Computer tricks : ¶a®t -2

Caps Lock

Have you written an email to someone and realized to late that you accidently hit the Caps Lock key and most of the email is in all caps? This has happened to almost everyone and is of course a violation of email etiquette because all caps letters makes it appear you are mad.

You do not have to delete everything and start over though. Instead, highlight the problem text, hold down Shift and tap F3. This will change all those letters from upper to lower or vice versa. Also, with a third tap you can make the text Title case, Meaning It Looks Like This.

Mass Rename

Do you take a lot of pictures and are tired of seeing the arbitrary image names like IMG_0123.jpg or DSC0123.jpg ? There is a way to rename a group of pictures to help you organize your folders. For instance, you can select all your Christmas pictures and rename them.

To do this, highlight the photos that you wish to rename, right mouse-click and select Rename. Type in the name you wish the photos to be, such as Christmas 2011 . All the photos will be renamed with a number at the end, such as Christmas 2011 (1) . You can do this with documents and other media as well.

★How to speed up your pc.

There are a thousand ways by which ,one can speed up a computer!!.It doesnt take much time really,to be frank...

A quick an easy one is to delete those temporary internet files, IE users need only click on tools>internet options - and then "delete files" under temporary internet files.

Also uninstall any software that you do not use any more. The best way is through start>settings>control panel and then "add or remove programs"

Another easy one is to keep your hard drive "defragged" A hard drive's data can get fragmented or separated along the drive. "Defragging" will bring your data back in a more orderly fashion allowing the drive to call it up quicker. Click on start>programs>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter.

Did not get me???,I recommend these steps too!:

Step 1: Cleanup your hard drive. This is number one for a reason folks. So many people just do not cleanup their hard drive and that can really degrade your pc performance. You can goto My Computer, Drive C, Properties, and then click on disk cleanup. You can also download the freeware utility Ccleaner. This free program will cleanup all kinds of useless junk off your pc.

Step 2: Remove unnecessary bells and whistles by disabling some of the visual effects that comes on by default in windows. This will recover a lot of lost resources for running faster instead of making pretty edges around unused icons that you never look at and such.

How to Disable Unneeded Visual Effects:
(Removes the visual effects, and increases computer performance)

1. Click your “Start” button to access the start menu
2. Then right click on “My Computer”
3. Select “Properties”
4. Select the “Advanced” tab
5. Then under the “Performance” tab select “Settings”
6. Click “Adjust for best performance”
7. Save these settings by clicking “OK”

How to disable the Indexing Service:
(Unnecessary default service, disabling will increase your performance)
1. Click your “Start” button to access the start menu
2. Click “My Computer”
3. Under “Hard Disk Drives” right click on your Hard Disk
4. Click “Properties”
5. Uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching”
6. Click “Apply”
7. Select “Apply changes to C:\ Subfolder and files” and click “OK”
8. If anything pops up on the screen simply click “Ignore”

Step 3: Uninstall unused software and programs that you don’t really need. Click Start, then Control Panel, Add Remove Programs. Now there will be a list pop up of all the software installed on your computer. Simply uninstall unused programs by clicking the uninstall button beside the unwanted software.

This will help free up hard drive space and help increase your overall system performance.

Step 4: Make sure you have updated to the latest versions of windows for your computer. This is offered totally free by microsoft’s website WindowsUpdate.com. You can also follow the directions below to goto the windows update site.

1. Click “Start”
2. Click “All Programs”
3. Look all the way on top and you’ll find a “Windows Update” or
“Microsoft update” button, then click the icon.

Step 5: For the last step and what is maybe the most important step we need to optimize your computer. This will allow your computer to run at it’s top speed. Your registry contains all the core information that your pc uses to run properly. Windows uses it every time it runs to tell the computer exactly how to handle information with all available hardware and software.

Optimize your computer with a qualified registry cleaner weekly. This will ensure you get top performance. There are many reputable products out there.

You certainly don’t have to use it but I prefer it to others and will use it for this demonstration.

Computer tricks:¶a®t-I

Top 10 Best Tricks About External Hard Drive
You must have used computer for a lot of years, and you perhaps still are puzzled about the hard drives, external or internal. Then this article will tell you some best tricks about external hard drive.

1. Run XBMC From a USB Drive

If you don't want to build a full-fledged XBMC computer, you can always put XBMC Live on a USB drive and connect it to an already built computer for certain occasions. And, while you could do it with a USB thumb drive, a larger, external hard drive would allow you to store your movies and TV shows on it, thus saving you precious space on your main computer.

2. Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

If your music is the reason your hard drive always seems full, consider moving those music files to an external drive. Not only can you do so while keeping your preferences and playlists intact, but you can then use previously mentioned iTunes Export to take the most important music and export it back to your space-challenged laptop.

3. Back up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Drive

You love your Wii, but your discs are fragile, disorganized, and easily misplaced. By backing up those games to an external hard drive, you can decrease your load times, protect those disc from harm, and always have your games on hand whenever you have a hankering for some Wii.

4. Use The External Drive's Controller to Connect Other Peripherals via USB

External drives work by having a controller than converts SATA or IDE connections to USB. If you have an old IDE optical drive that you only need every once in a while, you can take the circuit board from an old, IDE-based external drive enclosure and connect it to your computer via USB. It's remarkably useful for netbooks that don't have optical drives, or those really rare occasions you need to install something from CD on your newer, IDE-less computer.

5. Swap the External Drive with Your Computer's Drive

Sometimes, you'll actually buy an external drive for one purpose or another, but realize you don't need the space. In cases like this, you can actually open up the enclosure and replace your laptop's hard drive with the better one, and use your older, slightly outdated drive in the enclosure (you can even buy an external drive just for this purpose—it's remarkably cheaper than an upgrade from Apple).

6. Use an Extra Drive As a Scratch Disk

If you have a FireWire capable drive and do any kind of video editing, using it as a scratch disk instead of your internal drive can really speed things up. Caching files to your internal drive can put quite a load on it, because it's constantly reading and writing from the same drive. By shifting that cache to another drive (connected with FireWire or something speedy), you can increase the speed of your renders and exports, making you a happier video editor.

7. Backup Your Backups Using Windows Home Server

Local backups are great, but they're still vulnerable to lighting strikes, fires, floods, and other immediate disasters. While you can automatically backup your computers to a Windows Home Server, it's nice to have a backup of the server, too—even if it's a backup of critical files and not a full backup—to keep in certain, more protected places.

8. Clone Your Current Hard Drive

While backing up your data allows you to restore it should anything bad happen, using those external drives for direct clones of your current drive gives you a much faster solution. It requires more manual work, but in the event of a drive failure, you can be up and running again in no time (as opposed to reinstalling your operating system all over again and then transferring all your data, which can be done when you have the time to do so). We've walked through how to clone your hard drive in both Mac OS X and Windows.

9. Back Up Your Computer

If you haven't set it up already, one of the most popular (and most important) uses for an external drive is an automatic backup. Whether you're using Mozy, SyncBack on Windows, or Time Machine on OS X, an automatic, local backup is a must to make sure you don't lose any of your important data to the ever-looming possibility of drive failure.

10. Turn an Old Hard Drive Into an External Drive

If you don't have a ton of external drives lying around, you might still have a bunch of old internal drives, and the best thing you can do is put them in a USB enclosure so they see some use. Furthermore, this trick also works for upgrading existing external drives: if it dies or becomes too small to be useful, you can always swap the current drive out of the enclosure for a better one you have collecting dust.

What other tricks do you know about external hard drive? You can also share your tricks on the comments or send an email to kaushikpatil683@gmail.com

6 data recovery tools for SD cards, USB drives and more Have a damaged USB thumb drive or memory card?

6 data recovery tools for SD cards, USB drives and more
Have a damaged USB thumb drive or memory card? These applications can help you save your data.

As USB thumb drives and memory cards get larger and cheaper, it's getting easier to trust much more of your data to them. It's also much easier to mistakenly erase data or have them hiccup on you. And if you're in the habit of holding on to that data for too long -- for example, not transferring photos from your camera's memory card -- disaster is almost guaranteed to strike at some point. What happens then?
While there's no end of data recovery software packages out there, most of them are primarily designed to reclaim data from system drives. In this roundup, I look at the following six packages in terms of how well they recover data from mobile storage such as flash drives and memory cards: CardRecovery, PhotoRec, Recover My Files, Recuva, Remo Recover and Undelete 360.
Mobile storage devices can pose their own challenges for data recovery tools. A damaged device with no proper partition data might not mount correctly, making it impossible to use with tools that require a drive letter. Memory cards used in cameras can have data stored on them in oddball formats, such as Canon's CR2 raw-image format, a custom variant of the TIF format.
How we tested
For testing, I used two storage devices: a Transcend 8GB SDHC card (Class 6) and an 8GB Kingston DataTraveler flash drive. Both were formatted as FAT32 and loaded with 5.8GB of files, a mixture of image files in multiple formats (JPG, GIF, PNG, Photoshop), audio files (variable bit-rate MP3), Microsoft Office documents, ZIP archives and PDF files.
I tested them using the Windows versions of these recovery apps. (Some of these products also offer versions for other platforms, which I didn't test; these are noted at the top of each review.) Tests involved selectively erasing and recovering files, and attempting to recover all files after a quick format (one where only the directory information is erased, not each block on the disk).

Card recovery: CardRecovery is the most focused of the applications reviewed here: It exists mainly to recover files from memory cards used in cameras. The only file types it works with are JPG and RAW-format image files, and video and audio files (e.g., AVI, MPG, MOV, MP3, WAV). It will not search for documents, archive formats, some image formats (such as Photoshop or PNG) and other day-to-day file types.

On the plus side, CardRecovery offered the best detection of CR2 files I found. In addition, its wizard interface made the recovery process quite easy. To begin a scan, just enter a drive letter, a camera brand (optional) and/or a file type (also optional), and a destination folder in which to save the recovered files.
The results of the scan are shown incrementally, although there's no preview mode during the scan, which makes it harder to tell if a given file is in fact what you're looking for without stopping the scan. A full scan of each of my 8GB devices took just under 10 minutes.
Once the scan's complete, you can preview JPGs (but only JPGs) and the program window can't be resized, so you can't ever see more than six thumbnails on the screen at once. This makes it a little harder to deal with RAW-format files, especially since file names aren't recovered: It might be easier to just recover everything and sort it out later.
Because CardRecovery can only work with devices that have a drive letter, it may not be of much use if you're dealing with a card whose partition information is damaged and therefore can't be assigned a drive letter. (PhotoRec, in contrast, can work with any device even if there's no partition data.)
CardRecovery offers a free trial version that will scan media and find lost files, but you must buy the full version to recover them.

Hardware information 2

Removable Media Devices
If your putting something in your computer and taking it out is most likely a form of removable media. There are many different removable media devices. The most popular are probably CD and DVD drives which almost every computer these days has at least one of. There are some new disc drives such as Blu-ray which can hold a much larger amount of information then normal CDs or DVDs. One type of removable media which is becoming less popular is floppy disk.

CD¶
CDs are the most common type of removable media. They are inexpensive but also have short life-span. There are a few different kinds of CDs. CD-ROM which stands for Compact Disc read-only memory are popularly used to distribute computer software although any type of data can be stored on them. CD-R is another variation which can only be written to once but can be read many times. CD-RW (rewritable) can be written to more than once as well as read more than once. Some other types of CDs which are not as popular include Super Audio CD (SACD), Video Compact Discs (VCD), Super Video Compact Discs (SVCD), PhotoCD, PictureCD, CD-i, and Enhanced CD.


CD-ROM Drive

There are two types of devices in a computer that use CDs: CD-ROM drive and a CD writer. The CD-ROM drive used for reading a CD. The CD writer drive can read and write a CD. CD writers are much more popular are new computers than a CD-ROM drive. Both kinds of CD drives are called optical disc drives because the use a laser light or electromagnetic waves to read or write data to or from a CD.

DVD
DVDs (digital versatile discs) are another popular optical disc storage media format. The main uses for DVDs are video and data storage. Most DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs. Just like CDs there are many different variations. DVD-ROM has data which can only be read and not written. DVD-R and DVD+R can be written once and then function as a DVD-ROM. DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW hold data that can be erased and re-written multiple times. DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs respectively refer to properly formatted and structured video and audio content. The devices that use DVDs are very similar to the devices that use CDs. There is a DVD-ROM drive as well as a DVD writer that work the same way as a CD-ROM drive and CD writer. There is also a DVD-RAM drive that reads and writes to the DVD-RAM variation of DVD.


DVD

Blu-ray
Blu-ray is a newer optical disc storage media format. Its main uses are high-definition video and data storage. The disc has the same dimensions as a CD or DVD. The term “Blu-ray” comes from the blue laser used to read and write to the disc. The Blu-ray discs can store much more data then CDs or DVDs. A dual layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 50GB, almost six times thecapacity of a dual layer DVD (WOW!). Blu-ray discs have similar devices used to read them and write to them as CDs have. A BD-ROM drive can only read a Blu-ray disc and a BD writer can read and write a Blu-ray disc.

Floppy Disk
A floppy disk is a type of data storage that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible(“floppy”) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive. Floppy disks are a dying and being replaced by the optical and flash drives. Many new computers do not come with floppy drives anymore but there are a lot of older ones with floppy drives lying around. While floppy disks are very cheap the amount of storage on them compared to the amount of storage for the price of flash drives makes floppy disks unreasonable to use.
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Floppy Disk

Internal Storage
Internal storage is hardware that keeps data inside the computer for later use and remains persistent even when the computer has no power. There are a few different types of internal storage. Hard disks are the most popular type of internal storage. Solid-state drives have grown in popularity slowly. A disk array controller is popular when you need more storage then a single har disk can hold.

Hard Disk Drive
A hard disk drive (HDD) is a non-volatile storage devic

Hardware information 1

Internal Computer Hardware
Introduction
Computer Hardware is the physical part of a computer, as distinguished from the computer software that executes or runs on the hardware. The hardware of a computer is infrequently changed, while software and data are modified frequently. The term soft refers to readily created, modified, or erased. These are unlike the physical components within the computer which are hard.

When you think of the term computer hardware you probably think of the guts inside your personal computer at home or the one in your classroom. However, computer hardware does not specifically refer to personal computers. Instead, it is all types of computer systems. Computer hardware is in embedded systems in automobiles, microwave ovens, CD players, DVD players, and many more devices. In 2003, only 0.2% of all microprocessors sold were for personal computers. How many other things in your house or your classroom use computer hardware?


Inside Computer

Motherboard
The motherboard is the body or mainframe of the computer, through which all other components interface. It is the central circuit board making up a complex electronic system. A motherboard provides the electrical connections by which the other components of the system communicate. The mother board includes many components such as: central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), firmware, and internal and external buses.


Motherboard

Central Processing Unit
The Central Processing Unit (CPU; sometimes just called processor) is a machine that can execute computer programs. It is sometimes referred to as the brain of the computer.


CPU Diagram

There are four steps that nearly all CPUs use in their operation: fetch, decode, execute, and writeback. The first step, fetch, involves retrieving an instruction from program memory. In the decode step, the instruction is broken up into parts that have significance to other portions of the CPU. During the execute step various portions of the CPU, such as the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and the floating point unit (FPU) are connected so they can perform the desired operation. The final step, writeback, simply writes back the results of the execute step to some form of memory.

Random Access Memory
Random access memory (RAM) is fast-access memory that is cleared when the computer is power-down. RAM attaches directly to the motherboard, and is used to store programs that are currently running. RAM is a set of integrated circuits that allow the stored data to be accessed in any order (why it is called random). There are many different types of RAM. Distinctions between these different types include: writable vs. read-only, static vs. dynamic, volatile vs. non-volatile, etc.


RAM

Firmware
Firmware is loaded from the Read only memory (ROM) run from the Basic Input-Output System (BIOS). It is a computer program that is embedded in a hardware device, for example a microcontroller. As it name suggests, firmware is somewhere between hardware and software. Like software, it is a computer program which is executed by a microprocessor or a microcontroller. But it is also tightly linked to a piece of hardware, and has little meaning outside of it. Most devices attached to modern systems are special-purpose computers in their own right, running their own software. Some of these devices store that software (“firmware”) in a ROM within the device itself

Power Supply
The power supply as its name might suggest is the device that supplies power to all the components in the computer. Its case holds a transformer, voltage control, and (usually) a cooling fan. The power supply converts about 100-120 volts of AC power to low-voltage DC power for the internal components to use. The most common computer power supplies are built to conform with the ATX form factor. This enables different power supplies to be interchangable with different components inside the computer. ATX power supplies also are designed to turn on and off using a signal from the motherboard, and provide support for modern functions such as standby mode