My Insights

This advice is coming from a strong proponent of Windows Media Player - Ditch it! (For Video Playback at least)

I started using VLC Media Player a few months ago (thanks to Sarthak). For those who don’t know, my computer is slow with low RAM and almost all media players have difficulty playing even low-resolution videos on my computer.

VLC stands out of the crowd by allowing me and my crappy computer to enjoy full screen HD quality videos! I don’t know how VLC does it and I don’t care to find out. It is an amazing feeling to use a media player with such a light footprint and such a strong feature-set.

VLC also does an excellent job of managing codecs - I have not found the need to download a single codec ever since I installed VLC.

Check out VLC here.

I recently called AT&T wireless and told them that I had to travel internationally and needed my phone unlocked so that I could use a local SIM card in the country that I was traveling to. The customer service rep went ahead and instructed me on how to retrieve my IMEI number and then gave me an unlock code. It was that simple!It turns out that if the customer service rep cannot find the unlock code in their database then a support ticket will be created for you and the ‘unlock department’ will contact you within 7 days with the unlock code.Also, they will NOT unlock dual band devices that don’t work internationally.

I use a personal laptop and a work computer on a regular basis and tend to browse the internet during down times. I also have a lot of bookmarks in Internet Explorer that I wish to access while I am browsing - regardless of which machine I am using. Therefore I looked into different products that could essentially synchronize my IE Favorites across different machines. Up until now, I’ve been using Zinkmo and that has worked flawlessly in the background for me.

However, I recently upgraded to the latest version of IE7 PRO and noticed that IE7Pro offers bookmarks syncing as an online service. I decided to try it out and it seems to work just as seamlessly as zinkmo and it doesn’t place an icon in the taskbar notification area like zinkmo does.

So for now, I’ll be uninstalling Zinkmo and trying out the IE7PRO bookmarks synchronization for a while.

BlueSoleil is a Bluetooth manager that I use for my computer. However, Blue Soleil adds a plug-in toolbar in Outlook that is really hard to get rid of.

Unchecking the toolbar in the view toolbar settings will only remove the toolbar for that particular session. The next time you start outlook, the add-in pops right back up

HOW TO REMOVE:
Outlook 2007
Tools > Trust Center > Add-ins > Manage COMM Add-ins > Go > Uncheck the BlueSoleil Add-in

Outlook 2000/2002/2003
Tools > Options > Other tab > Advanced Options button > Addin Manager COMM Addin

About a month ago, I downgraded to XP from Vista. This is after using Vista on a daily basis for close to a year.

WHY? Most avid windows users know that windows installations tend to get bloated. In my personal experience, I’ve had to redo my Windows installation every 1-2 years on a regular basis. So after about a year of Vista, things had gotten bloated - REALLY bloated. It got to the point where I couldn’t watch YouTube videos on my computer.

This is not something that I blame Microsoft for. I think Vista is definitely more advanced than XP and I even miss some features of Vista (such as integrated search in the start-menu) after I downgraded.

I DO however blame the lack of support from third-parties. Sony was slow to roll-out the HotKey utility software for my computer. This meant that I couldn’t turn down the volume on my laptop or change the screen brightness by pressing a button like I could on XP. The lack of Video driver support for my integrated ATI video card was also a big factor.

In part I also blame myself for being a little ambitious and installing Vista on a Pentium 4 machine with a little less than 1GB of RAM. I also had a hardware issue where my processor would downgrade from 3 GHz to 1.6 GHz when the computer got a little hot. This hardware issue was alleviated to some extent by cleaning the ventilation fans.

In any case, I am back on XP and loving the little utilities that I had lived without over the past year. I would love to go back to Vista once I have a strong enough machine. I recommend that if you are buying a laptop, buy one that is designed for Vista so as to minimize compatibility issues with respect to various utilities and drivers.

If you can see this post then the nameserver change has successfully propagated to your DNS.

The primary motivator for the move was storage space. I was paying 4.95/month with Ace-Host for 5GB of storage. I have now moved to Web Hosting Pad for 5.95/month and now have 1700GB (1.7TB) of storage!

 Since I was spending the day moving my site, I decided to upgrade my bloggin platform from MovableType 3 to MovableType 4. However, after a few internet searches in an effort to re-evaluate my faith in MovableType, I started to like Word Press much more. The major reason I decided to switch from Movable Type to Word Press was the sheer number of plugins and themes available for WordPress as opposed to MovableType.

 Anyways, I am confident that I made the right decisions regarding my web host and my blogging platform. Comments are welcome.

Ok. Its not that bad but the title sounded pretty dramatic so it stays. I love Vista but one thing it broke was my volume buttons on my precious Sony Vaio and the sony utilities are just NOT there!

So if you’re stuck in a similar predicament with an IBM, Sony or some other manufacturer that refuses to live in the year 2007, then follow these steps-

1) Download and Install AutoHotKey

2) Edit the script and use the following Code-

#.::
Send, {VKFFSC120}
return

#/::
Send, {VKFFSC130}
return

#,::
Send, {VKFFSC12E}
return

3) Press Win+. to mute, Win+/ to vol-up and Win+, to vol-down

You can of course change the script to your liking or if you need help then post a comment