Is your PC running slow, do you feel it is sluggish? There can be a host of reasons why PCs become slow with time, ranging from registry filling up with redundant entries and broken links, malicious spyware/adware, trojans, file fragmentation etc.

What should I do to figure out the problems?

PC Pitstop’s free computer checkup and diagnostics can help you detect and fix many common computer problems.

What does the tool do?

The free check up performs the following tasks:

• measures disk fragmentation
• checks available system resources
• analyzes device drivers
• benchmarks the CPU
• memory
• video
• disk
• Internet connection
• looks for viruses and spyware in running software
• checks for common security problems
• and many more things

The analysis doesn’t change any settings on your PC.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Colorzilla is a very useful add-on for Firefox and a must for web designers. Earlier I was using Instant Eyedropper for figuring out the color code on any page but this tool goes above and beyond that.

What does Colorzilla do?

Besides giving me the color code for any point in the browser window, it lets me zoom the page I am viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

How does it work?

To activate it, click on the dropper icon in the statusbar and then move around the cursor on the page. As you move along you get the color code of that point, its x and y coordinate and tons of useful information (DOM path etc.). It also highlights the container as you move along on the web

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Any one who is a frequent flyer would appreciate the importance of real-time flight information. FlightStats platform owned by Conducive Technology Corp. delivers real-time and historical flight information that lowers travel related costs and improves the travel experience.

They have come up with an “All In One Widget” which you can embed directly on your Google homepage or Live.com. You can request a custom version for your own web site. The best part is this is free.

The widget allows you to track Flight Status, get Flight Rating, obtain Flight Notification, and see Current US Airport Delays.

If you are interested in more detailed integration in your web site or application, they have XML Web Services library which provide the following features:

• Current and Historical Flight Status
• Flight Notification and Event Messaging
• Flight Performance Rating
• Itinerary Monitoring
• Weather Conditions and Forecasts
• Current and Historical Airport Delays
• Airline and Airport Performance Information
• General Airline and Airport Information
• Flight Schedules and Dynamic Flight Routing

What would be nice is to have it integrated with MySpace to display information about your home town airport on your homepage.

Popularity: 3% [?]

StumbleUpon is a powerful tool which allows you to surf the Internet for great websites. It serves you random websites in categories of your choice. It personalizes recommendations according to your interests and allows you to rate, review and share any page. Recently they have integrated pictures and video to their repository too. It is usable in the form of a toolbar available for both Firefox and IE.

Recently a new version (3.0)  of the toolbar came out with some nice features.

I use this tool to discover great sites.

Here is a snapshot of the toolbar from my machine:

(click on the image to enlarge)

The list of changes they made in going to 3.0:

• Avatars on the ‘Send to’ menu and on shared notes.
• Drag-and-drop toolbar placement.
• Configurable channel buttons.
• Channel indicator on the stumble button.
• New icon set.
• Toggle button configuration via the options dialog.
• Several search / tag configurations to cater to power users.
• Compatibility with the IE Tab extension.
• Fix for a bug where buttons are spaced too far apart on OSX.
• Probable workaround for the issue where the toolbar cannot connect at the beginning of a browser session, causing a spurious ’server is down’ message.
• Fix for a bug where rating a page thumb-down when the page is new to StumbleUpon was displaying a generic error message. New behavior is to display an explanatory dialog.
• Final phase of migration to hashed passwords for users who upgraded from versions older than 2.85.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There are lot of boring and annoying ads and banners on websites which you wished were not there but could not do anything about them. Besides being annoying they often take longer to download than the rest of the the page. Adblock Plus gives you the power to get rid of these ads.

What is Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus is an add-on (software module that supplements or enhances the original unit it is adding on to) for
Firefox browser which allows you to get rid of text, banner, flash and image advertisements from any website.

But where can I get Firefox?

How well has this add-on been received?

It has been a year now since Adblock Plus was released. Since then there have been almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org (which is very good!).

Before and After

The pictures below show the same site before Adblock was activated (left) and after Adblock was activated (right).

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Popularity: 6% [?]

One of the primary reason why Firefox has people hooked in is due to the extensibility it provides by means of add-ons. With IE7, Microsoft provides you the ability to create and use add-ons as well.

Add-ons (also known as extensions or plugins) provide a mechanism for third-party organizations or users to extend the browser’s functionality in various ways.

In an article titled “Seven Best Add-Ons for IE7” in wired news, Scott covers some of the useful add-ons for IE7:

1. ieSpell: spell-checker 
   
   (click on the image to enlarge)
2. Inline Search: similar to the find as you type functionality in Firefox
   
3. IE7 Open Last Closed Tab: restore a tab after it has been closed (neat!)
4. Add Search Providers: add any other search engine
5. Trailfire Toolbar: leave sticky notes on web pages
6. StumbleUpon Toolbar: web surf randomizer
7. GooglePreviewIE: preview a page before you visit it

More extensions can be found at Windows Marketplace.

Some of the ones which I like are:

• VSPopUp: pop-up window closer (Update: has been removed from the site)
• IE7Pro: adds lots of features and extras that make your IE easier, more useful, more secure and more customizable
• Aw2 Explorer 7: Aw2 Explorer 7 has tabbed browsing, rss feader, pop-up blocker plus more security features.

Providing the ability for developers to extend the functionality of IE7 (using add-ons) is indeed a right step by Microsoft and this should give them some leverage on competing with Firefox.

Source: Seven Best Add-Ons for IE7

Popularity: 4% [?]

Microsoft has released a free Accounting software on the lines of Intuit Quickbooks and it is called Microsoft^® Office Accounting Express 2007. It is a successor to the Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA). It can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft^® Office Accounting Express 2007, financial management software is designed for millions of starting businesses and home based businesses that currently use pen & paper or spreadsheets to run their business. It provides a single place to manage the company’s business finances with the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office system programs.

It is a desktop based application and is designed to be used on a single desktop. It is currently supported on Windows XP (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 (SP1). It  uses SQL Server Express database as its backend (is installed as part of the application install).

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Popularity: 5% [?]

You come across a web page or an application and you like some of the colors on it. It is a painful process to go about figuring the exact color code for that color. You press the Print Screen key to copy a screenshot to the clipboard, load a graphics-editing program, create a new file, paste the screenshot from the clipboard, zoom in on the object, use the “Pick Color” tool, and finally copy the HTML code of the color to the clipboard. All this is very time consuming particularly for webmasters who might have to do this very often.

Instant Eyedropper is a free software tool that will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. It can be downloaded from here.

Here is how it works:

• When you run Instant Eyedropper, it sits as a icon in the task bar.

• Move the mouse pointer to the Instant Eyedropper icon in the system tray. Press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse pointer to the pixel whose color you want to identify.

• Release the mouse. That’s it. The clipboard now contains the color code - in HTML format (or any other format that you have previously specified). It can be pasted and used in any text or HTML editor or the Color Picker tool of Photoshop.

Instant eyedropper can capture the color in any of the following formats:

• HTML
• Hex
• Delphi Hex
• VB Hex
• RGB

Instant Eyedropper is a freeware and is available for install on Windows NT, 2000, 2003, XP.

I have used it many a times and is a very handy tool.

What do you do to capture the color you like?

Popularity: 3% [?]