The internet is everywhere. Literally. It’s in coffee shops, city parks, and likely every room in your home. If you have a smartphone, you’ve even got it in your pocket. It’s probably safe to say that you, like all the rest of us, take this constant connectivity for granted. But this ubiquitous access aside, you might not be getting the best browsing experience. Here are a few recommendations to help you remedy that!

Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

This browser is our top pick for a reason—it really does have it all. It’s super fast, easy to use, and has tons of features like tabbed browsing and thumbnailed site images to help you get what you need from the ‘Net. It’s got a neat mode called Incognito that allows you to open a browsing window free of your regular cookies and autofill information whose history won’t be saved, which is both secure and handy if someone else wants to check their email on your computer. It also opens each Incognito window in isolation, without affecting or requiring you close your other open windows. But the real feather in its cap is its stability: Chrome runs each open window as its own process thread, which means if the massive Flash game you’re playing in one window crashes, it won’t take any other windows down with it (like that important email you’re drafting). Other perks include synchronizable bookmarks, built-in reader view, and bundled Flash (so you don’t have to deal with those annoying Adobe update panes). The downsides? While Google has opened up the season for extensions, the options are still a bit less expansive than the competition. And you are, of course, giving a larger share of your internet presence (and info) to Google.

Mozilla Firefox (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

Firefox is the original alternative: a fast, open-source solution with more downloadable tools and add-ons than you can shake a stick at.  It has the full complement of convenience features like tabbed browsing, space for bookmarks on the toolbar, built-in reader view and customizable search bar, and synchronizable bookmarks. While it also has a private browsing feature, enabling it will force all other windows to close. And though it is easier to update than, say, Internet Explorer, it prompts you to update when you open the program and forces a restart (whereas Chrome downloads updates as you browse and applies them after you close). The biggest pain? It’s kind of a memory hog and can really slow things down if you browse for long periods without restarting the program or your computer.

Apple Safari (Windows & Mac)

Apple has quite a reputation for the sleek look of their interfaces, and their internet browser is no different. You can browse your site history and bookmarks with big, colorful Cover Flow thumbnails, use the reader view to strip ads and extraneous formatting from articles on the web, and even enjoy super-sharp text thanks to the font-smoothing on every page.  And while the aesthetic components of Safari are (of course) on lockdown, the rendering aspect is, like Firefox, open source. That means geeks of all colors can submit bug fixes and improvements as they find them, which helps build a more stable platform. The problems? Most of the really good, innovative stuff is reserved for Mac owners (check out Apple’s site to see how Safari interacts with Mail, Address Book, iPhoto, and the Dashboard). And remember how Steve Jobs hates Flash? Yeah. Though lots of non-Apple technologies can be accessed through “extensions,” some of them (cough, FLASH!) really slow the browser down. Also, the automatic update window is irritating in the PC environment. In OS X, you get all your system updates at once, so it’s no big deal. In Windows, it’s yet another popup demanding your attention.  And who wants that?

Opera (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

In a word? FAST.  Opera is blazing fast. Opera will load even the heaviest of pages, like CNN.com or Yahoo!, in the blink of an eye.  This super-speed is thanks to the fact that Opera multithreads every download, which is the technological equivalent of creating a widemouth bottle. Unfortunately, thanks to an ill-conceived attempt at creating a for-pay browser in its early days, Opera doesn’t have nearly the user base of Firefox or Chrome; so a lot of sites don’t bother to check for compatibility with it. There are also no add-ons or extensions available, so what you see is what you get.  Though we confess, those side-anchored tabs are pretty cool.

Internet Explorer (Windows only)

There is really nothing to recommend this browser.  If you’re still using it, please stop reading this article immediately and go download either Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer is full of security holes, slow as molasses, and its version of the new browsing standards (tabs, bookmarks on the toolbar) are clunky and unintuitive.  Internet Explorer is like a gaudy tie or a tacky sweater—you got it as a gift and you have to keep it, because there are those rare instances where you absolutely have to bring it out into the light. Like when Aunt Mildred’s visiting from out of town. Or you’re trying to fill in an “interactive” form on a shoddy government website. There are some times when, we confess, you will need Internet Explorer. But for all those other times, have something better at the ready.

For a more humorous (albeit more cynical) take on the five browsers we higlighted, check out CollegeHumor.com

Thanks to InternetBrowserSoftware.net for the image

In spite of all the wonderful things computers have added to modern life, they’ve given us some pretty rotten things too: sentient AI along the lines of HAL and SkyNet, diminished capacity for social interaction, FarmVille. But of all these modern inconveniences, repetitive strain injuries have to be the most prevalent, persistent, and downright annoying. From headaches to hand cramps, there are myriad ailments you can blame on your PC.

Including sleeping poorly.

Ever since computers stopped using interfaces made up of neon green fixed-width type on an empty black screen, the light emitted by your PC’s display was meant to mimic daylight. Specifically, the color temperature of most displays is set to around 6000K by default.  And if you leave your display’s brightness setting at the higher end of its range, it means your eyes are getting bombarded with an awful lot of photons.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare into the sun?

And burning holes into your retinas aside, staring long and hard at your computer screen after dark can actually affect your circadian rhythms—the biological clockwork that tells you when it’s time to eat, time to wake up, and time to sleep.  Since your body interprets the cooler temperature light coming from your display as sunlight, it thinks computer time equals party time, even if it’s actually nighttime and you want to retire shortly after that last round of Spider Solitaire.

So what’s a self-respecting technophile to do? Luckily, the kind folks who designed F.lux made it just for you.

F.lux is a simple, free application (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) designed to run in the background on your computer and create a gradually changing color overlay for your display to affect the temperature of the light it emits. It’s tailored to your geographic location and the kind of indoor lighting you already have to make its changes in time with the sun’s movements and to create overlays that look like the artificial lighting you already have. You can make the transitions a quick 20-second flip, or an hour-long fade. There’s even an option to disable the whole program for an hour at a time when you need to do color-sensitive work like photo editing or graphic design.

While F.lux doesn’t affect your display’s brightness settings, the less intense contrast from the overlays helps reduce eye strain in addition to helping your body clock remember what time it is.  It’s a sneaky utility.  You will barely notice it’s there, but take stock a week or so after installing it.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll notice you haven’t had nearly as many headaches as usual and your eyes don’t feel like they’re made of sand after hours in front of the computer.

And hey, maybe you’ll even sleep better!

Thanks to IRPC on Flickr for the image!

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

The first line of backups should always be local, an external hard drive or other device that your computer backups up to on a regularly scheduled basis.  If your system goes down it’s always faster to restore a large data set from a backup on site than it is to restore from the internet.

Local Backups

If you’re using Windows 7 (you have upgraded already, right?) you already have a great back up solution built into your system! Just get an external hard drive that’s at least as large as your internal drive (2 TB external hard drives are under $150 these days), connect it to your computer, go to your control panel and then click “backup and restore”

Then just follow the wizard to select your data, select the external hard drive and set the schedule and you can rest a little easier now.  With Windows Backup and Restore you can go back through all existing backups and recover individual files or whole directories.  This is especially useful if you make changes to a file or accidentally delete something and later realize you need the old version.  With a large enough backup drive you can go back months.

If you’re using an older version of Windows you can still backup your data, you just need to use some extra software to accomplish it. I’ve used Cobian Backup for years.  It’s a great free backup software that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of choosing how many full backups, incremental backups, scheduling and other options.  You can even configure multiple backups to different locations (multiple external hard drives, thumb drives, etc) so you can better organize your data.

If you’re using a Mac with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer you should definitely give Time Machine a try, like Windows 7′s Backup and Restore it comes built into your operating system.

Just like in Windows 7 you connect an external hard drive, and configure Time Machine and then just let it automatically back up your files. You can also use an Apple Time Capsule as your wireless router and backup hard drive.  That way as long as your computer is powered on and connected to your wireless network your backups will run on schedule!

Online backups

The advantage of online backups is that even if your computer and workspace are totally destroyed by natural disaster or massive theft all your data is safe somewhere on the internet.  Also with a backup solution like dropbox not only are your files backed up but you can also use it to keep files in sync between different computer and devices like Android devices and iPhones.  The down side is that unless you only have a little data to backup you’re going to have to start paying for a subscription.

Last year I wrote about a couple online backup options. An interesting addition to this list is crashplan.  They offer similar features to other online backup providers such as real-time backups, incremental backups to save time and bandwidth and the ability to go back in time and recover previous versions of files. One option that I really like is Backup to a Friend’s Computer.

It works like this.  You and a friend (or family member, or just another computer you own at a different location) sign up for a free crashplan account and link your computers together.  You then backup the files from one computer across the internet to the other computer.  So instead of using crashplan’s bandwidth and storage space you’re trading space with the other computer.  All your files are encrypted and the person on the other computer cannot open them in any way however if the unthinkable happens you can recover all your data safely using your credentials.

What other backup software or hardware do you use?  Let us know in the comments.

There’s been a lot of talk about Windows 7 since it’s launch, most everything has been positive (which certainly wasn’t the case after Windows Vista launched).  In this tough economic client people are asking themselves, “Why should I upgrade and what benefits will I see if you do?”  I’ve been running Windows 7 since August with their Release Candidate and installed the full version as soon as Technet offered it and I’ve found many improvements over previous versions.

(Be warned, this is a long post.  I wanted to get as much information in as possible.  The short story is if you’re getting a new computer definitely get it with Windows 7, if your computer is less than 2 or 3 years old I would recommend the upgrade).

Mainstream support for Windows XP is ending soon

Let’s face it, Windows XP was released in 2001 and although Microsoft has been pretty good about fixing bugs and releasing updates we all knew that at some point they would stop supporting XP just like they did with 2000, ME , 98, 95, etc.; however, Windows XP has had the distinction of being the most widely used operating system for such a long time I think many of us assumed it would last forever.  Unfortunately all things must come to an end and Microsoft’s mainstream support for Windows XP ends in April 2010, unless they release another Service Pack before then (we haven’t heard anything a 4th service pack, though).

Critical security patches will be released through 2014, but no new functionality will be added nor will any bugs get squashed.  It’s time to move to their newer operating system to get full support.

Faster boot

There’s been a bit of controversy over Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 boots faster than previous versions.  A fresh install of Windows 7 does boot much faster than Vista or even XP, although some people have noticed it slowing down over time.  Of course if you have dozens of programs that start when you turn on your computer that is going to slow you down.  I’ve found that Windows 7, unlike Vista or XP, is actually usable once you get to the desktop.  I’m not sure how they did it but the boot time from pushing the power button until you can actually do work has significantly reduced and that just makes the system feel faster.

Beyond that, sleep and hibernate modes both work faster and more reliably, with my computer coming out of sleep in seconds.  I only reboot when there is an update that needs it, but I’ve found that even after several months of use it still boots quickly.

Aero Peek

Aero Peek is a really handy feature.  Just hover your mouse over your taskbar and a live snapshot of all the active programs pop up, from there you can click on the snapshot and that will bring that window to the front.

If you hover your mouse pointer over one of the snapshots all other windows will temporally become transparent (you can see below the outline of the other two Firefox windows around the center one), highlighting the windows you are looking for and allowing you to easily find it.

Aero Snap

Another great addition is Aero Snap.  Aero Snap allows you to grab an open window and instantly re-size it so it takes up the left side, right side, or all of your screen.  Just click and hold in the title bar (about the menus) and drag the window to the far left, right or top of the screen and it will “snap” into place.  If you click and hold and drag the window out of that position it will remember it’s last size as well. You can also “snap” the window into location by using keyboard shortcuts.  Holding down the windows key and pressing the left arrow on the keyboard snaps the window to the left side of the screen, right arrow to the right, etc.  It’s really a time saver when working on a computer with one monitor, but the shortcuts are even useful when working with multiple monitors (you can move a window from one screen to the other using the windows and left and right keys).

Keyboard shortcuts

We’ve covered them before, but Windows 7 added a bunch of new shortcuts that can save you time, effort and mouse clicks when trying to get things done.

To see Microsoft’s list click here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts

Check out of other blog posts on them here: http://blog.nyctechguys.com/tech-blog/2009/10/windows-7-is-now-available/ and here: http://blog.nyctechguys.com/tech-blog/2009/07/useful-keyboard-shortcuts-in-windows/

Great backup service

Windows 7 comes with a really useful backup utility built in.  As long as you have an extra hard drive (external or internal) you can configure Windows 7 to make snapshot and incremental backups of your computer.  What this means is that your computer will make a copy of everything on your system and then at regular intervals make backups of anything that has changed.  What is really great is that it saves the backup as a drive image meaning that you can actually boot off your backup!!  Also, if your system dies you can restore from your backup and retain all your files, programs, settings and preferences.  Your computer will be exactly as it was before you had to recover!

Windows Search

The newest Windows Search is built into Windows 7 and has become really useful.  By default it indexes everything on your computer (email, files, etc), but also indexes all programs, control panel settings and other hidden options making it much easier to find whatever it is you are looking for.  Simply click on the start button (or press the windows key) and then start typing.  For instance, if I want to run Word, I can click the start button and start typing “word”.  Before I even get to the third letter in the name Windows Search has already found it and I can hit enter and start working.

Better memory usage and support for more than 4 GB of RAM

Windows XP (unless you were one of the very few people that ran the 64 bit edition) only supports a maximum of around 4GB of RAM.  Windows Vista 64 addressed more, but had many other issues related to RAM.  Windows 7 64 bit can support up to 196GB of RAM, although there aren’t any motherboards in the consumer market that can do that currently.  I have 12GB in my system and have never run out of RAM, no matter how many programs I have open.  Of course if you run Windows 7 32 bit you will run into the same 4GB limit as on Windows XP or Vista 32, however there really is no reason to run the 32 bit version unless you install Windows 7 on an old system that doesn’t support a 64 bit Operating System.

You can check the compatibility of your system for free using a tool on Microsoft’s site here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/en-us/default.aspx

Themes and personalization

Themes aren’t my cup of tea, but they can make your otherwise bland computer much more interesting looking and sounding if you are into that kind of thing.

The default themes that come with Windows 7 range between beautiful scenery and somewhat bizarre cartoon characters.  One thing that is really nice with Windows 7 is the built in ability to set a group of photos as your background and have them run as a slideshow.  Many vendors have also started coming out with themes (as well as small developers) and you can find many, many different styles of themes to give your computer the look and feel that’s right for you.

You can check out a nice sized gallery of themes at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize

UAC vastly improved

If you used a computer with Vista, you know one of the most annoying things about (and most often disabled) was Microsoft’s User Access Controls or UAC.  It’s that popup that asks if you want to allow your computer to do something you’ve likely done many times in the past (or legitimately when installing a new program, changing system settings, etc).  UAC was implemented to help keep your computer safe, however it was so annoying that most people disable it within the first week of owning their computer or just mindlessly hit yes whenever it pops up, totally negating its benefits.

Windows 7 still has UAC, but by default it is much more under wraps and only really asks for permission when you’re running a program as administrator, installing new software or making changes to the system settings; all good things.

XP Virtual Machine

A really cool feature that Microsoft added to Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is the Windows XP Mode.  It allows you (after a download or two) to run a copy of Windows XP within a virtual machine and install any software that won’t work with Windows 7 (to date I’ve found very few programs from the last 5+ years that won’t run under Windows 7).  Sure, a program ran within a virtual machine will run a little slower than one ran natively, but if your company uses a custom application that is business critical and they don’t plan to upgrade it anytime soon, Windows XP Mode is a perfect concession.

When it comes down to it Windows 7 actually *is* good.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/registry.htm

Generally if you like to tweak with your services and/or registry , you can sometimes forget to set them back. Or if things really go off kilter , you can just set them right back. Of course you are making backups of anything you change first …right? Generally I have used it when a computer has been hit by a Trojan. The new ones will disable as much as possible , creating havoc  for any administrator to get the system back up and running. I am also of the mindset that formatting is not necessary …..most of the time.

What is the registry-

The windows registry is a database that stores configuration settings for the windows. Services that run in windows can be configured in the registry. The files that are on the previously mentioned site are .reg files in a zip file. All you have to do is double click on the .reg file to import it into the registry proper.

I thin that the website has a slew of useful information and worth the read, check them out!

The vulnerability was used in the cyber attacks against Google, yahoo and others over the last couple weeks. If you’re running any versions of Internet Explorer please install any updates from Windows Update that are pending on your system or grab the update manually from Microsoft’s site.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002 – Critical

I love having multiple monitors. It makes working in multiple application so much easier. Most of the time I’ll have several browser windows, email, a couple servers, some windows explorer windows and other various things open and dual monitors makes switching between the programs much more fluid. What do you do if you don’t have the room (or budget) for a second monitor? Adding virtual desktops gives you almost the same functionality, for free!

What is the benefit of multiple virtual desktops?  For me, when I’m working on several projects at once virtual desktops allow me to segment the windows into groups and makes it so that I only see the windows that I don’t get lost in the shuffle of open apps.

I’m a big fan of a program called Dexpot.  It’s compatible with all modern verisons of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) and allows you to have up to 20 virtual monitors (the default is 4) with alpha transparency, fast screen switching options and the ability to move windows back and forth between different virtual desktops.

Dexpot is totally free, lightweight and fast.  Give it a try.

http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en

There are so many antivirus programs out there. It’s hard to know what is good and what is bad. For example, I will never place another norton antivirus product on a machine ever again. Why? Not only does it let viruses get through, but it can be so intrusive that it is a pain just to have sitting in the background.  Luckily there are researchers out there that test these products. In the past I have had some misgivings with the research as they have labeled certain antivirus programs as good , when I know from the field that they are horrible ( yes norton I’m looking at you).

Microsoft’s antivirus has been making waves, yes it’s free and its excellent. If you need a better antivirus , or any antivirus, I would recommend it. As so do independent tests. you can grab it here : Microsoft Security Essentials

You can grab the Pdf’s from this link : http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/main-tests

( That these with a grain of salt, they think that symantec is the bee’s knees , and that is just not the case)

Photo from netadptr0719 flickr stream