My Technology Guide

If you dual-boot or multi-boot your PC, then it might be sometime a daunting task to edit and change the boot loader entries. But there are some utilities available for both Windows and Linux platforms that makes this daunting task easy.

EasyBCD is one such freeware utility available for the Windows platform, that helps you to take control of your boot loader easily. EasyBCD lets you customize your Windows Vista or Windows 7 boot loader settings easily. Using EasyBCD, setting up and configuring dual-boot or multi-boot options between Windows 7, Windows Vista, older editions of Windows like Windows XP & Windows 2003, Linux distros like Ubuntu, BSD, and even Apple Mac OS X is an easy task.

You have just brought a brand new PC or laptop or netbook that came pre-installed with Windows 7 from one of the major manufacturers, viz. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba, etc. But the problem that you face when buying from them is you won't receive any Windows 7 installation media with your purchase. Instead, you will receive either a "recovery disc" (if you’re that much lucky) with your purchase or you'll have a "recovery partition" built-in your machine.

You may ask what is the problem here, as you can easily recover your Windows 7 or Vista, using the "recovery disk" or "recovery partition." Well, the problem is, when you use the recovery disks/recovery partition to recover Windows 7 or Vista, it will delete all your files and restore your computer to the state it was in when you first purchased it.

Microsoft's new Windows Live Essentials or Wave 4 is ready to rock - in beta form. If you're interested in checking out the new releases, then visit the Live Essentials beta download page now. You can download Windows Live Essentials beta from the official website. Downloads are provided in seven different languages including English, Chinese, French and Spanish.

Two different clients are offered on the website, wlsetup-webd.exe will automatically download and install the Windows Live Essential applications, while, wlsetup-webc.exe offers a choice menu to install only specific applications as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

X-Setup Pro is the best Windows system configuration and tweaking utility. X-Setup Pro is extremely easy to use and it allows you to nearly change 1800 hidden Windows settings and configurations that no other tweaking tool provides. X-Setup Pro wizards help you when you changing critical Windows configurations.

You want to startup Windows as quickly as possible the next time you start your computer. After all no one wants to wait 3-4 minutes for Windows to completely boot and load all the components. Usually, if you keep your computer in Sleep mode or use the Hibernate feature, then you will notice faster computer boot up. But if you are constantly use this method and start Windows after keeping it into Sleep or Hibernate mode, you will notice that Windows slowly becomes sluggish.

Windows works better when it is completely shutdown and then started up again. If you reboot your computer once, you will find it again fast. This is because when you reboot Windows clears a lot of data from cache files, Windows also applies the pending updates, and programs and services that may have become non-responsive are stopped and then started again. If you want to get the benefits of a reboot and still start quickly out of a hibernation, then there is a little geeky tool to help you.

Microsoft has released a free download manager, dubbed the Microsoft Download Manager, is designed to integrate seamlessly with Windows 7. It is now available as free download from Microsoft. Microsoft Download Manager utility is designed to help users control their downloads beyond the boundaries of the browser. It is specifically designed for downloads from Microsoft pages on the Internet but it can be used for any HTTP based downloads.

The Microsoft Download Manager enables you to download files from the Internet in a more reliable and faster way than using a browser alone. Using the Download Manager makes it easier to download large files such as an application or multimedia files.

More often than not, when users try downloading very large files, they face all kinds of problems, especially in the context of an unreliable connection. In such situations a download manager comes to rescue the user and helps the user to complete any download tasks, a feature which is missing in the browsers.

Using Windows Task Manager and many other third-party task manager replacements you can never kill more than one process at a time. Sometimes, Windows built-in Task Manger fails to kill or terminate a process which is hanged or a process related to malware or other malicious programs. But, today I found a small, free portable application that can end multiple processes and also stop those stubborn processes which are hard to kill.

KillProcess is the application I am talking about. This application is "an assassin of the extreme kind". It can kill almost any process running on a Windows machine, which even includes running services in the computer system. KillProcess can even terminate protected Microsoft system processes without any hiccups!