Do More with your Browser’s Search Box

You can use the browser search bar of Chrome, Firefox and IE to do more interesting things like fixing grammatical errors, storing long strings of text or even for removing formatting from clipboard content.

The search box is located in the upper right corner of IE and Firefox while Chrome has this thing integrated in the address bar itself. The function is however the same – it offers you a convenient way to search using your favorite search engine.
Other than search, there are some more interesting uses of the search bar as well.
1. Avoid Spelling Mistakes
If you writing an email inside the browser and are unsure about the spelling of some word, you can simply type that misspelled word in the search box.
Google will immediately offer you the correct spelling as a query suggestion that you can copy-paste into your email message.
2. Clean-up Formatting from Copied Text
When copying content from a web page into an email message, you can first paste that text into your browser’s search box and then copy it to the clipboard.
This will automatically convert the rich text into plain text removing all the hyperlinks and other formatting that you don’t want to add to your email message.
3. Correct Grammar Errors
The search box can also help you fix grammatical errors in your sentences.

Say you sometimes get confused between words like ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ or between ‘advise’ and ‘advice.’ In that case, just type the whole sentence in the search box and it should save you from making that silly grammatical error again.
4. Search Box as a Notepad
The search bar can be used like a notepad as it automatically stores all your search queries until you clear them manually.
This is so useful because you can easily save pieces of text in the search bar that you may repeatedly need inside your browser later.
For instance, I have an airway bill number of a package that I can store in the search box by performing a search only once. Later, when I am on the shipping company’s website to track the package status, I can easily retrieve that number by simply typing the first few characters in the search box – there’s no need for me to hunt for the email that has that tracking number.
5. As your Password Manager

Ever since my Gmail account got hacked, I have switched to a very long and complex password. Now it may be hard for someone to guess that password but it is equally hard for me to type that lengthy string correctly especially when everything in a password field is represented as asterisk characters.
I therefore store this ‘complex password’ in the search box. Whenever I am need my my Google Account credentials, I simply type the first few characters of the password in the search box, the string appears in the drop-down from where I can copy-paste it into the password box. Here’s a demo:

This method saves time but, obviously, it is not recommended for people who work on a shared computer.

Thankyou@dattu.

How to Create a Virtual Machine of your Windows Computer

Learn how you can create a virtual machine of your existing computer with all the software programs. You can open this virtual machine on any computer using Virtual PC, VMWare or VirtualBox from Sun.

Virtualization, in simple English, is a useful technology that helps you run multiple operating systems on the same machine.
For instance, if you are running Windows 7 on a computer, you can create virtual machines for Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux and run these operating systems on your existing Windows machine just like any other Windows application.
Related: How to Install Windows 8 as a Virtual Machine

How to Create a Virtual Machine

Windows Virtual PC, Virtual Box and VMware Workstation are some popular applications that allow you to create new virtual machines on a Windows PC but the only problem with these programs is that they require you do everything from scratch.
That is, if you want to create a new virtual machine, you will have to install the whole operating system first using the original installer DVD and then configure it with your favorite programs. This can be both time consuming and difficult.
What if you could use your existing Windows computer, that already has all your favorite programs installed, and turn into a virtual machine?

Convert your Computer into a Virtual Machine

While it has always been possible to convert an existing hard drive into a virtual machine, the process was difficult and often required expensive programs.
Well, not anymore. There’s a new utility from Microsoft that makes it both simple and free to convert an existing installation of Windows into a virtual machine ready to run on any other computer.
Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has released a simple application called Disk2vhd, that lets you easily migrate an existing computer to a virtualized hard drive (VHD). It’s a tiny utility doesn’t even require instillation.

Create Virtual Hard Disks with Disk2VHD

When you run Disk2vhd, it will immediately show you all the drives and partitions on your computer that it can migrate to a VHD.  Simply select a drive that you wish to create a VHD file from and click “Create.” Disk2vhd will convert the hard drive into a VHD file even if the computer /drive is currently in use.

When the Virtual Machine VHD file is created, you can run it in any desktop virtualization program including the free Windows Virtual PC, Virtual Box, or VMware Player. You can also mount the virtual machine as a standard hard drive in Windows 7, and can even boot from it if your computer is running Windows 7 Ultimate.
You may use Disk2vhd to create virtual machines of your Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and higher machines, including x64 systems.

Usage Scenario

Let’s say you have a computer that is already running all the software programs you frequently use, but you now want to move to a new computer or upgrade your operating system. You can then consider creating a virtual machine of your old machine using the Microsoft utility and this will help you use all your favorite programs (with the same settings) on the new machine.
You can also use virtualization to create a ghost image of your hard drive in a single file and this will be handy in the event of a disk failure.
Disk2vhd is an useful tool that will make it much easier for you to enjoy the benefits of virtualization without being too technical.

Thankyou@dattu.

Pick the Right Google Translation Widget for your Website

Google Translation Widgets are available in four different flavors – as a JavaScript based Language drop-down, as a overlay toolbar, as AJAX for in-place translation and as plain HTML . This article will help you pick the right Google Translator button for your website.

Google Translation Widgets are available in four different flavors – as a JavaScript based Language drop-down, as a overlay toolbar, as AJAX for in-place translation and as plain HTML. This article discusses the pros and cons of each option to help you pick the right translator button for your website.
If you looking to add language translation functionality into your website so that non-English speaking visitors can read your pages in their native language, you have a couple of good options to choose from.
Google Translate, Yahoo’s Babel Fish and Microsoft Translator (Bing) provide ready-made translator widgets that you can integrate in the body of your site using simple copy-paste. We’ll however focus our attention on Google Translation only since the other good choice, Microsoft Translator widget, is not public yet. Babel Fish has been around for ages but we’ll skip that widget as well since it supports only a limited number of language pairs.
Before we discuss the various options for integrating Google Translation into a site, you should check this online demo page and play around with each of the examples to understand how they’ll look and function on your site.

Google Gadget for Translation

Google Gadgets – This a JavaScript based widget that supports all languages and is easy to implement but the problem is:

• All the language choices are displayed in one giant drop-down menu and there’s no way to remove some options from the list (unless you create a new gadget by changing the XML file manually).
• The Google Gadget will open the translated page in a new window and visitors will therefore have leave your page after translation.

HTML Widget with Language Flags

While using country flags may not always be the best option to represent languages (as some countries – like India – can have multiple languages and some languages – like English – are spoken in multiple countries), if you still prefer to have flags in your Google Translate widget, here’s the code.
These are simple HTML tags so you can add /remove languages or completely modify the look of the widget using CSS styles. You can also replace the graphic images with text and this may be a good option for sites /blogging platforms that don’t allow JavaScript code.

Google AJAX Translation with Cookies

With the AJAX Language API, your visitors can perform inline translations without leaving the page or even reloading it.
The other advantage with AJAX based translation is that it will not rewrite the internal links on your web pages after translation. This is helpful because if someone decides to bookmark or share a translated version of your page, they’ll still be using your original URLs and not that of the Google Translate website (in case you haven’t noticed, when you translate a page with Google Translate, it changes all the links on that page by default – see example).
Advanced users may incorporate the jQuery Translation plugin into their site. This plugin uses cookies to remember the language preference of a visitor. For instance, if a visitor decides to translate your site from English into French, the cookie will remember this choice and the visitor will automatically see all the pages in French the next time he or she visits your site.

Google Translate Bar with Auto-Detection

Google has released a new widget (they forgot to give it a name so we’ll refer to it as the Google Translate Bar) that not just looks great but allows inline translation as well.

Why you’ll love the Google Translate Bar
1. It appears only when required – The bar can auto-detect the language of the visitor’s browser and if this is found to be different from the language of your page, it will show up automatically on your page.
2. It wont alter links – Like the jQuery plugin discussed above, the Google Translate Bar too won’t modify any of that links on your page which is great if people decide to share your translated pages.
3. Pick few languages – Google Translate now supports 50+ languages but there’s little point in adding so many languages to you language drop-down menu. You can use Google Analytics (choose Visitors -> Languages) to determine the top 20 languages that your visitors have configured on their computers.
Just add these languages to your Google Translator widget and ignore the rest. I have used a similar technique for the translator on my site (see the globe icon near the site’s logo).
Why you may not love the Google Translate Bar
The downside is that the new Google Translate bar requires the Flash player so if someone is viewing your site on an iPhone or a browser that doesn’t support Flash, they’ll still see a link to translate that page but it won’t work as expected.
The other issue with Google Translate Bar is the design – it’s beautiful but they have definitely not optimized for small screens like that of netbooks.

Conclusion: Google AJAX API or Google Translate Bar

While implementing Google Translate Bar is easy, the AJAX API solution gives you more control. For instance, you can translate pages without showing that big overlay bar and second, you can prevent certain areas of your site from getting translated (like the navigation bar or the footer).
You can auto-detect the browser language of a visitor using either of these methods.

Thankyou@dattu.

How to Hide the Data on your Computer

Learn how to hide private files and folders on your computer using free tools. Maybe you don’t want mom to see stuff you have downloaded from the Internet.

You may want to hide some files and folders on your computer for various reasons. Maybe you don’t want mom to accidentally stumble upon all the stuff that you have downloaded from the Internet. Or you share the home computer with an inquisitive brother and would not like him to view your private files. Or maybe it’s your work computer and you are worried that the system administrator may remotely access your files.

Hide your Data from Prying Eyes

Here are some ways to hide your data on the computer from other people:

Put your Sensitive Files in the Cloud

The easiest approach would be that you use a USB Flash Drive to store your confidential files and not the computer’s hard disk. USB disks are inexpensive – you can get a 16 GB disk for less than $10 – and some are so thin that they will easily fit in your wallet like a credit card.
The next option is that instead of storing the files on a physical disk, you upload them online to places like Google Docs (1 GB), Windows SkyDrive (25 GB) or Box (5 GB). Dropbox is another good option for online file storage but because the service synchronizes files automatically with your hard drive, you may want to avoid it on a common computer.

You can also use your web email accounts to store files – attach files to a messages and email it to yourself. The maximum size of files that you attach to an email message in Hotmail is 10 MB while the limit is 25 MB in the case of Gmail.
If you are planning to store EXEs or other prohibited file types in your mailbox, make sure that you change the file extension before attaching as the Gmail scanner will otherwise reject your message.

Hide Files inside Private (Invisible) Folders

If you wish to store your confidential files on the computer’s hard disk itself and not in the cloud, you have several options as well.
You can put all the secret files that you want to hide in one folder and then use a utility like My Lockbox to make that folder invisible on your hard disk. Once you hide a folder, it won’t appear in Windows Explorer and the only way to access the contents of that protected folder will be through My Lockbox.
The free edition of My Lockbox can lock one folder but if you would wish to hide multiple files or folders on your hard disk, use the free Winmend utility. Here you have the option to hide folders as well as individual files and someone will have to know your password to read, edit or erase any of these hidden files and folders.

Hide Files and Folders by Camouflage

Your curious friend is less likely to open a folder that resembles the Recycle Bin and even if he does, the real contents of that folder won’t be revealed.
That’s the logic behind Disguise Folders, a free Windows utility that you can use to easily disguises any folder as a system folder – like the Control Panel, Recycle Bin or even the Fonts folder. When you open any of these “disguised” folders inside Windows Explorer, they’ll open the folder corresponding to their appearance but if you open the same folder through Disguise Folders, it will reveal the actual content of that folder.

Hide Files using the Steganography Technique

The other option to hide files and folder on your computer is steganography – it’s like embedding documents, images, and other files into another unsuspecting file – like your kid’s photograph.
The idea is that you can embed your private files into another file which could be a JPEG image or an MP3 audio file. If you wish to hide an entire folder into another file, just compress into a zip file. When someone double-clicks these “container” files, the image or MP3 will open in the default media player but internally, they are hold all your private files.

You can hide files inside regular MP3s or JPG images using the simple copy command or make use of this free utility called Our Secret. It work like this. You pick a carrier file – it could be a JPEG image or an audio file – and then select one or more private files that you want to hide inside the carrier file. The next step is optional but you can also encrypt the contained files with a password.
Your private files will be secretly bundled inside the carrier JPEG (or MP3) and only when you re-open this carrier file inside Our Secret, the hidden files will be decoded. If you use the DOS copy command to hide the files inside another image, the contained files can be extracted using any Winzip like utility without requiring any special program.

The Most Secure Way of Hiding Files and Folders

While the above utilities do a decent job of hiding your files and folders on your computer, they aren’t the most secure choices available as they lack encryption. If you are really serious about protecting your files from snoopers and hackers, you should use a powerful encryption software like TrueCrypt or SafeHouse Explorer (I find the latter more user-friendly).
Once you launch SafeHouse, it creates a hidden storage area (or an encrypted volume) on your hard disk to hold all your private files and folders. The size of this volume can be adjusted based on your requirements. You can access this virtual drive just like any other drive inside Windows Explorer but the drive and the folders inside are completely invisible until you enter your password inside SafeHouse.
Here’s a detailed tutorial for beginners on how to protect files with encryption using SafeHouse. You can use the utility to protect files on your hard disk and also on your removable USB disks. Your files are protected using the strongest-possible encryption method available but that also means that if you forget your password, it will be impossible to recover your hidden files.

Thnakyou@dattu.

Send your Gmail Attachments to Google Drive

You can apply the #GoogleDrive label to any Gmail message to quickly save all the attachments in your Google Drive.

Imagine this. You are reading a Gmail message on your mobile, the message contains one or more file attachments, you apply a label (say GoogleDrive) to that message and automatically all those attachments are saved to one of the folders on your Google Drive.
And since Google Drive will automatically synchronize with your desktop folders, the saved email attachments will instantly download and become available on your local disk as well for offline viewing.

Save Gmail Attachments in Google Drive

You don’t have to install any extensions and the technique will work just fine in the web and mobile version of Gmail (including any of your Gmail Apps that support labels).

Setting the Stage

If you would like to have a similar setup for your Gmail and Google Drive, all you need is a minute. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Assuming that you are logged in to your Google account, create a copy of this sheet in your Google Docs (now Google Drive).
2. Open the sheet and you should see a new Gmail menu – click Initialize and grant the necessary permissions. This is your sheet (see source code) and you are not sharing your Google credentials or data with anyone else.
3. Next go the Gmail menu again and select Run. Close the Google sheet and you are done.

Behind the Scene

Here’s how the program works. The Google sheet will monitor your Gmail mailbox in the background (every two minutes) and as soon as it finds any message that has a label GoogleDrive, it will automatically save all the attachments in that message to the Gmail folder on your actual Google Drive.
Once the basic setup is ready, apply the label GoogleDrive to any of your email messages in Gmail and the attached files should become available in your Drive (both online and offline) in the next few minutes.

Troubleshooting tips

If you are getting errors like “Service invoked too many times,” you can increase the trigger duration. Open the same sheet in Google Docs, go to Tools –> Script Editor and then choose Resources –> Current Script Triggers. Change the value of Minutes timer from “Every 5 minutes” to say “Every 15 minutes”.
If you would like to stop the script from running in the background, go to the same trigger screen and simple delete the “SendToGoogleDrive” time trigger.
Alternatively, you can also follow the manual route to save attachments in Docs.

Thnakyou@dattu

How to Export Email Addresses of all your Facebook Friends

Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll come across quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.

There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.

Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.

The problem is that none of these apps can download what  you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.

Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.

Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.

You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.

Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Create your own Google Maps

Would you like to create a custom Google Map of all the wonderful cities that you have visited so far. Or maybe an annotated map that offers easy driving directions to the wedding venue? Or maybe you have customers in different parts of the world and you would like to display testimonials on one Google Map.

These are just some of the many scenarios where you may want to build your own maps. Let’s now look at some of the best online tools that make it easy for us to create custom maps in the browser without requiring any programming knowledge.

How to Make Custom Google Maps

One of the easiest way to create custom maps is through the Google Maps website itself. Open maps.google.com and click Create Map under My Places (see screenshot). Next search for a place, or drop a placemark manually, and save it to your custom map. Repeat until you have added all the places to the Google Map.

You can later change the style of individual pins, add rich-text descriptions, photos and videos to a location – these will show up when someone clicks the location pin.

The same “My Places” option in Google Maps can be used for creating a directions map. In that case, choose the “Draw a Line” tool and move it along the desired route. Double-click to finish the drawing. Here’s a nice video tutorial that will guide you through the process of creating custom maps with Google Maps.

Create More Accurate Route Maps

If you have a smartphone, you may also use GPS recording apps like My Tracks (Android) that log your location at different times and then create a complete route from these different points. Drive to the starting point and hit the record track button on your phone. Once you have reached the destination, stop recording and the app will export the route as a Google Map.

The other option for drawing direction maps is QuikMaps. It basically converts Google Maps into a whiteboard and you can scribble routes on the map just like you draw freehand on any canvas. Once you have sketched the route, export it as a KML file which can be imported into Google Maps or Google Earth for easy publishing.

Create Google Maps from Excel Sheets

One slight disadvantage with the Google Maps tool is that they do not let you enter places in bulk. Yes, there are options to import KML and geoRSS files but how do you create these files in the first place?

Enter BatchGeo – an online tool that can import location data from a spreadsheet table and marks those address on a Google Map. You can copy-paste postal addresses or the latitude and longitude coordinates and BatchGeo will map them all after decoding. It’s useful tool but you cannot export the map with the free account.

Add Animation to your Google Maps

You may see flight tracking maps where multiple airplane images seem to move along different paths on a single Google map. If you would like to have something similar for your own Google Map, check out Animaps.

With Animaps, you can quickly create animated markers that move along a pre-defined route over the map. You can have multiple markers on the same map and their respective playback speed can be controlled as well.

Custom Google Maps for Advanced Users

Advanced users can create customized Google Maps by simply changing a few parameters in the maps URL. The Static Maps API has a complete list of parameters supported by Google Maps along with a few examples. The big advantage with static Image Maps is that you can modify them pretty quickly and they are easy to embed as they they do not rely on IFRAMES or JavaScript.

Also, if you would like to create personalized Google Maps that look very different from the standard maps and have custom data, follow these code samples in JavaScript.

Thankyou@dattu

How Much Electricity Does Your Computer Use?

If you are curious to know the exact electricity cost of running your laptop or desktop computer all day long, here’s a quick guide.

Step 1: You first need to calculate the total power (in kilowatt) that’s consumed by your monitor, CPU, graphic card and other components of the computer.

Don’t worry – you don’t have to do these calculations manually. Joulemeter is a free software from Microsoft that can quickly estimate the power consumption of your computer based on the screen’s brightness, the microprocessor, etc.

Step 2: Now find the retail cost of electricity (commonly known as price per unit or price per kWh) in your part of the world. You can know the electricity cost per unit either from your last month’s electricity bill or check the official website of your power distribution company (search for electricity tariffs).

Once you have the two numbers, just multiply them to get an approximate idea of your computer’s electricity bill. I say approximate here because we are ignoring the power consumed by the modem, router and so on.

The Total Electricity Cost of Running a Computer

Let’s take a practical example.

Assume that your computer monitor has a power rating of 50W. It will therefore consume 50×1/1000 or 0.05 kWh energy if you use the monitor for one hour. Now if the price of electricity in your region is 10¢ per unit, the total cost of running that monitor would be 8 x 10 x 0.05 or around 4¢ for an average eight-hour workday.

The monitor is just one component of the computer – you can use the above-mentioned Joulemeter software to calculate the total power consumed by all the various components of the computer and then multiply that number with the price of electricity to know the average running cost of the computer.

PS: The Joulementer application may upload certain anonymous information about your computer such as type of CPU and utilization; applications running; hard disk size and type; memory size and type; or the name of the Internet service provider and the IP address of your computer.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Free-up Disk Space on your Windows PC

The cost of digital storage is going down and most newer computers ship with 500 GB to 1 TB of hard disks that are big enough to store all your files. However, if you are using Windows on an old computer with limited disk space, here is a list of things you should do to instantly recover some free space.

1. The Obvious Methods to Free Disk Space

a. Use CCleaner to quickly clear your Windows recycle bin, temporary Internet files, log files, memory dumps and other stubborn files that don’t show up in Windows Explorer. CClean also provides an option to clean your unused Windows Registry keys and your browser cookies but that won’t save any disk space.

b. Use Revo Uninstaller (the free version) to remove software programs, game demos and other stuff that you no longer use. Revo has a useful “hunter mode” to help you uninstall programs that are not listed in the “Add/Remove Programs” section of the Control Panel.

c. Use either WinDirStat or Space Sniffer to locate files that are taking the maximum amount of space on your hard disk and either erase the unnecessary ones or move them to another partition. You may also use Windows Desktop Search to easily find the largest files on your system from Windows Explorer.

d. Use Duplicate Cleaner to find duplicate files on your hard disk. These may include videos, documents, MP3s, zip archives, images and all other types of files. Duplicate Cleaner compares the MD5 hash of files – not just the file names or their byte size – and is thus pretty accurate at identifying duplicates. Another good alternative for removing duplicates is Duplicate File Finder – this is more suitable for novice users.

e. Check your downloads folder and get rid of all the program installers, driver packages, ISO files, IPSW files, virtual machines, and other bulky files that you may have downloaded from the Internet.

f. If you enjoy watching video podcasts, it may be a good idea to delete old episodes from the disk. iTunes, Zune and most other podcasting software offer easy options to automatically delete podcast episodes that either too old or have been watched.

g. iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users should consider deleting device backups from the computer to reclaim space. Open iTunes –> Preferences –> Devices and delete all backups of your iOS devices but for the most recent one.

h. If you have been an Outlook user all your life and only recently migrated to Gmail, you can backup Outlook’s bulky PST files to Gmail and then move them to another drive for safekeeping. All your old emails can be easily access from Gmail itself.

2. The Not-So-Obvious Ways to Recover Free Space

a. Get Rid of the Shadow Copies

When you install new software program, update device drivers or apply patches and hot-fixes on your computer, Windows will automatically store a snapshot of your system before making the changes. This helps because if something stops working after the installation, you can easily restore your system to the last working state.

Other than system files, Windows also stores backup copies of data files (like documents, pictures, etc.) on your computer which may come really handy if you accidentally modify or delete the original files. Technically, these are known as shadow copies and the feature is available in all editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If you have been using your computer for some time, the disk space consumed by these restore points and shadow copies may easily run in gigabytes. You can either remove all the restore points from your system or, if you would like to play extra safe, you can keep the new restore points and just get rid of the old ones.

Click the Windows Start button and type cmd in the search box (not the Run dialog). Now press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open the command prompt with Administrator privileges. Click Yes if you are shown the User Access Control Window.

Now type the following command to remove only the old shadow copies:

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest

Or, if your system is working normally, use this command to remove all the shadow copies.

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all

Command Line is quicker but if you prefer the visual option, launch Disk Cleanup from the Start Menu and choose Clean up System Files. Switch to the “More Options” tab and choose “Clean up” under System Restore and Shadow Copies to delete all but the most recent restore point on the hard disk.

b. Make the Service Pack Permanent

When you installed Service Pack 1 (SP1) on a Windows 7 machine, it saves the installer packages in c:\WINDOWS\WinSxS folder. These would be required in case you want to uninstall SP1 later but if that is unlikely to happen, you can remove the SP1 backup files and reclaim some lost space.

Launch Disk Cleanup, choose Clean up System Files, select “Service Pack Backup Files” and delete. Alternatively, you may run the following command as an admin:

c:\>dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

You may have to reboot the machine after the dism command. If you are on Windows Vista, you may also use the Vista Cleaner utility to clean the Service Pack installer files.

c. Reserve Less Space for Restore Points

Windows will continue to save new restore points until all the disk space reserved for saving restore points is filled up. That means if you have less reserved space, the old ones will get deleted more quickly to make room for new restore points.

Go to Windows Start –> Run and type sysdm.cpl to open the System Properties dialog. Click the “System Protection” tab, choose your current drive (C:) and click Configure. Set the Max Usage anywhere between 3% and 5% of the total disk size. Apply the changes.

Now that you have recovered some important space, go back to the “System Protection” tab and click Create to to capture of snapshot of your system in its current working state – just to be on the safe side of things.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Completely Remove Chat from your Gmail

If you are like me who uses Gmail for emails but not for chatting, there’s a simple setting that will help you completely remove (and not just hide) the chat box from your Gmail mailbox.

Go to your Gmail Settings page, switch to the Chat tab, choose “Chat Off” and click the “Save Changes” button. Alternatively, you may use this link to directly access your Gmail Chat settings page. You can re-enable chat in your Gmail by using the “Chat On” option.

This setting to disable chat may have been available in regular Gmail accounts for some time (am not too sure) but it was only recently added to Gmail for Google Apps accounts.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Edit PDF Files without Adobe Acroba

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf). There are several reasons why the PDF file format is still so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, portfolios, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it cancreate PDFs.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.

We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one, please refer to this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.

You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.

With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.

The tool can also be used for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata cum bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.

[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.

Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.

If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.

First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer cum editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.

Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape

With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.

The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with thePDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.

Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.

The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.

Thankyou@dattu