Firefox 3 super speed increase

Following on from my previous article, Firefox 3 Easter Eggs, I have discovered that broadband users can get a significant speed increase from Firefox just by changing a couple of settings. Firefox is distributed with settings that will work with any machine or setup, but really anyone with a half-decent connection can make these changes and get a great speed increase, and here's how you do it!

Inside the address bar type:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to "true". This adjusts the pipelining settings.

Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, though you should feel free to play with this number a little and tweak it as you see fit - the article http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests suggests that 8 is easiliy sufficient.

Finally, right-click on any setting and select 'new' and then 'integer'. Set the name to "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" (you might want to copy & paste it) and set the value to "0" (zero). This removes the render delay.

And hey presto you should notice a sigificant speed increase from a simple optimization!

ps. You may be interested in a related article: Firefox 3 Easter Eggs (fun hidden messages in firefox 3).

Firefox 3 super speed increase

Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service | Internet Service Deals

Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service

By Jessica Merritt

Most people pay a hefty amount of money every month to ensure that they have a quality connection to the Internet. But are you really getting what you pay for? Your speed, quality of service, and even the sites you’re allowed to use may be interfered with. Put these tools to work to make sure you’re getting everything you’ve been promised.

Performance and Speed

Check your Internet connection to see if you’re meeting the speeds you’re paying for.

CNET Bandwidth Meter Speed Test: This speed test will check your bandwidth against DSL, cable modem, and broadband services.
Intel Broadband Speed Test: Check out this test to compare your speed with what others have.
Doctor Ping: Compare your ping time to more than 100 servers with averages from other users with Doctor Ping.
Roadrunner Speed Test: Check your Roadrunner connection to see if you’re really getting the speed you’ve been quoted.
AT&T Speed Test: Just like the Roadrunner speed test, this tool will analyze the movement of your AT&T data.
Audit My PC’s Broadband Speed Test: This test offers broadband speed testing results that are both accurate and easy to understand.
Internet Performance and Speed Test: Use this test to check out your Internet connection speed.
Speakeasy Speed Test: Accurately measure your line and internet connection speed with Speakeasy’s test.

Uptime

Does your ISP promise 100% uptime? Check their record with these tools.

IsItUp: Monitor your ISP’s uptime from an external system using this service.
24×7 Line Monitoring: Check to see if your ISP is delivering on their always-on service.

Integrity & Quality

Check for interference on your line with these tools.

Web Integrity Checker: The University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute have teamed up on this tool that will detect whether or not your ISP is inserting advertisements into pages.
Line Quality Testing: Check for packet loss on your line, plus problem routers along the way.
Network Diagnostic Tester: Run performance tests on your network connection using this tool.
Smokeping: Monitor your IP address for 24 hours or more to detect packet loss or excessive latency variability from three different locations with Smokeping.
PingPlotter: With PingPlotter, you can collect data to uncover performance and security issues on your line.
Network Neutrality Check: Take this test to see if your ISP is altering your traffic in any way.
Pcapdiff: This tool will compare two packet captures to indentify packets that have been forged, dropped, or mangled.
Wireshark: Use Wireshark to capture raw packets and determine whether or not you’re a victim of ISP packet spoofing.

Ports

Make sure you’re getting full access to the ports you need by using these tools.

Open Port Check Tool: This tool will tell you if your ISP is blocking certain ports or not.
Open Port Tool: DynDNS offers this tool that will determine if you have incoming ports blocked by your ISP.

Throttling

Is your ISP throttling your bandwidth? These tools will help you find out.

Glasnost: Use this test to determine whether or not your ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic.
Gemini Project: Use this project and team up with someone else who uses your ISP to find out if you’re being throttled.
Vuze Network Status Monitor: Check for throttling right in your Vuze client, and help gather data on traffic control at the same time.
Network Measurement Agent: This tool will look for and flag a number of different ways your ISP may throttle your data.

Simple

Get to the bottom of what your ISP offers by using this simple tool.

Your TOS: A tool that’s worth checking out is your ISP’s terms of service. They will often spell out that they’ll stop your traffic if deemed necessary.

Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service

Free Spreadsheets Alternatives

Spreadsheets

Crunch your numbers in these Excel alternatives.

ChartAll: With this service, you can create customizable charts from your data sources.
Numbler: If you’re looking for a simple way to do spreadsheets online, check out Numbler.
Sheetster: This online spreadsheet has lots of great features, including the ability to embed spreadsheets in a blog.
iRows: iRows offers an easy way to do spreadsheets online, plus you can display your work on any website.
EditGrid: Create, share, and collaborate on spreadsheets with this app.
Simple Spreadsheet: This online app is a simple piece of open source software.
NumSum: NumSum is ideal for collaborators, as you can leave your work open and allow others to comment on it.

Free Online Alternatives to Popular Office Apps

Transformation Pack Round up for Windows XP | GeekNeeds

Transformation Pack let you change your Windows XP appearance dramatically.

It almost change every aspect of your windows, from theme, wallpaper, login screen, boot screen, until your mouse pointer.

There are various transformation pack that you can find. In this article I will try to round up almost all of the best pack that you possibly can find.

Vista Transformation Pack [Download]

Transformation Pack Round up for Windows XP

Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System

Nvu (pronounced N-view)

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Nvu Features

Check out the latest features and screenshots for Nvu here!

WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.

Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System

Pidgin: multi-protocol Instant Messaging client

Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

Pidgin can work with:
* AIM
* Bonjour
* Gadu-Gadu
* Google Talk
* Groupwise
* ICQ
* IRC
* MSN
* MySpaceIM
* QQ
* SILC
* SIMPLE
* Sametime
* XMPP
* Yahoo!
* Zephyr

Pidgin is free software. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. This means you are free to use it and to modify it, but if you distribute your modifications you must distribute the modified source code as well."

4 Free Video Players

Now a days, video is becoming part of our life, it’s like we can’t live without video. Because of these need, more and more players has been created to accommodate video files.
In this article there are gonna be 4 Media Player I will compare, so that you will have clue, which one you should install.
They are: Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic, VLC, and Kantaris Media Player. All of this are free to use.

*I’m using Transformers 720p movie as an example.

Windows Media Player 11
CPU & Memory usage:

Sample Image:

Media Player Classic
CPU & Memory usage:

Sample Image:

VLC
CPU & Memory usage:

Sample Image:

Kantaris Media Player
CPU & Memory usage:

Sample Image:
I’m sorry I couldn’t provide sample as this player didn’t compatible with all my capturing softwares.

My personal favorite still goes to VLC and 2nd is Media Player Classic. VLC support many video format, including those movie trailer that usually .mov, other players can’t play it. VLC can play it without installing any other codec.
Windows Media Player in the other hands, offer so many enhancement in video or audio, but lack of format support, like 3gp from my phone, or mp4.
Kantaris is a new to me, my first experienced with this player, the pictures too bright, compare to other 3, I don’t even set the brightness yet.

I suggest you get your Media Player Classic program from free codec like K-Lite Codec, instead of downloading stand alone player, as it will not support many movie format. I’m experiencing difficulties even playing .avi format.

4 Free Video Players

More Ways To Speed Up Windows XP | Connected Internet

Athough I’ve just got a new PC that is scarily fast (well, compared to my old machine) I’ve still spent quite a bit of time trying to make it even faster, and I’ve discovered some handy tweaks that I haven’t used before along the way.

These aren’t covered in my 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP or 10 Intermediate Ways To Speed Up Windows XP which together account for around 20% of my daily traffic. Once again, I’ve tried to focus on changes that any user can replicate and that won’t damage a system.

Speed Up Boot Times I

This tweak works by creating a batch file to clear the temp and history folders everytime you shutdown so that your PC doesn’t waste time checking these folders the next time it boots. It’s quite simple to implement:

1. Open Notepad and create a new file with the following entries:

RD /S /q “C:\Documents and Settings”UserName without quotes”\Local Settings\History”
RD /S /q “C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\History”
RD /S /q “D:\Temp” <–”Deletes temp folder, type in the location of your temp folder”

2. Save the new as anything you like but it has to be a ‘.bat’ file e.g. fastboot.bat or deltemp.bat

3. Click ‘Start’ then ‘Run’

4. Type in ‘gpedit.msc’ and hit ‘ok’

5. Click on ‘Computer Configuration’ then ‘Windows Settings’

6. Double-click on ‘Scripts’ and then on ‘Shutdown’

7. Click ‘Add’ and find the batch file that you created and then press ‘Ok’

µTorrent, the BitTorrent client that is..

Micro-Sized Yet Feature Filled

Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0 and above, BitComet 0.63 and above) and peer exchange.

Resource-Friendly

µTorrent was written with efficiency in mind. Unlike many torrent clients, it does not hog valuable system resources - typically using less than 6MB of memory, allowing you to use the computer as if it weren't there at all. Additionally, the program itself is contained within a single executable less than 220 KB in size.

Skinnable and Localized

Various icon, toolbar graphic and status icon replacements are available, and creating your own is very simple. µTorrent also has support for localization, and with a language file present, will automatically switch to your system language. If your language isn't available, you can easily add your own, or edit other existing translations to improve them!

Actively Developed and Improved

The developer puts in a lot of time working on features and making things more user-friendly. Releases only come out when they're ready, with no schedule pressures, so the few bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed.

µTorrent - The Lightweight and Efficient BitTorrent Client

IrfanView

- Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.

It is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

IrfanView is trying to create new and/or interesting features in its own way, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole "creativity" is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView has been stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, for 7+ years).

IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support.
One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support.
The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.

Some IrfanView features:

Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
Multi language support
Thumbnail/preview option
Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
Toolbar skins option
Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
Fast directory view (moving through directory)
Batch conversion (with image processing)
Multipage TIF editing
File search
Email option
Multimedia player
Print option
Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
Change color depth
Scan (batch scan) support
Cut/crop
IPTC editing
Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
Capturing
Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
Lossless JPG rotation
Many hotkeys
Many command line options
Many PlugIns
Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
No registry changes without user action/permission

IrfanView