1. ieSpell-Web www.ieSplee.com free for personal use, ieSpell adds set-up and spell checking options to Internet Explorer’s Tools menu and toolbar. A boon for bloggers and message board fans, you can check your spelling with a simple right –click to access the tool. It’ll check all the text on the page and offer suggestions if it finds any errors. Go to Tools> ieSpell Options first though to make sure you’ve selected the English(UK) dictionary!
2. Inline Search-Web www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch .Inline Search is a free plug-in that adds a ‘find as you type’ search box to the bottom of your browser. It starts searching for words in the text of the current page as soon as you begin typing, highlighting them in blue. If there are multiple instances of a search term, you can move through them with the Find Next button-or choose to highlight them all . Invoke Inline Search with the casual Ctrl and F shortcut-if you want to use Internet Explorer’s default search instead, you’ll nedd to go to Edit>Find.
3. Internet Tracks Washer-Web www.softcows.com/windows.washer.htm. For $29.95  Internet Tracks Washer helps you take absolute control over document history. You can wipe out your entire browsing record, blitz out your cookies and empty your temporary internet files. You can also do all these tasks selectively- picking exactly which web addresses and cookies to consign to the past. And though it’s predominantly useful for cleaning up your browser, it works with other Windows Vista tools, too.
4. Youtube Downloader-Web http:// youtubedownload.altervista.org . This handy tool can be used alongside Internet Explorer when you find video clips on YouTube you want to keep or pass on. Simply copy the URL of the page where the clip is embedded   and paste it into YouTube Downloader. Once you’ve got a copy of the clip safely on your computer , you can then use same program to convert the file into a format you can view in Windows Media Player- including AVI or MPEG 4. Not bad for free software.
5. Internet Download Accelerator-Web www.westbyte.com/ida . When you access a web site, Internet Explorer makes multiple calls to the server, downloading pictures, text and anything else simultaneously . On the other hand, when you click on a link to a file online, only one connection is made. Internet Download Accelerator makes file downloads faster by starting multiple connections to the same file, then assembling tge pieces on your machine . It also lets you stop and start long downloads-or resume them when your connection is interrupted. Registration costs $29.95.
6. StumbleUpon Web www.stumbleupon.com . Sign up for the free StumbleUpon service and you’ll open up a whole new way of browsing the web. It’s  not a search engine or directory … it’s something between the two. With the StumbleUpon Toolbar installed, you can specify a set of interests and be taken to random, but tried, tested and highly –rated sites that are guaranteed to please. You can also give ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ feedback to further improve the service. Search for one category only, or let the software pick for you. If idling away a few hours with some pleasant browsing is your idea of fun, it’s a must-have.

1. CONTROL PANEL TWEAKS Deleting applications you don’t need can help accelerate boot times – especially those that load into memory when you log in. go to the Control Panel and choose Uninstall a Program.
2. DELETING PROGRAMS To delete a program select it from the list and click Uninstall. Some may prompt you to restart. Wait until you’ve removed all programs you want to delete before rebooting your PC.
3. BE FRUGAL WITH FONTS When Windows Vista starts up, it loads all your fonts into memory. The memory you have, the longer this takes. It’s likely that you’ll only use a fraction of them – so you can safely remove those you don’t like.
4. IN THE BIN Go to Control Panel → Appearance and Personalisation. Click Install or Remove a Font. You’ll see a list of installed fonts in Windows Explorer. Double click on a font to preview it. To delete a font, just drag it to the Recycle Bin.
5. ADJUST VISUAL EFFECTS One last quick but rather drastic fix to speed up your system. Go to Performance Information and Tools in the System Maintenance section of the Control Panel and click Adjust Visual Effects. Tick Adjust for Best Performance to turn off animations and transparency.

By default,both XP and Vista wait 400 milliseconds before presenting expansion menus [those menu items with right-facing triangles on them]. You can eliminate the wait completely for instantaneous menu expansion [though be warned, you may not actually like it]. Note that this will not make, say, you’re your primary File or Edit menu show up faster-those menus automatically load as fast as possible.

DO IT Run regedit at the Run prompt. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Desktop. Double click the MenuShowDelay key in the right-hand pane and set the value to 0.

DISABLING QOS AND IPV6 OPTIONS WILL IMPROVE BANDWIDTH AND WEB PERFORMANCE

The theory goes that you should disable any service you aren’t using, and that turning off IPv6 and QoS Packet Scheduling options in your NIC properties will boost browsing speed. One absurb legend holds that QoS alone actually “reserves” 20 percent of your bandwidth. Microsoft has formally debunked this tip, and our test back that up: We found zero difference at all in file-transfer speeds whether QoS and IPv6 options were on or off, on both XP and Vista systems.

DON’T DO IT

PUTTING YOUR PAGGING FILE ON A SECOND HARD DRIVE WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

Splitting up the pagefile and your everyday apps is common sense. Doing this allows Windows to dump temp junk onto one drive while not having to interrupt reads or writes on the other. If you have two hard drives, this is a tip that definitely works and works well: Expect at least a 5 to 10 percent speed boost, depending on the existing speed of your rig and, especially, the performance of your drives. But any second drive will help at least a little: While not recommended, you can even put the pagefile on an external USB drive and see some performance gains.

CLEANING OUT CACHED AND TEMP FILES IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, ESPECIALLY OF YOUR WEB BROWSER

Unless you have so much junk on your hard drive that you are nearly out of free space, deleting any number of files-whether they’re temp files or permanent ones-won’t improve performance at all. The only exceptions to the rule are for programs or processes that involves every file on your drive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for examples, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It make sense to clear this files out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’t get a performance boost for your trouble.

DON’T DO IT

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Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista

In the Windows 95/98 era, conventional wisdom held that you should manually set your virtual memory [i.e., pagefile] size to at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM in order to optimize performance. [By default, Windows will manage pagefile on its own: You will likely find the initial pagefile size set to 0.5x or 1x the amount of RAM you have]. We were skeptical about this tip, but our benchmarks surprised us: Some systems showed no change at all, but some(particularly older machines) showed substantial improvement beyond the usual random noise we see in benchmark results. We got at least a 10 percent jump after we upped the initial pagefile size to 2x amount or RAM on two separate machines. It won’t work for all computers, so the jury’s still out on this one, but because it’s so easy to do and there are no negative consequences, it’s worth a shot just to see if it has any effect.

DO IT In the XP System Control Panel, click Advanced, then [under Performance] click Settings, Advanced. In the Virtual Memory module, click Change. Click Custom size then up both initial and Maximum size to roughly double your amount of RAM. Click Set [important!], then OK out of all windows. In Vista’s, click “Advanced system settings” in the System Control Panel and follow the same instructions.

CLEARING THE PREFETCH DIRECTORY [OR CACHE] WILL IMPROVE STARTUP TIME

One of the most notorious Windows tips ever is that deleting all the files in the Windows/Prefetch directory will cause your system to boot faster. We tested the tip by repeatedly measuring boot times on a trio of both XP and Vista machines with overstuffed Prefetch folders, then running the same test after clearing the folders out. The result: No improvement in boot time in any of the cases. Some testers have reported that clearing the Prefetch cache actually lengthens boot time, though we didn’t experience this either.

DON’T DO IT

WRITE CACHING WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE ON SATA DRIVES

This feature is disabled by default in VISTA because if your computer loses power before a write is completed,you can lose data. If you’re confident in your UP’s capabilities, crank it up and you’ll see at least a 10 percent improvement in performance. Remember, write caching is supported only on SATA drives. The options are grayed out for older ATA disks.

DO IT In Explorer, right-click the drive you want to speed up and select Properties. Click the Hardware tab, select Properties again. Click the Policies tab. Check both of the boxes beneath “Optimize for performance.”

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Switching to Windows Vista for Seniors: A Guide Helping Senior Citizens Move From XP to Vista (Computer Books for Seniors series)

A firewall for your hard drive

There’s no quicker way to infect your system than to tread online without the aid of a firewall. Unscrupulous saboteurs the world over are constantly on the hunt for unprotected PCs, and when they find them, it’s open season for unleashing keyloggers, dialers, Trojans, and other toxic trash the riff-raff carry in their arsenals. But with a firewall, you always know exactly what’s trying to access your PC, leaving you in command of who comes and goes.

Apply that same philosophy to your hard drive and you have DriveSentry. Borrowing a page from Microsoft Vista and its now infamous UAC, DriveSentry intercepts write requests to your hard drive, giving you an opportunity to deny or allow the action. To prevent being inundated with permission requests from harmless applications, DriveSentry implements an auto-advisor feature. Every time a new program runs, the advisor dials home and looks for a match against a whitelist of trusted applications, as well as a blacklist of known threats. Like your old high school cliques, programs are labeled according to how DriveSentry and the majority opinion among the community of users view them. A good program could potentially be deemed dangerous, or vice versa, though we didn’t run into any issues with mistagged programs during our tests. We did, however, run into an annoying number of pop-up alerts, even for trusted applications. Opening Notepad, for example, prompted a pop-up letting us know the advisor was dialing home, followed by a second alert telling us the program has been cleared to run. We dig the diligence but not the constant cries for attention.

DriveSentry’s greatest strength lies in its level of customization. The dizzying array of options is enough to overwhelm even staunch RTS fans raised on micromanagement, but for those willing to put in the time, you’re afforded a meticulous level of control over what files every program can or cannot write to. You can also create custom rules blocking a program’s access to entire folders or drives. Removable media, such as your USB key and optical discs, are protected too. And for armchair auditors, the Logs tab keeps track of every attempted write ever made and whether or not it was allowed.

We tried our best to thwart DriveSentry, but viruses and spyware never stood a chance, as long as we intervened. Should less-savvy users ignore the warnings, or worse, should a band of hackers infiltrate DriveSentry’s servers, the advisor could conceivably feed bad advice.

Even with the potential risks, DriveSentry offers a level of protection rivaled by only BufferZone. Combined with an anti-malware suite, this is as close as it comes to creating an impenetrable defense; just prepare yourself for a steady, and annoying, stream of alerts.

Conventional wisdom holds that you need to write and rewrite a hard drive numerous times with garbage before it will be totally unrecoverable by forensics experts. That’s not exactly the case: We overwrote a hard drive just once with zeroes and asked the recovery gurus at DriveSavers if they could rescue it. The answer: They couldn’t save a single bit. Now we don’t pretend to know about the hardcore resources of groups like the NSA, so if you’re that paranoid about being branded a terrorist because of a deleted PDF of The Anarchist’s Cookbook discovered on a used drive you bought on eBay, by all means, spend a week wiping that drive. But you’re just casually recycling a drive for resale or donation, a single pass will do the trick and will save you literally days of time waiting for the wipe to finish.

DO IT Run a program like KillDisk [www.killdisk.com] and select a single zeroes-only pass.

DISABLING UNUSED NETWORK CONNECTIONS WILL IMPROVE BOOT TIME

Say you set up a network drive for a network drive for a computer you had months ago but is no longer on your network: When Windows boot, it spends at least some time reconnecting to that drive, wasting precious seconds you could be spending on Facebook. While XP and Vista are better than older versions of Windows about network connections [who can forget those interminable “Connecting…’ messages?] it still makes sense to disconnect from network shares you no longer need. You won’t actually boot noticeably faster without those extra drive letters, but Explorer will become usable more quickly after launch. This is especially noticeable in Vista, which has a helpful “loading” progress indicator that overlays the address bar: Having any number of network shares will cause it to take any extra 10 to 20 seconds to fully load.

DO IT Right-click each shared folder in Explorer and select Disconnect. This will permanently remove them from your drive list unless you map them again.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista

Learn about Windows Vista the alphabetical way

Recycle Bin:

When you delete a file Windows temporarily stores it in the Recycle Bin. If you regret deleting any files then you can restore them before they are deleted permanently.

Recent Items:

Your recently-opened files can be accessed from Recent Items, in the Start menu. To empty the list, right-click and select Clear Recent Items List.

RAM:

Random Access Memory is used by your computer to store data. Your computer can access the data kept here much faster than from your hard drive, as it is solid state (as opposed to a spinning disc like your hard drive) and the data can be accessed at any ‘random’ point. If you want to speed up your computer, adding more RAM is both the cheapest and most effective way of doing so.

Quick Launch:

This toolbar sits next to the Start button. It allows you to launch programs and minimize open windows with a single click. Drag on shortcuts to your favourite programs to add them.

Right-click:

Right-clicking in Windows Vista brings up a context-sensitive menu, from which you can perform a number of actions, such as viewing properties or creating a new folder. What is displayed depends on what you clicked on, and what programs you have installed.

Restore Point:

Windows Vista takes snapshots of your system settings as you’re using it, and before any major changes. If you encounter any problems, use the most recent restore point to ‘rewind’, whilst files remain unchanged.

RSS Feeds:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds help you keep up-to-date with web sites and blogs by sending the content straight to you, without you having to visit the sites yourself. You can use RSS readers such as Internet Explorer 7 to find and subscribe to the RSS feed of a site.

Readyboost:

ReadyBoost is a great feature exclusive to Windows Vista that allows you to use a USB memory stick as a disc cache, which speeds up your PC as it can temporarily store processes and the USB drive rather than your hard drive – it essentially acts as extra RAM. When you insert a compatible device, Windows Vista will ask if you want to use it for ReadyBoost. The device must have at least 256MB of free space.

Remote Assistance:

Remote assistance is a great way of getting help when you’re struggling. It allows a friend to control your PC via the internet or network, so they can troubleshoot without leaving their desk!

Windows Vista: The Missing Manual

Protects you from threats on the web, but not from yourself

Just surfing the Internet can be enough to infect your system and grant malware uninvited access to your hard drive. But what about the malware that is invited? Malware writers know that the quickest way to infiltrate a system is through the end user, and there’s no shortage of dirty code masquerading under the guise of helpful applications. By the time you realize you’ve been duped, it’s too late, and it’s here that ForceField ultimately falls short.

Like BufferZone, ForceField protects at the application level, enveloping your web browser in an emulation layer. You’ll know ForceField’s working by the green border glowing around your browser. As you surf the web, unsolicited downloads write to a virtual file system, which prevents rogue sites from thrashing the OS. As a second layer of protection, ForceField issues a warning whenever you’re about to enter a site known to distribute spyware, at which point you can enter anyway or hightail it to safer corners of the web.

But unlike BufferZone, this one-two punch falls far short of providing an impenetrable defense. ForceField focuses only on web browsing, leaving email, IM clients, and other connected applications exposed to the same dangers. And while ForceField neutralizes unsolicited downloads occurring behind the scenes, it won’t save your system if you accidentally execute a malicious file or willingly install a seemingly innocent application only to find out later it was laced with spyware.

ForceField was still in beta from during our tests, and we uncovered a few rough edges. Despite support for both Internet Explorer and FireFox, we initially couldn’t get either browser to load through Vista’s start menu; instead, we had to right-click the ForceField icon in the taskbar. Several reboots later the problem disappeared. XP wasn’t affected, but some applications managed to load unprotected browser windows in both OSes, exposing a major vulnerability.

When we navigated the same shady websites we surfed with BufferZone, ForceField indentified only some of them as potentially harmful, letting several others slip through undetected. You have to wait while downloaded files undergo a scan for known malware, and we had little success getting ForceField to flag files embedded with Trojans and other common cruft. False positives were much less of an issue, but that’s little consolation given the weak detection of real threats.

By limiting virtualization to just automatic downloads made through the browser, ZoneAlarm also limits the product’s appeal. In its current form, ForceField can’t be counted on to provide a reliable defense. And even though ForceField isn’t intended as a stand-alone security application, there’s not enough to it justify a $30 investment.

Zonealarm Forcefield 2008

SUPERFETCH BOOSTS PERFORMANCE

Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed to more intelligently load applications into RAM based on frequency of use. With Superfetch on, your PC should theoretically get faster over time, particularly when loading frequently apps. You won’t see improvement in general performance, like rendering Photoshop files, but Superfetch does tend to make apps load10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.

DO IT Superfetch is on by default. To ensure that it’s active, go to the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, and select Services. Scroll down to Superfetch and ensure that it is set to “Started” and “Automatic.”

DISABLING XP’s INDEXING SERVICE CAN IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

You can almost ignore the question of whether XP’s Indexing Service slows down your computer. The fact is it doesn’t do much good anyway. Indexing is supposed to help Windows keep better tabs on files, but it does a terrible job of it and offers the users no options for configuring what gets indexed. It’s almost beside the point that it can slow your system-sometimes only a little and sometimes to an outright crawl. Even Microsoft acknowledges that the Indexing Services can cause hard drives to thrash and that it “uses lots of pagefile space and lots of CPU time”-in fact, Microsoft oftens recommends disabling it. Note, however,that Vista’s integrated search and indexing system is considerably improved.

DO IT There are several ways to turn off XP’s Indexing Service. The most thorough is to open the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then open Services. Scroll down to Indexing Services and double-click it. Change the Startup type to “Disabled.”

TURNING ON MULTIPLE CORES IN VISTA IMPROVES BOOT TIME

You’ll find an option within Vista’s msconfig utility that cryptically lets you set the “Number of processors” used during boot. By default it is turned off [with the dropdown set to 1]. We tried upping the setting to 2 on a dual-core system and, guess what, no change in boot time whatsoever. Turns out this is just a debug setting for coders who want to test how programs load on single-core machines without having to physically go to a less-sophisticated PC.it can be completely ignored. By default Windows uses all your cores.

DON’T DO IT

Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks

WRITE CACHING WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE ON SATA DRIVES

This feature is disabled by default in VISTA because if your computer loses power before a write is completed,you can lose data. If you’re confident in your UP’s capabilities, crank it up and you’ll see at least a 10 percent improvement in performance. Remember, write caching is supported only on SATA drives. The options are grayed out for older ATA disks.

DO IT In Explorer, right-click the drive you want to speed up and select Properties. Click the Hardware tab, select Properties again. Click the Policies tab. Check both of the boxes beneath “Optimize for performance.”

MINIMIZE MENU LOADING DELAY TIME THROUGH A REGISTRY HACK

By default,both XP and Vista wait 400 milliseconds before presenting expansion menus [those menu items with right-facing triangles on them]. You can eliminate the wait completely for instantaneous menu expansion [though be warned, you may not actually like it]. Note that this will not make, say, you’re your primary File or Edit menu show up faster-those menus automatically load as fast as possible.

DO IT Run regedit at the Run prompt. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Desktop. Double click the MenuShowDelay key in the right-hand pane and set the value to 0.

CHANGE YOUR DEFAULT ‘VIEW SOURCE’ APPLICATION WITH A REGISTRY HACK

Viewing web-page source file in Notepad is hardly a user-friendly experience. You can hack the registry to change which app opens source files, but using TweakUI is a better choice.

DO IT Load TweakUI [http://tinyurl.com/553fw6], browse to Internet Explorer >View Source. Click Change Program… and browse for whatever app you prefer. This only changes the setting for Internet Explorer; to change the View Source app for Firefox, type about : config in the address bar, scroll to view_source.editor. path, and change the setting by pasting in the full path to the application you want to use. [The Firefox tip works with XP and Vista, but you’ll have to tweak the registry if you want to do the same for IE under Vista.]

DISABLING QOS AND IPV6 OPTIONS WILL IMPROVE BANDWIDTH AND WEB PERFORMANCE

The theory goes that you should disable any service you aren’t using, and that turning off IPv6 and QoS Packet Scheduling options in your NIC properties will boost browsing speed. One absurb legend holds that QoS alone actually “reserves” 20 percent of your bandwidth. Microsoft has formally debunked this tip, and our test back that up: We found zero difference at all in file-transfer speeds whether QoS and IPv6 options were on or off, on both XP and Vista systems.

DON’T DO IT

Mastering Windows Made Easy Training Tutorial v. Vista & XP – How to use Microsoft Windows Video e Book Manual Guide. Even dummies can learn from this … through Advanced material from Professor Joe