So What Is Drive Extender? The idea of drive extender for Windows Home Server is you can have as many hard drives as you want and they all group together into the same pool of storage. This is similar to a RAID setup but drive extender had a few cards up it’s sleeve that made it invaluable for a NAS appliance. No special RAID controller or hardware was needed. Hard drives did not have to match in size or manufacturer so you could literally take any hard drive and use it in your pool....

Media Center Master is a free third party application that automatically downloads metadata from the Internet for WMC and other HTPC applications. It works with both Windows 7 and Vista. File Organization Before you get started, it’s important to have our files properly organized. Each movie file must be in it’s own individually named folder. Here’s how you can quickly copy movie files to individual folders. Setting Up Media Center Master...

About ieSpell While ieSpell may seem like a small simple program, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Such as IE-based alternative browser support and integration with Microsoft Office’s proofing tools. Using ieSpell The installation process for ieSpell goes very quickly and you will be presented with the following information when finished. Notice the note regarding use in IE-based alternative browsers. Note: The program will install to its’ own Program Files folder....

Scanning Your Document In this example we’re using an HP PSC 1500 All-In-One printer connected to a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. Different scanners will vary, however the process is essentially the same. The scanning process has changed a bit since the XP days. To scan a document in Windows 7, place the document or picture in the scanner, click on Start, and go to Devices and Printers....

The Office 2007 Ribbon was both praised and criticized. While many users felt they were more productive with the new interface, others felt frustrated searching for commands they had memorized in older versions of Office. Now, with Office 2010, the ribbon interface has been brought to every app in the Office suite, and is integrated into many newer programs from Microsoft. If you’re moving from Office 2003, using UBitMenu allows you to add the old familiar menus back along with the new Ribbon interface for an easier learning curve....

Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player. Before If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other....

The Threat Landscape It was a staple element of old war movies. They always included a scene set in command HQ with officers huddled around a plotting table displaying a map. Using tools like a croupier’s rake, they moved models of planes, tanks, ships, and men around the map. They were trying to track the location of their resources, and those of the enemy so that they could double-guess and out-maneuver the enemy....

After installing Microsoft Office 2010 Beta you’ll notice the Send-a-Smile feature in the Taskbar. It’s so you can send Microsoft a smile or a frown based on what you like or don’t like about an app or feature. To disable it from running automatically during Startup, go into System Configuration \ Startup and uncheck the box next to Office Send-a-Smile scheduler… If you’re wondering where it is in Windows Task Manage it’s “OfficeSAS....

As it turns out, the old plug-in is generally still installed… but you can easily disable Chrome plug-ins in the latest version, so let’s get to work. Disable the Extra Flash Plug-in Head over to about:plugins and look through the list—you should notice two Shockwave Flash plugins. The first one should be in your Google Chrome installation folder, and has the filename gcswf32.dll. This is the NEW one, so don’t disable it!...

Manufacturer Estimates Are Very Conservative If you look up the estimated power consumption of a TV you’re shopping for, you might find that it has a very conservative power use estimate, with the manufacturer claiming that the TV uses a mere watt or two in standby mode. Yet when you take it home, hook it up, and measure the actual energy use, it’s much higher. Perhaps as high as 15-20W instead of the suggested 2W....

Getting Started If you’d like to download pictures from your Facebook account and your friends pages, Pick&Zip is a great tool that lets you download as many pictures as you want in a zip or PDF file. Head over to the Pick&Zip site to get started (link below), and click the Login with Facebook button near the bottom of the page. Pick&Zip will need access to your profile information and pictures, and also asks for your email address....

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can have thousands of cells for storing data, which can slow down your PC — even if there’s no visible data in many of the cells. Thankfully, Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to improve spreadsheet performance. Microsoft mentioned in a recent blog post that empty cells with leftover formatting and style information can often slow down performance and increase file size. The company said, “we observed that over time, a workbook can collect cells that have no data but still contain hidden information of little or no use anymore....

Clicker.tv Navigation Navigating in Clicker.tv is rather easy with your keyboard. Directional Keys: navigate up, down, left, and right. Enter: make a selection Backspace: return to previous screen Escape: return to the Clicker. tv home screen. Note: You can also navigate through Clicker.tv with your PC remote. Recommended Browsers Firefox 3. 6 + Safari 4. 0 + Internet Explorer 8 + Google Chrome Note: You’ll need the latest version of Flash installed to play the majority of content....

Google announced its newest streaming dongle offering ahead of its larger hardware event on October 6. The new Chromecast with Google TV HD is, on the outside, identical to its 4K counterpart. It has the same exterior design, as well as the same controller. Not that it matters much, anyway — it’ll sit behind your TV out of sight for most of its lifetime. What changes, however, is its capabilities....

You might have noticed that searching for movies or TV shows on Google Search will display links to stream them on popular services, such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and other platforms. Google is now doing the same for video games — if a game is available on services like Xbox Cloud Gaming or NVIDIA GeForce Now, links to play them will be added to the knowledge panel. There’s also “no download required” text next to the links, just to clarify that the game will stream in the browser....

AWS’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a compute engine specifically designed for Docker containers. You can use it to deploy containers using underlying EC2 instances, or run a server-agnostic deployment on Fargate. What Is ECS? The basic usage of ECS is pretty simple. Rather than having to administrate Linux servers, you simply give it a Docker container, choose how much compute power you want to give it, and set it to work....

While you can’t manipulate a string of text in its normal form to accomplish mirroring or flipping, you can use text boxes instead. This also gives you the freedom to place the text wherever you like for just the right look. Add a Text Box in Word You can add a text box in Word in just a couple of simple steps. Open your document, select a page where you want the text box, then head to the Insert tab....

Do you want invites to automatically appear in your Google Calendar but are leery of spam? Instead of blocking all events from automatically appearing, you have another option. You can show events from only people you know. This addition to the Google Calendar settings was announced in July 2022. So if you haven’t checked it out yet, now’s the time! How It Works If you enable the option to automatically display events from people you know, this includes senders in your organization, using the same domain....

To rip our DVD we’ll use HD Decrypter which is the always free module of the DVDFab software suite. HD Decrypter will remove the copy protection from your DVD, and copy the contents of the DVD to your hard drive. Note: You’ll get full access to all the options in DVDFab during the 30 trial period. HD Decrypter is always free. Download and install DVDFab. You’ll find the download link below....

Grep is an amazing tool to search through log files and pull out useful information, but what if you want to search a log file using a giant list of keywords from another file? Luckily it has that feature built in as well. This happened to me when I wanted to pull a list of all URLs that were requested by a huge block of IPs that was abusively attacking our server....