Are you ready to rock?  I should hope so.  I’m giving your hands a rest and your ears a workout this week, for none of the apps in the ol’ "freeware roundup" this time around are actually downloadable.  That’s right.  Zero.  After you read this, you will spend the course of your week installing absolutely nothing.

So what, then, am I profiling in this roundup?  Dust?  Nope.  Rock.  Every single Web app in this collection is specifically geared toward an audio pursuit of some kind.  I’ll show you apps you can use–through the comfort of whatever browser you’d like–to both create music and find new music to jam to.  If you want to go worldly, I’ll show you how to find the latest music streams from all over the world.

That’s not all, however, for not everything audio-related has to involve music.  The other two cool Web apps in this week’s roundup center on audio usability.  One lets you edit files online as if you were rocking an offline audio editor, and the other lets you craft up a message to your friends that will be read by one of those lovely, synthetic computer voices we’ve all come to know and love.

So that’s that.  It’s audio week in the Freeware Files–even though you won’t have to download a single executable to reap the benefits of these awesome finds!

Blindspeak

Nothing says, "thanks a lot, bro," like receiving a message, full of insults, being read to you by a synthetic computer voice.  At least, that’s the first thing I would think of to do after stumbling across Blindspeak.  But in all sincerity, this Web app is the perfect thing to use when you want to send a loving note to your elderly grandparents / lazy friends who, for whatever reason, aren’t down with the text, yo.

"Download" it here!

Myna

Sometimes, you just need to get your hands on an audio editor real-quick, but you just don’t have the permissions (or time) to install something like Audacity.  That’s where Myna comes to save the day.  This super-handy Web app lets you import (or record) audio and perform basic tasks like trimming, shuffling, and multitracking your selections.  You can fiddle around with a  few different effects–delays, equalizers, et cetera–in an Acid-like environment. It’s not a perfect replacement for the power of an offline editor, but I have no complaints!

"Download" it here!

Antenna

Finding new music or audio streams to listen to can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to make sense of the lists, upon lists, upon never-ending lists of possible online stations and/or streaming sites on today’s Web.  Yikes.  Antenna attempts to reduce this cacophony a wee bit by combing a list of online radio stations with an easy-to-navigate global map. Not only can you narrow down your search by country or genre, but you can also rate your favorites for easy access at a later time.

And, yes, this is an Adobe AIR app, so I suppose it’s not a true Web app per se.  Close enough, eh?

Download it here!

We Are Hunted

Want new music to listen to?  Unsure of where you’re going to find the latest-and-greatest jams that are popular in "the scene" before they hit the top-40 charts?  We Are Hunted is an awesome site for getting yourself more invested in music that’s cool before it becomes… cool.  Click on a band and title to stream the track.  If you like it, you can buy it, add it to a personal chart, or otherwise share it with friends.  The service itself determines popularity based on a crazy algorithm that considers blog posts, mainstream press, and other popularity-driven places to determine the 99 daily songs that are, simply, "cool."

"Download" it here!

Audiotool

Here we go.  Audiotool is a crazy, feature-packed Web app for creating your own music from the ground up.  And I’m not just talking about some cheesy "loop a few WAV files and call it a day" kind of an app.  Use actual virtual synthesizers to concoct your beats, riffs, jams–whatever–and assemble a pretty neat track (or remix someone else’s track) in a manner akin to an offline tool like Propellerhead’s Reason.  Well, a trimmed-down version of Reason, that is.

"Download" it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) 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. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you’re dying to recommend!

 Sourced from: Maximum PC Features RSS Feed

OPENING ADDRESS BY MR LIM HNG KIANG, MINISTER FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY
AND DEPUTY CHAIRMAN, MONETARY AUTHORITY OF SINGAPORE
AT THE 1st ANNUAL WORLD ISLAMIC BANKING CONFERENCE: ASIA SUMMIT 2010
“SEEKING NEW GROWTH HORIZONS”

H.E. Governor Rasheed Mohammed Al Maraj, Central Bank of Bahrain,

H.E. Governor Sultan Bin Nasser Al Suwaidi, Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates,

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen

Introduction

1. Good morning and a warm welcome to our overseas guests. First of all, let me thank Governor Rasheed and Governor Sultan for joining us at this inaugural World Islamic Banking Conference: Asia Summit (WIBC Asia). Your presence here today is testimony to the strong and long-standing ties that Singapore enjoys with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and warm relationships between MAS and your respective central banks.

2. The World Islamic Banking Conference has been held successfully in Bahrain for the past sixteen years. We are honoured that WIBC Asia is now anchored in Singapore. We hope that the Summit will become an important event on the Islamic finance calendar over time and catalyse even greater engagement between the Middle East and Asia. Hence, the theme: “Seeking New Growth Horizons” is highly appropriate for this inaugural Summit.

Strengthening Asia-Middle East engagement

3. Uncertainty and fear from the financial crisis have abated somewhat, but risks still remain. Global economic output had begun to pick up from the second quarter of 2009. The pace of recovery however varies across regions. Though global conditions have improved, recent developments in Europe have once again unsettled financial markets as doubts have arisen over the fiscal sustainability of several countries in the Euro zone. These episodic concerns serve as broad reminders that the world economy still faces serious challenges as governments, financial institutions and corporations adjust to the new realities of greater prudence, tighter market conditions and lower tolerance for weak governance and excessive leverage.

4. In Asia, economic growth has rebounded strongly above pre-crisis levels and become more broad-based. Fundamentals in Asia continue to be strong, boosted by robust domestic demand, healthy balance sheets and strong resurgence in intra-regional trade. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Asia is expected to grow by an average of 7.1% in 2010 and 2011, up from 3.4% in 2009. Having reformed and restructured their economies following the Asian Crisis a decade ago, Asia was better positioned with less fiscal imbalances or corporate excesses to emerge faster from the downturn. Prospects for sustained growth in ASEAN are also good. Its outlook is enhanced by continuing efforts to create an integrated single market by 2015. With improved trade links with the two Asian giants – China and India, ASEAN will become an even more dynamic and vibrant region within Asia.

5. The GCC countries too enjoy solid growth prospects, and look set to achieve around 5% GDP growth in 2010 and 2011, according to the IMF. They have implemented broad-based development strategies to diversify their economies away from hydrocarbons and harness new growth drivers. While the energy-related sector will remain an important pillar in Asia-Middle East relations, we should develop other complementarities between the two regions such as in financial and business services, infocomm technology and media, infrastructure development, tourism as well as green technology and life sciences.

6. In this respect, the linkages between Singapore and the GCC have deepened. We have signed the milestone GCC-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Singapore companies, such as Capitaland in Bahrain and UAE, Changi Airport International in Saudi Arabia, Keppel Corp in Qatar and SembCorp in UAE and Oman, have secured about S$26 billion of projects in the GCC. In addition, a strong cluster of Middle Eastern banks, such as Arab Bank, Emirates NBD, First Gulf Bank, National Bank of Kuwait and Qatar National Bank, is already based in Singapore. Quite a few are looking to expand their operations in trade finance and wealth management to capitalize on new growth opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region.

7. By strengthening linkages at all levels, the Middle East and Asia can then complement each other’s development and seek out new growth areas for mutual benefit. Inter-regional platforms have been established to achieve this; for example, the Asia-Middle East Dialogue (AMED) and the ASEAN-GCC Ministerial Meeting, which was held in Singapore recently. Growth in trade between ASEAN and GCC have resumed post-crisis and is expected to receive a further boost with the ASEAN-GCC trade and investment framework agreement and FTA. I therefore urge all parties to work swiftly towards a mutually-beneficial conclusion.

Reforming finance to sustain growth

8. The financial sector has encountered major turbulence and headwinds as a result of the financial crisis and has de-leveraged extensively in response to a more risk-sensitive environment. Significant changes in financial regulation are underway. Global regulators under the auspices of the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, are working to put fractured financial markets back on a sounder footing. These changes include increasing the quality and quantity of risk-based capital, introducing new global liquidity requirements, and developing a fresh regulatory approach towards systemically important financial institutions. Such reforms should bring about greater stability to the global financial system.

9. These changes will not be dramatic for Singapore-based financial institutions because MAS’ regulation and supervision have been sound, prudent and effective. This has helped our financial system to remain resilient through the crisis. Last week, MAS communicated our long-standing approach in the latest monograph – “Tenets of Effective Regulation” where we reiterated that our approach to regulatory development is outcome-focused, risk appropriate and impact sensitive. MAS’ policies and actions need to be clear and consistent as well as responsive to industry and market changes and economic cycles. We believe that a stable and dynamic financial system that serves the needs of the economy and the public cannot be built on regulation alone. Responsible and competent board and senior management who manage the risks of their financial institutions well are also critical.

Growing interest in Islamic Finance

10. The general outlook for Islamic finance remains positive despite the negative spillover from the financial crisis. As a basic tenet, Islamic finance emphasizes that financing activities should underpin real commercial activities. Due to its widening acceptance and its appeal as a means for ethical investment, the industry is expected to continue growing at twice the pace of its conventional counterpart. As such, surveys estimate that the industry will soon cross the US$1 trillion mark in total assets.

11. But similar to conventional banks, Islamic financial institutions have been impacted by the economic slowdown and resulting weaker asset prices. Some financial institutions have been badly affected by the over-concentration in illiquid assets and overly-optimistic business plans. The Islamic industry therefore needs to take heed of the lessons learnt from the current crisis and pay greater attention to issues related to capital adequacy, market liquidity and risk management. Overcoming these challenges will require strong cooperation within the industry and across different jurisdictions. MAS, as a full and Council member of the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) since 2005, will continue to advocate and support multi-national initiatives that would bring about such improvements.

Singapore as a Global City for Business and Finance

12. As we have seen in recent times, financial centres are important nodes in ensuring that the world economy continues to function well. They need to be responsive to the dynamic market place in order to perform their critical roles to sustain growth by ensuring that capital is channeled to the most productive uses.

13. Singapore as a vibrant and cosmopolitan Global City is well-positioned for businesses to connect to Asia and international markets. Over time, we have established the necessary infrastructure, global connectivity and pool of expertise with the requisite knowledge, understanding and experience of local conditions in Asia that can add value to companies entering the region.

14. As a financial centre offering a full suite of financial services, Singapore stands ready to play a wider developmental role in promoting Islamic finance in response to rising regional demand for Shariah-compliant products and services. MAS has worked closely with the industry and other government agencies to ensure a level-playing field between Islamic and conventional finance such that Islamic finance is not disadvantaged for tax and regulatory purposes where the economic substance and risks are similar.

15. Many market players are already leveraging on Singapore’s strengths and capabilities to raise capital, create infrastructure and real estate funds and conduct wealth and asset management activities. For instance, the Islamic Development Bank and City Development Ltd have tapped our capital markets to raise Shariah-compliant Singapore-dollar funding. Another notable development is the joint venture by Singapore’s Keppel T&T and Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Group to create the world’s first Shariah-compliant data centre fund. Last week, the fund managed to secure an initial US$100 million from institutional investors in Asia and Middle East. We also understand that various market players are in the midst of preparations to launch and list Islamic Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which will further boost Singapore’s position as the largest REIT market in Asia ex-Japan.

16. In talent development, several credible players have initiated training courses and programmes to enhance the financial sector’s capabilities in Islamic finance. For example, the Singapore Management University has started an International Islamic Law & Finance Centre to promote high-quality research, training and professional education. Such efforts will further support the growth and innovation of Islamic finance in the region.

Conclusion

17. I am therefore pleased to launch the inaugural WIBC Asia Summit today. Such events serve to bring industry leaders together to explore and create business partnerships to capitalize on new opportunities in the Middle East and Asia. The financial crisis has not diminished the Asian growth story; in fact Asia has emerged even more compelling with growing exports and investment spending. Singapore is well-positioned to be the launch pad for GCC businesses entering and investing in Asia. The Middle East also offers plenty of opportunities for Asian businesses to participate in its growth.

18. With greater awareness and adoption in more financial centres, Islamic finance is poised to play a bigger and more central role in global finance. We look forward to WIBC Asia as a key platform that will buttress the development of Islamic finance as it takes root in the region. The industry, which is open to all participants, can only reach greater heights with your commitment and support. I therefore wish you a productive conference as you seek exciting new horizons for Islamic finance.

http://www.rudyherman.com/?p=355

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door.

Why Erasing Files Is Not Enough

Sure, you could erase the contents of the drive, but keep this in mind: the act of erasing a file does not remove it from a storage device.

When you erase/delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone until the areas of the disk it used are overwritten by new information. If you use the normal Windows delete function, the “deleted” file is sent to the Recycle Bin until the space it uses is required by other files. If you use Shift-Delete to bypass the Recycle Bin, the space occupied by the file is marked as available for other files. However, the file could be recovered days or even weeks later with third-party data recovery software. As long as the operating system does not reuse the space occupied by a file with another file, the “deleted” file can be recovered.

With SSDs, the erased file situation is even more complex. SSDs store data in blocks rather than in sectors as with magnetic storage. Overwriting a block was previously used involves copying the contents of the block to cache, wiping the block’s contents, delete the block to be overwritten from cache, writing the new data to cache, and rewriting the block with the new data. As an SSD is used with files that are deleted or changed frequently, the performance can drop unless the drive (and operating system) support a technology called TRIM that wipes out deleted data blocks as soon as the file using the blocks is deleted. TRIM is supported by Windows 7 and by some late model SSDs, but not by older Windows versions. So, disk wiping can be both a security feature and a performance improvement strategy.

Data Wiping Versus File Erasure

While erasing files simply marks file space as available for reuse, data wiping overwrites all data space on a storage device, replacing useful data with garbage data. Depending upon the method used, the overwrite data could be zeros (also known as “zero-fill”) or could be various random patterns.

Products that can be used for wiping hard disks might not be suitable for wiping other types of drives. In this article, we will look at methods for securely wiping hard disks, USB flash memory devices, flash memory cards, and SSDs.

Zero-Fill a Hard Disk

Time Needed: several hours (varies with size and speed of drive)
Software: Hard disk utility software from your drive vendor
Media: blank CD or floppy disk

Although writing zeroes across the entire hard disk surface (aka “zero-filling”) is not sufficient to meet government data sanitation (disk wiping) standards such as DoD 5220.22-M or the more comprehensive Standards and Technologies (NIST) Special Publication 800-88, overwriting the entire hard disk prevents most types of data recovery from being successful.

Here’s where to get zero-fill software from hard disk vendors:

Hitachi
Drive Fitness Test (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT
Select the Erase Drive feature to zero-fill your hard disk

Samsung
HUtil (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.html
Use Tool, Erase HDD to zero-fill your hard disk

Seagate (including Maxtor)
SeaTools for DOS (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
Use Full Erase to zero-fill your hard disk

Western Digital
Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (select drive model for specific version recommended)
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en
Use Write Zeros to drive to zero-fill your hard disk

1.    Determine the brand and model of hard disk you want to overwrite.
2.    Download a CD ISO image or a floppy disk image (depending upon your equipment) and use the image to create bootable media. The floppy disk image is self-contained: run it, insert a blank floppy disk when prompted, and the image is created on the disk. You will need to use a CD burning program that works with ISO images to convert the ISO image into a bootable CD.
3.    Restart your computer with the bootable media you created in Step 2.
4.    Select the hard disk to zero-fill when prompted.
5.    Choose the option to zero-fill the hard disk.

6.    When the program is finished, follow the on-screen instructions to shut down or restart your computer.
7.    Remove the wiped hard disk; you can now reuse or recycle the hard disk.

Secure Wiping a Hard Disk

Secure wiping goes beyond zero-fill operations, and provides an extra level of security. Most secure wiping programs are designed to meet DoD 5220 standards, which require three passes of overwriting with a special numeric pattern and verification. More information about this and other secure standards are available from the DataErasure website.

(Note that the 2007 revision of the Defense Security Service, Updated DSS Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (June 28, 2007) now recommends degaussing or drive destruction for maximum protection.

Stanford University’s Disk and Data Sanitization Policy and Guidelines, a must-read for understanding data wiping issues, recommends Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) for secure hard disk wiping.

Secure Wiping a Hard Disk with DBAN

Time Needed: several hours (varies with size and speed of drive)
Software: Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN); available from http://www.dban.org/
Media: blank CD (all versions) or floppy disk (version 1.0.7 and older versions)

1. Download the DBAN boot image ZIP file (we used version 1.0.7 and beta version 2.0 for this article); we downloaded the ISO image for CD burning, but a floppy disk builder is also available
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Burn the ISO image file extracted in Step 2 to CD; see our article on how to do this, or use the built-in ISO CD image burning support in Windows 7. If you downloaded the floppy image builder, run the program to create a bootable floppy disk.
4. Restart the computer using the CD or floppy disk created in Step 3.
5. Press Enter to run DBAN in interactive mode.
6. Use up and down arrow keys to highlight the drive to wipe.
7. Press the space bar to select the drive.
8. Press M to select the wiping method.
9. Press F10 to begin the wipe process.

10. At the end of the process, shut down the system. You can reuse or recycle the wiped hard disk.

Note: if DBAN is unable to recognize your SATA hard disks, configure your system BIOS to use IDE mode rather than AHCI mode.

Wiping Flash Memory Cards and USB Drives

Programs such as DBAN or vendor-supplied hard disk utilities are limited in the devices they support: they are designed to work with internal ATA/IDE or SATA hard disks only. Programs that work with flash memory cards and USB flash drives often support hard disks as well, enabling you to use a single program for all disk wiping processes. Roadkil’s DataWipe can be used with any hard disk, floppy disk, or flash drive that has a drive letter.

Wiping Flash Memory Cards with Roadkil’s DiskWipe

Time Needed: Varies; from a few minutes to several hours, depending upon size and speed of drive and computer
Software: Roadkil’s DiskWipe, available from http://www.roadkil.net/
Media: Can be run from Windows desktop

1. Download Roadkil’s DiskWipe.
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Open DiskWipe. If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, right-click the program icon and select Run as Administrator.
4. Select the drive to wipe.
5. Select the type of wipe to perform; DiskWipe can zero-fill the disk or write random data.
6. Enter the number of passes.
7. Click Erase to start the process.

8. At the end of the process, close the program. You can reuse the wiped disk.

Wiping SSDs

To solve write performance problems on drives that don’t support TRIM (check with your drive vendor for firmware upgrades) is to use wiper.exe (included with some SSDs) or to run the Secure Erase feature supported in most recent ATA/IDE and SATA drives. The Secure Erase feature can be activated on many systems by running Secure Erase 4.0 (HDDerase.exe), available from http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml. Version 4.0 works with most recent ATA/IDE and SATA hard disks and SSDs, but if you use an Intel X-25M, X-25E, or X-18M SSD, follow this link to download Secure Erase 3.3 http://www.iishacks.com/index.php/2009/06/30/how-to-secure-erase-reset-an-intel-solid-state-drive-ssd/.  Note that it is no longer being developed, and we were unable to use it on a system running an AMD 690 chipset.

Wiping Drives and Free Space with SDelete

SDelete is a free program from Microsoft’s TechNet Sysinternals collection. It runs from the command line, and can be used to wipe drives, wipe files, or wipe free space.

Time Needed: Varies; from a few minutes to several hours, depending upon size and speed of drive and computer
Software: TechNet Sysinternal’s SDelete, available from http://technet.microsoft.com

Media: Can be run from Windows desktop

1. Download SDelete.
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Copy sdelete.exe to c:windowssystem32 (this will enable you to run it from any location)
4. Open a command prompt session with Administrator rights.
5. To wipe all files on drive X: and its subdirectories and to wipe free space, enter Sdelete  -p 2 –s  -z X:*.*  (to see all command-line switches, enter Sdelete with no options)
6. Wait; the program displays status messages as it runs. When the program is finished, you can reuse or dispose of the drive.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Disk Wiping Programs

We used demo versions of two popular data recovery programs to evaluate some of the disk wiping programs discussed in this article. To determine whether a typical data recovery program could recover files on a SD card wipe with Roadkil’s DiskWipe, we first of all formatted the card using a card reader. Ontrack’s EasyRecovery Data Recovery (available from http://www.ontrack.com) had no difficulty finding folders and files to retrieve.

However, when we used DiskWipe to wipe the drive using a one-pass blank disk (zero fill) operation, EasyRecovery DataRecovery was unable to find the file system, let alone any files or folders.

After reformatting the card, taking a few photos, and deleting the photos, EasyRecovery Data Recovery was able to find the new photos, but the contents of the card before running WipeDisk were unrecoverable.

To evaluate SDelete, we used SDelete to wipe all of the files on a hard disk, but omitted the –z switch; when –z is not used, SDelete deletes files and renames them, but does not clear free space. To determine what might be visible, we used a demo version of Disk Doctors NTFS Data Recovery software, available from http://www.diskdoctors.net.

Disk Doctors were able to locate the deleted folder and Outlook Express message folders, but SDelete had renamed them from their original names and DBX extensions (Outlook Express message folders). If you use SDelete, it’s very important that you take time to use the –z switch to clear free space on the disk (once a file is deleted, the space it occupies is free space).

We also used Disk Doctors to evaluate the effectiveness of a freeware program called Eraser, which can delete and overwrite files and folders from the right-click menu.  We created a documents folder with a subfolder called Figures and used Eraser to overwrite the folder and subfolder using its default settings.

Disk Doctors was able to locate the folders, but the contents are files with garbage names and are zero bytes in size – except for leftover word processing temporary files (files that begin with $). These filenames were not changed, which could enable a snooper to figure out the names of the files in the folder – although the files themselves were destroyed. By using more overwrites or different methods available with Eraser, a more thorough wiping may be possible

Conclusion

We’ve highlighted a variety of free ways to protect data on castoff drives from being retrieved. As you can see, your best bet is to overwrite data directly, but you also might want to consider using a program such as SDelete to scramble filenames first and then use a disk wiper such as Eraser or WipeDisk to finish the job.

Use demo versions of data recovery programs such as Ontrack Easy Recovery Data Recovery, Disk Doctors Data Recovery (various editions for NTFS, FAT, and flash media), and others to evaluate the effectiveness of your data wiping procedures. Remember, the full versions of these and other data recovery programs can save your data if you accidentally format or partition a disk because, until the data is overwritten, it’s still there.

Sourced from: Maximum PC How-Tos RSS Feed

Your OS drives your whole PC experience, so it’s your job as an enthusiast to keep it in a high state of tune

Twist cap carefully. Only pour into Maximum PC-approved computer tanks.

After installing a new OS, most people just jump right in and start driving it through all their favorite applications and games. Makes sense, right? The operating system, after all, should be a background player in the computing experience—a means to an end, with the end being web surfing, content editing, and wanton destruction in the first-person shooter of one’s choice.

The problem, however, is that most people, even a lot of self-described power users, never take the time to really tune the new OS, exploring its menus and setting up the interface for the fastest, most convenient operation based on personal preferences. And as operating systems offer more and more user controls, it’s the curious, performance-minded enthusiast who has the most to gain from tuning an OS to his or her liking.

It’s been about six months since Windows 7 hit the market, so we figure most of our readers have made their upgrades. For those who’ve made that jump, we present a bottle of our favorite Windows 7 tips, each designed to help you extract the very last bits of convenience and GUI-navigating performance from your own personal dream machine. And if you haven’t yet upgraded to Win7, we trust you will after reading this article, as its core features—let alone its actual Lab-benchmarked performance—kicks Vista and XP ass.

We close out our tuning session with a tip designed to supercharge the process of installing the OS. By loading Windows 7 onto a USB key, and making that key a bootable drive, you can do an end-run around slow optical-drive technology and install your OS in (pardon the pun) a flash.

It’s time to get started. Park your computer, but don’t shut down. This is one PC tune-up that can only be done with your engine running.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Committed Mouse Abolitionists

Let’s kick off this power-user party with keyboard shortcuts—tricks every enthusiast should memorize when mastering a new OS. We’re confident the following time-saving keystrokes will save you precious neural processing cycles, and make your mouse jealous with neglect.

Alt + P

In Windows Explorer, this shortcut activates a preview pane of your selected file, be it an image, sound, or video document. This panel is great for previewing images in your photos directory, obviating the need for fancier third-party software.

Windows + Up and Windows + Down

If a window isn’t maximized, pressing the Windows + Up arrow key will make it fill your entire screen. Windows + Down arrow will minimize that active window.

Windows + Shift + Up and Windows + Shift + Down

Hitting these three keys will vertically stretch an active window to the maximum desktop height (the width of the window, however, will stay the same). Pressing Windows + Shift+ Down will restore the window to its previous dimensions.

Windows + + and Windows + -

Pressing the Windows button with either the plus or minus key activates the Magnifier, letting you zoom in on the entire desktop or open a rectangular magnifying lens to zoom in on (and out of) parts of your screen. You can also customize the Magnifier to follow your mouse pointer or keyboard cursor.

Windows + Left and Windows + Right

These two shortcuts will make your active window fill up exactly one half of your screen—depending on which arrow key you use. And once a window is fixed to one side of the screen, you can repeat the shortcut with the same arrow key to flip it to the other side.

Windows + Home

This shortcut minimizes every open window on your desktop except the active window. Pressing this shortcut again restores all the minimized windows.

Windows + T

Like Alt + Tab (still our all-time-favorite Windows shortcut), Windows + T cycles through thumbnails of your open programs via the Taskbar’s peek menu.

Windows + E

Automatically opens up a new Explorer window to show your Libraries folder.

Windows + P

Manage your multiple-monitor setup more efficiently with this handy shortcut. Windows + P opens a small overlay that lets you configure a second display or projector. You can switch from a single monitor to dual-display in either mirror or extend-desktop mode.

Windows + Shift + Left and Windows + Shift + Right

If you’re using two or more displays—and you are, aren’t you?—memorize this shortcut to easily move a window from one screen to the other. The window retains its size and relative position on the new screen, which is useful when working with multiple documents.

Windows + [Number]

Programs (and new instances) pinned to your Taskbar can be launched by hitting Windows and the appropriate number key. Windows + 1, for example, launches the first application in the taskbar, while Windows + 4 will launch the fourth.

Windows + Space

This combo performs the same function as moving your mouse to the bottom right of the Taskbar: It makes every active window transparent (save faint outlines) so you can view the desktop underneath.

Track Your Actions with Problem Step Recorder

To aid their development of Windows 7 beta versions, the Microsoft engineers built in a diagnostic tool called Problem Steps Recorder that combines screen captures with mouse tracking to record your actions. You can launch this program from the Start Menu by typing psr.exe in the search field. Hit the Record button and the applet tracks your mouse and keyboard input while taking screenshots that correspond with each new action. When you stop recording, your session is saved to an HTML slide show recreating your steps, to which you can add comments and annotations. This tool is insanely useful if you need to create a tutorial for a computer-illiterate relative. Hi Mom, hi Dad!

Master Your New Font Manager

Font management is much improved in Windows 7. The Add Fonts dialog is history, and in its place is new functionality within the Fonts folder itself. First, the folder now shows font previews via each font file’s icon (visible with Large or Extra Large icon views). Second, fonts from a single set will no longer show up as different fonts; they’re now combined as a single family, which can be expanded by double-clicking the icon. Third, you can now toggle fonts on and off by right-clicking a font icon and selecting the Hide option. This prevents applications from loading the font (thus saving memory), but still keeps the file retained in the Font folder. Finally, Windows 7 includes a new fancy, free-flowing font called Gabriola that shows off the advanced antialiasing, text rendering, and “stylistic alternate” font flourishes afforded by DirectWrite (Microsoft’s API for 2D text rendering) and OpenType.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Launch Games with Keystrokes

One of our biggest annoyances with Windows Vista was the Games Folder, aka the Gaming Grotto, aka the Gaming Ghetto. In Vista, Games for Windows titles and other game shortcuts automatically install to this directory, which you can only access with a Start Menu shortcut. This scheme prevents you from starting a game from the Start Menu search bar (aka the power user, keyboard-only method). Indeed, while you can launch any other application by mashing the Windows key, and typing its name in the Start Menu field, this isn’t the case for games installed to Vista’s Games Folder. Well, this oversight is fixed in Windows 7, and the universe is now home to slightly less evil.

Burn a Spittin’ Image

You can quit messing around with ostensibly free, malware-infected burning software, because Windows 7 comes loaded with a DVD and CD ISO burning application. Just double-click your image file and Windows will start a tiny program window to help burn your disc. It’s a bare-bones app, but it works!

Become More Wordly with Hidden Wallpapers

Besides its default desktop wallpaper, Win7 includes desktop backgrounds catered to your region (which is identified when you first install the OS). We Americans, for example, get six 1900×1200 images showing off National Parks and beaches. However, if your tastes run more international—don’t worry, we won’t hold that against you—you can grab wallpapers for other regions from a hidden folder. Type globalization in a search of your C: drive. The only result should be a folder located in the main Windows directory, and you should only be able to see ELS and Sorting folders nested here. Now search for MCT in the top-right search bar. This will display five new unindexed folders, each corresponding to a different global region. Browse these folders for some extra themes and wallpapers specific to Australia, United Kingdom, South Africa, and Canada.

Take Control of UAC

Despite good intentions, User Account Control pop-ups were one of the most annoying aspects of Vista, and thus UAC became a feature that most of us immediately disabled after a clean install. UAC in Windows 7 displays fewer warnings, but you can also fine-tune its notification habits by launching the UAC Settings dialog from the Start Menu. Just type UAC in the Start Menu search field and click the result. We find that setting the bar to just one tick above “Never notify” provides a comfortable balance between mindful security and incessant, Alice Kramden–caliber nagging.

Calculate Your Mortgage and Other Math Tricks

The reliable Calculator applet has been beefed up to do more than just basic arithmetic. You can now toggle between Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and even Statistics modes. In addition, the Options menu lets you pull out many new automated conversation tools, such as Unit Conversion (e.g., Angles, Temperature, Velocity, and Volume) and Date Calculation (e.g., calculate the difference between two dates). More templates give you the ability to crunch gas mileage, lease tipping points, and even mortgage estimates (yeah, right!) based on any variables you input.

Reveal All of Your Drives

If you use built-in memory-card readers in a 3.5-inch drive bay or on your desktop display, empty memory card slots will not show up as drives in My Computer. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still there. To reveal hidden memory card slots, open My Computer. Press Alt to show the toolbar at the top of the screen, and go to Folder Options under Tools. Hit the View tab and uncheck the “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder” option.

Use Devices and Printers to Quickly Dig into Hardware

Tired of switching between Device Manager, Properties menus for your devices, and the Start Menu to manage and use printers, digital cameras, mice, and other peripherals? Windows 7 comes to your rescue with its Devices and Printers dialog. Open Control Panel and select View Devices and Printers from the Hardware and Sound category. Right-click a device icon in Devices and Printers to configure the hardware, create shortcuts, troubleshoot, view properties, and run programs. Devices and Printers can save you a lot of effort. For example, when you use it to manage your computer, you have one-touch access to 12 different Control Panel and Explorer interfaces. And when you use a Windows 7–specific driver that supports Device Stage, Devices and Printers uses thumbnail art of the actual device, as shown.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Calibrate Your Notebook’s Text and Color

After doing a clean install of Windows 7 on a notebook, the first thing you should do is tune and calibrate ClearType text and Display Color. Windows 7 includes two built-in wizards that run you through the entire process, pain-free. Launch ClearType Text Tuning by typing cttune in the Start Menu search field and opening the search result. You’ll go through a brief series of steps that ask you to identify the best-looking text-rendering method. For Display Color Calibration—useful if you’re using Windows 7 with a projector or large-screen LCD—search and launch dccw from the Start Menu. It’ll run you through a series of pages where you can adjust the gamma, brightness, contrast, and color of the screen to make images look their best.

Control AutoPlay Settings Like a Megalomaniacal Tyrant

Windows 7’s version of AutoPlay, like its predecessors’, lets you specify what to do with media types when you connect an external drive or insert a disc. Sure, you may have hated AutoPlay in Windows XP, but Win7 provides you with reasons to take a fresh look. As in Vista, Win7 lets you configure AutoPlay settings by media type, but you should poke around for more tweaking options. Open Control Panel, select Hardware and Sound, and then select AutoPlay. By default, Win7 uses AutoPlay for all media and devices; this can be unchecked, and from there you can personalize AutoPlay actions like a madman. Note that each type of media—music CDs, DVDs, software and games, media files, blank media, and video discs—offers you choices based on Windows utilities as well as third-party programs. Choose your favorite app as an AutoPlay default, or to keep the traditional pop-up AutoPlay menu, select Ask Me Every Time.

Solve External Hard Drive Hassles with Convert.exe

Windows 7 prefers hard disk drives that use the NTFS file system: Its integrated backup program cannot back up files from or to drives that use the older FAT32 file system. So, if you select a drive that uses FAT32 as the backup location, Windows 7 displays an error message. FAT32, a leftover from the days of Windows 98, works with both MacOS and Windows (which is why most external hard disks use this file system by default), but it lacks the features needed to fully support Windows 7 backup. Use Convert.exe to solve this problem. Open a command-prompt session and use the following command to change your external hard disk’s file system: convert x: /fs:ntfs (replace x with the actual drive letter of your external hard disk). Convert.exe will check your external hard disk for errors, verify there’s enough space for conversion, and then convert with abandon. While this theoretically will not destroy your data, we recommend you back up your files first.

Convert WMC Recordings for Use with Vista and XP

Windows Media Center (WMC) improved in the jump from Vista to Windows 7—you’ll find better integration of cable, broadcast, and Internet TV in the program guide, better support for widescreen displays, and a refined user interface, among other changes. But if you want to share your recordings with Windows XP or Vista users, or use the dozens of recording and file-conversion utilities made for those versions of WMC, you’re sort of screwed, as Windows 7 no longer uses the DVR-MS file format for recording. Instead, it uses WTV (Windows TV), and WTV files can’t be used by older versions of WMC or Windows Media Player.

You can, however, convert a TV recording from WTV to DVR-MS by using the conversion utility provided in Win7.

TV recordings are stored by default in the Public Recorded TV library. Open the library, right-click the recording, and select Convert to DVR-MS Format. At the end of the conversion process, the Recorded TV library contains both your original .wtv file as well the .dvr-ms conversion. The .dvr-ms file can be used with programs designed for Windows XP and Windows Vista Windows Media Center, and can be played on Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Command Windows 7 to Generate an Energy Report

As a power user, you may be concerned with power consumption, making the command-line utility powercfg.exe a must-see. To create a report on your PC’s energy appetite, press the Windows key and type cmd in the search box. Right-click cmd and select Run as Administrator. Now, select the box and type powercfg –energy at the command-line prompt, and hit Enter. Powercfg will run for about 60 seconds, then generate a report called energy-report.html in C:Windowssystem32. This report will notify you of anything in your computer that is keeping the CPU cycling, thus burning power and sucking notebook batteries dry. After you run the report, you’ll likely find that USB devices never entered Suspend state. While you might think the power consumption of a USB key is pretty insignificant, if it prevents the CPU from cycling off, that device can really hit where it hurts—in your battery’s nards.

Cling (Desperately) to Vista’s Taskbar

Let’s start with the bad news: Windows 7 eliminates the option to use the classic grey Windows 2000–style Taskbar. You’re also committed to the modern version of the Start Menu. But the good news is that you can still tweak the Taskbar to make it run like it did in Windows Vista, replacing the program icons with the names of each open app. Right-click the Taskbar and hit Properties. Check the “Use small icons” box and select “Combine when Taskbar is full” from the drop-down menu under Taskbar buttons. You still get the peek-view thumbnail feature of the Taskbar, and inactive programs remain as single icons, but open programs will display their full names.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Exile Programs to the System Tray

All active programs show up as icons on the Taskbar, whether you want them to or not. While this is useful for web browsing or word processing, your taskbar can get cluttered with icons you would normally expect to be hidden away, like those for Steam or a chat client. You can, however, keep active instances of these programs hidden away in the System Tray/Notification Area by right-clicking their shortcuts, navigating to the Compatibility tab, and selecting Windows Vista under the Compatibility Mode drop-down menu. Just be aware that this only works for programs that would previously hide away from the Taskbar in Vista.

Manage Your Jump Lists

The Jump List, a list of shortcuts to files or tasks for a particular Start Menu or Taskbar item, is one of the most significant improvements in Windows 7. Each time you open a file or website, or run a task with a program that supports Jump Lists, Windows 7 stores the shortcut to the file, website, or task for reuse. Unlike Windows XP, however, Windows 7 doesn’t group these shortcuts into a single location. Instead, it stores shortcuts for each program’s files, websites, or tasks in a separate shortcut list—aka the Jump List. To see the Jump List for a program in the Start Menu, simply click the right-arrow icon. To see the Jump List for a program icon on the Taskbar, right-click the icon. Windows eventually removes items from the Jump List when it runs out of space, but you can override this. To make any Jump List item a permanent entry, highlight it and click the pushpin icon (reverse this process to unpin it). And if the idea of leaving an icon trail of all your recent history disturbs you, you can disable Jump Lists entirely: Right-click the Start Menu, choose Properties, and uncheck the two boxes under Privacy.

Organize Your Taskbar and System Tray

The programs that you pin to your Taskbar can be moved around to any order you want, whether they’re just shortcut icons or currently active applications. The Taskbar, if unlocked, can also be dragged to latch to the left, right, or even top of your desktop. As shown below, Windows 7 improves side-docked Taskbar support with better gradient rendering and shortcut support. It really works well if you’re using a widescreen monitor. Just as the Taskbar icons can be rearranged at will, the icons in the System Tray (actually called the Notification Area) can be dragged and set to any order, as well. Hidden Icons can be dragged back into view, and you can hide icons by dragging them over the white triangle, and dropping them into the Hidden Icon well—much easier than working through the Notification Area Customization menu.

Accelerate Your Start Menu

The Start Menu hasn’t changed much from Vista, but there are some notable improvements. The behavior of the power button has been changed to Shut Down, as opposed to Hibernate, which was the asinine default in Vista. But you can also change the button default to do other actions. Right-click the Start Menu, and choose Properties. From the Power Button Action drop-down, you can choose a new default button behavior. If you hit the Customize button, you’ll enter a world of opportunities that help you control what the Start Menu displays. Most options are turned off, but you may want some on, like the option to display recorded TV files, a feature that’s new in Windows 7. Also be aware that Start Menu items should be set to “Display as a link” if you want them to open up Jump Lists.

Arrange Files by Type, Month, Artist, and Other Options

Windows Vista introduced the concept of using the Details folder view to group files by criteria such as name, date modified, type, size, and other options. These choices are still available in any folder by right-clicking inside the folder and selecting them from the options menu. But Window 7 does Vista one better with its new Libraries scheme, which enables you to view the contents of multiple file locations in a single logical folder. And as you’d expect, each Library comes correct with contextual file-arrangement options that vary according to what’s being viewed. For example, in the Pictures library, you can choose from Day, Rating, Tag, and Month. For videos, maybe arranging by Length, as in our screenshot, is most relevant. You get the point.

Pin Folders to Favorites and Start Menu

Explorer’s Jump List shows your seven most frequently visited folders, but you can manually bookmark some favorites to the top of the list by pinning folder locations. Just right-click any folder—either on your desktop or from an open instance of Explorer—and drag that folder icon to the Explorer shortcut on the Taskbar. You’ll see a message that reads “Pin to Windows Explorer” before you release the mouse button. The folder will appear under a Pinned section of the Jump List, and you can remove it by clicking the “Unpin from this list” icon on the right side of the panel. You can also right-click and drag a folder directly to the Start button to pin that folder to the general Start list.

Next Page: Put an OS in Your Pocket >>

Put an OS in Your Pocket

How to load Windows 7 onto a bootable USB key

To complete your Windows 7 power-user experience, you may consider dropping the whole darn OS onto a USB drive. Whether you carry it around in your pocket or toss it in a desk drawer, it’s a perfect boot disk for emergency installs—including those times when you’re working with a netbook or some other computer that lacks an optical drive. Even better, your install times will be significantly reduced, thanks to your key’s flash memory—we shaved off minutes from our total install time.

Here’s how to create a schmancy-fancy boot key for either Windows 7 or Vista—but not for other OSes, so please don’t try! We’ve run a truncated version of this article in the magazine before, but because it was so incredibly popular—and so germane to this feature story—we’ve decided to share it again, this time with more detail and screens.

1. Format Your USB Key

Plug in your USB key and back up any existing data stored on it. You’ll need to format the key (thus erasing existing data) before you can make it a bootable device. We used an 8GB key, but a 4GB key will also work.

2. Partition that Key in CMD

Open up a command prompt as an Administrator. You can do this by searching for cmd.exe in your Windows/System32 folder, right-clicking the executable, and selecting “Run as administrator.” Alternatively, type CMD in the Start Menu search field and activate the command prompt using Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

You should now be under C:Windowssystem32 (assuming your Windows partition is the C drive). Type diskpart in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command-line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks. Now type list disk to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity. In this screenshot, our USB drive is Disk 2.

3. Format Away (Command-Prompt Style)

It’s now time to enter a load of commands to properly partition the key, and format for the NTFS (did you know this stands for “New Technology File System”?). In succession, enter the following—and type carefully, Jimbo!

Select Disk # (where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed Select Disk 2 for this job)

Clean (this removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)

Create Partition Primary (creates a new primary partition with default parameters)

Select Partition 1 (focuses operation on the newly created partition)

Active (sets the partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)

Format FS=NTFS (formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key)

Assign (this gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned)

Exit (quits the DiskPart tool)

4. Copy Windows DVD to a Desktop Folder

Insert the Windows 7 installation DVD into your drive, and view the files that it contains. Copy all of the files to a folder on your Desktop. We put the disc contents in a folder named Windows 7.

5. Turn Your Key into a Bootable Device

Now, go back to your command prompt, running it as an Administrator. Using the CD command, navigate your way to the folder where you placed the Windows disk ISO files. Your command line path should look something like C:UsersUSERNAMEHEREDesktopWindows 7 if you followed our lead on folder placement. Now type the following commands:

CD Boot (this gets you into the boot directory)

Bootsect.exe /nt60 L: (this assumes L is the drive letter assigned to your USB key from the previous step)

In case you’re wondering, Bootsect infuses boot manager–compatible code into your USB key to make it a bootable device. Also be aware that if you’re currently running 32-bit Windows Vista or 7, Bootsect will only work if you use the files from the 32-bit Windows 7 install disc. The Bootsect executable from the 64-bit version will not run in 32-bit Vista. Don’t forget it!

6. Load the USB Key with Your Install Files

Copy all of the extracted ISO files into the USB drive. You don’t need to do this from the command prompt. Just drag and drop the files from the Windows 7 folder into the USB drive using Windows Explorer. We also recommend copying your hardware drivers onto the same key so the installation wizard can find them.

Your USB key is now all ready to go! Plug it into your target system and make sure you enter the BIOS (typically by hitting F2 or F12) to temporarily change the boot order to allow booting from the USB key before your primary hard drive or optical drive. Now, when you plug the key into a machine, your system should automatically begin speedily downloading setup files off of the USB key and entering Windows 7 installation.

Sourced from: Maximum PC Features RSS Feed

Translated into Malay by Rudy Herman Sinen
Reviewed by Umi Kalsom Mohd Azuddin

Saya telah menulis sepucuk surat minggu lalu mengenai kerja-kerja di yayasan, berkongsi beberapa masalah. Warren Buffet mengesyorkan saya berbuat begitu — berterus-terang mengenai apa yang berjalan lancar dan apa yang tidak, dan melakukannya sebagai satu acara tahunan. Matlamat saya ialah untuk menarik lebih ramai orang untuk menangani masalah itu, sebab saya fikir terdapat beberapa masalah yang sangat penting yang tidak dapat ditangani tanpa dipaksa-paksa. Maksudnya, keadaan pasaran tidak mendorong para saintis, pakar perhubungan, pemikir, pemerintah untuk melakukan perkara yang betul. Dan hanya dengan memberikan perhatian terhadap perkara-perkara ini serta adanya orang pintar yang prihatin serta dapat menarik lebih ramai orang lagi, barulah kita boleh membuat kemajuan seperti yang kita perlukan.

Jadi, pagi ini saya ingin berkongsi mengenai dua masalah dan bercakap mengenai perkembangannya. Tetapi sebelum memperkatakannya, saya akui yang saya seorang optimis. Sebarang masalah yang sukar, saya fikir ia boleh diselesaikan. Dan antara sebab saya berfikir begitu ialah dengan memandang ke waktu silam. Di sepanjang abad yang lalu, purata jangka hayat telah meningkat lebih seganda. Satu lagi statistik, mungkin yang menjadi kegemaran saya, ialah dengan melihat kepada angka kematian kanak-kanak. Sejak tahun 1960, 110 juta kanak-kanak telah dilahirkan, dan 20 juta daripada itu mati sebelum berusia lima tahun. Lima tahun yang lalu, 135 juta kanak-kanak telah dilahirkan — lebih ramai — tetapi kurang 10 juta daripadanya mati sebelum berusia lima tahun. Jadi, itu menjadi faktor bagi dua penurunan bagi kadar kematian kanak-kanak. Ia suatu fenomena. Setiap nyawa itu amat berharga.

Sebab utama kita boleh mencapainya bukan saja kerana meningkatnya kadar pendapatan tetapi juga berlaku beberapa penemuan yang utama: Vaksin telah digunakan secara meluas. Contohnya, penyakit campak meragut empat juta nyawa sehingga tahun 1990 tetapi hingga kini kurang dari 400,000 nyawa Jadi, kita benar-benar dapat melakukan perubahan. Pencapaian seterusnya ialah mengurangkan 10 juta itu kepada separuh lagi. Dan saya fikir ia boleh dilakukan dalam masa kurang 20 tahun. Kenapa? Sebab hanya tinggal beberapa jenis penyakit yang menyebabkan jumlah kematian yang banyak itu: cirit-birit, pneumonia dan malaria.

Justeru, berbalik kepada persoalan yang saya utarakan pada pagi ini, iaitu bagaimana kita menghentikan penyakit berbahaya yang disebarkan oleh nyamuk?

Jadi, apakah sejarah penyakit ini? Ia merupakan satu penyakit yang teruk sejak beribu-ribu tahun. Malah, jika kita lihat pada kod genetik, ia satu-satunya penyakit yang dapat kita saksikan orang-orang yang tinggal di Afrika telah mencipta beberapa cara untuk mengelakkan dari kematian akibat malaria Angka kematian sebenarnya memuncak lebih sedikit dari lima juta dalam tahun 1930an. Ia sungguh besar. Dan penyakit itu berlaku di seluruh dunia. Satu penyakit yang dahsyat. Ia menular di Amerika Syarikat. Ia menular di Eropah. Orang di zaman itu tidak tahu apa puncanya sehinggalah pada awal 1900an, apabila seorang anggota tentera British terfikir bahawa nyamuklah penyebabnya. Jadi ia ada di mana-mana. Dan terdapat dua cara yang telah membantu menurunkan kadar kematian. Satu ialah membunuh nyamuk dengan DDT. Satu lagi ialah merawat pesakit dengan kinina atau ubat yang bersumberkan kinina. Dan sebab itu kadar kematian dapat dikurangkan.

Kini, ironisnya, apa yang berlaku ialah, ia telah dihapuskan dari semua zon beriklim sederhana, di mana wujudnya negara-negara yang kaya. Jadi kita dapat lihat: tahun 1900 ia merebak di mana-mana. Tahun 1945, masih ada di kebanyakan tempat. 1970, Amerika Syarikat dan banyak tempat di Eropah sudah dapat menghapuskannya. Tahun 1990, kawasan utara sudah menghapuskannya. Dan akhir-akhir ini anda boleh lihat ia hanya di kawasan sekitar khatulistiwa.

Dan hal ini menimbulkan satu paradoks bahawa kerana penyakit ini hanya berlaku di negara-negara miskin, ia tidak mendapat banyak bantuan. Misalnya, lebih wang dilaburkan dalam kajian ubat mengawal keguguran rambut daripada kajian untuk mengubati malaria. Memang, keguguran rambut ialah sesuatu yang menakutkan. (Ketawa) Dan ramai orang kaya yang terkena. Dan sebab itulah keutamaannya sudah ditetapkan.

Tetapi, bagi malaria — sekalipun jutaan kematian setiap tahun yang disebabkan malaria masih kurang menggambarkan impaknya. Lebih dari 200 juta orang yang menghidapnya dalam satu-satu masa. Ertinya pembangunan ekonomi di tempat-tempat ini terbantut kerana ia menghambat perlaksanaan banyak perkara. Kini, memang diketahui malaria disebarkan oleh nyamuk. Saya ada bawa beberapa ekor di sini, supaya anda boleh mengalaminya. Biarkanlah nyamuk-nyamuk itu berterbangan di sekitar auditorium ini (Ketawa) Jangan hanya orang miskin sahaja yang mengalaminya. (Ketawa) (Tepuk tangan) Nyamuk-nyamuk itu tidak dijangkiti.

Oleh itu, kita sedang melakukan beberapa perkara. Kita ada kelambu. Dan kelambu ialah satu benda yang bagus. Maknanya, ibu dan anaknya masuk ke dalam kelambu pada waktu malam, jadi nyamuk yang menggigit pada lewat malam tidak dapat menyerang mereka. Dan apabila anda menggunakan semburan DDT dalam rumah serta memasang kelambu, anda boleh mengurangkan kadar kematian sehingga 50 peratus. Dan hal itu sedang berlaku sekarang di beberapa buah negara. Sungguh memberangsangkan.

Tetapi kita harus berhati-hati kerana malaria – parasit itu membiak dan nyamuk juga membiak. Sebab itu, setiap penawar yang kita gunakan dahulu sudah menjadi tidak berkesan. Dan akhirnya anda tinggal dua pilihan. Jika anda pergi ke sebuah negara membawa penawar yang betul dan cara yang betul, anda melakukannya dengan sungguh-sungguh, anda sebenarnya boleh mencapai tahap penghapusan di kawasan setempat. Dan di situlah kita nampak peta penularan malaria menguncup. Atau, jika anda ke sana secara acuh tak acuh, untuk satu tempoh masa anda boleh mengurangkan beban penyakit itu, tetapi lambat-laun penawar itu akan menjadi tidak berkesan, dan kadar kematian akan melonjak naik lagi. Dan dunia sudah melaluinya. Perhatian diberi dan kemudian tidak mengendahkannya lagi.

Kini kita sudah membuat kemajuan. Dana untuk kelambu sudah meningkat. Terdapat penemuan ubat baru. Yayasan kami membiayai kepada satu vaksin yang sudah memasuki ujian tahap ketiga yang akan bermula dalam beberapa bulan lagi. Dan ia dapat menyelamatkan dua pertiga nyawa jika ia berkesan. Jadi, kita akan mempunyai cara-cara baru seperti ini.

Namun, perkembangan begitu tidak memberikan kita apa-apa hala tuju. Sebab hala tuju untuk menghapuskan penyakit ini melibatkan banyak perkara. Ia melibatkan pakar perhubungan yang dapat memastikan kemasukan dana, yang dapat meneruskan kelangsungan projek ini yang mampu menyebarkan kisah kejayaannya. Ia melibatkan saintis sosial, agar dapat menggalakkan bukan setakat 70 peratus orang menggunakan kelambu, tetapi 90 peratus. Kita perlukan ahli matematik untuk membuat simulasi, ala Monte Carlo agar kita faham cara kaedah ini digabungkan dan bekerjasama. Sudah tentu kita perlukan syarikat ubat-ubatan untuk menyediakan kepakarannya. Kita perlukan sumbangan pemerintah negara kaya bagi menyediakan dana untuk projek ini. Dan apabila elemen-elemen ini bergabung, saya agak optimistik kita boleh menghapuskan malaria.

Sekarang, saya akan beralih kepada soalan yang kedua, soalan yang agak berbeza, tetapi pada saya ia sama penting. Dan ia adalah: Bagaimana anda menjadikan seorang guru itu hebat? Ia seperti satu soalan yang orang akan mengambil banyak masa membahaskannya, dan kita sangat faham mengapa. Dan jawapan sebenarnya ialah kita tidak begitu memahaminya. Mari kita mulakan dengan bertanya mengapa hal ini penting. Saya yakin, semua kita pernah mempunyai beberapa orang guru yang hebat. Kita semua menerima pendidikan yang baik. Itulah salah satu sebab kita berada di sini pada hari ini, sebahagian daripada sebab kita mengecap kejayaan. Saya boleh berkata begitu, sekalipun saya tidak tamat kolej, saya mempunyai guru-guru yang hebat.

Sebenarnya, di Amerika Syarikat, sistem pendidikannya berjalan dengan agak baik Terdapat guru-guru yang berkesan di tempat-tempat yang terhad. Jadi 20 peratus pelajar yang teratas mendapat pendidikan yang baik. Dan 20 peratus yang teratas itu menjadi yang terbaik di dunia, jika anda membandingkan mereka dengan 20 peratus teratas yang lain. Dan mereka telah mencipta revolusi dalam bidang perisian dan bioteknologi dan mengekalkan Amerika Syarikat di barisan hadapan.

Kini, kekuatan 20 peratus teratas itu sudah mula pudar secara relatif, tetapi yang lebih membimbangkan lagi ialah pendidikan untuk golongan yang selebihnya. Bukan sahaja ia lemah tetapi ia bertambah lemah. Dan jika anda lihat pada ekonomi, ia benar-benar hanya menyediakan peluang pekerjaan untuk orang yang mempunyai pendidikan yang lebih baik. Dan kita perlu mengubah hal ini. Kita mesti mengubah supaya semua orang mempunyai peluang yang saksama. Kita perlu mengubahnya supaya negara ini kuat dan kekal di barisan hadapan dalam semua bidang yang dipacu oleh pendidikan tahap tinggi, seperti sains dan matematik.

Apabila pertama kali saya mengetahui mengenai statistik itu, saya agak terkejut dengan begitu teruknya keadaan yang sedia ada. Lebih 30 peratus kanak-kanak tidak pernah tamat sekolah tinggi. Dan keadaan itu dikelabui sekian lama sebab kita lazimnya menghitung kadar keciciran dengan mengambil perbandingan antara jumlah yang memulakan tahun senior dan jumlah yang menamatkannya. Sebab mereka tidak memantau di mana kanak-kanak itu berada sebelum itu. Tetapi kebanyakan keciciran sudah berlaku sebelum masa itu. Mereka terpaksa menaikkan kadar keciciran yang diumumkan selepas pemantauan itu dilakukan hingga melebihi 30 peratus. Bagi kanak-kanak minoriti, ia melebihi 50 peratus. Dan sekalipun anda lulusan sekolah tinggi, jika anda berpendapatan rendah, anda mempunyai kurang dari 25 peratus peluang untuk tamat kolej. Jika anda berpendapatan rendah di Amerika Syarikat, anda mempunyai peluang yang lebih tinggi untuk ke penjara daripada mendapat ijazah dalam masa empat tahun. Dan hal ini tidak adil.

Jadi, bagaimana anda menjadikan pendidikan lebih baik?

Yayasan kami, sejak sembilan tahun yang lalu, telah melabur di dalam bidang ini. Ramai orang yang terlibat. Kami bekerjasama dengan sekolah-sekolah kecil, kami membiayai biasiswa, kami meningkatkan perpustakaan. Kebanyakan dari perkara ini menghasilkan kesan yang baik. Tetapi, semakin kami meneliti hal ini, semakinlah kami sedar yang guru hebatlah menjadi kunci kejayaannya. Dan kami bekerjasama dengan beberapa pakar untuk mengkaji berapa banyak perbezaannya di antara guru-guru, katakanlah, di antara golongan yang paling atas, yang terbaik, dan golongan yang paling bawah. Berapa banyak perbezaan di dalam sesebuah sekolah atau di antara sekolah-sekolah? Dan jawapannya ialah perbezaan ini sungguh di luar jangkaan. Golongan guru yang paling atas akan meningkatkan prestasi kelas mereka — berdasarkan markah ujian — dengan lebih dari 10 peratus dalam satu tahun. Apakah ertinya? Ertinya jika seluruh Amerika Syarikat, selama dua tahun, mempunyai guru-guru dari golongan yang paling atas, maka seluruh perbezaan di antara kita dan Asia akan lenyap. Dalam masa empat tahun, kita akan mengatasi semua orang di dunia.

Jadi, mudah saja. Apa yang anda perlukan adalah guru dari golongan yang paling atas. Dan anda akan katakan, “Wah, kita perlu memberikan mereka ganjaran. Kita perlu mengekalkan mereka. Kita perlu ketahui apa yang mereka lakukan dan memindahkannya kepada orang lain.” Tetapi saya katakan, hal itu tidak berlaku pada masa ini.

Apakah ciri-ciri golongan yang paling atas itu? Apakah sifat mereka? Mungkin anda fikir mereka adalah guru-guru kanan. Tetapi jawapannya tidak. Seseorang yang sudah mengajar selama tiga tahun, mutu pengajaran mereka tidak berubah selepas itu. Perbezaannya adalah sangat, sangat kecil. Anda mungkin fikir golongan ini adalah pemegang ijazah sarjana. Mereka kembali belajar dan meraih Sarjana di dalam Pendidikan. Carta ini menunjukkan empat faktor yang berbeza dan menjelaskan banyak perkara mengenai mutu pengajaran. Yang di bahagian bawah itu, yang bertulis tidak ada kesan langsung, itulah golongan berijazah sarjana.

Pada masa ini, sistem gaji memberikan ganjaran terhadap dua perkara. Satu ialah berdasarkan tempoh perkhidmatan. Sebab apabila gaji anda meningkat, anda akan masukkan ke dalam pencen anda. Yang kedua ialah memberikan wang tambahan kepada yang lulus ijazah sarjana. Tetapi ini tidak ada kaitan dengan menjadi seorang guru yang lebih baik. Mengajar untuk Amerika: kurang kesannya. Bagi guru matematik yang khusus dalam matematik, kesannya boleh diukur. Tetapi, keseluruhannya ialah prestasi anda yang terdahulu. Ada orang yang sangat bagus dalam hal ini. Dan kita tidak pernah melakukan sesuatu untuk mengkaji perkara itu dan mengambil iktibar dan menerapkannya, untuk meningkatkan purata kemampuan — atau menggalakkan golongan itu untuk kekal berada di dalam sistem itu.

Anda mungkin berkata, “Adakah guru bagus kekal dan guru tidak bagus pergi?” Jawapannya ialah, secara purata, guru-guru yang agak baik meninggalkan sistem itu. Dan ia satu sistem dengan kadar pusing ganti yang tinggi.

Kini, terdapat beberapa tempat — sangat sedikit — di mana guru yang hebat dilatih. Satu contoh yang baik ialah sekumplan sekolah carter yang dipanggil KIPP. KIPP bermakna Ilmu Itu Berkuasa. Ia sungguh menakjubkan. Mereka ada 66 sekolah — kebanyakannya sekolah menengah, ada juga sekolah tinggi — dan cara pengajaran mereka sungguh hebat. Mereka mengambil kanak-kanak yang paling miskin, dan lebih 96 peratus lulusan sekolah tinggi mereka pergi ke kolej selama empat tahun. Semangat dan sikap di sekolah-sekolah seperti itu sangat berbeza daripada sekolah awam biasa. Mereka amalkan pengajaran berpasukan dan kemahiran guru sentiasa dipertingkatkan. Mereka mengumpulkan data, markah ujian, dan berkata kepada guru mereka, “Anda telah membuat peningkatan begini banyak.” Mereka sangat komited untuk menjadikan cara pengajaran mereka lebih baik.

Apabila anda duduk di dalam salah sebuah bilik darjah ini, pada mulanya ia sangat pelik. Saya duduk dan saya berfikir, “Apa yang sedang berlaku?” Guru itu berkejar ke sana kemari, tahap kecergasan sangat tinggi. Saya fikir, “Adakah saya berada di acara sukan. Apa yang sedang berlaku?” Guru itu sentiasa memerhatikan jika ada pelajar yang tidak memberikan tumpuan, mana satu pelajar yang berasa bosan dan memanggil pelajar dengan pantas, menulis sesuatu di papan hitam. Ia sebuah suasana yang dinamik, kerana sewaktu di sekolah menengah terutamanya — darjah lima hingga lapan — mengekalkan perhatian mereka dan menetapkan arahan supaya semua yang berada di dalam bilik darjah perlu memberikan perhatian, tidak ada sesiapa yang boleh bergurau atau tidak ambil peduli. Semua orang mesti terlibat. Sebab itu KIPP sedang melakukannya.

Bagaimana keadaan itu berbanding dengan sekolah biasa? Di sekolah biasa, guru-guru tidak diberitahu bagaimana prestasi mereka. Data tersebut tidak dikumpulkan. Di dalam kontrak guru, ia mengehadkan berapa kali guru besar boleh datang ke bilik darjah — adakalanya satu kali setahun. Dan mereka perlu memberikan notis lebih awal untuk berbuat demikian. Cuba bayangkan, jika anda mengendalikan sebuah kilang, di mana pekerja-pekerjanya, ada sebahagiannya yang hanya membuang masa, dan memberitahu pihak pengurusan, “Anda hanya boleh datang sini setahun sekali, tetapi anda mesti beritahu kami sebab kami mungkin akan berpura-pura dan cuba melakukan kerja dengan baik hanya untuk waktu itu sahaja.”

Bagi guru yang mahu memperbaiki diri pun tidak ada kemudahan untuk melakukannya. Mereka tidak mempunyai markah ujian, dan terdapat usaha untuk menyekat data tersebut. Contohnya, New York telah meluluskan undang-undang yang melarang data peningkatan guru dikeluarkan dan digunakan dalam pertimbangan kontrak bagi guru-guru. Jadi, ia seperti bergerak dalam haluan yang bertentangan. Tetapi saya optimistik mengenai hal ini, Saya fikir masih ada perkara-perkara yang jelas yang boleh kita lakukan.

Pertama sekali, masih banyak lagi ujian yang sedang dijalankan, dan ia memberikan kita gambaran di mana kedudukan kita sekarang. Dan ia membolehkan kita mengetahui siapa yang melakukannya dengan baik, dan menghubungi mereka dan mengetahui apakah teknik yang mereka gunakan. Memang, kos video digital murah sekarang. Pasang beberapa buah kamera di dalam bilik darjah dan buat rakaman secara kerap adalah sesuatu yang praktikal di semua sekolah awam. Dan beberapa minggu sekali, guru-guru boleh berkumpul dan berkata, “OK, ini ada klip video tentang tindakan saya yang rasanya baik. Di sini klip video sesuatu yang saya lakukan kurang baik. Nasihatkan saya — dan apabila budak itu buat perangai, bagaimana patut saya tanganinya? Dan mereka semua boleh sama-sama berbincang mengenai masalah itu. Anda boleh mengambil guru-guru yang terbaik dan membuat catatan mengenainya, supaya semua orang dapat lihat siapa yang terbaik untuk mengajar mata pelajaran ini.

Anda boleh menyediakan kursus-kursus hebat seperti itu supaya seseorang pelajar itu boleh menonton kursus fizik, belajar daripadanya. Jika anda mempunyai pelajar yang ketinggalan, anda boleh menyuruhnya menonton video itu untuk mengulangkaji konsep itu semula. Malah, kursus-kursus percuma ini bukan hanya ada di internet, anda boleh menjadikannya dalam bentuk DVD yang boleh ditonton pada bila-bila masa, dan sesiapa yang mempunyai pemain DVD boleh belajar daripada guru yang terbaik Dan dengan memikirkan ini sebagai sistem meningkatkan diri, kita boleh melakukannya dengan lebih baik.

Kini, terdapat sebuah buku mengenai KIPP– tempat di mana ia sedang dijalankan — tulisan Jay Matthews, seorang pemberita, tajuknya, “Bekerja Keras, Bersikap Ihsan”. Dan saya fikir ia sesuatu yang menakjubkan. Ia memberikan anda apa ertinya peranan seorang guru yang baik. Saya akan memberikan buku ini kepada setiap orang yang ada di sini secara percuma. (Tepuk tangan)

Kita membelanjakan banyak wang dalam pendidikan, dan saya benar-benar fikir bahawa pendidikan ialah yang paling penting untuk diperbetulkan bagi sesebuah negara untuk mempunyai masa depan yang mantap. Malah, ia dimasukkan di dalam rang undang-undang rangsangan, sungguh menarik, versi Dewan sebenarnya mempunyai wang di dalam sistem data ini, dan ia dikeluarkan di Senat sebab ada orang yang rasa terancam oleh perkara-perkara yang demikian.

Namun, saya rasa optimistik. Saya fikir orang ramai sudah mula menyedari betapa penting hal ini, dan ia berupaya mengubah kehidupan jutaan manusia, jika kita lakukannya dengan betul. Saya hanya ada masa untuk memperkatakan dua masalah itu sahaja. Terdapat banyak lagi masalah yang seperti itu – AIDS, pneumonia — saya nampak anda sudah mula rasa ghairah, hanya dengan mendengar namanya sahaja. Kemahiran yang diperlukan untuk mengatasi masalah ini juga sangat luas. Anda tahu, sistemnya tidak dapat menyelesaikannya secara spontan. Pemerintah biasanya tidak akan menyambut masalah ini dengan spontan. Sektor privet tidak dengan sendirinya mengagihkan sumber untuk tujuan-tujuan ini.

Oleh itu, orang bijak seperti anda semua perlu mengkajinya, mengajak orang lain untuk terlibat — dan anda membantu mencipta penyelesaiannya. Dan dengan itu, saya fikir akan ada sesuatu yang hebat yang akan muncul.

Terima kasih. (Tepuk tangan)

English

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.

So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.

And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: Vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.

So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitoes?

Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitoes. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.

Now, ironically, what happened was, it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.

And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.

But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitoes. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitoes are not infected.

So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitoes that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.

But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.

Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.

But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.

Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.

In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.

Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak; it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.

When I first learned the statistics I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

So, how do you make education better?

Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.

So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.

What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.

Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.

You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.

Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.

When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.

How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”

Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.

First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.

You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.

Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)

Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.

But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.

So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out of it.

Thank you. (Applause)

ZAKARIA: He’s been called the world’s biggest movie star, with almost 70 blockbusters to his credit. His box office stake is said to be comparable to that of his Hollywood counterparts Tom Cruise and Will Smith, and you may never have heard of him.

But his contributions to the bottom line are so prodigious, he was invited to ring the opening bell at the NASDAQ. My magazine, “Newsweek”, has named him one of the 50 most powerful people in the world, and he stirs up such passion that his fans burned a U.S. flag after he was detained at Newark Airport last summer. Perhaps the TSA agents have never heard of him either.

The film he is here in the United States to promote when he was questioned is called “My Name is Khan”, and, ironically, it’s about racial profiling of Muslims after 9/11.

Shah Rukh Khan, welcome.

KHAN: Thank you very much, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: First, tell us about this incident. So you are, without any question, the biggest movie star in India, a billion fans some people say, and you get to Newark Airport and what happens?

KHAN: You know, normally I am kind of used to being — having extra security checks, perhaps because of the name or the way profiling is done, even my kids, so I’m used to it. It’s not something new. So —

ZAKARIA: They thought your fans were sort of being unruly or —

KHAN: Yes, I guess — suddenly they started asking questions, what are you doing here and do you have a telephone number? I was going to give yours. Yes? I was going to — you know, I took out my phone and they were a little angry about me taking out my phone. So I said, I can’t give you a number until I find them out.

So I sort of — I gave a few numbers and then they would go in, check, then they came and said what are you doing here? And so I said I’ve came here for a film. There were some strange questions like if you’re a film actor — I’ve come for a live talk, and they said if you have come for a talk, how can you be a movie star? So I said, you know, I talk also. (INAUDIBLE) acting films.

So it just got out of hand, and I guess it was a process, so they went on and on — and it took a couple of hours.

ZAKARIA: But you — you feel like you have had experiences like this before?

KHAN: Not quite like this, but — not at the immigrations, but at security. I’m — you know, initially, when — post 9/11, I think, yes, there were instances when — I guess your boarding pass gets SSS (ph) written on it, so you’re taken on to the other side and you take off your shoes and stuff, yes?

ZAKARIA: Even your kids?

KHAN: Oh, yes, yes. They get very excited, because, you know, they get to put their feet on those little marks and stand like that. So they think they’re being special.

ZAKARIA: Now, you’re very — you’re relaxed about it. Does it — does it not anger you, I mean, that you’re — I mean, you’re —

KHAN: No. I said it before, Fareed. Like, you know, if I’m planning to come to your house, I have to follow the rules. It’s as simple as that. I’m very practical like that. So I’m like, OK. I said, if I have to come to your house and you have a rule that I need to take off my shoes before I walk into your study, then I do that.

But I just — just had an issue that, you know, for a country which has such outstanding processes and systems for everything, and they have a process and system for, you know, profiling people who are perhaps on a marked list, they should also have a system where people who come regularly, they should also be marked positively. And so OK, you know, you can go —

ZAKARIA: Do you think this affects America’s image in — I mean, you’re — you’re somebody who understands the power of images.

KHAN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Does it affect America’s image in a country like India?

KHAN: Oh, yes. I think so. Yes. I think all over the world.

I think, specifically, if I can just take one — because I’m an entertainer, so I would take, say, tourism, you know? Just that way. You come to have fun, you want to go to Orlando, you know, go to the Disney or whatever, when you think about it, like I do now, I take them to Europe now, my kids, if I need to. Unlike — (INAUDIBLE) and she was traveling domestically more than internationally, to be honest, because I think domestic travel is even more strict. So you do think twice. I think it does affect the image, and I’m sure it’s in a lot of spaces (ph) also, not just wanting to come to Disney. I’m sure it goes beyond that also.

ZAKARIA: And this is a big change, right? Because, I mean, 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I was growing up in India, America was the land of openness, of freedom, a sense of adventure.

KHAN: Absolutely. I think, it still is looked upon like that. And, you know, everybody wants to come to America, everybody loves America and has all the nicest things. Whether it’s technology or businesses, whatever. It’s the land of opportunity. And suddenly, the opportunity gets a little curtailed because of this. And you do think twice. And you know, would it affect me negatively, would it affect the family negatively?

ZAKARIA: So, now talk about this movie. Because the movie is really about this problem.

KHAN: The film is about a man’s message or I wouldn’t like to make it as strong as saying a Muslim’s message, but an American who has been living here for years and who is married here, and post-9/11 how the lives of this couple gets affected. You know, it’s like a butterfly effect. It’s not directly related to the incident of 9/11. So, the film is not about terrorism or — it’s not dealing with 9/11. Or the sadness that followed around the world. But it’s dealing with how some of the people we don’t even know and some of the far corner of the world or in America affected without being directly linked to it.

And how, just the love gets completely disrupted because he’s a Muslim man, married to a Hindu girl, both American, both have been living here for 20, 25 years. And how he has to go on a journey to explain to everybody that, guys, just because “My Name is Khan” doesn’t mean I’m a terrorist. So, it’s an emotional trip across America to convince the world. And I feel the film’s relevance is that there is an issue as far as religions and ideologies are concerned in terms of the west and Islam and everywhere.

And we have to accept it. But the thing is, I think as a Muslim, I’ve not been able to explain my religion to you well enough. So unless I do that, I don’t have an excuse of saying, uh-oh, one second, these guys are taking it wrong. Maybe they don’t know him. So, I think it’s my duty as an actor.

ZAKARIA: Do you feel that Muslims have a special responsibility to explain their religion?

KHAN: See, if you were to look at it from one side and turn around and say, listen, you better know my religion. I think that’s not fair. I think, we need to — I think, not only do they need to explain their religion, they need to understand other religions also. And it’s a dual process, just because somebody doesn’t understand, of course they will take it wrongly or react to it wrongly. And I think it’s a duty of every educated, maybe a little liberal Muslim to go out in the world and if he has the opportunity, like I think I have as an actor, I think we need to make sure, that’s yes, this is what it stands for, this is what Jihad means, this is what tolerance means and this is what Islam means. And whatever little knowledge I had, and I am not fully knowledgeable, and so I find out and try to promote that and tell people. And if you understand it, maybe you’ll say it, actually no, it’s exactly like how our discipline is. I think it’s a reason for every Muslim to think about.

ZAKARIA: You know when George Bush saw Manmohan Singh at some event, the first time he had an opportunity chance to introduce his wife, Laura Bush, to Manmohan Singh, he said to her, honey, this is the prime minister of India. This is a country that has 150 million Muslims and not one member of Al-Qaeda. That was the way he thought of Indian Muslims. Why do you think Indian Muslims are not so radicalized? When you look, think about Pakistan, Afghanistan, you know, there’s so much Jihad and terrorism in the Arabic. Indian Muslims have not succumbed as much. This is the second largest Muslim population in the world by some count. What, is there a secret?

KHAN: I think the secret lies within the way Indians are. We as people are more compromising and understanding. We do give a chance to everyone to say their point of view, listen to it, and not react really radically. Of course there will be sections which do it. And that permeates to the Muslims, to the Hindus, to the Christians, to every, you know, section in our society. I would like to believe it’s like that. But I think that’s the main reason. I think Indians by nature like people and they’re compromising and understanding. Is what I’d like to believe, really.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that there is a tendency towards radicalism, violence, within Islam right now that worries you? Because, let’s be honest, when you look around the world and you see terrorism, it is basically being committed by radical Muslims. And there is something either within the, you know, some of these fringe groups, but they all tend to come from one religion by and large.

KHAN: Yes, of course. I mean, somewhere down the line, you know, religion can be very easily misused. And I think I would like to really believe as a modern person that it’s the lack of education that is being — that is there in large sections of the Islamic world. I think the youth needs to be educated in world matters, apart from their religion. I mean, it’s really wonderful to learn your religion. I think it’s fantastic for everyone to have a discipline whichever that maybe, and respect each other that way.

But I think it’s also very important to be educated in worldly affairs. If they do, they will not be misled. I think, most of these places that we’ll talk about and radicals coming from, you would know this, that there’s a huge gap between the educated and uneducated. And most of the uneducated may be falling in the category of, you know, having a religion, by religion being Muslims. So, I think that is the main reason.

ZAKARIA: We will be right back with Shah Rukh Khan. And we will talk about Bollywood, globalization and much else. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: People say you have a billion fans, but as you point out, the dollar value is lower because a ticket costs less in India than it does in the States. But do you imagine there may be a time when Indian stars will be truly global in that sense?

KHAN: Much sooner than anyone would expect. Most certainly.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the world’s biggest movie star. Talk about Bollywood and what it’s like. When I was growing up in India, Bollywood was, you know, much, much smaller than Hollywood. It was low production qualities, wonderful movies, but always, you know, very different. Often copying trends that came directly out of Hollywood, often copying stories as the stars were big in India, but very small on a global scale. That’s all seemed to have changed in the last few years.

KHAN: The younger filmmakers, I think are completely new- thinking people…

ZAKARIA: In what sense?

KHAN: To be exposed to western cinema, western culture. They have learned the technique and technology, and writing from the western world, which is a more developed science. As far as screenplay writing, it is a more developed science in the west. And they have been able to take those ideas and say OK, we can bring them into our films. Many times failing at it, but the youth here in our country now is also understanding different kind of cinema, because they’re also exposed to because of television, Internet. So, they’re like, OK, we can compare. And somehow Indians at this juncture feel, you know what? To be really proud, we need to make films which make a mark in the world.

ZAKARIA: When you think about movie stars, you know, the biggest movie stars in the world remain all Hollywood movie stars.

KHAN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: You know, Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or something like that. Do you imagine that, I mean, you have probably more fans than those people, you know, people say you have a billion fans. But as you point out, the dollar value is lower because a ticket costs less in India than it does in the States. Could you imagine there maybe a time when Indian stars will be truly global in that sense?

KHAN: Much sooner than anyone would expect, most certainly. You know, of course, all the main standard in the world becomes how much dollar value that finally the business brings, and that’s how you’re big. But I can see it happening in the next five or six years, very easily. Because see, also the problem is that the language that we use in our films is Hindi. So, I don’t think Hollywood, that’s the only advantage that they have is that they speak in English — they’re great filmmakers also — but I think that’s a big advantage, that we don’t make films in English yet. But the time is coming now, because I have kids and they’re all watching, you know, language in Hindi films, if you see a new Indian film, you’ll realize that the language is more English (ph). You know, we’re using, and we don’t have to translate it anymore, everyone understands it. And everyone uses it every day.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that we’re, you know, at the rise of something truly called world cinema that, you know, the United States has have this privileged position of being cinema the only global cinema, but now it’s not just India, maybe China and maybe other countries will be able to present their own world cinema?

KAHN: Absolutely. You know, I mean, everybody uses these words in business parlance, everyone talks about globalization and everybody talks about globalization and everyone talks about global village and coming together. But yes, one of the biggest things about globalization and this global village scenario that we’re going through, communication and information, is going to be very clearly that the, you know, the language as a barrier will start breaking down. Culture as a barrier will start breaking down. And you go on to the Internet — I go on Twitter or you know, I hang with kids and chat with them. And I’m realizing that, you know, they’re trying to figure out what my culture is and talking about it. So, all that will break down and other cinemas will come over, will come, and they’ll use the technology — and a lot of technicians from here. But stories, every country has a story to tell. And once it reaches a certain standard in terms of technique, I think the world would like to watch it.

ZAKARIA: Shah Rukh Khan, pleasure to have you on.

KHAN: Thank you so much, Fareed, thanks a lot.

ZAKARIA: Now, we will be back.

Using just a small fraction of Google’s vast application offerings? That’s about to end!

Remember that old maxim that says we use only about 10 percent of our brain’s capacity? It’s been proven as hokum by modern neuroscience, but we think we can safely apply the same basic analogy to Google: The vast, vast, vast majority of computer users—even those practiced in hardcore nerdery—are almost certainly using a pitiful fraction of all the applications and features intrinsic to Google’s ever-expanding matrix of software code.

Sure, a Maximum PC reader may be well-versed in Google’s advanced search operators (Google allintext: “advanced search operators” if you missed that chapter), but we’re willing to wager that even the most curious among you haven’t taken the time to play with more than a few Google applications, let alone explore all their advanced features. Indeed, Google HQ is a fan-friggin’-amazing hotbed of R&D, but its developers are relatively quiet about the tools they’ve released. And that’s a shame, because Google’s constant innovation should get more press.

To address your inevitable Google knowledge deficit, we commissioned Gina Trapani to share her favorite tips. Gina launched Lifehacker.com, writes about Google for a bazillion media outlets, co-hosts the “This Week In Google” netcast, and pretty much makes it her job to know as much as possible about Google’s sundry apps and features.

Want even harder hardcore tips? Or did we leave out an application you really want to know about? Send your requests to comments@maximumpc.com. Oh, and by the way: Google Buzz was announced literally minutes before this article went to press. But we’ll certainly cover this app in a future issue—because if there’s one thing this world needs, it’s more social media options. FTW! —Jon Phillips

Maps

Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) is a mapping application and route planner that provides driving, walking, and public transit directions from your starting point to one or more destinations. Launched in 2005, Maps is based on technology created at Australian startup Where2 by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen (currently the lead engineers on Google Wave). Along with Gmail, Google Maps was one of the first web apps to extensively use Ajax, a JavaScript programming technique that updates map imagery as you pan and zoom, all without reloading the page.

Preview Which Streets Made Street View’s Cut

Not only does Google Maps display aerial imagery in Satellite view, it also offers a huge database of on-the-ground photos via Street View. To switch to Street View from the basic map screen, drag and drop the yellow “pegman” from the top of the zoom control onto the map. When you do, blue lines appear on the streets where ground imagery is available (throughout the United States and in select other countries). Drop the pegman onto the road of your choice, walk down the street by clicking the navigational arrows, and double-click any area of a photo to zoom in on it. Some images are so clear, you can read the hours on No Parking signs.

In-Car Navigation? In Maps Help, search “Using Maps with your navigation device” to learn how to send directions straight from Google Maps to your TomTom, Garmin, BMW, or Mercedes navigation systems.

Add Local Color to Your Map

Don’t miss out on the brave new world beyond the Map, Satellite, Terrain, and Street View features in Google Maps. Under the More button (located between the Traffic and Satellite buttons on the top-right of a map), you can overlay links to photos, videos, Wikipedia articles, webcams, transit maps (in some cities), and real estate listings. This feature is perfect when you want to know the history of a monument, find open homes for your Sunday real estate tour, or see what’s happening on the local zoo’s “panda cam.”

Check Traffic to Avoid the Madness!

Before you start the car, check for clogged arteries by clicking the Traffic button. By default you’ll see live, current traffic conditions—anonymously collected from drivers’ mobile devices—but you can change the day and time to see extrapolated predictions. To do so, in the Traffic pop-up click the Change link, and set the day and time of your departure. Things looking bad out there? Well, when you get directions in Google Maps, you can always opt for an alternate route by clicking and dragging the suggested route to another road. Or you could opt to ditch the car entirely: Click the Public Transit or Walking link on the right panel below the starting point and destination to see how you can get there by bus, train, trolley, or on foot.

Next up, Google Docs!

Docs

Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) is a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application that stores any files you create in it, as well as files you upload. While Google Docs doesn’t offer all the functionality you’d find in Microsoft Office, its web-based collaboration features present a whole new world of utility.

Save Time on Formatting with Templates

This personal financial budget shows you exactly where all your money’s going. Oh well, at least the spreadsheet is free!

Whether you need an invoice, resume, or calendar, you don’t have to design it from scratch—just grab a template, thousands of which can be found in the drop-down menu of the Create New button. Various spreadsheets, text documents, presentations, and forms are broken down by categories like “Resumes and Cover Letters,” “Personal Finance,” and “Legal.” (Hint: Choose your language from the “Narrow by language” drop-down to hide foreign-language templates.) Google Docs will keep track of which templates you’ve used in the past for easy reuse. The spreadsheet templates—pre-formatted with built-in formulas and charts—are reason enough to check out Docs.

Conduct Surveys with Forms

Feel free to mix in “check all that apply” questions with those demanding “one answer only.”

Google’s form templates are awesome for not only collecting data from co-workers, loved ones, and website visitors, but also for tallying responses. In Google Docs, click the Create New button, and chose “form” from the drop-down. Now, enter your questions, as well as the types of answers each question should get. You can format answers for multiple choice, checkboxes, and other common survey criteria, as well as add section headers and choose custom visual themes. Clicking the “Email for” button will send your contacts a link to the form (you also can copy and paste the link to publish it yourself). When your recipients answer the form’s questions, a Google spreadsheet living in the cloud collects and charts the responses for you to see. For example, you can gather all your friends’ vital personal specs—phone numbers, home addresses, even favorite foods—with one simple questionaire.

Chat While You Crunch Numbers

When you give other people access to a document in Google Docs, a blue notification icon on the far right of the menu bar will inform you who else is viewing and/or editing the document while you have it open. In spreadsheets, this bar has a down arrow on it, which you can click to expand a chat panel. Not only will you be able to see real-time updates to your spreadsheet as others change it, you can instant message your collaborators as you work. This feature is conspicuously absent in documents and presentations.

Visualize Data with Interactive Gadgets

Once you’ve got a spreadsheet full of data, you’ll want interesting ways to visualize it without doing too much work. Enter Google Docs gadgets, which are interactive charts, maps, and other data visualizations you can embed in a spreadsheet, publish on a web page, or include on your iGoogle homepage. From your Google Spreadsheet’s Insert menu, choose “Gadget…” to choose and configure a gadget that displays your data in informative ways. You can create your own gadget or use one of the many provided, which include charts, guages, timelines, org charts, and the fun “Bars of Stuff.”

Ditch the Thumb Drive and Store Files at Google Docs

Files converted to Google Doc documents don’t count toward the 1GB storage limit. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files can all be converted and stored for free, but you might lose features and formatting.

Google Docs isn’t just for office files anymore: You can now upload, store, and share any kind of file, including music, video, photos, and zip files. A simple click of the Upload button will save files to your home in the cloud. File sizes can be as high as 250MB, and you get up to 1GB of space for storing non–Google Docs files. Once your treasures are uploaded, select a file and click the Share link to give others access to it. You can also share entire folders, creating a Dropbox-like meeting space for your friends and colleagues to work on files together.

See a Document’s Revision History

When multiple people are working on a document, things can change fast. To see who changed what and to compare revisions, open a document and from the File menu choose “See revision history.” You’ll get a list of all the changes a document has undergone. You can also select two revisions and compare them to see exactly what changed between them. Just be aware that revision history is available to anyone you share a document with—even your boss. So, if you don’t want collaborators or viewers to see the history, make a copy of the document, which wipes away the bread-crumb trail of its changes.

Get Your Documents Offline

Google Gears helps you keep your cloud business in sync.

One of the biggest concerns about keeping data in the cloud—instead of on your hard drive—centers on the question of offline access. So, if you’re wondering how you’ll work on your Google Docs files when you’re on a non-Wi-Fi-equipped flight, Google Gears has you covered. This free browser add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari gives you access to your files offline, and syncs changes when you connect to the Internet again. You can download Google Gears at http://gears.google.com.

Next up, Google Wave!

Google Wave: Collaboration Made Easy

At first glance, it seems like there’s nothing Wave can’t do.

Google Wave (http://wave.google.com) is a new, real-time group collaboration tool that’s currently an invitation-only beta product. Combining features from email, chat, wikis, and forums, Google Wave is best described as a mash-up between a real-time wiki and multimedia chat. You do all your group collaboration in “waves” (note the lowercase W), which function as a hybrid conversation/document—wrap your head around that!—that multiple people can view, edit, and add to.

Waves are live documents and change right before your eyes: You can watch collaborators’ cursors move about with fury, keystroke by keystroke. You can also embed interactive content—like polls, YouTube clips, and slide shows—and easily discuss a particular sentence in a block of text with the inline reply feature. Wave is young and missing essential features (like the ability to remove someone from a wave), but there’s no mistaking its ambitions to change how power-users work together online.

Calendar

Google Calendar (http://google.com/calendar) is a scheduling application that offers email, SMS alerts, and collaboration features. The interface is similar to Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, with daily, weekly, and monthly views, as well as a customizable time period and agenda views. Launched in April 2006, Google Calendar officially graduated from beta status in July 2009.

Get Your Agenda via Email or Text Message

When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can also configure an email or SMS reminder to come to you minutes, days, or weeks in advance—great for remembering to order flowers for Mom’s birthday. You can also receive your daily agenda via email first thing in the morning. To do so, in the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow button next to the appropriate calendar, then select Notifications. Check the “Daily agenda” box, and save your settings to get an email each morning at 5 a.m. in your timezone of the day’s upcoming events. You can also get your schedule via text message: Text the word day to shortcode GVENT (48368) to receive your day’s agenda. The word next will get the next event on your calendar, and the nday command will send back tomorrow’s events. (Standard text messaging fees apply.)

Quick-Add Events with Natural Language

We wish more apps—and even people—could intelligently interpret conversational language.

The Google Calendar app is quite remarkable in its ability to generate calendar items from events you describe in natural, conversational language. For example, if you type “Lunch with Mark tomorrow at 2pm at Maria’s,” Calendar will parse “tomorrow at 2pm,” scheduling the event for the correct day and time, and even fill in “Maria’s” as the event location.

Subscribe to Team Schedules, Birthdays, and More

Does your company give you a paid vacation for Groundhog Day? Your IT department can share your company’s complete paid vacation day schedule via Google Calendar.

You can instantly add sports team schedules, holidays, and your contacts’ birthdays to your schedule by subscribing to public calendars. In the Other Calendars module on the sidebar, click the Add link. From the drop-down, choose “Browse interesting calendars” to pick and choose from a selection of calendars, like religious or U.S. holidays, or your contacts’ birthdays (compiled from your Google contact entries and their Google Profiles). You can also subscribe to any public calendar, or any of your contacts’ Google calendars by choosing “Add by URL” or “Add a friend’s calendar.”

Incorporate the Weather Forecast on Your Calendar

Get the weather forecast for this weekend’s softball game directly on your Google Calendar. In Settings, under the General tab, enter your location (either city and state or zip code) and then, near “Show weather based on my location,” choose whether you’d like the temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Save your changes, and GCal will display a small weather icon for the next four days; click the icon to expand forecast details.

Next up, Gmail!

Gmail

When Google’s free, web-based email service (http://mail.google.com) launched as an invitation-only beta on April 1, 2004, initial speculation had it that the 1GB storage offer was an April Fool’s gag. It wasn’t a gag, and Google has only gotten more generous; as of this writing, Gmail storage capacity is up to 7GB. Thanks to all this storage space—along with threaded conversations, a powerful spam filter, conversation labels, and more—Gmail remains a standout amid other free webmail products that have been around much longer.

Access Gmail via IMAP

With IMAP settings, you can keep Gmail properly synced on all your sundry Internet machines.

While most email providers offer only one-way POP downloads of your messages, Gmail offers the more sophisticated, two-way sync protocol, IMAP. With IMAP, you can access your Gmail on multiple computers and mobile devices, and changes you make on one device are immediately reflected everywhere else. IMAP syncs the read and unread status of all your Gmail messages in all your labels (represented as traditional folders in your IMAP client of choice). To enable IMAP in Gmail’s Settings, click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. You’ll have to configure your email program using Gmail’s secure IMAP settings; click the “Configuration instructions” link to get the details for your email software.

Mute a Chatty Email Thread

Just check the box of a thread you want to silence, then mute it—mute it good.

When an email conversation is stuck in a never-ending “reply all” cycle and you wish you weren’t on the recipient list, open the conversation and choose Mute from Gmail’s More Actions menu. This will silence the thread, meaning that any new replies to it will skip your inbox and be archived automatically. You can still search for and find muted messages; you just won’t get notifications of new replies while it’s going on. To find conversations you’ve muted, enter is:muted into Gmail’s search box.

Master Gmail’s Keyboard Shortcuts

If you receive a lot of email, Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are essential, and should be committed to muscle memory as soon as possible. To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail’s settings, go to the the General tab, and select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” radio button. Now you can move forward and back between your messages using the J and K keys, tap R to reply to a message, C to compose a new message, and the / key to move your cursor to Gmail’s search box. Some keys even perform multiple actions. For example, if you’re done reading a message, press ] to archive it and move to the next message. See all the available keyboards shortcuts at http://goo.gl/hlBI.

Catch Embarrassing Email Mistakes Before You Send

Google has a very canny way of making us feel slightly incompetent, doesn’t he?

Just sent an email you wish you could take back? Told someone the file was attached and sent the message before you actually attached it? Gmail Labs, Gmail’s “testing ground for experimental features,” offers two tools that can help. The Undo Send feature gives you a few minutes to click an undo link after you’ve sent a message you immediately regret. The Forgotten Attachment Detector checks to see if you mentioned the words “attachment” or “attached” in your message but did not attach a file. If it suspects you’ve made a mistake, it prompts you with a dialog box that asks if you forgot your attachment—all before it sends the email. To enable Gmail Labs and get these and other Labs features mentioned on this page, click the Labs tab.

Send Repetitive Replies Faster with Canned Responses

Whether you need a uniform reply to server-outage complaints, or just want to tell that latest Nigerian 419 scammer that you thank him for thinking of you but aren’t currently interested, a Canned Response will get the job done.

When you receive a lot of email that requires the same response, you need not suffer the indignity of same-replying from scratch every time. Gmail’s Canned Responses feature (another tweak from Gmail Labs) lets you set up email scripts that you can choose from a drop-down to send as a reply to a message. For example, you could have a Canned Response called “thanks” associated with the message, “Thanks for letting us know, we’re working on it!” With Gmail Labs and Canned Responses enabled, open a new email, compose your canned response, and from the Canned Responses drop-down under Save, choose “New Canned Response” and enter a name for it. Then, any time you want to use the response when replying to an email, click the Canned Responses link, and choose its name from the Insert section. Canned Responses also work in filters. For example, you could say that any email from certain addresses should automatically get a particular canned response.

Send and Receive Mail from Other Accounts in Gmail

Which email identity does Gina want to use today?

Switching to Gmail sounds tempting, but what if you don’t want to change your email addresses? You don’t have to. Gmail comes with a built-in POP fetcher, which can retrieve messages from up to five existing email accounts and drop them in your Gmail inbox. You can also set up multiple “From:” addresses that match your existing accounts. This way, when you send an email in Gmail, you can have it originate from your Gmail account, or from your alternate “From:” addresses. To start using other email addresses within Gmail, go to Settings and enter your other account details in the Accounts tab.

Add an Email to Your Task List

If a message has a chore attached to it, just add it to Tasks, and it will loom over your to-do list like the proverbial albatross.

Gmail’s built-in to-do list application, Tasks, makes it easy to turn messages into to-dos. You can manage your tasks, subtasks, task descriptions, and due dates just by clicking the Tasks link in the Gmail sidebar. And if you’ve got an email message that contains a to-do item in it, choose “Add to Tasks” from the More Actions menu to add it to your list with a link to the message.

Next up, alerts and feeds!

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Crawler Alerts: Let Google Do the Search Work for You

Want to know how many people are referencing your name online? Setting up a Google Alert will keep you appraised.

You want to see the latest, greatest search results for a brand name, person, or any keyword, but find it too time-consuming to manually search Google every few days? Then turn to Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts), which will automatically deliver these hits via email or RSS feed. Simply enter the keyword you want new results for, what sources you want to monitor (News, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups, or Comprehensive), how often you want the email alerts, how many results the alerts should contain, and what email address the alerts should go to. Then, as Google crawls the Internet and indexes new content that contains your keyword, you’ll get an email summarizing those results. If you’ve already got too much email, choose Feed from the “Deliver to:” drop-down to subscribe to alerts in your feed reader instead.

Reader

Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) is a news aggregator that lets you subscribe to website RSS and Atom feeds, organize them into folders, share items with followers, and read their content offline. Billed as “an inbox for the web,” Reader displays the number of unread items per feed (and per folder of feeds), just like an email client does.

Follow People in Addition to Feeds

Once all your pals begin following each other, your reads on good reads will grow exponentially.

Your friends are your most trusted informants, and seeing what they’ve been reading might bring you the news you care about more quickly than a faceless website could. To get started following people in Reader, click the “People you follow” link in the sidebar. You can find people to follow by name or email address, as well as configure access to your own shared items. Click the Follow button to add someone to the “People you follow” area, where each person’s profile will display a count of things they liked, shared, or commented on.

Read Your Feeds Offline To read your feeds somewhere other than in a web browser, try the free desktop newsreader FeedDemon (http://goo.gl/ALNW). It syncs with Google Reader, and maintains your subscriptions, tags, and read and unread item status whether you changed them on the desktop or in the web application.

Sort Feed Items ‘By Magic’

Is Doug Henning still alive? Something tells us he’d like this feature.

You can instantly see the most interesting feed items first, using Google’s version of magic: Hover over any feed, and from the drop-down menu change the sort order from “newest” (the default) to “by magic.” The “Sort by magic” algorithm ranks items based on your reading habits as well as global Google Reader activity to predict which items will interest you most. The more feed items you like and star in Google Reader, the better the magic will work.

Graph Your Reading Habits

Spending too much time reading, and not enough time writing? The Trends feature can chart this in living color.

How much time do you spend reading and sharing feeds? Click the Trends link on the Reader sidebar to get an overview of how many feed items you read per month, with navel-gazing stats like what day of the week and hour of the day you read feeds most. Trends also shows you which of your feeds are most frequently updated, inactive, and least subscribed-to, as well as how active your Reader friends are. To see how much you interact with an individual feed, click it and then click the Show Details link on a feed’s blue menu bar to see a bar graph that displays how many items that feed has published compared to how many you’ve read.

Next up, Chrome!

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Chrome

Google Chrome (http://google.com/chrome) is an open-source, tabbed web browser developed with a focus on simplicity and speed. Its design is extremely minimalist, stripping away many of the menus and buttons common in other web browsers. A mere 16 months after it launched, Chrome is the third most widely used web browser, after Internet Explorer and Firefox. The latest stable build of Chrome is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Willing testers can also use beta versions of Chrome, which include previews of new features that are in development.

Customize the ‘New Tab’ Screen

Stabbing a tab with a thumbtack insures it will remain stationary on your thumbnail view.

When you open a new tab in Google Chrome, by default you get the aptly named “New Tab” screen, a smart grid of thumbnail previews of your most visited websites. You can customize the look, layout, and position of the thumbnails on this launcher page to make it more useful. To remove a thumbnail, hover over it and click the X in the upper right-hand corner. To relocate a thumbnail to a different position in the grid, hover over it, then drag and drop it to its new location. To pin a thumbnail to a spot—so it’s always there, no matter how often you visit it—hover over it and click the thumbtack button on the upper left-hand side.

Honey, I Hid the Pr0n If you want to web surf without leaving behind traces of your activity—“to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” according to Google’s faux-naïve language—you can activate Incognito mode, which is under Chrome’s Tools menu. Downloaded files and visited webpages won’t appear in the browser’s history, and new cookies will be closed upon exiting the incognito window.

Manage Tab and Extension Memory Usage

Chrome is a speedy browser, but once third-party extensions are in the mix, you’re a bit vulnerable to memory leaks and slowdowns. To see what’s eating Chrome’s memory, launch its internal Task Manager using the Shift+Esc keyboard shortcut. Much like the Windows Task Manager, it will show you how much memory, CPU, and network bandwidth each tab and extension is using. Select a runaway memory hog and choose “End process” to nix its greedy activities.

Sync Your Bookmarks—Everywhere

If you’re running Chrome on several computers, you don’t have to worry about missing bookmarks you saved while working on another machine. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to launch the Bookmark Manager, and click the “Synchronize my bookmarks…” button. Sign into your Google account, and Chrome will merge and sync the bookmarks in your current instance of Chrome with every other installation of Chrome that has sync enabled (and is signed into your Google Account). Chrome actually saves your bookmarks in Google Docs. After you sync your bookmarks, you’ll find a Google Chrome folder in your Google Docs account with a Bookmarks subfolder, and all your links stored within. This way, if you want to access your bookmarks from a different browser, you can access them by logging into Google Docs.

Add Features to Chrome with Extensions

The latest stable version of Google Chrome includes support for third-party extensions: installable plugins that add features to Chrome, like ad blocking, email notifications, or a session manager. To start exploring extensions, choose Extensions from the blue-wrench menu on the far right of the Chrome menu bar. If you have extensions already installed, they’ll be listed here. Otherwise, click “Get more extensions” to browse a catalog of extensions categorized and ranked by popularity. We especially like the One Number extension, which adds a button to Chrome’s toolbar that displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail, Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave accounts.

Picasa

Google’s Picasa photo management software (http://picasa.com) comes in two flavors: desktop software you install on your PC or Mac, and an online version called Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com). While you’ll want to sort, organize, tag, rate, and edit the gigabytes of digital photos you’ve collected on your desktop, Picasa’s Web Albums interface makes publishing and collaborating on those photos easier.

Group Your Photos by the People in Them

Both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums can recognize faces in your photos, and let you identify those faces by assigning Name Tags to them. Once your photos are loaded into Picasa on the desktop, it will scan them and place all the images with faces in them in an Unnamed People album (under People in the left column). Browse that album, and add a name to each person pictured to identify them. If you’re signed into your Google account, link those photos with the corresponding person in your Google Contacts list. For each person you identify, Picasa creates a person-specific album, and continually scans your library for new photos that include faces matching ones you’ve already tagged. Picasa will ask you to confirm its name tag suggestions on faces it finds. The suggestions are often, but not always, accurate. Regardless, you can always correct an inaccurate name tag. Picasa Web Albums also uses name tags, and can list photos by the people in them. To turn on this feature, click the Try It button on the right side of your album list, in the Name Tags section.

Put Your Photos on the Map

Picasa let’s you geotag in a Google Maps view, and you can also “View in Google Earth” by hitting the link at the top right.

You can easily add location information—aka geotags—to your photos and display them on a Google Map, with each photo pinned to the location where it was shot. To assign location data in the desktop app, click the Places button on the bottom right, between People and Tags. In the Google Maps panel that appears, search for an address. Once you’ve found the location where a photo was taken, click OK in the “Put photo here?” dialog. In Picasa Web Albums, choose a photo, and in the information panel on the right, click the Add Location link to find an address in Google Maps, and then put the photo there. Once you’ve geotagged your photos, you can view a map of photos by clicking the View Map link for an album.

Automatically Sync Photos (and Edits) on Your Computer to the Web

Behold, the Picasa desktop app in all its glory.

Once you publish a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you don’t have to re-upload an image by hand every time you change a caption, add a name tag, or crop a photo. Instead, you can automatically sync changes to photos. To do so, go to the desktop app and select an album or a folder of photos. Toggle on the “Sync to Web” control, and sign into your Google account. Now, configure your sync settings—what size photos should be, whether they should have a watermark, whether they should be public or private—and start automatically syncing that local album to Picasa Web Albums. With web syncing on, any photos you add to the album or edits you make to existing photos automatically update in Web Albums—all without having to manually upload them again.

Get Arts-and-Crafty with Your Photos

Notice that you can set the aspect ratio of your Picture Pile so that it matches the dimensions of your desktop.

The desktop version of Picasa comes with several built-in tools to create nifty projects from your photos. To get started, choose an album or folder of photos, and from the Create drop-down menu choose Picture Collage, Movie, or Gift CD. Picasa’s built-in Movie Maker tool can create photo slide shows with music, transitions, text, and captions, and includes an option to instantly upload your project to YouTube. The Picture Collage maker organizes a set of photos into various layouts, such as a picture pile, grid, contact sheet, or mosaic. You can save the collage to edit later, or set it as your desktop background. Finally, the Gift CD maker burns a disc of selected photos and an accompanying slide show.

Make Your Photo Albums Collaborative

Inviting friends and family to collaborate on albums is as simple as sending a quick invite.

When you’ve taken photos at an event with other attendees—say, a wedding—everyone’s got his or her own pictures, and they’re not always stored in the same place. But when you share a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you can allow others to edit the photos in it, as well as add new photos to make that album collaborative. In both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, choose an album or folder of photos, and click the Share button at the top. In the Share Photos dialog, enter the email addresses of the people you want to see the album, and check the “Let these people contribute to my album” box to grant them permissions. Now your collaborators can add and edit photo captions, apply name tags, edit the photos themselves, and add photos to the album. Just remember that any photos added by collaborators will count toward your Picasa storage quota, which is 1GB if you haven’t yet upgraded from a free Picasa account.

Upload Photos via Email

Don’t even try uploading a photo go Gina’s Picasa account. You will be stymied!

Sure, you can upload photos to your online albums from within Picasa itself, but you can also upload photos via email—a perfect method for your camera phone. To set up your secret upload email address, go to Picasa Web Albums and click the Settings link in the top-right corner. Under the General tab, in the “Upload photos by email” section, check the box next to “Allow me to upload photos by email.” Enter a secret word to get your unique email address, and click the Save Changes button. Now add that secret email address to your contacts. Next time you snap a photo from your smartphone and want to instantly upload it to Picasa, send it via email to that address. To add a photo directly to a particular album, enter the name of the album in the subject line of your message.

Next up, Search!

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Search

The front door to the grandaddy of all of Google’s web applications—its web search engine—is an unassuming text box that doesn’t give you any hint to what it can do. In July 2008, Google’s index exceeded 1 trillion unique websites, and a billion new web pages are purportedly added per day. Here’s how to twiddle Google’s knobs and levers to find your needle in that haystack.

Find Business Hours, Restaurant Menus, and What’s Nearby

The Maximum PC crew can’t get enough of Google’s savvy in finding food menus.

Get business hours in your Google search results by searching for the business name, city, and the word “hours.” For example, a search for Seaworld, San Diego hours includes the days and times the park is open, right on the results page. Likewise, a search for a restaurant name and the word menu (like Ranchos Cocina Ocean Beach menu) includes a blue link directly to the menu in the first result. Finally, when you visit Google.com in the browser on your location-aware iPhone or Android phone, you’ll see the name of your current location. Click the “Near me now” link to see restaurants, coffee shops, banks, and ATMs in your vicinity.

Calculate, Convert, and Get Local Time Instantly

Google’s search box doesn’t just return links to web pages, it can also perform calculations and conversions, as well as tell you the local time in places around the globe, and what time a plane flight might arrive. For example, search for 20% of 37.45 to see how much you should tip the waiter for dinner. To see what the local time is in faraway places like Tokyo, you would search for what time is it in Tokyo. Google also comes in handy while you’re cooking: Enter quarter cup in teaspoons when you can’t find your measuring cup. Finally, to quickly check whether a flight is on time, search for it by airline and flight number, e.g., JetBlue flight 185, and you’ll get arrival and departure times at the top of the results page.

Find Images and Videos of a Certain Size and Type

Sure, but can it find a video of a Simpsonized Christopher Walken reading Goodnight, Moon?

Google Image search has special filters you can use to specify the size and type of the image you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for desktop wallpaper images of the moon that are 1024×768 pixels, first go into Google Images, search for moon, then in your results, click the Show Options link to set the exact size. In those options, you can also narrow down results by the type of image you’re looking for—images that contain faces, a photo, clip art, or line drawing. Google’s Video search offers similar options. You can specify the length of a video you’re looking for as well as whether it’s a cartoon, slide show, or high quality.

Add Custom Sections to Your Google News Page

Google News (http://news.google.com) comes with built-in sections like Top Stories, Business, Entertainment, and Sci/Tech, but you can also create a custom news section that you monitor over time. For example, to track news related to the Apple iPad, in News, search for iPad. Then, at the bottom of the search results page, click “Add a custom section for iPad to Google News.” This will add it to your section list on the Google News sidebar.

Search Within a Single Website

Many websites don’t offer their own built-in search box, and those that do don’t usually provide results as good as those you get from Google. Luckily, you can search a single site from Google’s search box using the site:example.com operator. For example, to search maximumpc.com for the word Google, search for site:maximumpc.com Google.

Profile Enhancement: Finally, for the Eternally Anonymous

When potential bosses, dates, clients, and old high school friends type your name into Google’s web search box, what do they get back? If you’ve got a common name or just don’t have the time to keep up an active web presence, you can still get listed in search results with Google Profiles. Head over to http://google.com/profiles to set up a personal page with your name, a head shot, a short bio, places you’ve lived, schools you’ve attended, and your websites. You can even include photos from Flickr, Picasa, or any online photo feed. (Hint: specify an album that contains pictures of you so that searchers can identify you!) Once you’ve added enough information to your Google Profile, a search for your name will include your profile (along with anyone else who has your name) at the bottom of the Google results page. The more information you add, the higher you’ll move up the rankings.

Chrome OS: Just a Lean Browser Wrapper?

Google Chrome OS is a yet-to-be-released, open-source operating system whose sole purpose is to quickly get you online. As such, only a single, installed application runs on it: the Google Chrome browser, which provides shortcuts to web applications like Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail, Hulu, Facebook, and Twitter.

Everything you do in Chrome OS happens in the browser, on the web. Speed is the highest priority in Chrome OS development, and early builds running on netbooks boast promising boot speeds of four to seven seconds—which Google engineers say they will work to reduce! Currently, only source code for the open-source project—called Chromium OS—is available (find it at www.chromium.org/chromium-os). In the fall of 2010, Google and its hardware partners are slated to announce netbooks and other devices running this most lean of OSes. For more on Maximum PC’s unique take on Chrome OS, go here.

For more info on Gina Trapani and all her Google projects, go to http://ginatrapani.org.

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Trying to fix a badly infected PC without HijackThis is sort of like going into surgery without a scalpel; it’s the only tool for the job when all other measures fail. New spyware strains and increasingly complex viruses emerge every day, and your PC’s immune system (i.e, antivirus software) isn’t always able to keep up. And if you’re performing emergency surgery on someone else’s PC, you may find that they didn’t have any AV software installed to begin with.

No matter how bad the infection, HijackThis gives you the means to dig deep into Windows to root out whatever it is that’s wreaking havoc. It’s not a cure-all, however, or even a cure-little. In fact, HijackThis doesn’t cure anything on its own. What HijackThis does do is give you a snapshot of the system’s registry and file settings, putting particular emphasis on the browser. It doesn’t discern between safe and malicious settings, so it’s possible to unintentionally inflict real harm if you don’t know what you’re doing. Follow along as we show you how to properly wield HijackThis.

1. Download and Run HijackThis

Originally developed by Dutch programmer Merijn Bellekom, HijackThis has since been sold to Trend Micro, a security firm better equipped to maintain and update the program. But don’t worry, HijackThis is still free and you can download it at http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/ where you’ll find both a stable and beta version. We haven’t run into much trouble using the beta, but it’s currently only available as an installer. With the stable version, you have the option of downloading just the executable and plopping it on your USB thumb drive.

Once installed, fire up the program and choose ‘Do a system scan and save a logfile.’

After you do this, you should see a bunch of seemingly obscure settings in the program’s main window, (Image 2) which will also be listed out in a separate text file generated on the fly. If the text file that appears is empty, try using the stable release instead of the beta.

2. Understand the Results

Keep in mind what we said earlier, in that HijackThis doesn’t discern between safe and malicious entries. Even on a badly infected system, many, if not most, of the settings will be legit and altering them could affect the functionality of your PC.
If you consider yourself a savvy user, you can scroll through the settings on your own and look for any suspicious or harmful settings. In some cases, this will be obvious, but not always, so you want to be sure to Google (or Bing) any entries you’re unsure about before nuking them.

3. Hop Online for a Second Opinion

No matter what your level of expertise, it never hurts to get a second opinion. One way to do this by posting your log contents on your favorite PC tech support forum. Mash the AnalyzeThis button to see a list of forums to choose from, or just hop over to Maximum PC’s board.

If you strike out on a bulletin board or need instantaneous feedback, German Website www.hijackthis.de will oblige. Just copy your entire log contents to the clipboard (right-click>select all>copy), paste it into the site’s textbox, and press the Analyze button. Within a few moments, the site will spit out the results and alert you to any potential problem areas. Anything with a green checkmark is most likely safe, while the opposite holds true for any red Xs that are displayed. You may also see orange question marks, which are unknown files or entries that require further investigation.

Rather than toss all your eggs in one basket, double-check these results by heading over to http://hjt.networktechs.com. Just like before, you’ll paste your log file’s contents and press the Parse button. All the results are color coded so you can see any potential pitfalls at a glance. Hover your mouse cursor over these to learn why they’re being flagged and what the recommended course of action is.

4.Get Offline Help with HijackReader

The problem with relying on a Website to sift through your HijackThis log is that an infected PC doesn’t always let you have access to the Internet. In some cases, you may be able to hop online, but your Web browsing attempts either gets constantly rerouted, or pages load too slow to be of any help.

In this case, arm yourself with HijackReader , another free third-party app which works in conjunction with HijackThis. There’s no installation necessary – just unzip the archive to your hard drive or portable flash drive and run HijackReader.exe. Copy the HijackThis log file to your clipboard and mash ‘Paste log,’ followed by the ‘Check!’ button.

When HijackReader finishes, it will save the results as an HTML file and prompt you to give it a name. Open this file to see the results. HijackReader tends to know less about individual entries than the online sites do, but for the ones it does recognize, it tends to be a bit more informative. No matter which method you use (or combination thereof), it’s a good idea to double-check any iffy entries with Google before you go blasting away registry and system settings.

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Security rivals thermal paste as the most important thing you have to keep in mind when building or using a system. Every bit of software on your PC should be updated; every external access point into your digital life, closed.  There’s no reason why you should be handing over the keys to the castle to random Internet strangers.  Powerful virus protection, a strong firewall, and a bit of common sense — among other tricks — will go far to preserve your fortress of a system.

Now that’s all well and good for the desktop in your living room, but what about third-party machines?  We’ve all had to jump on a system over which we’ve had no control–no observance or administrative rights to ensure that every bit of the operating system checked out to ideal security standards.  You can always head over the falls in a barrel and type your passwords and login credentials blindly, with no foresight or worries that you’re inputting valuable information on a potentially infected machine.  That, or you can do what I’d do: Make sure that your every keystroke and action is somehow safeguarded through the use of portable applications that you can carry on a storage device of your choice (cough USB key cough).

And that’s exactly what I’ll be exploring in this week’s Freeware Files: Five awesome portable apps that you can carry with you to increase your security presence on a PC that isn’t yours.  These aren’t panaceas–you’ll still want to be as critical and as cautious as you would previously.  However, they’re a step in the right direction toward (hopefully) a data-leak-free lifestyle.

Active Kill Disk — Hard Drive Eraser

In a world of small arms, I’ll start with the security nuke: If you need to wipe a drive that’s too far beyond saving due to malware, virus infections, or some other critical issue, you’ll want to slap a copy of Active Kill Disk on your USB key post-haste.  Provided you’re rocking a bootable USB key, you can use this app to fire up a DOS-based destruction tool for unruly digital files.  The free version of the app only allows you to erase your drive using the one-pass zero method.  Stronger techniques will require you to pony up a price for the full version of the app.  However, unless you’re trying to avoid a government inquiry or something, this should be all you need for bringing your beleaguered hard drive back in line–and making sure that your key information is gone for good!

Download it here!

FreeOTFE

Similar to the popular privacy app TrueCrypt, FreeOTFE allows you to create and access encrypted volumes of information on a system–which, naturally, will appear as just a stream of junk for anyone lacking the proper authorization credentials.  The beauty of FreeOTFE is that, unlike TrueCrypt, you don’t actually have to install an application in order to gain access to this powerful protection.  You don’t even need administrator rights for the encryption to work!  While this app might not make the most sense if you’re frequently jet-setting between systems, it’s an ideal solution for building additional privacy into something like your work system.

Download it here!

PortableTor

Need a quick way to access Web sites while reducing your ability to be tracked?  PortableTor is the easy solution for gaining access to a large network of proxy servers (really, other people) that bounce your traffic requests around before pointing them toward the final destination you seek.  The only problem with the Tor solution is that, by nature, traffic exiting the Tor network isn’t going to be encrypted.  That would theoretically allow someone serving as an exit node for Tor to eavesdrop on what gets passed out between that machine and said destinations.  Still, for an easy-to-use privacy solution, PortableTor sure beats surfing the Internet vanilla-style.

Download it here!

PuTTY Portable

Right on the heels of PortableTor comes PuTTY Portable.  This app doesn’t allow you to join an encrypted network of proxies.  Rather, you can use PuTTY to fire up an encrypted SSH connection — or tunnel — to your desktop computer that’s presumably located in a safer surfing location than wherever you happen to be.  Once this connection is live, you can use this protected gateway to do your normal network routines like browsing around, checking email, et cetera.  Others won’t be able to decrypt the information you’re sending out and you won’t be forced to use an unsecure network to conduct your important business!

Download it here!

NetWrix USB Blocker

If you’re on the flip-side of the equation and are looking for ways to keep your system free from the USB-based applications others are carrying around, then this app is a perfect way to lock down your system from unauthorized, portable access.  NetWrix USB Blocker helps you turn off all (or a select number) of your USB ports, which will prevent anyone from simply walking up, slapping in a USB key, and ripping out your saved passwords in a single setting.  The app requires the use of Microsoft’s Group Policy Management, so make sure that’s installed on the system of choice before you go to run NetWrix USB Blocker.  After that, your system will be safe from unwanted flash drives!

Download it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) 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. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you’re dying to recommend!

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