PC Tonic

Install Bulk Apps in Windows with Ninite

Ashutosh — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:49:14 PST

Everyone knows of the pathetic software [Notepad & Co.] built into Windows. And for many tasks, there isn’t anything at all [antivirus, PDF, office work]! So it’s common practice for us, PC users, to download our favourite tools from the Internet or install them from a disk, right after a clean Windows installation. It’s painful, but it has become a habit. Recently launched Ninite aims to break that habit by automatically downloading and installing your software without you having to do much. Ninite is dead simple to use : you visit the website, select the apps you want, and then click the “Get Installer” button at the bottom of the page.

You’ll then get a custom installer, which will download the latest versions of the apps and install them for you. The default install paths and settings are automatically chosen, while the usual crapware [like toolbars] is left out. Ninite also plans to offer premium plans, with features like local / network caching and silent mode, in the future. These futures are actually currently available for free, until the premium subscriptions roll out.

Ninite

Pros : prevents mental and physical torture inflicted during installing two dozen software

Cons : may not be supporting your favourite software (yet); 64-bit support is limited; requires a good Internet connection (who doesn’t have it!)

Required for : anyone with a freshly installed Windows; technicians who repair PCs and install Windows frequently

Rating : 5/5

Free Antivirus Tools for Windows, Revised

Ashutosh — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:54:17 PST

Today I made some modifications to an older post on free antivirus tools for Windows. Norton Security Scan, no longer available with Google Pack, has been removed from the list, while the recently released Microsoft Security Essentials has made its way in. If you’re looking for some free PC protection, do read the article.

10+1 Free Antivirus Tools for Windows

Two Years of PC Tonic : Not Much So Far

Ashutosh — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:18:42 PST

PC Tonic turns 2 years today. Two years ago, I wrote my first post on how to speed up your computer and started my quest to be a future blogger, tech-preneur, and a millionaire (unfortunately, the last one being my top priority). Save for moving from Blogger to Wordpress, I’ve made little progress since. Doing nothing for two years is no less than crime in the Internet world. I’m realizing my mistakes, and I believe my passion will carry me forward in the right direction with time.

The Internet has been like my best pal ever since dad brought home a connection in ‘06. I’ve learned things I would have never been able to before. I’ve won some trophies and earned a few bucks. I’m the self-proclaimed computer geek at home (and one of many in hostel). I’ve [tried to] blog and help others. Still, one thing hasn’t changed much in these three years – procrastination continues to kill and consume me from inside. I’m really desperately trying to get rid of it, but it’s sort of got a hold on me. It’s like being drug-addicted; you know it’s bad and try to get over it, but you get pulled further into it.

Anyway, too much of personal talk. From today, I’ll be making another attempt (not the last!) to carry PC Tonic forward. I’m not saying I’ll be writing posts everyday, but you can safely expect not to see gaps of 3 months between posts!

I’m also planning to open up PC Tonic for other writers, where they can write articles, link to articles on their own blogs, and earn with the AdSense revenue sharing program. You will be hearing more about this in December, when I get back to home after the semesters.

Ok, that’s it for now. Have a great day.

Photo Credit

Block spyware, adware, and bad sites with SpywareBlaster

Ashutosh — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 07:55:08 PDT

SpywareBlaster is a useful security tool for Windows, designed to block all forms of malware. The software maintains a regularly updated blacklist of ActiveX spyware, adware, dialers, browser hijackers and prevents them from being installed on your PC. SpywareBlaster also protects you from privacy-invading tracking ads and malware infested websites.

SpywareBlaster packs in some additional useful features as well, like

configuration options and custom blocking in Internet Explorer
System Snapshot, which can reset browser and important system settings after a malware attack

Easy as it is to use, SpywareBlaster lacks the power of a traditional anti-spyware – it doesn’t have a scanning tool which can clean already infected systems. However, it can be used alongside any anti-spyware, as it doesn’t run in the background, thereby ruling out possibilities of confliction.

SpywareBlaster is free to use, but you can pay a small fee to enable automatic updates (you can still update manually for free). The program runs on Windows 7 / Vista / XP / 2000. It supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and other Mozilla based browsers.

SpywareBlaster – Home

Browse anonymously and access blocked websites with UltraSurf

Ashutosh — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:22:41 PDT

We’ve previously covered the Vidalia bundle, which uses the Tor network to let you hide your identity while browsing the internet. With the amount of options provided by Vidalia and the complexity of the Tor bundle (three tools working together), it can certainly get confusing for quite a few people out there. Moreover, the Tor bundle supports only Firefox out-of-the-box, which isn’t installed on every PC out there.

UltraSurf is a tiny substitute to Tor, which gets its job done without much fuss. Without ANY fuss at all, if you ask me. All you’ve to do is to download a 400KB file, and double-click it. UltraSurf will automatically scan for it’s servers and open up a configured Internet Explorer for you (it might take some time; usually takes 5 – 20 sec for me). Now you can access every blocked thing from your IE window. Surfing with UltraSurf is noticeably faster than Tor, and most of the time you won’t feel a lag.

In short, UltraSurf has a few advantages, like :

Portable, and extremely easy to use
Automatically cleans IE history after use
Seamless browsing experience
Updated frequently

UltraSurf might lack the bells and whistles of Tor or Your Freedom, but it’s still a pretty good choice for fast, trouble-free access to blocked websites.

UltraSurf : Home | SoftPedia.com

Get USB Threat Defender for free from Giveaway of the Day

Ashutosh — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:01:47 PDT

USB Threat Defender is a specialized anti-virus designed to protect your PC from the USB threats. It runs silently in the background and automatically scans any plugged in USB device for possible threats. It can also manually scan, detect, and heal USB infections that might have already infected your PC. USB Threat Defender can be normally picked up for $40, but you can get it for free from the GiveAwayOfTheDay.com website, only for today (about 14 hours left as of now).

Even if you’re reading this article a bit too late, you can always get the ongoing giveaway from the site.

Ada is an absolutely tiny Twitter app!

Ashutosh — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:41:16 PDT

Most Twitter clients are getting overly bloated these days, trying to pack in as many features as possible. The likes of TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and DestroyTwitter have got what it takes to be a power Twitter user, but can be overwhelming and confusing for the lesser tech-savvy Twitter users. If you’re looking for a simple yet functional Twitter app, do check out Ada. Sporting a tiny, unobtrusive interface that puts most of the side-functions out of your way, Ada is the perfect way to use Twitter without putting a toll on your other computing tasks.

Ada uses the Adobe AIR platform and runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, with AIR installed.

Optimize your WordPress blog with Autoptimize

Ashutosh — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:21:32 PDT

Autoptimize is a new WordPress plug-in that makes optimizing your blog a cakewalk. Adhering to it’s name, the plug-in will automagically optimize your blog’s HTML, JavaScript and CSS codes to make it leaner and faster. The plug-in is extremely simple to use, and provides just three configuration options – to optimize the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The author recommends using Autoptimize alongside the popular WP Super Cache plug-in for giving some serious speed boosts to your WordPress blog.

Get Autoptimize (compatible with WordPress 2.6 and above)

Note – I had troubles getting the “CSS optimization” portion of the plug-in to work. Activating it simply made this blog to vanish. That might be due to conflicts with some other plug-ins I’m using. The plug-in was released just two days back and there isn’t much help at the moment.

Update 1 : The plug-in is VERY effective in combining JavaScript files and reducing their total size (reduced total JS by a whopping 60% on this blog!), but with one catch : All your ad scripts (Adsense and similar stuff) will also be ‘optimized’, rendering them useless. HTML size has been reduced by around 10%.

Update 2 : The plug-in’s author, Emilio, seems to be really enthusiastic. He has dished out a bunch of big fixing and new feature updates in the last couple of days. Autoptimize should now work for 99% of the cases. If you do run into problems, use the Support forum or drop him a reply ( @turl ) via Twitter.

Google Announces It’s Own Operating System

Ashutosh — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:45:07 PDT

Google has officially announced that it’s open source, lightweight operating system – Google Chrome OS – will be available on netbooks in the second half of 2010. This is what Google has to say about Chrome and Chrome OS :

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

As with all Google products, speed, simplicity, and security shall be the key aspects of Chrome OS. It’ll based on the Linux kernel and will run on all major chips. Knowing Google, one can already imagine a plain, no-fuss desktop, lots of web apps, and (maybe!) a sub-10-second boot time.

Google has further clarified that Chrome OS and Android are two separate projects, even though they will overlap on quite a few concepts. Android was designed to run basically on everything starting from phones to set-up boxes to netbooks. Chrome OS, on the other hand, will focus on everything from netbooks and above.

For years it has been OS-giant Microsoft trying to rattle Google’s firm grip over the Internet, with little success. Nevertheless, recent projects like Windows Live and Bing are finally starting to take away little things from Big G. About time Google hit back. First with Chrome and now Chrome OS, Google is carefully treading on Microsoft’s grounds, with speed and innovation in mind.

What’s your thought on this exciting development from Google? Say in the comments!

Use Twitter elegantly, in Windows Vista / 7, with Blu

Ashutosh — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:59:12 PDT

Ever since Twitter started getting popular in early 2007, the number of apps for this microblogging service have exploded at a phenomenal rate. Blu is one such desktop app for Twitter, and it tries to distinguish itself with aesthetic look and feel. Quoting the developers,

There have been a lot of attempts at a great Twitter desktop client, but most have have resulted in glorified readers or overly complex applications—not a great experience. Meet blu. Now you can experience Twitter in a whole new way.

Blu utilizes the powerful

Windows Presentation Foundation feature of Windows Vista and 7, which is responsible for the great looks of these OSes. And it’s not just about looks either – Blu throws in a few useful features like

unlimited scroll down to see older tweets
see full conversations (@ replies) from the past
a translucent background showing the number of characters left
integrated with TinyURL
easy way to send replies and direct messages

While Blu clearly doesn’t match up with the feature set of some other Twitter apps like TweetDeck or DestroyTwitter, it does have it’s own charm. Give it a try, the great looks and simplicity of use may win you over!

Blu – Home (Windows Vista / 7 only)

Fetch movie subtitles with Sublight

Ashutosh — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:10:18 PDT

Sublight is a useful utility for Windows that allows you to fetch subtitles for movies and TV shows from various sources across the web. With it’s nifty features, Sublight can automatically look up subtitles for the movies on your PC and play them on your favorite media player.

The Quick Help guide that’s installed along with Sublight runs you through three easy steps on how to play a movie with subtitles.

Besides these basic features, Sublight packs some punch with innovative features like

batch download of subtitles for an entire folder of videos – read this tutorial
statistics of most popular movies based on usage and downloads
automatic integration with VLC and Windows Media Player
automatic and frequent program updates
facility to publish your own subtitles, and edit the ones you download
seamless integration with Windows Explorer, and a modern Ribbon-interface
integrated command-line tool

If you’re a movie buff like me, Sublight is a must-have addition in your software arsenal. Go grab it now.

Sublight – Home

Block ads, flash and other annoyances with a few mouse clicks [Opera Trick]

Ashutosh — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:35:29 PDT

We’ve previously covered ad-blocking tools for all the major browsers :

IE7Pro for Internet Explorer
AdBlock Plus for Firefox
AdSweep for Chrome, Opera, and Safari

All these tools work great, but if you’re an Opera user you can actually block ads using the browser’s built in features! Let’s see how :

On visiting a web page that contains some obnoxious ads (say our own PC Tonic!), right click anywhere within the Opera window and select “Block Content…”

The entire page will instantly fade out except for the blockable items (ads, flash, images etc.). All you’ve to do is to click on the elements you want to block. This will add a filter and Opera will block similar elements from all websites. If you’d rather block a single item, hold the Shift button while clicking on it.

Considering there are a large number of advertising services (AdSense, AdBrite, Chitika, Widget Bucks…) it’ll take some time to build up a commendable list of filters. However once done, you can conveniently surf through websites without having to see those ugly, bandwidth-sucking ads or horrendous auto-playing flash videos. You can view all your blacklisted content through Tools > Advanced > Blocked Content…, where you can also add website URLs to be blocked.

Opera might be the dark horse of the Big browsers, but it continues to impress with it’s rich feature set.

WordPress 2.8 “Baker” is out

Ashutosh — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:33:14 PDT

Wordpress has released version 2.8 of it’s popular blogging software. The latest version, codenamed “Baker” in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, brings about a lot of under-the-hood improvements and impressive new features, like

Much faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
Browse and install themes from the dashboard
Completely revamped drag-n-drop interface for Widgets
Timezone support and automatic daylight savings time adjustment

You can find the complete changelog in the WordPress Codex. All in all, 2.8 looks a lot like 2.7 but is much snappier.

Are we upgrading?

Definitely yes, but not now. The developers usually come up with a minor point upgrade (like 2.8.1) in about a month which contains a bunch of bug fixes and support from all popular plugins. We’re waiting for that.

2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets – WordPress Blog

We’ve fully migrated from Blogger

Ashutosh — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:25:29 PDT

All the posts, comments, and tags of our blog at Blogger have been successfully migrated to pctonic.net! Visiting any page on our Blogger blog should automatically redirect you here. Here is some information you could do with -

If you’re NOT using Internet Explorer, and you’ve got JavaScript enabled, you’ll be redirected to the corresponding page you want to see. For example, if you clicked on a link to post X at pctonic.blogspot.com, you’ll be redirected to the same post X at pctonic.net.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, or you’ve disabled JavaScript,or both, you’ll be always redirected to this page no matter whatever page you wanted to visit in pctonic.blogspot.com. We know this is a bit inconvenient, but you can always use the handy search box to get what you’re looking for!

So here’s a little recap of our new addresses, make sure you’ve got them updated!

URI : http://www.pctonic.net/

RSS Feeds : http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pctonic

Email Subscription : http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=pctonic

Finally, a note of thanks to Rahul Bansal for his cool Blogger to Wordpress Redirection Plugin, which made the transfer so much easier. He’s working on support for Internet Explorer in upcoming versions of the plugin, and we’ll be eagerly waiting for that.

Windows 7 Superbar glows according to your icons’ colours

Ashutosh — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:23:09 PDT

The traditional taskbar in earlier versions of Windows has been completely overhauled in 7, the next Windows in line. Popularly as the “Superbar”, the new taskbar has drawn accolades from the tech community for better management of a large number of running windows and for improved productivity. And like every other part of 7, Microsoft has put some neat, subtle effects into the Superbar as well. We’re highlighting one such effect in this post.

Open any program in Windows 7 and then minimise it. Now hover the mouse over that program’s icon in the Superbar. You’ll notice that the background around that icon will glow with the same colour as the icon’s colour. If the icon has more than one colour, the background glows with the most prominent of these colours. Not very useful, but definitely cool, isn’t it? Here’s a small video demonstration of this feature (this is my first ever screen cast, so please excuse if it’s horrible!) :

Subtle glow effect in Superbar

Windows Vista failed to shine, but Microsoft is clearly making it sure that this won’t be the case with 7.