Advanced System Care review

Folks this is going to be a rather long one so please get your snacks ready. You are about to encounter one of the best PC maintenance programs ever made to this date. And best of all – it’s TOTALLY FREE!

Advanced System Care

I have been working with and troubleshooting PC’s for many years and tried numbers of different software solutions for cleaning and maintaining the Windows system, from windows 95 up through XP, and now even Vista. All these systems are prone to problems, and as the years have gone by the systems have grown exponentially making them harder and harder to control for the end user.

Advanced System Care (from now on in this review referred to as ASC) is a free tool by the rather new company iobit. ASC contains everything you need to easily control your PC’s by single click optimization, and you can go even further and explore the other included tools for system optimization. Everything is very easy, well explained, beutifully organized in one simple application. I truly love this program! There, I said it…

I will not go through all the optimization tools for you in this review, it’s just going to be too long  a post. My plan is to go into the different modes as single posts. This is going to be a review, not a complete guide. -Yet.

If you at this time get interested in the software you can start the download, and then follow me through the optimization and cleaning process.

DOWNLOAD ASC HERE

Okay, let’s continue…

LOTR BFME DirectX Error fix

After installing Lord of the Rings Battle For Middle Earth 2 I kept getting DirectX Errors, and the program wouldn’t start.

I realized that somehow the program wasn’t able to change resolution.

To fix this I added -xres 1680 -yres 1050 after the quotes in the shortcut.

“C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Battle for Middle-earth ™ II\lotrbfme2.exe” -xres 1680 -yres 1050

1680 and 1050 is my widescreen resolution, you should add whatever resolution you have set in windows if you get this problem.

Hope this helps

Best Antivirus – Detection rates

A simple list of detection rates, from research by av-comparatives.org February 2009

Out of a total of 1.274.928 viruses, trojans, worms and malware the following list tells us the detection rates of the different AntiVirus programs:

Phantom Alert, Speed camera warning system

Police Hate Them. Drivers Love Them. New Invention Uses GPS to Locate Police Speed Traps. 100% legal.

Phantom alert is a database of locations in North America where “enforcement cameras” are placed. Similar systems are available for Europe, and probably the rest of the world. Loading the database onto your GPS in your car gives you alerts whenever you are approaching a speed-camera or red-light camera that is placed along the roads.

This alert has several benefits. One, You will probably slow down. Two, you will not get a ticket, Three, You will probably feel great because you feel you are “cheating the system” and sticking it to the man.

“The system gives you enough time to correct any dopey thing you’re about to do,” said Brooklyn subway conductor John Carlson, 49, who bought the software from Pennsylvania-based PhantomAlert last year, and said it “absolutely” has helped him avoid tickets.

Piezoelectricity powers artificial bunny

Illustration by B. Gillespie

Well, maybe  not an artificial bunny but ScienceNOW Daily News Reported this on Mar. 26, 2009

Georgia Institute of  Technology researchers have built a piezoelectric effect (mechanical pressure converted to electricity) nanogenerator, the first to use this effect at the nanoscale.

This could allow microsensors and miniature medical devices to derive their electrical needs from their surroundings instead of from batteries.

Help! The New Skype Window is Huge!

After installing Skype 4 I almost fell out of my chair. The new skype was huge! It was taking up half my laptop screen.

I fiddled around for quite some time to get it back to the way the old skype was.

Here’s the easy way to do it:

• In the top right cornerof the new Skype window there is a row of 4 icons.

• The leftmost icon in this row looks like two windows slightly overlapping.

• Click this icon to separate the chat window from the contact list. These can now be individually resized.

PHEW!

Why skype made that sort of stick-it-all-together-in-one-cumbersome-lump approach default choice I will never understand.

Download Free ‘Illustrator’ as freeware

I love using Illustrator, however i recently set out on a quest to find a free alternative. And boy did I find one. It’s called:

Inkscape is totally free software and it is updated often to include new cool features. The UI is similar to Illustrator, and people who use illustrator will feel right at home. Some functions are so much smarter than Illustrator.

This is truly an amazing peice of free software, perfect for the smaller graphics firm or anyone who wants to use opensource (free) software and don’t have to worry about licencing fees.

Over at heathenx.org there is almost a hundred of easy to understand video tutorials for inkscape. Very well done.

Free Love and Peace, and software!

Gnomie

Dropbox free file storage

Save your files online and access them from any computer!

I just found a great web-service for storing files online. It’s called Dropbox.

Storing files is really simple, you just create an account, and then download a small application. The application creates a folder in your “My Documents” and anything you place in that folder is automatically uploaded to your Dropbox account.

To access the files from another computer you just log on to your account at www.dropbox.com and download them. You can also invite friends to share your files, by giving them access to your dropbox folders of choice.

Dropbox is also a great place to store and share photos, with built in image gallery functions it’s easy to browse and download.

Besides sharing files, Dropbox can serv as a backup for important files.

I really recommend this free service!

Check it out!

Microsoft shuts down Flight Simulator Studio

Microsoft has closed down one of their most profitable and oldest studios, the ACES studio that makes the Flight Simulator series. Rumors were confirmed yesterday.

“I can confirm the closure of Aces Studio,” a Microsoft representative told GameSpot.

Full screen flash lag final fix!

For a while now i have had problems playing full screen flash movies. They have lagged, that is had very low fps (framerate). This has happened in Both IE and Firefox

I finally found a fix that works!

Do like this.

1.Go to the control panel and uninstall Flash Player and Flash ActiveX Control

2.Start INTERNET EXPLORER (It has to be IE), and install flash player from Internet explorer.

3. Close IE and start firefox. Install Flash player from Firefox.

Done! This helped me, and I’m playing flash movies in full screen on my 1680×1050 res monitor at high fps.

This solution really works, I have tried others but to no avail. I finally found this to work. 😉

surfthechannel here I come 🙂