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Rainmeter is an awesome application that lets you customize your desktop in many ways. For starters, its Skins are like desktop gadgets that you can just open or close.

For more advanced users, everything can be customized to your likings through INI files editing. This sounds complex but after editing a couple of settings you will feel more comfortable. There is a documentation section on its website that has everything you need to know.

The main application lists all available themes and skins and provides a quick way for editing any file.

You can search for hundreds of Skins or objects to use with Rainmeter in sites like deviantART, Customize.org, and many others.

Totally recommended.

Website & Download

If you ever encounter yourself stuck in a file operation that cannot be completed, like moving or deleting a file or folder this program can help you. It is called Unlocker and it adds an entry to the shell context menu.

When you try to delete or move a file or folder and windows says it cannot do it because another process or person is accessing it, you right-click the file or folder in question and choose Unlocker.

It opens a windows where you can see which process are locking the item. You can either kill the process or unlock it. The latter works great for 99% of the cases. If you still can’t do it, well, kill the process and you are ready to go.

A 64-bit version is available.

Website Download

Searching for an easy way to convert DTS audio to AC3 I found a great application called PopCorn MKV AudioConverter. You can download it here.

Many video files in MKV like movies or concerts contain DTS audio and some setup boxes or old A/V receivers can’t decode it while AC3 is a more standardized format, even for old players.

I gave a WD TV to my mom for christmas but her Home Theater didn’t have an optical input and the WD TV needed to output DTS audio via its optical output because it can’t decode that format.

By using this tool, only the audio will be converted and then remuxed again to a new MKV file, while the video will remain untouched.

Using PopCorn MKV AudioConverter is as easy as it gets. When you open it, it will automatically download all the needed files and tools. Then, its just a matter of specifying the source file, the destination file and deciding whether or not you want to keep the original DTS audio track inside the MKV file along with the new AC3 audio.

You can choose a file or a folder if you want to convert many files at once. If you want to keep the original DTS track, make sure to select the checkbox Preserve DTS Track.

When you are ready, click the Run button and the process will begin. It only takes between 5 or 10 minutes for 1 file depending on your computer.

You can use it to convert audio in other formats, not only DTS, if you want to.

The guys at TechSpot posted an easy guide on how to dual boot Windows 7 along with Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Now that Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7 (beta) is publicly available, almost everyone is itching to get their grubby paws on a copy and take it for a test drive.

However, because this is only a beta release most people simply aren’t willing to part with their established installations of Windows Vista or XP. With that mind, we’re going to look at one easy way of dual booting Windows 7 Beta with either Vista or XP in three painless steps…

Read the Guide

This tutorial has been updated to work with the new version of Windows Live Messenger (Build 14.0.8117.416).

As i always do with my unattended installations, i try to modify every installer i can to fit my needs.

With Windows Live Messenger 9, this time i wrote a little tutorial in case you want to modify it to include patched files and to fit your particular needs.

Some readers are reporting errors viewing this post with IE. Please view it with Firefox while i figure out what’s going on. Thanks.

Read more…

Making images of hard drives is a useful way of having backup copies of all your information, including your entire operative system.

For many years, only a few companies made this kind of programs and they were expensive. But now, there are some free alternatives that make this possible without spending any money. Besides, they are pushing commercial products to lower its prices because of the new competition.

The industry is lead by two applications, Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost. These two are great and include an impressive array of options that many of the free applications don’t have. But most users won’t use them anyway.

DriveImage XML

The first application i want to talk you about is DriveImage XML, from Runtime Software.

Official description:

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

The program allows you to:

• Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
• Browse these images, view and extract files
• Restore these images to the same or a different drive
• Copy directly from drive to drive
• Schedule automatic backups with Windows Task Scheduler

Macrium Reflect Free

The second one is Macrium Reflect Free.

Official description:

• Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
• Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
• Built in scheduler.
• 32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
• Industry leading compression levels and speed.
• Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
• Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
• HTML log files.

No Excuses

There are free tools to make those important backup disk images. It is up to you which one to choose.

Personally, i liked Macrium Reflect Free feature set.

I just came across this tool when doing some reading on jailbreaking the iPhone 3G in Mac OS X.

WinPwn is supposed to unlock the iPhone 3G in Windos, so you can use it with any carrier or service provider. I don’t have an iPhone so i haven’t try it.

This tool is made with resources of iPhone Dev Team, the guys who unlocked the iPhone 3G in Mac OS X. This guys have a blog. You may want to read it.

Website

There are many Firefox extensions that still don’t work with versions 3.0 and higher yet.

I updated Firefox to 3.0.1 and discovered that one of my favorites, Tab Mix Plus, was not compatible.

After investigating how the extensions and versions work, i found an easy way to modify some of them to work with Firefox version 3.0 and higher.

Follow this instructions and hopefully you will get yours to work:

1. Manually download the extension you want to modify. You can right-click and choose Save Link As to save the XPI file.
2. Rename the XPI extension to ZIP and open it with WinRAR, WinZIP or 7.Zip.
3. Extract the file install.rdf and open it with Notepad or other text editor.
4. Look for this line: em:maxVersion=”3.0″ and change it to the last version of Firefox you have. In this case i have 3.0.1 so i changed it to em:maxVersion=”3.0.1″.
5. Save the file and update it inside the ZIP archive.
6. Change the ZIP extension back to XPI and install it. A fast way to do it is to drag it to a Firefox window. The install extension dialog will appear and if all went right, you should be able to use it.

Be aware that this is not guaranteed to work with all the incompatible extensions because some of them work different or they may have different features for the browser versions.

I have made this modification to MinimizeToTray and it works great as well.