, to try and suggest ways the issue can be rectified, but not many packages do this (Windows being a notable exception). You may get an automated response back, which can help you resolve your issue; so it’s worth sending in your report.

Your report actually does go back to the developers; whether it’s Microsoft or an Orange County computer support firm, though it is usually aggregated with the reports from other users. computers are complicated things, and the more clues developers get to fix problems, the easier it gets for them. It does help the company diagnose and repair the problem. You may not get an immediate response from the company; but your problem may be fixed in the next release.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, your computer should be powerful enough to be able to handle most things you can throw at it. However, some games are bit more graphically intensive than others and the way to help them out is to get some dedicated graphic hardware. A lot of computers come with on-board graphic adapters which are not always optimised for the sort of high performance that is needed by some games. You can pick up a decent graphical card without breaking the bank.

One such card is the GeForce GT 220 Graphics Card. It’s got an nVIDIA chipset which is one of the best around and boasts a dedicated graphics processor and 1Gb of RAM just for processing graphics. It will make a great difference to your graphical processing power and is on sale from Buy.com for under $60.

The one thing for sure is that you’ll see a great difference in the graphical abilities of your computer, and World of Warcraft will look like it’s never looked before.

There are a number of options for taking backups of your work, ranging from online options, all the way to network attached storage on your own network. All the options have different capabilities and different prices. I don’t think an online option would be ideal in this case though. Your files are bound to be too big to take advantage of online storage.

A good idea would be to get yourself a large internal disk that you can store all your files on. I just found one on sale at Buy.com that just might fit the bill for you. It’s the Hitachi SimpleTech Desktar Hard Drive and you get 2 Terabytes of space for under $170. It’s pretty astounding how cheap storage space is getting nowadays and getting this sort of disk you can take advantage of all that space right at your fingertips. It’s a 3.5″ drive, so you’ll need a caddy if you don’t have the right slot available in your machine. So make sure you check what’s available. The disk has free shipping, so might as well avail yourself of the offer.

I had to do some reading up on this to tell you the truth, as I had no idea that Adobe Reader used Javascript. Turns out it’s quite easy to turn off, and if you come across a document that really needs it, you can always turn it back on again. Here’s what you do.

• Start Adobe Reader
• Click on the Edit menu
• Click on Preferences
• Click on Javascript in the left-hand column
• Untick the box labelled: Enable Acrobat Javascript
• Click OK to save the changes

Pretty simple really, if you know where to look; so if you start seeing strange things when you open a PDF document, like a popup taking you to a colon cleansing website; try turning Javascript off to see if it cures the problem.

Turns out that it is possible to upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium. The downside is that you won’t be able to use the Upgrade wizard to this this. Instead you’ll have to perform a clean installation of Windows 7 and reinstall all your applications from scratch.

Take a backup of all your files and data, wipe your disk and perform the installation. You’ll then need to install your applications again and install your data. Please make sure you back up all your data before you do this, so to make sure you have a complete copy of everything; you don’t want to be losing your alli review or high school assignments .. that is, if that’s what you have on your machine.

This is caused by a part of Windows XP that lets you display a web page on your desktop. Web pages are designed to be viewed in a browser though and I’m pretty sure most web designers never test their pages in this way. It does give you extra functionality that an image can’t offer; however you need to know how to remove it. Taking it away is actually quite simple; clicking on the page itself will show a border around it, and click on the X in the top-right corner will get rid of the page. Pretty simple huh? I wish it was that easy to get some allergy relief, but well, thank goodness for anti-histamines

There are many different formats that can be used to get video from one place to another. My old TV used to take Scart, and I have a Scart-to-composite converter, connected to a Dell laptop that had composite out. I’ve since upgraded to streaming video using VLC over my WiFi connection to my Dreambox which is connected to my TV; but that set up is a bit too complex for more people.

There is an interesting bit of kit that can work really well for you. The Cables Unlimited Wireless USB to Display Adapter offers a number of different options, one of which is HDMI and is currently on sale from Buy.com for around $100 (including free shipping). Here’s how it works. The adapter comes with a Wifi dongle you plug into your laptop. There’s a corresponding unit that plugs into your TV or monitor using VGA, DVI or HDMI. The two units talk to each other wirelessly, so that’s all there is to it. It then allows you to watching pictures or stream video directly off your PC onto your display adapter of choice. It’s a pretty sophisticated solution that looks really simple to set up and can give you amazing results, without having cables training all over the house.

UAC (User Account Control) is a mechanism to alert you that a program is requesting elevated permissions to perform some sort of function. Most programs run with a normal level, so this shouldn’t be appearing whenever you run a program. If you’re certain you don’t need any prompting when a program starts up, you can disable these prompts by giving the program full permission. Here’s what you do:

1. Right-click on the program and choose Properties
2. Click on the Compatibility tab
3. Click the box labelled “Run this program as an administrator”
4. Click OK to save the changes
5. Confirm in UAC you are happy to make this change

And there you have it. Don’t forget that UAC is really there to protect you, much like fastin helps you keep in shape. You should only turn it off when you’re sure you trust a program, but I can understand your frustration of having to give a program the all-clear over and over again.

The great thing about Android is that the operating system on your phone is open up to any tweaking you might want to do. unfortunately, there is no UI for proxy settings for Android web browser. Instead the Android web browser will read the proxy settings in its settings database.

Here are the instructions to enable the proxy in the android web browser.

1. > adb shell
2. # sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
3. sqlite> INSERT INTO system VALUES(99,’http_proxy’, ‘proxy:port’);
4. sqlite>.exit

You can talk to settings.db for more information.

1. sqlite> SELECT * FROM system;
2. sqlite> .tables
3. sqlite> .databases
4. sqlite> .schema table_name
5. sqlite> any SQL expressions to talk to the tables

Give it a whirl and see how you get on. Once you have the proxy set up, you can visit The Joke Shop, Free People or any other website you want to go to.