rridgely

All laptops get a little hot when your doing stuff like playing games and encoding video. It should be fine.

CCleaner will wipe out stuff like browser history, recently used documents, ect ect.(look in the program to see all the stuff it cleans) This would do a lot to preserve the privacy of the original owner, however if they have all their tax info saved in a word file, or all the passwords saved in their browser then no its not going to get that. You could probably spend a few minutes going through the computer for files and stuff and then use ccleaner and be good to go. Thats if you feel comfortable that this is sufficient. Personally if it were me I would probably nuke the computers with DBAN and then reinstall a fresh copy of windows. Dban will completely destroy ALL data on the computer to a point where it is inaccessible.(operating system and all). Sort of a happy medium between physically destroying the hard drive and making sure your not selling a computer that could contain sensitive information: http://www.dban.org/

Remember the good ol days when GMAIL required you to get an invite from someone who already had an account? Well, back then I had registered 6 accounts which I used to send out invites and just because they were names I wanted. Some of these accounts I hadn't logged onto in years, well yesterday I decided to try and log into all of them just to see if I got to keep the names(since sometimes you lose an account if its not active). To my surprise I still had all the accounts but I was shocked at the amount of spam in there. I had hundreds of spam emails(some had up to 400 or more) in all of these accounts, I had never even sent an email from a single one these names before. So I cleared them out and decided to check them today, one of them had 17 spam emails in it. I have a yahoo account that I have had for 7-8 years and I haven't gotten that much spam in it the entire time I've used it. (I would say I get about 4 a month and they are in the spam folder). My main account now is a live.com(msn, I use it for the Windows Live Mail integration) and I have never gotten a single spam email from it. Maybe the people who I gave invites too signed me up for some crazy spam or something, but it just seems really excessive. My question to all the gmail users, are you getting a ton of spam in your mail box?

They gave you a free license for mentioning them? Sounds like payola to me.

I downloaded it but I'm not sure if I'm going to install it or not. I never liked the old freeware version of this program and I'm not sure I really want another system cleaner.(ccleaner and desktop maestro seem to get the job done) but I guess its good this is available. Oh and you don't have to give them your email, I got it to download without entering one.

http://download.cnet.com/Ashampoo-Burning-...4-10776287.html

It is still going trouble free for me at the moment. I've been using this pc pretty extensively the past couple of days too. I really like this program so I hope it stays this way. I think this is one to try for anyone interested in having a software firewall. However if it does cause problems in the future it will be kicked the the curb as I don't really feel like I need a software firewall anyway, but it is nice to have I guess. (at the moment I don't even notice its running, I'm interested to see how it acts once the week is up on the auto learn)

This new outpost gets a thumbs up from me. I've been using it for a few days now(4) and it hasn't bothered me at all. When I installed it, I chose to have it auto create rules for one week(as I know my pc is clean) and it has not prompted me for anything yet. I don't love its GUI but its simple/functional and I can live with it. The program is stable, doesn't take forever to load, and its really easy to control network communications with it(Just uncheck a few boxes). Its getting good reviews from the security people so it seems to work as well. As someone who gave up on software firewalls a long time ago, this one doesn't bother me in the least. I will leave it on this computer just for the simple fact that it works and doesn't get in the way at all. I just hope it stays this way, because this is a program that I would recommend to others at this point. (but you never know with firewalls, they can become finicky out of the blue sometimes)

If you want to watch TV then HULU is the way to go: http://www.hulu.com/ I watch some episodes of House on there every now and then.

Are you trying to convert youtube videos into mp3s or something? If thats it your going to get horrible quality no matter what you do.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10217386-...OCmoreStories.0

Here is mine right now. I think I'm done with windows for good on this laptop. I've managed to do just about everything on this linux set up. Its been good for a few months now.

There are tons of them, but if you force him to use Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger for all his online stuff then you can use the free one microsoft offers: http://download.live.com/familysafety

If you already have MS Office 2003 then don't bother with openoffice. Openoffice is sufficient for a lot of users(I would argue students is where its best suited) but if you have the cash then its worth paying the $100-150 for the home edition of office. Its just a much better experience and you dont have to worry about compatibility(especially with excell and powerpoint). I love office 07 and wouldn't want to go back to 2003. The ribbon is an awesome design and it makes things a lot easier to do.

I think PS3 has folding at home built into it... If I had one I would let it do it. Send me a PS3 to help science Sony!

There is a new version of movie maker as well... I haven't tried it yet as it requires vista: http://download.live.com/moviemaker

I think you can connect two routers together to gain more ethernet ports by setting one of them as an access point instead of a router. I know linksys has a drop down box for this. I've never tried it, just seen it in mine and other routers config screens.

I didn't notice any system issues with IE8, but it still prompts me every time I try and switch my search box to google instead of live search(it auto switches back to live every time I close it), I just gave up because I don't see any settings that could be causing this.

A-squard = false positive crazy, I would stay away. I gave up on adaware years ago. You would probably get better real time protection from window defender.

Superantispyware is my go to app. Malware Bytes is proving to be useful as well. If I had to pick only one I would get get super but they both can be installed together without slowing anything or causing conflicts, so I would install both. Both can be found here: http://www.filehippo.com/software/antispyware/

I've actually had the opposite effect. I put it on my laptop instead of avast and found my pc to load faster and just overall feel more snappy.

Ok I split these posts from the other topic. No need to have stuff showing up from 3 years ago. Spyware Doctor is pretty bloated and the latest versions have caused all kinds of issues. Just take a look through their forums to see what I'm talking about.

I tried IE8 just now for the first time and I hate it. 1. They still wont let me put individual buttons where I want them. Unacceptable every other browser lets me do this. 2. It keeps telling me my search box is corrupted whenever I change it to google.(wtf?) 3. Noticeably slower than firefox.

Cool idea but I don't like that search engine at all. Ask.com was doing something like this for a while and they switched back because more than anything it just makes searching for something take longer. Why would you want anything other than just the internet sites? Who wants random powerpoint and pdf files that could be about god knows what(or where). I definitely don't want twitter/myspace/facebook stuff coming up. I guess to each his own though. I'll stick with google. They already know everything about me anyway Edit: Ok so you can switch it back to normal(only internet sites). Still stupid that you have to do it though.

No way to really know. You could try recuva to see if it can get them back.