Speed up loading of Acrobat Reader witht his free webtool

If you are one of those frustrated with the long long time taken by the Acrobat Reader to load, then use following trick.

Download Adobe Reader SpeedUp from Softpedia, install it and you are through.

It actually speeds up Adobe Reader's launch time by disabling the majority of plugins that are completely useless for most users. It's completely free from any malicious scripts.

Or, alternatively, if you don't want to use any third party program on your machine, follow these steps.

1. Go to the installation folder of acrobat reader (eg. C:\program files\adobe\acrobat\reader\.. ).
2. Move all the files and folders from the “plugins” directory to the “Optional” directory.

It will prevent Acrobat Reader to open the (mostly) useless plugins and load the Reader faster.

FullerScreen | Hide your toolbars and status bar with this Mozilla Firefox add-on

We all have used the slide-show mode of Powerpoint to make the desktop full-screen. But can the browsers do that. Off-course yes, if you are using Firefox, the versatile net browser. This feature is specially useful in case you are making a presentation.

You need to download this firefox add-on and just have to press the F11 key to toggle full screen mode and normal mode. Or alternatively, you can click a special button on the extreme right of your status bar to go full screen. To return to the normal mode, just scroll your mouse to the bottom, the status bar will appear and you can easily click the normal mode button.

It also provides a slide show feature which, if you are willing to mess about with CSS and HTML a fair bit, will give you basic Powerpoint type functionality from within the browser. Quite smart.

Save Money with these 20 Firefox add-ons

Add-ons and extensions of Firefox, developed by third party make it so popular. This blog has already published many posts on Firefox add-ons like Searchstatus, CoolIris, Firefox Showcase, pdf Download, Joey, Fasterfox, Answers and IE Tab.

But do you know that Firefox add-ons are a great way to save your money also. How...?
Recently, SavingAdvice has compiled a great and very useful list of 20 useful firefox add-ons for the same. The list is categorized into following categories.

• Cell Phone Minute Minders (3 add-ons)
  
• Grocery List Generator (1 add-on)
• Product Price Comparison (5 add-ons)
  
• Mailable Browser Tabs (1 add-on)
  
• Customizable Charts (1 add-on)
  
• Travel Price Comparison (2 add-ons)
  
• Deal Alerts (3 add-ons)
  
• Local Deal Finder (1 add-on)
  
• Be an eBay Sniper (1 add-on)
  
• Save Money by Saving Time! (2 add-ons)
  

You can check out this list here.

How not to speed up mozilla firefox | Disable Link Prefetching

Link Prefetching is a Firefox feature which allows it to pre-load all the links on the current webpage being browsed. The purpose of it is to load the next page clicked by you a bit faster. Know more about link fetching here.Although a nice feature for faster browsing, it sometimes is counter-productive especially for those who pay to their ISP on a pay-per-byte basis. They may like to consider disabling this feature of Firefox so as to save on the bytes transferred. But how ?

Here is how...

You just have to type about:config into the address bar, and scroll down to ‘network.prefetch-next’; double click on it to set the boolean value to false.

Free webtools: Speed up Mozilla firefox

Every Firefox user must have got irritated when your browser just hangs on clicking a pdf link.


But, thanks, this Firefox add-on makes life simpler by opening the pdf file in your pdf viewer application instead of the browser itself.

Just install the pdf extension from here.
and
go to Tools > Add-ons > Select PDF Download > Click Options > Click ‘General’ tab > Check ‘Open PDF box’ button > Navigate to ‘PDF opening’ tab > Check ‘Use OS default viewer’ box button > OK.

You might also be interested in Lifehacker's great compilation of top Firefox configuration tweaks about

• How to modify Firefox's configuration (about:config)

• Session restore

• Tab width before scrolling kicks in

• Tab close buttons

• Fetch only what you click

• Limit RAM usage

• Turn off chrome tooltips

A few other tips for speed-up of Mozilla firefox are available on this blog here, here and here.

A simple way to keep your files secured

If you work on a shared computer, then there is always a threat of loosing important personal information on your computer to others.

Windows XP has a very simple built-in secured tool to encrypt your important files, which will be not available to other users of your computer. Here is how?

• For encryption: Right click on file name > Properties > General Tab > Advanced button > Check the option "Encrypt content to secure data". Multiple files / folders can be encrypted in one go.

• For giving permission to any other user to access an encrypted file: Right click on file name > Properties > General Tab > Advanced button > Details > Add (whichever user you like).

• To stand-out the excrypted files: Open Explorer > Tools Menu > Folder Options > View Tab > Advanced setting box > Select "Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color". This will change the color of the name of all the encrypted files so as to enable you to recognize them easily.
  

For more advanced encryption: You can Download True Crypt from PC World, which is a free, open-source encryption program that lets you place files and folders in "safes" of any size.

Few more tips to make your Windows XP faster

Did you read my previous post to make your Windows XP faster. Here are a few more tips, you can use to still increase the performance of your machine.

1. Disabling Error Reporting

By default, WindowsXP will request to report application errors to Microsoft.
To turn this off:

• Right click > My Computer on the desktop
• Select Properties > Advanced > Error Reporting tab
• Check Disable error reporting

2. Remove MSN Messenger

Many times it is seen that MSN Messenger is of no use. Turn it away from always starting in the system tray, by

• Go to Start > Run
• enter following :
  

"RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove" and run.

3. Turn-off Built-In CD Burner

If not using the built-in CD burner software that comes with Windows XP, then why loading it?:

• Open > Explorer
• Right click the drive which is your CD burner
• Go to Properties
• Click > Recording tab
• Uncheck Enable CD recording on this drive

Speedup Windows XP in Minutes!

Although Windows Vista has slowly started to spread its wings, but still Windows XP is de facto standard of most of the desktop as on date.

As we know XP is a feature-rich OS, but it is pain to find people often complaining about the slowness of their systems running on XP, just because it is more resource sucking.
I just came across a nice tutorial (about 10 beautiful tips) to make your XP lean and thin and speed up my machine.
Why not give them a shot...! Try yourself.

1. Disable extra startup programs

Several items add up to the start up list when you install different software. Such programs are loaded when your system boots and remain in memory (RAM), they also continuously use processor. Here are is what you have to do to make them go away:

• Goto Start>Run, type "msconfig" > OK.
• Click startup tab
• Uncheck all th extra items which are of no use.
• OK.
• On restart a dialogue box will appear.

For rest of the tips, Click here