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.

Most modern hard disks that are available today comes with a built-in feature called Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T. (sometimes written as SMART). Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology or SMART. The hard disk's integrated controller works with various sensors to check various aspects of the hard drive's performance, from this information, S.M.A.R.T. determines if the hard drive is behaving normally or not.

This helps the operating system keep an eye on the health of the drive, by checking its operating temperature, how long it takes to spin up to full speed, whether it encounters any read errors, and so on. When a failure is anticipated by S.M.A.R.T., the drive is typically replaced and returned to the manufacturer, who then analyzes these dead drives to discover where faults lie and how to prevent them from recurring on the next generation of hard disk drives.

AVG Technologies has unveiled AVG LinkScanner for the Mac operating system. AVG LinkScanner for Mac is the first free AVG product designed for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard and supports Internet browsers Safari 3.x, Safari 4.x, Safari 5.x and Mozilla Firefox 3.x and higher.

According to AVG research, 99 percent of all malicious threats are delivered through the web and cannot be stopped with traditional antivirus software. These threats can come and go within hours and can live on familiar, big-name sites and even on third-party applications on popular social networking sites, without users even noticing. And with the growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, the bad guys are using these sites as their main vehicle for spreading malware.

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.

Have you ever wanted to keep a particular running program safe from prying eyes, but don't want to close it? For protecting your running programs from prying eyes in situations like this, you will need a small free utility called, LockThis! This tool is a perfect solution for people who often lend their PC to others, because with this tool they can keep programs or documents from other people eyes without the need to close them first. It is a huge time saver and helps increase productivity, if you really often lend your PC.

LockThis! is an extremely easy to use application. All you need to do to lock an application, is press the [Ctrl] key while minimizing the window that you want to password protect. On re-opening or maximizing the program, it will ask you for your admin password (default password is LockThis! but you can change it from the LockThis! administrator window).

WinTinker Password Generator is a light portable application with a download size of only 124 KBs, but don't be fooled by its small size! Under the hood, it is a very powerful password generator. In the past, we have seen how accounts got hacked because of using simple dictionary words as passwords. It becomes extremely important to make sure that the passwords that you are using for WEB 2.0, be it, social networking sites, online banking accounts or anywhere online are very strong, secure and hard to break.

While searching online for password generators you will get tons of apps. But the only problem with them is that the passwords that they generate are filled with random alphabets, numbers and symbols which is very hard to remember. For this reason, you may note down the generated password which renders the process of having secure passwords.