wutske

dead is dead, that's all I have to know when an environement crashes. If it's a hardware lockup then even this trick won't help ... you only create a lot of signals that are going nowhere to be interpreted by nothing .

bookmarked^2 . About the svchost process, try Process Explorer, if you hover over one of the many svchost.exe processes, then it'll show you which service it's hosting:

winrar isn't exactly what I'm looking for because it's uses the same principle as an encrypted container. And I've already did a search on several sites but I didn't find any. I even got to this search term in yahoo:

I'm looking for a small and free program that can password protect a folder. If this is possible, I'd like it to automaticaly ask for the password when someone wants to open the folder (so I don't have to open the program first to unlock it). I'm not looking for encrypted containers like TrueCrypt provides (already installed, but it's such a hassle because I do have a lot of folders I'd like to password protect).

you've posted this in the wrong section, Kapsery Internet Security is not freeware, it's trialware.

Useless software imho ... it has never detected something on my laptop (vista) (except that I have the security center disabled, but I know that because I did that). And yes, my laptop is connected to the internet and yes I do surf and chat a lot. Opera rocks

great site, features some tools I already have (and use a lot), but it's always great to try out new programs. I do miss faststone photo resizer on the list, it doesn only resize images (8+ resize filters), it can also watermark, add text (like EXIF info or just your name), adjust (sharpen, soften, brightness, contrast, heu, saturation, ...), crop, rotate and rename images. It supports png, gif, jpg, jp2, tiff and bmp

Cool, this is something I'm going to use more often , thx

mtnbluet, your talking about Intel while the real competitor is nVidia (AMD opens their graphics drivers, not their cpu drivers and tools).

omg, that's amazing , I always tought making such images would take hours of work. Nice tut samma

Faststone Capture can do that, but unfortunately, it's the only piece of shareware faststone has (the other great apps are all freeware). Link: http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

I did this in the GIMP, so I can only give explain exactly how you could do this in The GIMP ...So here's how I did it:1) load an image, now you have one layer, the background2) make a copy of the background layer (right-click on the background layer and select duplicate layer)3) Make sure this new (duplicated layer) is selected and apply a gaussian blur to it (filters>blur>gaussian blur). A 5px radius is okay.4) Add a layer mask to the same (duplicated and now blurred) layer. Right-click on this layer and select 'add layer mask', you'll get a pop up screen that asks you which color the mask should be, choose black (transparant).In the layer, channel, pads window you'll see a black box next to the layer preview of the duplicated layer, this is your layer mask. If there's a white rectangle around it, this means it's selected and everything you do is applied to the mask.5) Make sure the layer mask is selected and draw a white rectangle. You'll see that where you've drawn the rectanlge, the blurred layer will become visible.If you want to colorify it, do the following:1) add a new layer and fill it with the color you like2) set the layer mode to 'color'3) add a black layer mask4) select the layer mask of the duplicated (blurred) layer, press CTRL+A (select all), then CTRL+C (copy), then select the layer mask of the colored layer and press CTRL+V.Eventualy, you should end up with something like this:ps. The process is exactly the same for photoshop, except some things might be in a different location and might have a different name.

haha, lol, makes me remind of an old application that could create custom error messages (like the ones windows 9x used to give quite often ). So funny, it could even be operated over a network

Erightsoft Super can convert almost everything into something else, it can even make 3GP movies: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html miksoft has a 3GP converter too: https://www.miksoft.net/mobileMediaConverter.php

my bug list so far:1. sometimes, an explorer.exe process doesn't close when it's supposed to. It keeps running in the background and might cause some strange behaviour2. desktop doesn't refresh automaticly anymore, restart required ...3. Vista create thumbnails twice, first in low quality and then in high quality. Sometimes, after creating the lowq thumbnails, it replaces the lowq thumbnails by the default extention image insead of rendering the highq thumbnail.4. some random BSODs5. Vista changes folder views all the time without a reason, it has happend more than once that closing a folder and opening it again results in a different view. Vista also sometimes enables the grouping option, again without a reason.6. Happend a lot: when I open a folder, it briefly shows the content of another folder and then loads the real content of that folderI've already had more bugs than this list, but I can't remember them all . Despite these bugs, I'm still quite happy with Vista

Same opionion here, compared to µtorrent, it's nothing. It's not lightweigth, starting big downloads takes too long and speeds are below par and there's not DHT support to speed things up.

sometimes you have to do such things with old hardware, otherwise keeping old stuff isn't fun anymore . Nothing more fun than trashing old motherboards, smashing an old, useless LCD screen, dismanteling a dead hdd (using an EXTREME amount of force ).I sometimes do miss the real clicking sound of 3 500Mb HDDs working at the same time, but on the other hand I probably wouldn't be able to work as long as I can do now (don't forget these old hdds had very noisy ball bearings, producing the most annoying high pitched sounds). A light, ticking sound is the best for me, it's not annoying, but at least you know when your computer is slowing down due to a lot of hdd activity.

try RealVNC, it's free and works like a charm

Make a copy of the original layer and apply a blur effect to it. Add a layer mask to the same layer and edit it. Adding a white rectangle to the layer mask will make the blurred layer visible, while a black rectangle will make the blurred layer invisible.Add another layer and fill it with a color you like. Copy the layer mask previously made to this (colored) layer. Play around a bit with the layer modus to get the right effect.I hope my explication is a bit clear

The BIOS energy savings are overruled by windows afaik. The only thing people need is some sensibilisation, it's been said more than often, but everything you have to do is to completely power off your tv, hifi and computer when you don't need it. This doesn't mean you may not put your computer in standby if you don't need it for an hour, but at least turn everything else off. Same thing overnight, turn everything off (even better, connect all your equipment to a switch that you can toggle off when you go to sleep). About damaging your hardware, it's in fact true, but it wears out sooner rather than killing it instantly . Constantly starting and stopping a hdd is not good, constantly powering on and off the backlight of an LCD screen is bad, ...

Kinda useless imho, the only thing it does is changing the windows power management settings and that's something I can do myself w/o any trouble . Plus, the calculation of how much CO2 you've saved can never be correct (I doubt the app can calculate how much power your computer draws ... and it doesn't even know how much your monitor draws (CRT vs. LCD is a huuuuuge difference)).

Do you include the time for loading applications after you login or do you stop counting when you get the login screen ?

wow, you're not serious ? You'd prefer MSN Explorer above IE7 ? Afaik MSN Explorer is more like a skin around the Internet Explorer core. I've tried it once and immediatly disliked it, it was slow ... realy slow .Opera is indeed a good browser for general use, tough I think Firefox still supports more sites because of it's popularity (a good example is Google Picasa). Opera is a lot better for security reason ... not many people are using it so why would someone bother looking for possible exploits ?I can't give an opinion on Netscape, a friend of mine uses it and I must admit it looks good, but I don't know how well it renders websites.

Why getting a Canon ? Most camera's can take descent sunset shots, especialy if a scene preset is available (and a lot of cameras have such preset).Using a dSLR is indeed the best solution because of the big dynamic range of the big sensors, this allows you to still have details in the bright and dark area.

Impious is right about the lack of knowledge of most computer users and this lack creates a real mess. If every computer user was to be a "geek", then there wouldn't be so much problems w/ viruses, spam, ... or at least not like it is nowadays. I haven't used DOS a lot (we already had Win3.1 installed ) but I must admit that I sometimes miss it. But then again, I'm quite happy that things became more easy to do, I don't like wasting hours of my time just for setting something up, that's the reason why I don't want to switch to Linux anymore, I've already wasted to much of my time to get a descent system up and running ... but so far I've failed to do so .