Edit your photos or images using Paint.NET 3
There are plenty of free photo views and basic manipulation tools on the market. There are few fully-fledged photo editors. The Gimp is one, Xara XS is another free tool. These applications enable you to touch-up your photos, edit images and convert between formats, free of charge. Of course, there's a basic paint tool included within the Windows, although it's not an advanced application.
Paint.NET 3 was originally designed as a replacement for the paint tool, that ships with Windows. This photo and image is updated regularly and is Vista compatible. The latest v3 ships with a number of new features, such as tab-based user interface, an interactive gradient tool and a user-definable colour palette. Download Paint.NET 3 and see if it meets your requirements.
Skype isn't the only tool that will enable you to chat to other users, using your computer as a phone, over the Internet. The Gizmo Project is a rival product that will enable you to chat traditionally (traditionally being through the keyboard, directly to another Gizmo user) or use broadband to chat over the Internet, cheaply.
Whether you dream or think of ideas during office hours, the problem is remembering and taking notes of our ideas and thoughts. Although we all think we have good memories, keeping track of our ideas isn't always easy.
Your clock resides within your System Tray fairly innocuously. It's easy to refer to this clock for the correct time as you can set your system clock against Internet time, so it is continuously updated. However, it always appears the same. If you're one of the many who like to customise their system, you are now able to customise your system clock.
Buying a webcam made a lot of sense at the time, but how many of you really use it for chatting over the Internet? One option would be to use the camera to record video taken from your camera, for security purposes. If you use the right software, you can set up motion detection so that the camera starts recording as soon as it picks up motion within the room.
Someone once laughed when I mentioned that I monitor the weather from my desktop. They argued you could simply look out of the window if you needed to see how the weather was performing. They're right, but if you work in an office where getting up and about isn't easy, or you're thinking of planning an outdoor event, you'll want a rough indication of what the weather is going to be doing this evening.
Tabs are a fantastic addition to web browsing. Only a couple of years ago, if you wanted to surf more than one website, it required you to open an additional browser window. More often than not, your Task Bar was full of open browser windows. However, even with the addition of tabs, it's not particularly easy to determine the websites that you have open within each tab, as they offer a text-only preview.
When you ordered your computer, you probably spent a fair while choosing between different manufacturers, the components within each computer and the price advertised. However, when it arrived, did you check whether the components specified shipped with the PC? For instance, is your graphics card the card specified, with the 256MB memory upgrade?
When you purchase your new PC it often ships with a large hard drive, partition in one continuous block. Which often means you're stuck with the large drive as Windows and other applications have already been installed. You could re-partition your drive, which means chopping your drive in to different segments. Perhaps one for your system, one for music, another for your work.
Nervous of upgrading your Windows XP to Windows Vista? Want to try Windows Vista before you decide to wipe Windows XP and move across to the new operating system? Either way, there's no reason why you can't install a virtual operating system, which means that you can run another copy of Windows on top of your existing Windows installation. As the operating system is virtual, you can install whatever you want and then simply re-install or scrap the virtual OS if things go wrong.
There are plenty of tools to help you manage, edit and print your digital photos. These include commercial and freeware applications. However, there aren't too many tools aimed at the (semi)professional photographer. Apple have their Aperture, which is Mac-only. This tool enables you to import your RAW photos, touch-up each photo individually, export and even create your own photo book, slideshow or homepage.
Back in the late 80s, vinyl contained mixes that you didn't get on a CD single, such as that extended 12¨ remix. There are also plenty of old tracks that you might not be able to download through iTunes or other digital stores, so you have no option to keep your old LPs, tapes and VHS cassettes. However, sooner rather than later your cassette player may cease to function, or you might want to reply your old stereo. Now's the time to digitise these tracks and to get them on to your computer.
Microsoft Outlook is a powerful tool, combining your email, a calendar, your 'to do' list and the ability to contact other users and share their information through an Exchange server. However, as we mostly use Outlook for our email, we rarely look at the calendar and rely on reminders to keep us informed of forthcoming meetings or tasks.
If you have a lot of applications installed on your computer, you can leave an icon shortcut on your desktop. However, these quickly distract from your work and leave your desktop looking cluttered. The other option is to find your installed applications through the Start Menu, but this takes time.
Only a few years ago, with the rise and popularity of digital cameras, software developers were falling over themselves to produce digital photo editing and viewing software. There were a fair few commercial apps and a selection of freeware. These days, there aren't that many decent free image viewers that provide the basic tools to view, manage and edit our photos.
When you install Windows for the first time, the majority of your drivers are supplied on the Windows installation CD. Windows doesn't check the Internet for the latest drivers during installation. Most of us then either forget to look for the latest drivers or simply do not bother. Those users who want the latest drivers spend ages looking for them, so do not want to repeat the process if they have to re-install Windows, in the future.
You'd be amazed how few users take advantage of their free homepage, provided by their ISP. Many of us are offered anywhere between 50-200MB of space, easily enough to store a few documents, backup our important data or swap files between different computers. Think about it: only you know your password, so you can easily use this space to store files you need to share between your work and home computer. Like a temporary storage point for your files.
If you're a keen traveller, you've probably got travel books, recommendations, photos and much more, all over your house. Wouldn't it be great if you could collate this information, digitally store it on your computer and then refer to this information when you're planning on further travel.
When you first bought your PC, you probably didn't purchase a top-of-the-range computer as the difference between the price of the 2.0Ghz and 2.6Ghz model meant that you couldn't really justify the additional cost. Two years down the line, that 2.6Ghz chip will be based around old technology and PC suppliers will be almost giving the chips away. Now is the time to upgrade, but you need to make sure that you're selecting the right CPU.
Provide files across the Internet isn't always easy. What compression/archive format do you use and will novice users be able to open your archive and install your software? You could create a self-extracting archive, but would the end-user know how to work with the file contents? Another option is to create a folder or disc of your contents and then simply supply as an ISO image. The end-user simply burns these files to their own CD or extracts them from the original ISO file.
Taking screengrabs is relatively easy. Taking grabs of obscure windows and other objects is less easy. There are quite a few excellent screen grabbing tools available, including 
When you start your computer, you'd be surprised how many applications, libraries and files launch with your machine. Some are more problematic than others and rely on a specific launch sequence to start correctly. You may find your system boots very slowly whilst it waits for a particular application to start.
Some Internet providers used to (and may still do) set up their own proxy server that would speed up and limit access to the Internet. Many companies use a proxy server to limit access to particular websites or to throttle access during the day. You can set up your own proxy server. If you have a home where each family member wants access to the Internet, you can determine when and how they access the net.
Some of the warnings that you see within Windows XP and Windows Vista can be rather frustrating. Yes, we know we've not turned on the firewall, we know that we're visiting a non-secure site and so on. However, there are some warnings we do want to see. We want to know when the latest security updates are available for our operating system or whether there's anything we can do to enhance our system performance.
Our web browsers securely store our usernames and passwords and can be configured to automatically populate web forms with the information we've previously used in our forms. However, if you move across to another computer, borrow a laptop to take on the road or use your computer at home, these passwords and other personal information isn't available on this other computer. This means you have to remember your personal info, at all times.
When we first turn on our new computer, it boots within seconds. After installing (and removing) software, the Registry expands, more apps boot with your computer and your disk becomes defragmented. Result is that your machine takes much longer to boot. You can solve these problems, but you may not realise that Windows will look for and load fonts when you boot your computer. If you're an illustrator, with loads of installed fonts, you might find that this is the main reason your computer has slowed.
If you click on a file on your desktop, you'll be able to right-click on this file and the system menu will offer you a number of options. If it's an image, you can choose to preview. If it's a archive, you can use an archive management tool to either open or extract the file. However, there's another option, the 'Send To' menu. This is a user-configurable menu that enables you to send a file to a destination folder, recipient or application.
When developers produce software, they configure it for the average user. Most likely a user who is connected to a 1MB/sec broadband connection. However, you can often tweak and optimise software through third-party tools. Mozilla Firefox is no exception and there's now a tool that enables you to get the most from Firefox, depending on the type of Internet connection you use.
You've got to admit it, most security software is a tad bloated. It attempts to do everything, from acting as a software firewall on your computer, through to parental controls. This can slow your machine as your security software is controlling just about every function that you do with your computer, from checking email through to opening ZIP files.
Google offer various services for web users. GMail enables you to send and receive email across the web, the bookmark services for Firefox will sync your bookmarks across your various computers, you can create your own documents and spreadsheets online and even personalise your own Google homepage.
It's easy to buy a completely new computer, but how do you get your old data across to the new machine? Most new PCs have a spare cable for another hard drive. Grab your old drive from your old system, connect it to the spare cable in your new PC and then simply clone or migrate the contents of your drive across to your new drive. Alternatively, if you want to add a larger drive to your old PC, simply add the drive, select the destination and clone your data across. Then simply reboot with your larger drive.
Are you one of those people who has notes for everything on their desk and all over your computer monitor? They can easily get knocked off your desk when the cleaners come around to clean the office at the end of the day. They're also a waste of resources. You have to keep throwing them away, whereas a sticky note on your screen could be edited, deleted or extended with the click of your mouse.
Office suites are generally made up a document writer, spreadsheet, database, presentation tool and sometimes and email client. Which components do you actually use? Most of us use the document editor and perhaps the email client. The spreadsheet might be useful from time to time. However, did you really need to install and purchase an Office suite just to edit and write documents?
We backup important files, data and essential files such as our fonts. However, what we don't do is backup our drivers. If you've had your system for a while, you might have spent time downloading and installing the latest system drivers and you don't want to have to find your driver discs, or rely on the Windows supplied drivers to manage your hardware.
Over the last few years, burning software have expanded to incorporate other media-related technologies, such as image managers, video editors and similar tools. This means that you have to navigate through a range of other tools just to burn a simple audio and data CD. Remember that these tools are there to burn a CD/DVD, quickly. That's the primary function.
It wasn't so long ago that the two big browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape, were constantly at loggerheads to become the web browser of choice. For for a while, Netscape was the popular choice and looked like becoming the number one option. It only really changed when Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows and it was simply easier to use the browser built-in to the system.
If you use Microsoft Outlook on your work computer and your laptop, when you're out the office on business, you have one or two options: you could set up your laptop-based Outlook to leave the email messages on your POP3 server then download them when you get back to your office. However, if you're out of the office for a long time, this might not prove efficient. The alternative is to use a synchronisation tool to sync your email across the two computers.
Not that long ago there wasn't such thing as a WYSIWYG web editor and certainly no template-based editors. If you wanted to code your own website, you had to get in to the raw HTML and create the page from scratch. When Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were developed, this enabled designers to create a palette of styles and colours that can be applied to any page or site.
