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Jan 04

Windows Mobile Bug Dates Messages from 2016

Posted in: mobile, Phones, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

Windows Mobile users are facing an unexpected New Year’s surprise. A software bug has struck smartphones running the Microsoft operating system so all messages received starting January 1 are dated 2016.

Phones running versions 6.1 or 6.5 of Windows Mobile are reportedly affected. Microsoft and the handset makers haven’t responded yet with a fix for the bug. We are still waiting for a comment from the company.

The Windows Mobile bug is similar to the once-feared Y2K problem where computer programs had to be rewritten to ensure they interpreted the “00″ date tag as year 2000, instead of 1900. Windows Mobile had 11 percent share of the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008. But it has been losing ground to competitors such as Apple with the iPhone OS and the Google-designed Android operating system. In the fourth quarter, Windows Mobile’s market share declined to 7.9 percent.

The latest Win Mobile bug is an annoyance to its users. Because messages are incorrectly dated, they get lost in the inbox and conversation threads don’t show up appropriately. Outgoing messages, though, are dated correctly.

There is a temporary solution. An unofficial patch tries to use the phone’s clock rather than the one used by the SMS gateway to date the messages correctly. Meanwhile, users of Windows Mobile based smartphones on T-Mobile’s network say they haven’t faced the problem.

See Also:

Photo: (Tim Dorr/Flickr)

Jan 04

Resolved: Keep Your PC Clean, Safe, and Backed Up in 2010

Posted in: feature, Today's Chili, top, Windows

It’s the start of a new decade, and while you’re busy making resolutions for yourself, you shouldn’t forget about your PC. We suggest making a resolution to keep your PC clean, safe, and backed up for 2010. Here’s how to make it easy.

Image remixed from viagallery.com.

Keep Your PC Backed Up Automatically

There’s one thing that most users neglect or procrastinate on rather than actually doing, and it’s also the most important system maintenance task you really need to do: Keep your PC backed up. The thing is, this doesn’t need to be a time-consuming task; in fact, your best bet is to spend a small amount of time configuring automatic backups of your hard drive and just leave it alone.

A handful of great backup tools are available to choose from, but it doesn’t really matter which one you use, as long as you make sure you’re backing up your data the right way. The most important factor is that all your data exists in more than one place—you can’t backup to a second drive, get rid of the original files, and consider yourself backed up. Redundancy is key.

While you’re backing up your system, you should strongly consider making a full image of your hard drive so you can restore more easily in case of a failure. You’ve got a number of tools to choose from, but if you want step-by-step instructions, we’ve got a full guide to hot imaging your hard drive with DriveImageXML.

Setup Your PC to Clean Itself

Now that your data is safe, secure, and backups are totally automated, you should use some more automation to set your PC to keep itself clean, keep your hard drives healthy, and prevent problems from happening in the first place.

If you’re already using Windows 7 or Vista, your PC automatically keeps your drives defragmented, but Windows XP users can check out our guide to setting up a self-repairing hard drive and setup a scheduled task to run the cleaning automatically in the background.

Keeping your drives defragmented isn’t nearly as useful if your PC is completely cluttered with temporary files and other junk that needs to be cleaned out on a regular basis. If you just want to keep your user folders organized, you can use Lifehacker’s own Belvedere to automate your self-cleaning PC. For less specific and more wide-ranging cleanouts of system files, your best bet is to setup CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, keeping your PC nice and tidy without any action on your part. If you want to be able to trigger it manually, you can always setup a shortcut to run CCleaner silently.

Be Smarter About What You Install

With your data backed up and your PC cleaning itself automatically, the next step is to keep Windows running as fast as possible by avoiding junk software that you really shouldn’t be installing—cluttered up drives from too many junk apps is the single biggest reason why people reinstall Windows on a regular basis when they shouldn’t need to.

It’s not only questionable software sources that you need to watch out for, however—you need to be careful when installing any piece of software to always use a Custom install, and carefully read every option. Too many people just hit the Next button through the install process, and end up installing toolbars, startup system tray apps, and other crapware components, even with popular software like Digsby (an app that, earlier this year, was taking advantage of people that don’t know any better).

If you need to install a bunch of software at once, you should check out Ninite, which bulk-installs freeware applications while avoiding any of the optional toolbars that you wouldn’t want.

Make Sure Your PC is Safe and Secure

Even if you carefully choose what you install, backup your PC regularly, and keep your system clean, you still need to make sure that you don’t get hit with the latest security hole. Make sure that you keep your Windows PC patched and updated, install important Firefox updates as soon as they come out, install Flashblock (not everyone would suggest this, but Flash is often the source of browser security holes), and get rid of Adobe Reader in favor of a better alternative. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be a lot safer—but be sure to read our full guide to protecting your PC from a drive-by browser attack.

It should go without saying that you probably want to have an antivirus app installed, and if you won’t take our recommendation of Microsoft Security Essentials, you’ve got a bunch of free utilities you can choose from. Just remember, you really should stop paying for Windows security.

You can’t talk about security without mentioning passwords, and you should make sure to choose and remember a great password, use a password manager for those really complicated passwords, and up your savvy to avoid getting scammed online with a phishing attack.

So what about you? Do you have any New Year’s resolutions for your PC? Let’s hear about ’em in the comments.

The How-To Geek likes to automate tedious tasks like backups so they don’t end up forgotten. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Jan 02

Editra: Free Cross-Platform Code Editor with Syntax Highlighting

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Linux, Mac, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Win; Mac; Linux
Whenever I do programming I tend to use some form of text editor, and so far my favorite app for that is Notepad++. Ever since they added in the code auto-completion it has been a great tool for the projects that I’ve worked on. The only downside is that it won’t exactly work if you’re looking for a free cross-platform solution.

That’s where Editra comes in. It’s a Python-based program that has many of the features that are nice to have when programming like syntax highlighting and code folding, and as an added bonus it’s also cross-platform. Don’t worry, just because it’s Python-based doesn’t mean it’s a pain to install… it all comes bundles in a single download just like a typical app would.

The only thing I wish it was capable of is auto-completion of code for languages besides Python. That’s the biggest downside that I’ve found, but other than that it does everything I’d expect it to:

Auto-Completion/Calltips (for Python only)
Bidirectional Find/Replace w\Regular Expression Support
Bracket Highlighting
Built-in Plugin Downloader/Installer
Code Folding
Drag and Drop (tabs/file opening/text)
Editable User Profiles
Highlight Style Editor
Line Bookmarking
Session Saving
Syntax Highlighting (60+ Languages)
Tabbed Windows

This app is pretty tough to beat when it comes to cross-platform code editors. It’s updated every month or two, and so I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that a future version will support code auto-completion for more languages.

Get Editra for Windows, Mac, or Linux

Aptana: A Free Cross-Platform Web Application Designer

Portable Notepad++: A Must for your Flash Drive

AceHTML – Limited Time Free Advanced Web Editor

FileZilla 3 – FTP Client for Windows, Linux, and Mac

Dec 30

HTC HD2 plays Tekken 3 using FPSECE emulator

Posted in: HTC, playstation, Today's Chili, Windows, Windows Mobile, WindowsMobile

Not much to say here other than there’s a PlayStation emulator for the HD2 and it bloody well works! The original gangster of consoles, already emulated on other WinMo devices such as Toshiba’s TG01, has made its way to HTC’s finest thanks to version 0.10 of the First PlayStation Emulator for Windows CE. You can hit the read link to find out how to get it up and running on your own handset, and then we’ll naturally expect you to come back and tell us how good it felt to play Final Fantasy VII in a whole new way. The more impatient among you will already be watching video of the HD2 running Tekken 3 effortlessly after the break, so go join ’em already.

Continue reading HTC HD2 plays Tekken 3 using FPSECE emulator

HTC HD2 plays Tekken 3 using FPSECE emulator originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink WMPoweruser | source XDA-Developers | Email this | Comments

Dec 28

You Don’t Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows; Here’s Why

Posted in: feature, Today's Chili, top, Windows

One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications

Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install

We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.

Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim

Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software

If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

So what about you? Do you always take the reinstall route, or have you devised your own best maintenance practices? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Dec 25

10 Things You Must Do With Your New Windows 7 PC

Posted in: feature, Microsoft, PC, Today's Chili, top, Windows, windows 7

If you got a new Windows 7 laptop for Christmas, you are truly in luck. But here are 10 things you need to get the most out of it.

1. Take a Spin Around the New Interface: Still glassy, glossy and damn near glittery, the Windows 7 interface is actually a major progression for Microsoft: It’s not just easy to use, it’s a whole new paradigm with the revamped taskbar and Aero Peek making multitasking with multiple windows more natural than ever.

2. Turn Off Everything You Don’t Need: While Windows 7 is missing some odd things, like a mail application, the flip side is that you can turn off pretty much every major feature you don’t want. Internet Exploder 8? Gone. Windows Media Player? Poof. And if you’re used to tweaking the crap out of Windows, you still can—a lot of the old tricks, like for manipulating context menus, still work.

3. Move All Your Crap from Your Old Machine: Windows 7 actually has pretty decent built-in powers for moving all your crap from your old and busted PC to your new pride and joy, though you need to download Windows Easy Transfer separately onto XP if you’re pulling stuff from that.

4. Master All of the New Keyboard Shortcuts: Why deal with flipping around a mouse or scribbling on a trackpad when you do the same thing in a tenth of a second with a keyboard combo? The Start key (oh sorry, Windows key), which I’ve always neglected as a useless monotasker, is supremely useful in Windows 7, as the underpinning for a metric ton of keyboard shortcuts.

5. Get It to Play Nice With All of Your Gadgets: The good news about Windows 7 is that, unlike Vista, most of your gear that worked with your computer a couple years ago with Windows should still work. And newer gear interacts with Windows in a fancy new way with a big ol’ splash graphic and easy access to all the stuff you’d wanna do with it. While even simple things, like adding a second monitor, are more straightforward now, here’s a device-by-device breakdown on getting everything to touch Windows 7 appropriately.

6. Share Stuff With Your Other Computers, ‘Cause It’s Easier Now: The networking UI hasn’t just gotten a facelift to make it more accessible, it’s actually easier to use with HomeGroups—join a HomeGroup, and all of the stuff you want to share with other computers spreads like herpes to the rest of the HomeGroup, no arduous networking required. Also, network in general—like with Macs—seems to just work better with Windows 7.

7. Stream Your Music and Videos Everywhere: Connecting your PC to a TV sounds so 1999. Well, you might not know this, but your Windows 7 PC is a badass music and video streamer, DVR, photo viewer, video aggregator and everything else you’d want out of a multimedia box, all thanks to Windows Media Center. The living room PC is legit now. Not to mention Play To, which beams music (and video and photos) to any compatible device on your network, no setup required (really!). All it takes it a right-click, and those Sonos speakers on the other side of your house will magically start yelling the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

8. Upgrade Your Netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium: If you got a Windows 7 netbook, there’s a good chance you got stuck with the artificially gimped out Starter edition, which sucks. The cheapest way to fix this is to buy Windows 7 for $30 using a valid .edu email address, then follow our guide to installing Windows 7 on any netbook.

9. Set Up Some Network Storage: A fresh computer is a fresh start—meaning it’s a perfect time to start a new life with fully networked storage for backup, especially if you’re using your machine as a DVR with Windows Media Center. (But skip on faster drives.) One awesome option? A Windows Home Server machine, which can do backups and stream out media to all of your computers.

10. Remote Control It From Anywhere with VNC: While diving deep into the system and futzing with your network at the same time, you might as well set up a VNC server so you can control your computer from anywhere, whether it’s to pull files or schedule downloads.

That’s it from us. Share your own tips and tricks in the comments, and Merry Christmas!

Dec 24

XBMC Updates to 9.11 Camelot, Brings Awesome New Look, Improved Features

Posted in: Linux, mac os x, Today's Chili, top, Windows

Windows/Mac/Linux/and more: XBMC is a killer open-source, cross-platform media center, and today they’ve released XBMC 9.11, introducing a whole new default look and feel, and it’s very friendly on the eyes.

Called Confluence, the new look blends some of the best features of XBMC’s previous default skin (PM3.HD) with several other popular skins for pretty impressive results. It’s definitely a different look from what we’ve seen in the Boxee beta, but the two media centers continue to deliver really impressive (and most importantly free) offerings.

(See all the images on one page here.)

You can read the condensed changelog on their blog, but some highlights include:

Better support for multi-monitor setups
High Definition, Surround Sound, and Subtitle Flagging and Filtering in Video Library
Speed up RAW image loading and handle more file extensions
Performance improvements to SQLite (database) queries (help is always wanted here)
Ability to scrape and scan TV Shows into the video library by air-date via TheTVDB.com

If you’re an XBMC user, it’s an update well worth grabbing. XBMC is a free download for Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV, and pretty much anywhere else you want to put it. Also, good news for people who followed our guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center on the cheap: The latest release of the Live version looks like it supports our machines out-of-the-box without custom third-party builds.

Dec 23

Microsoft Security Essentials Ranks as Best-Performing Free Antivirus

Posted in: free, Freeware, Microsoft, Today's Chili, top, Windows

Anti-malware testing group AV-Comparatives.org not only gave Microsoft Security Essentials a top rating for malware removal, but now they’ve given it their best ranking in their performance test as well.

AV-Comparatives.org ran a series of real-world tests running through common scenarios like downloading, extracting, copying, and encoding files, installing and launching applications, and they also ran through an automated testing suite as well. Once the dust had settled, it became clear that not only is MSE one of only three products that both blocks and removes malware well, but it’s also very light on system resources.

Out of all the products tested, Microsoft Security Essentials was the best-performing free antivirus solution, and one of only two that received “very fast” on each of the real-world tests, earning it their top award: an “advanced+” ranking. We’ve been telling you for a while that you don’t need to pay for Windows security, and now with MSE ranked alongside the top paid apps in both malware removal and performance, you might want to consider making the switch.

Hit the AV-Comparatives link for the full report in PDF form, or check out the PC Mag story for the overview—if you can deal with some irritating in-text ads.

Dec 21

PeaZip: Unzip Files for Free

Posted in: Freeware, Linux, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Linux
I’ve been a big fan of the open source 7-Zip application, and it has served me well over the last few years. Today, however, I came across a new program called PeaZip that looks like it is just as nice, and the great news is that it works on both Windows and Linux.

As you would expect it supports all of the major file formats that the competition does including:

Create & extract: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, PAQ/LPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, ZIP
Extract only: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DEB, ISO, LHA, RAR, RPM, XPI

When it comes to file extraction utilities it’s hard for each of them to distinguish themselves. They always seem to have the same features, and support all of the same formats. For the most part PeaZip falls within that category, but it does one thing that I really like. During the setup process it asks you which commands you’d like to have added directly to the Context menu, and which ones you’d like placed in the Send To menu:

peazip setup.jpg

The option(s) you choose to put in the Context menu will be available without needing to navigate into a menu, which means you should only place the commands you’ll use the most there. The ones you won’t use as frequently can be put in the Send To menu where it won’t clutter up the Context menu:

peazip context.png

If you like customizing the file extraction options in the Context menu I’d highly recommend checking out PeaZip. There’s also a portable version available for those of you who just want to try it out, but you must use the installable version if you want to add the context menu entries.

Get PeaZip for Windows or Linux

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Dec 21

Easily Convert Movies to iPhone or iPod MP4 Format

Posted in: Freeware, iPhone, ipod, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on January 08, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
The other day Ward pointed out in the comments a simple little application that’s available for Windows users who are looking to convert movies to a video format that the iPhone and iPods can play. We talked about being able to do this using the SUPER video converter, but a lot of you are probably just wanting to go from AVI to MP4. If that’s the case the iPodME program is just what you need.

You can see in the screenshot to the right why there is little confusion about how to use this program. You simply drag and drop the movies into the application that you’re looking to convert, choose from the options available on the screen, and let it do its thing.

Here are some of the reasons why I love iPodME:

Simple interface means you don’t have to fuss with options you probably wouldn’t change anyway
The program requires no installation, and the single executable is under 3MB in size
You can start converting one video, and at the same time continue to add more files to the list
Choose from different profiles that target the speed of conversion, quality, and size of output
Shutdown the computer after encoding is done (great for overnight processing)
It’s free!

This is definitely an application you should try out if you enjoy watching videos on your iPhone or iPod. And in case you’re wondering about performance it took me around 35 minutes to convert a 2-hour (700MB) AVI movie on my Pentium-D machine. That’s pretty darn good!

iPodMe Homepage

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Hasta La Gadget!

Windows Mobile Bug Dates Messages from 2016