NOTE: Mac users and Linux users (Ubuntu etc) do not apply. The filesystem(s) associated with your OS either automatically corrects this problem or stops it from happing in the first place.

So then the question is, which defragmenter should I pick?

The main stream ones are;

• Diskeeper
• Defraggler
• Auslogics Disk Defrag
• Perfect Disk
• JK defrag
• O&O defrag

I know there are a thousand others, but for this article I am only going to pick the ones that I hear of the most.

Which one do I prefer? Defraggler. Why?

Image via Wikipedia

Well its free, its easy to use, and its simple.

I have tried Perfect Disk and Diskeeper along with Auslogics disk defrag…but you either pay an arm and a leg for them or I just personally don’t like em.

Defraggler allows you to schedule a defrag, shutdown after defrag, quick or full defrag, book defrag, so its got all the bases covered. It does it all.

You can download defraggler here; its free .

Which one do you use and why? Leave a comment .

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Well thats gonna change pretty soon, as Google is majorly changing its privacy policy along with its terms of conditions.

Which is good right? Yes .

The new policy is much more clear and simple, and without much of the legal mumbo jumbo.

Glad Google is starting to care more about its privacy of its users…wish Facebook would!

Watch the video below for a explanation of the changes:

Other neat features are the customizable email skins and themes you can apply to your Gmail account to give it more personality, and Google Instant which predicts what you are searching for as you type it to save you time.

Image via CrunchBase

But Google doesn’t stop there.  In addition to all the cool things Google does that are easily discoverable, there are also a whole host of “Easter egg” type surprises that Google has planted in tactical places, just waiting for people to stumble on.  Here are some of the best:

Old Snakey

Remember the classic computer game Snake where you travelled around eating red “apple” pixels and grew your snake by one pixel every time you did? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but either way, you can give it a shot in Gmail.  First, enable key shortcuts (Settings > Labs > Enable Shortcuts) in your Gmail account.  Once that’s done and you’re in your inbox, hit “&” and enjoy a challenging game of Snake!

Pac-Man

Pac-Man is perhaps the greatest arcade game in video game history.  It has entertained children and adults alike for decades now, and on the game’s 30^th anniversary, Google replaced its banner with an interactive game of Pac-Man.  It lasted for that day, but people were so sad to see it go that Google made it permanent.

Flight Simulator

Have you ever wanted to fly around the world? Easy.  Just hop on to Google Earth, go to Tools > Enter Flight Simulator and cruise around the globe without ever leaving your seat!

Byline:

This is a guest post by Eliza Morgan who is a full time blogger.  She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.

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Smartphones have done their part in making travel easier, too. In fact, a smartphone is the only tool you need to research, book, organize, and track your travels. With just a few apps it’s a snap.

Research: Kayak

In the past few years Kayak has become one of the biggest names in travel. Their website provides a number of tools to help you research the best prices for flights, hotels, and car rentals. The mobile app essentially wraps up all of that website content and presents it in a form fit for mobile.

The Kayak app not only shows you available pricing information, but also adds in any applicable fees. If there is a hotel surtax, or if a certain airline charges to check bags, Kayak will add the charge into your total. They also offer price alerts, so you can track the price of desired flights.

While you can book hotels from Kayak, it doesn’t not allow you to book other accommodations. Perhaps that alone works, but if you want to book your entire trip, there is an app that provides a more comprehensive experience.

Get the Kayak app for free. It’s compatible with iPhone, iPad, Windows 7, BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia phones.

Booking: Orbitz

One of the biggest names in travel websites also has one of the most powerful smartphone travel apps. After you research your trip on Kayak, you can open up the Orbitz app and book your entire trip, soup to nuts. That covers your airfare, hotels, rental car, and other accommodations.

Really, Orbitz is the modern-day travel agent. But, because it uses a computer-searchable database, there isn’t a need for as many humans doing work. That means lower commissions, which means cheaper travel for all. The mobile app can make it even cheaper, too, since Orbitz offers a number of mobile-only deals on hotels.

You can get the Orbitz app for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

Organizing: TripIt

When my family used to travel, my dad, like many other dads, carried all of our information in a manila folder. It got quite stuffed by the time we departed, since it contained our tickets, a printout of our itinerary, rental car booking, hotel accommodations, and more. It was nice to have it all in one place, but it did get a bit bulky. And easy to lose.

Now that our confirmations come via email, the game has changed. Sure, you could print out that email and continue using the manila folder. But wouldn’t it be much easier to have all that information on your smartphone, a device you have with you all the time anyway? With TripIt you can forward your confirmation email, and it automatically populates the app with all the relevant information. Confirmation numbers, flight times, gates, arrival times, rental car, hotel — it’s all there in your pocket.

The basic service is free, and while there are some additional features available via the premium subscription service, the free app works plenty fine. You can get TripIt for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows 7.

Tracking: FlightView

Once you have your trip in place, you’ll probably want a way to track your flight. Delays and cancellations can ruin plans, so you want to stay a step ahead of the game. While Kayak does offer a rudimentary flight tracking service, and TripIt offers one on a subscription basis, there are apps dedicated to the function. FlightView takes care of pretty much everything.

The free version of the app provides basic services, such as a listing of flights out of airports. That way if there’s a delay, you can plan an alternate route before you even reach the gate agent to make arrangements. The only issue with FlightView is that Android and iPhone have different sets of free and premium features. For instance, flight alerts are a premium feature for iPhone, but free on Android. Premium for both is flight boards, which replicates the board at an airport. That can make tasks such as picking up someone from the airport much easier.

There are three tiers of the app: FlightView Free, Regular, and Premium. Check out FlightView’s site to get information on which features are available on each tier. It’s ready to go for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Image via CrunchBase

Except for Facebook timeline which seemed to slowly come to our profiles…until now. You have a few short weeks before Facebook timeline becomes a standard feature.

I personally like Facebook timeline…its just a better design and layout for Facebookm but naturally alot of people will hate it.

I welcome the change, so bring it on!

Watch the video below on what Facebook timeline is:

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What is SOPA? Watch the Video:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

So who is taking part?

Related articles

• WebHostingBuzz to Blackout on January 18th in Protest of SOPA and PIPA (prweb.com)
• Websites go dark at start of SOPA/PIPA protest (digitaltrends.com)

1. Combining more gadgets

Image via Wikipedia

One reason smartphones have grown rapidly is that they combine many devices into one. Even before we consider all the apps available on iPhone and Android, we have their primary features. Smartphones have successfully melded MP3 players and digital cameras. They’ve become our GPS units and our pedometers. They can record our voices, and even our instruments. There are so many gadgets we no longer need now that we have smartphones.

What interests me now is what other gadgets will get fused into the smartphone. TV remotes seem to be an up and coming idea. Is there any way to put a universal remote sensor in a smartphone? What about virtual controllers for our video game systems? That might pose some technical issues, but it would provide a solution to the problem of having four people and only two controllers. Think of all the benefits of adding a thermostat to a smartphone.

There are plenty more gadgets we can fold into our smartphones. Half the fun is imagining the possibilities. The other half is seeing them in real life. We could be on our way to seeing the next big gadget fusion in 2012. Once we do see it, we can bank on a couple of other developments.

2. More powerful processing

If our smartphones are going to gain more functionality, they necessarily need to become more powerful. This isn’t much of a worry, since we’ve seen great leaps forward in smartphone processor power. The best smartphones now are featuring dual-core processors, and we’re set to see the first quad-core smartphone processor in 2012. The implications are huge.

Not only will more powerful smartphones allow us to fold more gadget functions into our devices, but it will allow us to do more in general. There is a wave of tablet users who are essentially ditching their laptops. A smartphone will never actually replace a laptop, since it has certain physical limitations. But with greater processing power smartphones can do certain things that previously required laptops or desktops. That means lugging around laptops less often, which makes everyone happier.

There’s also the usefulness factor. The UI on most smartphone platforms is simply more intuitive than it is on PCs. Touching the things we want just makes more sense. Moving more core functions to the smartphone, then, will make things easier on a number of levels. Yet we can’t accomplish this without one last development.

3. Energy efficiency

Here’s where things take a turn and only the geekiest of the geek get excited. Everyone wants more functions available on their smartphones. Everyone also wants more powerful devices. That’s what gets us excited about shows such as CES and MWC. We get to see the latest developments, and many of these developments mean more powerful devices. Yet there’s one aspect missing there: battery life.

We have seen some breakthroughs in battery energy efficiency, but we’re going to need a lot more in the near future. You know why tablets are so popular? Because their batteries last forever, even with heavy use. Smartphones need this kind of development, too. Of course, tablets have the benefit of size, but really, smartphones are growing, too. There are even rumors of a four-inch iPhone in 2012. Size will help a bit, but efficiency is the key. I’m psyched to see how they can squeeze more out of less, whether that’s with software or hardware.

Even more so, the further we stretch the limits of our current lithium-ion batteries, the closer we necessarily get to the next step. How will we power our smartphones once we can’t squeeze another ounce of efficiency out of our current technology? By creating something new. And isn’t that what’s really exciting about technology?

Joe Pawlikowski is the editor of Prepaid Reviews, a site that provides news, commentary, and reviews of prepaid wireless services.

Related articles

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• CES 2012: Eric Schmidt Envisions A Home Where Every Gadget Knows You (huffingtonpost.com)

Well there thankfully is a easy selection of solutions;

1. Sew conductive thread into the finger tips.
2. If the gloves are thin lick or blow into the fingertips until it works.
3. Cut off the tips of the glove (last resource).
4. Do what they do in south Korea and use a sausage as a stylus!

And other tricks leave a comment!

Fortunately, there are many great ways that you can connect with your readers and build a relationship with them. Between social networking, bookmarking and private communication, there are many ways you can connect with your readers off of your site and keep them coming back.

However, one of the most compelling means is through an email newsletter. Such newsletters are easy to setup, cheap to maintain and provide a personal, direct and continuous line of communication between you and your readers.

However, getting newsletter subscribers and building your list can be a challenging task as surfers are often reluctant to part with their email address.

If you’re looking for good ways to get readers to take that extra step and become more involved in your site, here are 6 tips for turning your passive readers into active subscribers.

1. Use a Professional Email Service

Using a profession email service like MailChimp or Aweber will only cost you a few dollars per month but will greatly help you grow and maintain your newsletter.

For potential subscribers, these services give readers a reason to trust you as they know you’ll abide by industry-standard unsubscribe and list maintenance policies. The trust these companies have built up helps encourage readers to trust you.

For you, they not only make it easy to create professional sign-up forms, send high quality newsletters and attract new readers, they also take care of many of the legal and technical challenges that come with sending a newsletter.

Unless you are prepared to deal with the legal pitfalls, spam filtering and other issues that come with sending out bulk email, you’ll likely want to turn things over to the professionals.

2. Display Your Sign-up Form Prominently

If you want people to fill in your sign-up form, you need to put it where they can see it. That means having it somewhere “above the fold” on your site (meaning visible when the page first loads, without any scrolling).

Also, consider putting it in multiple places such as adding one at the end of every post. Likewise, though pop-ups may annoy some visitors, they’ve been shown to be effective at getting people to sign up.

The most important thing is that, when a reader decides they want to sign up, they shouldn’t have to go hunting for the form to do it.

3. Offer a Powerful Incentive

The best motivator to get someone to sign up is creating compelling content that people want to read.

However, some readers might need a bit more than that so offering a free giveaway, such as a small eBook or a free consultation, might be enough to push people who are indecisive into making the leap.

Sometimes, people just need a push and freebies are a great way to provide it.

4. Ask Your Readers Nicely

Sometimes your readers want to support you but don’t know how. As such, if you offer an easy, free way they can help out, they’ll likely do it.

Place a call to action at the end of your posts and encourage your readers to subscribe, you may be surprised just how many do.

5. Stay in Contact With Your Subscribers

Once someone does subscribe, you need to keep them there. This first means providing exactly what you promised, but also keeping in touch with them and getting feedback on how your newsletter is meeting their needs.

In addition to the sign-up emails, send out occasional, but rare, emails to see if they are enjoying the list and if it’s meeting their expectations. Find out what they would like to see more of and get them involved in the process of determining the future of the site and newsletter.

Readers are much more likely to stick with and support something they feel they have a voice in. This helps you keep subscribers longer and grow your list faster.

6. Don’t Be a Jerk

Finally, though this one should be obvious, don’t be a jerk and abuse the trust that people put into you. If someone wants to to unsubscribe from your newsletter, that should be the end of it. Not only is it the law, but it’s the right thing to do.

If you abuse the trust of others, word will get around and you’ll find it more and more difficult to gain subscribers. Furthermore, the ones you do have will be less and less enthusiastic about it.

While growing your list is important, it’s better to have a small list with enthusiastic readers than a large one made up of people who just want to get out of it.

All in all, there’s no real magic to building an email list, though you do have to put a great deal of effort and energy into it.

Still, if you follow a few simple practices and give your readers a compelling reason to subscribe, you’ll likely find that the list, in many respects, takes care of itself.

After all, one of the greatest benefits of having an email newsletter is that, if you set it up properly, it’s much less maintenance than social networking and direct marketing efforts. It’s a hand-free way to stay in contact with your readers and do so in a way that is still deeply personal to them.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that works with physicians and patients to evaluate the likely effectiveness of tumorgrafting, and who also consultants for container check inspection company.

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There are a lot of factors that comes to place when it comes to determining your mobile experience, and learning a few tricks for the difficult times won’t hurt at all (especially if you travel a lot and are likely to experience constant network problems). This article will be giving you a few tips to help you ensure robust mobile internet experience.

Try Changing Your Position

The first step you should take when trying to access the internet via your mobile phone is to change your position. It is very important to take this step even if your mobile phone is showing full network signals. A lot of people think that the fact that there is full network signal in a place means they will get better internet speeds, but that isn’t always the reality, simply because a network tower you are close to might be overloaded; that won’t prevent it from showing you full signals, but that will affect the speeds you get. However, by moving positions you will be able to connect to another tower, and even if the signal isn’t that full you might be able to get better speeds.
Don’t Rely on Just One Mobile Internet Provider

One thing I always advise people to do whenever they come to me complaining about having constant problems with their mobile internet is to never stick to one provider. In other words, I’m not trying to tell you to change providers; instead, I’m saying you should have two or more mobile network providers that you can easily fall back to should you have any problems along the way.

There are a lot of quality mobile internet providers around you, and you can even get better deals if you decide to use the internet to research them.

Image via Wikipedia

One thing I have always done that I will recommend is to have a variety of browsers you can always use whenever you want. The general consensus is to go with the default browser that comes with your mobile phone, but I have discovered that to be extremely ineffective over time.

Most default mobile browsers are designed in a way that they don’t have support for some elements that speed up web browsing, but by installing and trying additional mobile browsers you might be able to get the speed you want. A great browser I will recommend is the Opera Mini browser.

This guest post is by mobile and broadband expert writer Paul Tobis, who writes for the Broadband Expert sites.

Image via CrunchBase

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