Computers

Rapidshare is a popular 1-click file hosting service. While it's free for anyone to download the files, if you don't have an account they apply certain restrictions which make downloading several files annoying. Not only do they make you wait more than a minute for the download button for a 100mb file to appear, but they also limit how much data you can download per hour. You'll have to wait 15 minutes to download a second 100mb file for example. This can get quite annoying, having to reload the pages, wait for the download button etc.

Here is a free online tool which will convert your PDF file into a Word Doc file. You just select the PDF you'd like to convert, and click "Convert and Download". Easy! The PDF to DOC converter is here.

Sometimes an AVI video file will be broken in such a way that it can actually be fixed quite easily and quickly. DivFix ++ is a free utility which does just that, repairs broken avi video files.

FLV, or Flash video files, are everywhere these days. Sometimes people will download an FLV file and want to extract the audio from it, as an MP3 or WAV file for instance. All you need to do this is a brilliant tiny little free piece of software.

Most people usually only need an image editor to do simple tasks, such as resizing an image, cropping images, adding text to their image and so on. You don't actually need any software installed to do this - you can just use a free online image editor website!

If you've got a video file that has an accompanying subtitle file which is separate, that's usually preferable to "hardcoded" subs (which are in the actual video itself).

I recently upgraded to Winamp 5.52, and while it looks all very shiny and nice, I was disappointed to find that its startup speed had slowed to a crawl. This really bugs me, as I'm often opening and closing winamp, to check out single music files or podcasts etc, so I need my media player to load instantly.

After a few searches, and some options tweaking and testing, I discovered that by uninstalling the Nullsoft plugin for Ripping and Burning, the startup of Winamp no longer has several seconds of lockup every time its loaded. Sweeeet.

Heres where to find it...

Options > Preferences > Plugins > Media Library

Uninstall the plugin:
Nullsoft Rip & Burn v1.1 [ml_disc.dll]

Of course, presumably this disables ripping and burning music files with Winamp, but I've never used this feature (or indeed many of the others in Winamp).... I simply want a decent music player, without unused bells and whistles which ruin the day to day usability of the program.

Enjoy.

Alright alright, I'll admit it, I don't own an iPod! In actual fact I haven't bothered upgrading from my old Sony NetMD Minidisc MZ-N1 player that I bought probably around 2002.

Well we all need to take a break from our online work, and what better way to relax than hurling yourself into an online battlefield with 64 other human players?! It's great fun, except when your computer has a heart attack every time you turn around in-game.

As most of you know, these days viruses, spyware, and all sorts of other worms, backdoors and trojans are everywhere.