Been having trouble with your PC? Applications freezing, wireless internet dropping constantly? If so, try this quick fix submitted by one of our visitors.

I am running Windows XP as my OS. I started the process by going to the “Start” menu and choosing My Computer – right click on your C drive – choose properties – tools tab – check volume for errors portion of the screen and click “check now” button. I had to shut down and restart, and then the process took a good 3 hours of unattended disk cleanup. The result was a rewriting of several system .dll files that had been partially written to bad sectors, and immediately after performing this time consuming task I saw much improved performance and system stability.

As you can see, its a pretty simple process, albeit a bit time consuming. However, if it gets the job done and the problems fixed then it is time well spent!

Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet. It is a nice collection of general keyboard shortcuts, navigational shortcuts, search shortcuts, mouse shortcuts, file locations, and tips and tricks. Here is a sampling of the keyboard shortcuts.

• Add Bookmarks: Ctrl + D
• Bookmarks: Ctrl + B
• DOM Inspector: Ctrl + Shift + I
• Downloads: Ctrl + J
• Full Screen View: F11
• Help: F1
• History: Ctrl + H
• Page Source: Ctrl + U
• Print: Ctrl + P
• Refresh Page: F5
• Refresh Page & Cache: Ctrl + F5
• Save Page As: Ctrl + S

We also want to show you this cool add-on geared towards web developers and codes. Web Developer – allows you to view cookies, css, forms, images and edit them on the fly. Contains a bunch of built in tools, such as HTML, Feed & CSS validators, DOM inspector, Java console and finally connection speed test. After installation the plug-in adds a separate bar under the bookmarks toolbar with the cute icons and all the tools are two clicks away. Also the plug-in duplicates some features of Firefox though making them more convenient you can disable cookies images css java script and popup blocker with a one click. Definitely this plug-in makes a powerful developer tool from a simple browser.

The disk crash is many PC users’ worst nightmare: All data lost, the last backup is from months ago, and all that downloaded software has to be downloaded again. And, saddest of all, all that personal data, the digital pictures, etc. Will that backup still be restorable? There couldn’t be a worse scenario, or could there? There could: What if your house burned down and your PC, including all backup media was destroyed? Now, those family pictures are surely lost. Of course, you could store those pictures on a DVD and take it to a friends’ place. In a different house, maybe a different part of town. Or you could take it to a bank locker. But who’d leave the house for that?

Now online backups, in particular Jungledisk, ElephantDrive, provide an alternative. Simple to install, they provide relatively low cost datastorage in large vaults run either by Amazon or other providers. With the possibility to mount network storage as a Windows drive, they integrate into the Windows Explorer, so even non-sophisticated users can access them, making them a much more feasible solution for these user groups than old school hosting providers.

Two major drawbacks should be mentioned: Both Jungledrive and ElephantDrive do not offer client side encryption. This basically means you cannot be ultimately sure that nobody can ever access your secret data. This can be overcome by encrypting your data locally, e.g. with GnuPG and then submitting them for backup. However, this requires some expertise on the user side, reducing the ease of use of the online backup solutions somewhat. If your data isn’t secret or you trust those providers, this drawback may be irrelevant for you.

The other drawback is of course speed. With the limited upload speed of retail DSL connections, a backup of your digital photo album can easily take several days. You can run those backups in the background and limit bandwidth usage, so you can continue to work with your PC and even run the online game of your choice, but this increases backup duration even more. However, since your photo album probably increases in size only slowly, and backup is incremental, these long durations are generally acceptable — for me. Your mileage may vary.

Windows Vista is where it’s at for anyone with a digital camera and at least one friend.

For anyone that emails digital photos, Vista has incorporated a great new feature to make the standard processes easier to complete. For those of us that have spent countless hours trying to reduce the resolution of our digital pictures to minimize file size to make it easier to send to friends and family on dial up, our savior has arrived in the form of Microsoft Vista.

Vista now allows you to highlight a group of photo’s to be emailed, click the “email” button on the toolbar, and choose the appropriate resolution size & approximate file size you wish to email. After clicking the attach button Vista brings up Windows Mail and automatically included the pictures into the attachment at the smaller resolution size. All you need to do is type in the email address you wish to send them to & click send. A task that used to take an hour now takes 15 seconds. It is simply amazing.