Stop Printing And Enjoy Digital Era

Stop Printing And Enjoy Digital Era 

Printing, once, was necessary, when computers and printers were heavy, and kept on your desk-tops. Nowadays, printing is going costly because they often requiring expensive ink cartridges and papers.

All kind of printed papers cluttered top of your desk and they must be properly organized, unless you’ll never be able to find what you’re looking for.

But in this digital era, we just walk around with computers in our pockets, like a piece of paper, and cloud services help us to do back-ups and syncs all our documents across all our devices. So, the saved documents can be searched, easily, by the words they contain and no worries for a complicated filing system. 

Some peoples may have stopped printing, long ago, but there are many peoples, who still print e mails, web pages regularly. 

Through this article, we'll guide you some tips of way to away from the printer and the way will be saving and organizing information, which makes sense! 

Creating a Digital File Cabinet: is a good way that allows you to have one consistent location, where you've save everything. There are some sort of cloud services like  Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and MicrosoftOneDrive that syncs across all your devices and you can access them on smartphones, tablets as well as your PC. And if you really prefer local storage, then save your files to a folder on your PC and be sure to sync it up with the cloud service(s) that you're using. 

Print to PDF: If you'd like to print anything such as a receipt, e mail, webpage or any document  then it can be printed to a PDF file. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t included a built-in PDF printer; so, installing a PDF printer on Windows system will allow to print PDF files from any form of application. After installation, a new virtual PDF printer will be added on the list of installed printers. When printing any document over the PDF printer, a new PDF file will be created on your system, instead of printing, as a physical document. Then the document can be stored in something like Dropbox or Evernote.  

You may choose a variety of free PDF printers available online and CutePDF Writer is a free version for PDF converter, which virtually enables Windows applications to convert professional quality PDF documents.

During installation be sure to uncheck AskToolbar, which is noted as malware toolbar, and couldn't be removed from most common browsers once installed. 

Emails, web pages and even maps can also be printed to PDF in the same way and they're able to save, instead of printing, in a separate folder on your system / cloud services, then can be accessed later. 

It's also possible to bookmark the web pages to view later and the bookmarks can be synced across all your devices, too.  

If you'd like to read the web pages later, use a service like Pocket or Instapaper to create a list of stuff you like to read. These services take the web pages, convert them to a readable, text-only article, and even store them in offline mode on mobile devices so you can read them later without having to print. 

So, the digital work place, where you've stored a number of documents, offers plenty of advantages such as:

• No need to buy expensive ink, printers, and papers; you’ll save money.
• The files can be backed-up, if they stored over cloud services. They can be accessed anywhere using smartphone or tablet, if you're away from PC.
• You can search and find the electronic documents, which you need, over cloud services that has full text search features.  
• No worries for storing, organizing and making space to the printed documents. The digital workspace will be de-cluttering your documents.

The printed old documents, which were in your possession, has also be converted into digital versions; but it seems lot of work.

However, if they're important and necessary then you may scan and save them in PDF file format using a scanner.

The sensitive documents can also be stored online but you should use encryption and create an encrypted container then store them on your cloud services. People will need a password to access these sensitive documents.

10 Essential Portable Apps To Be Carried On Your USB Drive

10 Essential Portable Apps To Be Carried On Your USB Drive 

Portable App is a computer program, which can be carried around on a handy, portable device and used on any Windows computers. The portable device could be a USB flash stick, portable hard drive, iPod or any other devices that plugged in or your cloud drive is synced. And when you unplug the device, none of your data is left behind.

Nowadays, the memory sticks are so cheap, in the market, including the larger capacity, even 64GB, wouldn't break-up your wallet! With such larger capacities, you may store a lot of documents, pictures and even music album; but apart from these you may turn the USB stick into a veritable knife of tools with utilities. Yes, using with right tools and utilities, you may turn the USB stick to browse the web, check e mails or even edit the photos and no matter what's installed on your PC that you're using!

Web Browsing: For web browsing, there were many portable versions are available, in which Chrome and Firefox has also the portable versions. Once installed these portable versions on USB drive, you may add your favorite add-ons and extensions. As you're running the browser from USB stick, you won't leave any cookies, browsing history or even temporary files on the system you're using.

It is ideal for using in Internet Cafes or where you doesn't like the people to know what you've been accessing.
  

Safe Passwords: If you doesn't like to store your passwords online with a service like LastPass, then you can arrange a password vault instead. KeePass is an open source, free portable password manager, which is secured with a single master key, and there's no restriction to keep internet passwords, valuable information such as bank card PIN's, Windows / software serial numbers, user name with passwords, server connection details and etc., It's a best place to keep, not only, the above said; but you may add much more.

Make sure the master key you choose is strong and to be encrypted with your password database.

Zip Files: Windows has the ability to open and create .zip files; but, if you'd like to download .rar files then you're out of luck! Here's a free, open source portable version 7-Zip is one of the best desktop archiving tool, through which you may open compressed archive formats such as .zip, .rar, .gzip, .tar and .arj, including Cab and ISO files (useful for extract individual Windows files).  

Cloud Storing: Certainly, everyone of us is a big fan for Cloud and its Applications such as Google Drive, Microsoft's OneDrive and Drop Box; but without an Internet connection these aren't so helpful. So, just step on portable office App, like LibreOffice &  OpenOffice.org, which has fully featured suites with good office compatibility and both are open source, too.  

LibreOffice will open most of the MS Office documents, even complicated spreadsheets.

Photo Editing: Gimp, is an open source, portable image editor, has powerful tasks. You can took it along your USB stick to crop, resize the pictures and correcting the colors.

For Entertainments: VLC Media Player, a free open source portable multimedia version, which can allow you to play various types of audio and video formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, mp3, ogg with different streaming protocols.                     

File Recovery: Even the recycle bin, in Windows, gives a second chance on file deletion and if anyone wants to recover the deleted data then it's a headache and he has to install more software on his system. If you need to recover deleted data, then Recuva, a portable version, will help you to recover deleted files, emails, and even the images. You can use it as an ideal portable, which lives on your USB drive without leaving any traces of use on your PC.

This portable version is available for 32 and 64 bit systems.

Antivirus On The Go: You're confident on your PC is free from viruses, but you shouldn't trust anyone, who handles your PC, even for a while. So, it is better to carry a digital prophylactic app ClamWin, a portable antivirus package, and use it on any computer to scan files on the go, without leaving any personal information behind.

Spyware Detection and Removal: Generally, antivirus programs aren't looking at spyware or other malware on your PC. When browsing some sensitive websites like net banking, the usage track and registry issues to be cleaned and fixed unless the system gets infection as the threats are emerging daily. Spybot Search & Destroy is one of the best spyware scanner, which detects then removes tens of thousands of spyware and malware and enables to delete those annoying tracking cookies used by advertising.       

Protecting Your USB Stick: One of the drawback of USB stick is, too easy to lost, because they're tiny in size, but keeping on your key-chain is a bit safer. If you lost it along with sensitive / private information then you've to face problem. So, its better to secure the private data by doing encryption, an encoding process for data that can be read only by authorized person, which runs from USB stick. WinmagicEncryption, is an encryption tool that will run from your USB stick, enabling you to encrypt and decrypt files on the go. However, it needs admin rights to the computer you are using.

What's Cache File? Is It Make Your Browsing Faster?

What's Cache File? Is It Make Your Browsing Faster?  

Caching is a storage mechanism for web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce the usage of  bandwidth, server load, and perceived lag.  

Browser creates cache for some reason and caches are not the browsing history but it contains copy of images, Java Script files and etc., for the visited websites and stored on hard drives. The cache is a place where the browser stores copies of these files, and it doesn’t have to be downloaded again when you visit the same web page, next time. When revisiting the same websites, the caches will be retrieved from hard drive(s) and speeding up the browser to open the web page and saving download bandwidth as well.

So, browser caches are good for our browsing experiences and if you erase the caches, regularly, then the system just slowing down your web browsing while the browser rebuilds the caches, again. Browsers also limit the amount of data that stored in cache; so, the browser will automatically purge the old data and keep the cache size in control and every browser has it's own cache files.

As mentioned earlier that the cache took some hard disk space and when you use a tool to clean some data like history, then the tool could able to remove the browser caches, too. So, when using such a tool, for example: CCleaner, you should have to un-check Cache option to prevent from clearing the browser's cache. If you're using CCleaner or a similar tool to wipe-out some unwanted files, left by certain programs, then keep in mind to un-check the option of Cache; so, the tool remembers your preferred setting in the future.

However, when using FireFox browser, you can erase browsing and download history, cookies and even other data without erasing caches. You've to remove tick mark from cache box, then caches wouldn't be erased. And you may also erase the browsing and download history, cookies and even caches for only a small period of time, like past hour. This will helpful, when you're using other peoples system for an hour or more, which wipes away the tracks of your browsing without clearing the entire caches. 

To get this option: History > Clear Recent History .... then choose your appropriate option from Time range to clear.

The similar ways have to be applied to stop clearing caches on IE, Chrome or Maxthon browsers, where IE calls the caches as Temporary Internet Files, Chrome and Maxthon calls it as Cache.

When using IE: Internet Option > General tab then ... Browsing History > Settings then Website Data Settings.

From Website Data Settings window you may do all the required arrangements as per your need.

  
When using Google Chrome: Just type chrome://cache in the address bar then Enter. Chrome browser reveals the list of caches as shown in the below picture.

If you really want to clear the caches on Chrome, then go Settings (type chrome://settings in the address bar or choose Settings option from Customize and control i.e., Menu bar) and choose History > Clear browsing data.
 
From Clear browsing data window, you may do all the required arrangements as per your need.

When using Maxthon: From Menu, click and open Clear browsing history. From this window you may do all the required arrangements as per your need.
 

Suppose you've watch some sensitive websites, in a frequent manner, then its cache should have to be cleared, every time; because, other people may able to see you've been there. Rather clearing the caches every time, for the sensitive websites, just use Private Browsing Mode, which doesn't represented your cache. This feature is safe and not necessary to clear the caches, even if you visit several times. 

The features are called: 
in Firefox, Private Browsing ....

 in Chrome, Incognito Mode ....
 

in IE, InPrivate Browsing, and

 

in Maxthon, Private Mode that can be accessed from Menu > New Window section > Private tab. When click Private tab, a New tab (for private mode) will be opened as shown in the below picture. 
So, when browsing over these features, you'll be safe and the browser wouldn't kept the cache files, browsing history and even the data that you've accessed.

Windows Laptops: Tips To Increase Battery-Life

Windows Laptops: Tips To Increase Battery-Life 

Most laptops still doesn't has all-day battery life and here we discuss some ways to squeeze the life of your Windows laptop's battery. The ways wouldn't turn your laptop much stamina to work all day; but they may help without an outlet for a while longer.

1. Reduce Screen Brightness

2. Auto Turn-Off the Display

3. Disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other Hardware Devices

4. Adjust the Power Plan

5. Use Windows Power Trouble-shooter

6. Hibernate the system
 

1. Reduce Screen Brightness: Without doubt, the brightness of screen is the biggest battery drain, whether your device is a laptop, smartphone or tablet. So, reducing screen's brightness is a good way to squeeze little bit more time for battery. Lowering brightness level will enhance battery power longer. To do this press and hold the Function (Fn) key, then press the brightness button on laptop keyboard. And you can also use Windows Mobility Center, from laptop, to adjust screen's brightness; open Windows Mobility Center by pressing Windows Key + X, for Windows 7 and for Windows 8, just launch it from Control Panel (Windows Key + X, opens power user menu).        

2. Auto Turn-Off the Display: If you're going away from laptop for a few minutes or more, then its screen will still be on, which draining the power. So, setting-up laptop's aggressive power settings to dim then turn-off the display, automatically, is a good choice to save battery power, when the laptop is not in use. To enable this option open Power Options dialog from Control Panel then set the display to dim and adjust to turn-off after a short period of time. This is also an easy way to save the power and when moving the mouse or pressing any key the display will be turned back. For media players, set the display to automatically stay on, while they're running.   

3. Disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other Hardware Devices: Bluetooth radio and the laptop even having some devices such as infrared (IR) port are, also, drain the battery power when they're enabled / powered-on. So, they should have to be disabled to save some battery power when they're not in use. To disable Bluetooth, press Function Key (Fn) then press the key, which has Bluetooth symbol on laptop. 

Disabling Wi-Fi is also a good way to save battery power, when you're not using Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi can be turned-off the similar way of using Function Key or disable the adapter of Wi-Fi from Control Panel's network connection window. 

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi could able to identified, whether they're on/off, through the indicators of your laptop.

4. Adjust the Power Plan: Windows offers power plans and through them you can change laptop's power settings to different profiles. If you need every bit of power to be saved then your laptop should be switched to Power Saver mode. Balanced is the default mode, which balances power consumptions on hardware. Power Plan settings can be modified easily and they're hidden in Control Panel's Power Options window.

To modify Advanced power options, click Change plan settings link and choose Change Advanced power settings. Now Power Options window will open and you can change a variety of settings such as power off the hard-drive and even slow down the processor speed rather turning the fan to on, if the processor gets hot. Both of these activities may save power, too.

5. Use Windows Power Trouble-shooter: A tool, Troubleshooting, is included in Windows 7 and 8, through which scan your system for common battery drains and fix them, automatically. To load the tool, Control Panel > Troubleshooting then perform a search for Troubleshooting. 

To launch Power troubleshooter: Troubleshooting > All Categories > Power.

Windows will search for common issues then fix them, automatically. 

It's a technique used to discover the optimal solution to certain problems on Windows laptops. 

6. Hibernate the system: Hibernation is an option, which is similar to sleep mode but saves more power. If you're not going to be using the laptop for a few hours, then switch it into hibernate mode, rather than sleep mode, to conserve more battery power. Hibernate makes the hardware to powered-off, but not like a regular shutdown. A tiny amount of power will be drawn from power supply to keep CMOS to be powered.   

 Here's few general ideas to prevent battery from draining faster:

• Do not use screensavers, as they're unnecessary and not useful. They will drain the battery. 
• Run fewer programs at the background. Just check the system tray for the programs that were running and disable them to prevent as they're automatically running, when the system starts. 
• Reduce CPU usage. Using heavy programs may cause the CPU to work a lot and CPU will take more power then the battery will drain faster. 
• Avoid maxing-out of RAM. When RAM reaches its limitations, then it became heavier and looks for more memory to write the data. So, RAM moves the data to the page-file on system's hard drive, and hard drive's usage will be increased, which may drain the battery, too. This solution is not a problem on modern laptops, as they're coming with excellent capacity of RAM. If your laptop's RAM became full, then try to close some unwanted running programs, which will free-up the RAM or upgrade the RAM. 

Windows Task Manager's Performance tab will reveal more info about the usage of CPU and RAM. 

So, the less your computer has to do; the more power it can save.

How To Reduce Data Usage When Browsing Web On Smartphone

How To Reduce Data Usage When Browsing Web On Smartphone

If you've limited data subscription on your Android / iPhone, then every megabyte will be counted and billed. Some browsers, such as Chrome and Opera, supporting data compression features, which allowing to browse less data on your phones. 

When loading a web page on your smartphone, the browser will directly connecting the website's web server then the server sends the web page. Your cellular provider just sits in the middle and passing the traffic forth and back then charging for it.

If you wish to get some advantage then enable data compression feature on your phone, which allows to browse all the websites with some noticeable differences, and you may feel, too. When you load a web page, the browser of your phone will, usually, send a request to it's server then the server accept the request to download the web page, which you wanted to view, with images and other assets as well. 

After enabling data compression feature, on your phone, the server compresses the web page, i.e., making less space, then send it to your phone with transcoded images as they're smaller without high resolutions and this function will also be good to reduce your phone's data usage, as well.

To enable data compression feature on Chrome, just tap Chrome App from Android, iPhone or iPad and select Settings. Scroll to Advanced then tap Bandwidth management. Tap Reduce data usage then set the slider from OFF to ON.

After enabling the feature to on, then browse for a while and head to the same Reduce data usage page, to view how much of data has been saved. Through this you may get the worth of the feature.   

To enable Opera's data compression mode on Android / iOS, tap Opera menu button then set Off Road mode's (previously called as Turbo) slider to On. This mode can be easily disabled and enabled as your choice of using Wi-Fi, and mobile data. Through Opera's Settings page, you may also adjust to lower the image quality, which allows to save bandwidth for images.   

After enabling the mode, you can view how much of data has been saved. Through this you may get the worth of this mode, like Chrome.

The performances for a faster data connection may take little bit longer to load web pages; because, the connection is not direct and looks for proxy. And for a slower data connection the web page may download even faster, if the phone has less data to download. 

Further, you've to know some privacy concerns of Google and Opera. Both able to watch your activities such as the web pages you're accessing. Your Cellular Carrier, Internet Service Provider (ISP) and various security agencies around the world would also able to watch what web pages you're visiting. 

When using Chrome or Opera, the history will also be synchronized on their servers and if accessing secured websites, such as of banks with encrypted HTTPS, wouldn't allow to get benefits for less data usage, because your sensitive data is not routed via proxy but you've stayed on secured connection.         

Browser Extensions: Are They Really Slowing Down Your Browser Speed?

Browser Extensions: Are They Really Slowing Down Your Browser Speed?

Browser extension is a computer program that extends the functionality of a web browser and also improves the user interface, which can be achieved through a variety of add-ons such as toolbars and plug-ins. 

So, browser extensions are useful and not like other software that remains running on your computer; but you should have to use limited browser extensions, which required for work, otherwise your browser will be slow down. Using fewer lightweight extensions should not be resulted in a noticeable difference on modern computers, but keep adding more and more then they can increase browser's memory consumption, take longer time to open the browser and finally your browser will be slowing down. And if you use 2 or more browsers then each browser offers its own way to pin down memory consumption, CPU usage and start-up delay. You can identify the exact information of impact that the browser's extensions has on your system. 

Google Chrome is a multi-process browser, which supporting plenty of extensions and running their own way. 

Through Chrome's integrated Task Manager, you can view the memory consumptions, current CPU usage for the running browser extensions and this process will give an idea that how each extensions took memory consumption. To open Task Manager, click Chrome's Menu button, choose Tools then select Task Manager. Task Manager also displays the resources of installed Web Apps including other background processes. 

Internet Explorer does not exposing the memory consumption for browser's Add-on. However, it gives the information about how long each browser's Add-on took to load. If the browser's Add-on takes longer to load then assume that it consuming more memory as well as slowing things down. 

To get this info click the Gear icon and select Manage Add-ons. Now a window will open and you'll see each browser's extension load time that were listed under Load Time column. 

To prevent an add-on from loading, just choose it from the list and click Disable button. There's also Navigation Time column, where you can find the delays of time to the related Add-on that you Navigate/Load a new web page. 

Mozilla Firefox is also doesn't offer an easy way to get memory usage for browser's extension. However, you should have to install an extension, about:addons-memory extension, which will display the memory usage. After installing the extension, just type about:addons-memory in the address bar and enter to open addons-memory page.

The installed extension(s) will be displayed and sorted by how much memory they're consuming. Through this, you may concluded the memory usage for each add-on. You may also get memory benefits from Tools > Add-ons by disable/remove the unwanted add-ons.  

Above said process of system resources to a particular browser's extension wouldn't give a clear picture. But open the browser in Safe Mode will load the web pages without any extensions and the browser itself speedier in this mode.

To launch Chrome in Safe Mode, right click Chrome Icon from Task Bar and right click Google Chrome in the list then choose Properties. 

Now Chrome's Property window will open. From Shortcut tab, add -disable-extensions at the end of the script of Target box {i.e., C:\Users\DELL\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe-disable-extensions} and click OK.

Close all the running Chrome, including the Icon that may running on system tray. Use the shortcut and relaunch Chrome. To disable safe mode, just remove the words that you've entered and click OK then restart Chrome.

For Internet Explorer If you use Windows 7, click Start button and launch All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Internet Explorer (No Add-ons) shortcut. If you use Windows 8, you’ve to launch this program manually by pressing Windows Key + R to open the run dialog box and type iexplore.exe -extoff  into it, then press Enter.

     
Mozilla Firefox: Click Help, and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.

So, Safe Mode browsing, without extensions, will determine system resources with loading the web pages speedier and you may noticed that how the performances are improving when pin-down the Add-ons.