Author Archives: Administrator

Convert PDF to Word

With the recent hubbub about Adobe not allowing Microsoft to allow the Microsoft Word to convert PDF to Word I thought we would take a look and see what other products are out there that can do the trick.

According to CNET, the second most popular request they receive is “save to PDF”. I found a little tool here at Myzips that can accomplish this task for us: PDF to Word Converter. Sounds easy enough right? This company actually has a wide variety of PDF tools. Their PDF to Word product will run you around $40 but according the site it will “enable export the text, images and other contents from PDF document into word document, so you can reuse your PDF content, PDF to Word software will preserving text, layout and bitmap images in the generated word document.” Sounds like a winner to me!

Blue Tooth Technology

Bluetooth Technology is a technology that allows computers, PDA’s, mobile devices, and other devices to connect to each other via a short range wireless network. This allows users to sync and coordinate their varied mobile and stationary devices. Bluetooth wireless technology is robust, powerful and affordable. Bluetooth technology is a globally accepted standard available for free to all product makers. It is currently the only short range wireless technology available and will be available in up to 500 million devices by the end of 2005.

HP Photosmart AIO Color Inkjet 4180 Printer Review

This is one of the many printers in the 180 series. This is a far superior printer.

Let me first list the pros of the HP Photosmart 4180 printer. This is a color inkjet printer, and uses two ink cartridges, one for black and the other for tri-color, the colors are not separated into different cartridges, which could be a downside for some people, but for me it was fine. It has a brilliant 2.5” display, great for printing photos; it even has a separate holder for 4×6 photo paper. I was also impressed with the speed that the printer prints at. It will print at about 30 pages per minute on black in draft mode, which is pretty good for a sub $200 printer.

I could only find a few cons, the software takes about 15 minutes to load in and I could not get the OCR software to work, but it does sound very good on the package if you do get it to work. I also wasn’t that satisfied with the quality of the scanner, the photos look a bit dull, but text is great. I contacted them and they said the 5180, the next model up, produced much better looking photos, but I decided, it wasn’t worth the money. Overall I was satisfied with this AIO, except that I couldn’t get the OCR software to work, as I stated above and the scanner was a bit on the low-end side. I would also like to mention that the inks are quite expensive to replace if you can’t get them on sale. Overall, this is a great printer for the average home user, but probably wont suit a small businesses needs. On a scale of 1-5, I would rate this printer a 4.5/5.

ObjectDock

When one first logs onto a Mac OSX after a great many years of using Windows, one might be dazzled by the visual and functional appeal of the Mac Docker.

You may be surprised to find that you can also have it on your desktop PC. There are many PC third-party dockers, but the best so far are StarDock’s Objectdock and Punk Software’s Rocketdock. Objectdock’s premium version gives users the ability to create multiple docks, so you can have one on each screen. Objectdock and Rocketdock great appeal is that they can show opened windows in their docks and also a preview when windows are minimized. I found Objectdock more appealing because it can show notification area (the icons on the rightmost side next to the time clock of windows taskbar) on its dock. Objectdock seems to be the only one who has this cool ability. Rocketdock can utilize Windows Vista’s live preview (on minimized windows), which appears unique to Rocketdock. So whether you’re looking to emulate the look of a Mac on your PC, or you just want that cool dock look and feel, take a peek at these quality software products.

Just Try It

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!

Firefox Cheat Sheet

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.