Archive for the Category ◊ Software ◊

Auslogics Disk Defrag
Sunday, March 07th, 2010 | Author: motorbelly

Disk Defrag – Fast and Safe Defragmenter for Your Disks

One of the things Windows PCs need is to be defragmented regularly as the fragmented files will begin to slow the computer’s ability to read large files quickly. I keep watch on Gizmo’s Freeware page and noticed this software just moved to the top of their recommendations for defragging. Consider keeping this in your Tools/Utilities of your XP and up Windows boxes.

A suggestion from Larry Cotton.  :)

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Online Graphic Editor now FREE!
Sunday, February 28th, 2010 | Author: motorbelly
Aviary – Creation on the fly / blog / Setting Aviary Free

Some months ago we had a meeting about online graphic editors and as often happens we discovered a service far better than the one planned for the meeting. Aviary.com has much of the function of Photoshop and Coreldraw all from your browser. And now they have found a new source of funding which allows them to offer all their services free, it used to be $25/year, still incredibly reasonable, but I like free.  :)

If you forgot our last meeting or weren’t there you may want to take another look at this service. It has a Firefox extension which will capture all or part of anything visible in Firefox and open it in it’s editor for resizing or other editing. It also edits sound files. Amazing stuff!

Aviary

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Sharedview.com Presentation Tomorrow
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Welcome to Microsoft SharedView | Microsoft Connect

(Click graphic or link above to visit their site)
This tool by Microsoft (Yes, can you believe I’m recommending it?) requires a Microsoft email address (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) to begin a meeting but it is not required for viewing. Install the software if you would like to be able to see the presentation tomorrow with us on your own machine whether you come to the cafe or not. (If you don’t have it already it may install MS .NET software it runs on)

If there seems to be interest we will setup a conference call for the folks not at the cafe. Call or write us ahead of time if you are interested in this tomorrow.

-=Larry Cotton=- webmaster@epcug.net

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November 23, 2009 Meeting – Windows Optimizing
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Since there has been a fair amount of mail list discussion about speeding up Windows I thought it would be a good chance tomorrow night to go through a presentation about what can be done and some free tools to do it. This is the presentation I plan to use. If you would like to preview the show, go right ahead, bring your thoughts or questions:
Windows Xp Optimization

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Online Graphics Editor – Sumo Paint – and Aviary
Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Update: We may not be able to use the cafe’s meeting room this week, Mon the 21st, in which case this show will be done Mon the 28th. Sorry folks…

Sumo Paint :: Online Image Editor :: Home

We had a great time last week just doing problem solving, but the consensus after the meeting was to try to do the graphics demo we had planned weeks ago. So this week for sure we will watch ways to ‘tune up’ photos and just plain have fun with graphic editors online.

For years graphic editing had been the ‘Mac” thing, Mac’s had more memory than PC’s and tended to crash less so folks in the know used them and software programmers wrote for them and the best graphic programs were Mac. But as PC’s improved and programming advanced these same programs became available for PC’s. Coreldraw for vector images and Photoshop for bit images became the standard, but they are expensive.

Now there are some very good Open Source alternatives, Gimp for bit images and Inkscape for vectoring and there are versions (ports) for Windows PC’s, Mac’s and Linux operating systems. If you really want practise graphic editing I recommend these programs. (And I recommend the commercial programs if you have the money.)

The latest advancement is now ‘Online’ programs that do the functions of the editing programs from in our web browsers. No need to install a program on our hard drives and not even to store our images. Websites now offer both from any browser, any computer, wherever we are we can access our work and edit it. And this will be our demo this coming Monday using the site linked at the start of this post, Sumo Paint. Come join us and learn what is available.

If you want a look in advance visit their site and view the video and read about its Features and FAQ’s.

If you want to see other sites with similar features check these out:

Another great review of these sites is at Lifehacker.com, let me recommend it as well.

Update: I can’t believe what is available these days! Just while writing this post I rediscovered Aviary.com. I’d looked at this before and not understood it all, but on second glace today I found it to be incredibly complete. So it and its tutorial videos will be part of our show.

Note to John – remember to bring the projector, this will be a good chance to make good use of it!  :)

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Hotmail now uses POP3 in Outlook Express
Tuesday, September 08th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Image via Wikipedia

How to add your e-mail account to Microsoft Outlook Express – Mail and Settings – Windows Live Help

If you use a Hotmail or MSN.com email address and have been using Outlook Express for your mail reading you may have noticed it isn’t working any more. Microsoft has switched away from the DAV mail collection method and requires everyone to switch to POP3 settings in Outlook Express now.

Actually they seem to want you to use the web interface at Windows Live.com or download their new program, Windows Live Mail and use it instead of Outlook Express. But if you use Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora or any other normal mail program Hotmail’s change to being POP’able is a very good thing.

So if you noticed your Hotmail isn’t coming into your mail program lately you need to change your server settings. Click the link above to learn how to setup POP for Hotmail.

-=Lare=-

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Suggested Software from CPCUG
Tuesday, September 08th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

CPCUG Recommended Freeware Programs

CPCUG is the Capitol PC User Group in Washington DC, a group a bit larger than ours. They have a page/presentation of some software recommendations for Windows XP and up that I think is very good. Use the link above to see it.

If you don’t have a firewall yet, if you have a system running slow there are some good suggestions here.

Try them out and let us know what you think of the programs at any coming meeting.

-=Lare=-

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Want a free copy of the new Windows 7?
Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

If you have been wondering about spending $200 for the coming upgrade to Windows, Microsoft has made a method available to get a copy, FREE!

They are holding meetings in cities across the nation and Portland will have one on Oct. 14.

If you can make it just sign up and be there for your copy.

Just follow this link: http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/Portland/default.aspx

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Google Voice Update
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

For those of you at the meeting two weeks ago I mentioned a beta service at Google called Google Voice. Since that meeting it has opened up and received an update from David Pogue at the NYT.

In short, Google makes phone numbers available to forward calls and voicemail to your phones, home, business, cell, whatever. In addition it will take voicemail and convert it to text and host it online is a very Gmail looking format.

The advantage here is you can give folks this new number for yourself and receive call at any or all your numbers (at once!) and screen them. If you tell it a number you don’t want calls from it will do the three tone ‘number no longer in service’ for those ’spam’ calls and if folks are leaving you voicemail you can here it ‘live’ as it is made if you wish.

Frankly this could change the way we use our phones for the better in my opinion.

Google Voice

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Windows 7 RC vs. Ubuntu 9.04
Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly


This week’s meeting is not our normal presentation night, that would be the second week of the month. But your group president experienced a laptop loss due to his cat’s getting spooked and kicking it off a table. So after making a purchase from Craigslist.com and finding the operating system was pirated I wiped it clean and installed the Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) to try it out and give my two cents to M$ about it.

Then, I made a new install CD for Ubuntu 9.04 and installed it to dual boot on this machine. Being able to compare the two systems on the same machine like this has been a lot of fun. If you join me at Monday, July the 13th’s 5:30 gathering at Aquilla & Priscilla’s Cafe (I had some *excellent* soup there last week!) I’ll be happy to demo these two ineresting systems on a new (used) $200 laptop. This is a Toshiba Satellite Celeron 1.6 with 1.3GigB RAM. Nothing too fancy so many of you may be able to get a reasonable comparison of what your own machines would be like with them.

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