Computer Technology: April 2015

Sunday 5 April 2015

Resize Image without losing Quality – How to Guide

People hate to visit websites which require more time for loading. So one should always seek to improve the webpage load time, so to do so you have to look at many things like loading sources, page cache, media files etc. One among such media file is images, adding beauty to your page, but at the same time, it is regarded as the most bulky resources which takes much time to load on the page, thereby causing inconvenience to the visitors.

But one can improve the page load time by cutting the size of an image to a significant amount. But even resizing the image without any proper knowledge may be troublesome as you may lose the quality it had. Though photoshop provides a nice feature to save the original quality of the pic, it is not preferred much as it’s too expensive to purchase the photoshop application for desktop or web version. So here I’m going to provide you with free online tools to Resize Image without loosing Quality

Web Based Tools to Resize Image without losing Quality

1.Kraken.io :

JPEG, PNG, GIF, SIV are some of the image formats that can be compressed with this online application. This reduces the image to a quite considerable point without losing the image size.

This application is also available in Chrome and Firefox extensions

2.Imageoptimizer.net:

After uploading the image from your computer, give the size of the image and quality you wish to have after processing. This provides only some control of the output and compression ratio But Greatly Helps to Resize Image without loosing Quality.

3.Smush.it:

Smush.it is the best and popular online application you can have to compress images. It is present with an up-loader as well as URL box to have the image. In this you will not be provided with the ‘enter’ option to enter the image quality as that of previous one because it automatically optimizes the image by compressing it to a limit.

4.Compressjpg.com & Compresspng.com :

I would suggest you to have these application, for more control of the image quality. A slider appears as soon as you upload an image to auto control the quality of the last image. A preview panel is provided for showcasing the changes according to the quality slider change. So before downloading the image you can have the review of your final image. This application is available on different domains for JPG and PNG images.

5.Punypng.com :

This application is available to compress the PNG files. Upload an image and you can get a compressed size of the image. Besides this, tinypng.com , a quick tool to compress the PNG images to the best level without affecting the image quality.

Desktop tool to Resize Image without loosing Quality

If you need a Desktop tool to do this task then i would suggest you to have PNG Gauntlet as your first choice, You will need .Microsoft Net Framework 4.0 to run this tool on your Windows.

You won’t Face any difficulty in Using this tool as it is very User Friendly. While Optimizing the images PNG Gauntlet will show you older size and Optimized size of the image. this Program is not that Fastest at it work but Usefull.

How to Schedule emails to send in future

You never know if you will have time in nearby future. There are two instances, once when you are having enough time and no work to do and the other when you are not having time and you are having huge workload. During the times of heavy workload, there can be instances when you forget to do important things which you should have done.

Let’s say you didn’t mailed your friend for his birthday. So, what to do then? To keep yourself on a safer side you can schedule your mails when you are free.

How to Schedule emails for sending them in future.

Boomerang for Gmail

There is a plugin, names Boomerang for Gmail which is available both for Firefox and Chrome which will help you to Schedule emails. This plugin is compatible with Gmail and using this you can take control of sending and receiving emails at desired time in your Gmail account.

How to Install Boomerang

Open your Google chrome or Firefox Browser and visit the Boomerang website by clicking Here.
Once you have visited the website, click on the Install Boomerang button which is present on the website and the installation will be started.
You will come across a couple of steps, follow those steps and your installation will be done.
Once the installation has been completed, the next time you will open Gmail, Boomerang will be automatically enabled.

How to use Boomerang

Using Boomerang is very easy as the interface of this plugin is very user friendly. Read the guide below on how you can use Boomerang on your Gmail account to Schedule emails.
Compose email like you normally do.
On the Compose page right next to the Send button you will see a new button named Send Later. This is the button which will help you to send email later.
Choose the date and time as per your schedule, whenever you want to send the email.

Additional Features

Schedule Recurring Message :There is one great feature which comes with Boomerang and that feature is that you can schedule recurring messages to anyone on periodic basis. Let’s say you are working in a project and you are the project leader and each week you need to ask your team member about the progress report of the project. Using Boomerang you can schedule that message using the Schedule Recurring Message feature. You will see the option to schedule recurring messages once you click on the Send later Button.

Deal with emails later: Sometimes we don’t want to read the emails we received at that time. Boomerang will remind you to read the received mail at the time you have set. If you have sent an email to your entire team and you want that the person who is max qualified in your team should reply to It but he fails to reply it then you will be get notified.

Top 5 Websites to Improve typing Speed and skills

Everyone using the computer wish to finish their tasks quickly. For doing this, typing plays a vital role because no matter if you are making presentations, doing content writing or even chatting you have to apply your Typing skills everywhere.

It is dream of everyone to type rapidly and without even looking at your keyboard, just by concentrating on word over your screen which you are typing. But many of us really don’t have those great typing skills and if same is the case with you , just don’t worry .

Here is a list of few outstanding websites which will not only increase your typing speed but also let you Improve typing Speed and minimizing typing mistakes.

Top 5 websites to Improve typing Speed

1.TypingTest.com

On Typingtest.com you will have to select a time slice ranging from 1 minute, 2 minutes and 3 minutes. Accordingly choose one text type from given ten types and then you can begin the touch typing test

After this test completes, website will generate a summary showing your typing speed, typing accuracy and errors that you made during your typing test. It will also categorize your typing in slow, Average or Fast in order to help you improve.

Besides, you can also play nine different games to test your typing speed while enjoying the game at the same time.

2.PowerTyping.com

The website PowerTyping is an online free typing tutor website allowing you practice on both kinds of keyboards i.e. Qwerty keyboard and Dvorak keyboard. Here Qwerty keyboard will make your paragraph or words typing skills better while Dvorak keyboard will be helping you to understand the alphabet’s keys location on your keyboard. You can select your desired keyboard and take the typing practice, or you can play some typing games as well.

3. Keybr.com

Keybr.com is different from above mentioned two websites in such a manner because besides English, you can also take test for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian here. Some of which offer more than one default keyboard layout making you perfect in typing languages even other than English.

You can choose the test type from Random words, Custom text and Imported web site or blog which gives you flexibility to practice simply anything you want.

4. TypeRacer.com

In TypeRacer.com you can enter a typing race, take some practices yourself and also invite your friends to a private race with chat where you can compete against them. It will not just Improve typing Speed of yours but will also help you to measuring typing speed as well as chatting with your friends at the same time. You can install TypeRacer on Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, or Netlog and you can also test your typing speed in Chinese, French, Japanese and many other languages.

5. FreeTypingGame.net

As per the name of website, you can test and Improve typing Speed by playing games. There are 10 different free typing games and each of them has three levels: beginner, Intermediate and advanced.

Apart from this you can also study the typing lessons or you can take some typing tests if you don’t wish to play game and just want to practice in classical manner.

Keep on Practicing to Achieve your Goal, If you know any other Great Website, Feel Free to Mention it in Comments.

Amazing Tricks to Speedup Pendrive Data transfer.

Pen drives or USB are quite popular in the digital world for instant transfer of data. Using USB flash drives, one can easily transfer large files from one PC to another, from PC to laptop, from laptop to TV, and vice versa. This latest technology has made our work easier than before. In current times, you can move Gigabytes of information into just a tiny pen drive within few seconds.

In recent years, a lot of changes has been made in storage devices. When you compare new pen drives with the older ones, you will notice a considerable high transfer rate in the latest ones. However, there are times when you can get irritated with slow transfer speed of pen drives while copying data in pen drives. Well, this article shall provide you with some tricks using which you can Speedup Pendrive Data Transfer Rate

Factors responsible for data transfer rate:

Before knowing the tricks, we shall have a look at some factors responsible for data transfer rate , and they are as follows.

1.Pen drive ageing: Well, this is common for any device that when it becomes old, the rates gets slower.

2.Type of files: The transfer rate of data also depends on the file type; you might have noticed that songs, videos and documents take very less time in transfer while application files need more time.

3.USB port version: The most popular version of USB is 2.0, and it will give you 35mbps speed. So, if you want fast speed then buy 2.0 version pen drives.

Few tricks to Speedup Pendrive Data Transfer Rate:

1.File system should be NTFS: If you want to Speedup Pendrive , then make sure you have NTFS as file system. You can do so by Right clicking on your pendrive and selecting Format,Select NTFS File system, Uncheck Quick Format And Click On Start.

2.Disk errors: To check disk errors go to the properties tab of your pen drive, then select ‘tools’ tab. You will find a ‘check now’ button, click it and then hit ‘start’ to fix the errors. The time taken for scan depends on the size of the pen drive.

3.Device policy: Under properties of your pen drive, select ‘hardware’ tab. Then select USB device from there that will lead you to a pop up window where you need to change settings. You can even have better performance of pen drive by clicking the option under ‘hardware’ tab.

4.Format: This is one of the effective options that many users have tried. When you have used your pen drive for quite a long time, you can speed it up by formatting the device.

Carefully test your pen drive with the factors given above to Speedup Pendrive. In addition to this, you should keep checking for these aspects regularly, say twice or thrice in a month.

Computer Security Tips to Protect your System information

We hear a lots and lots of concerning cases of hacking, softwares, malwares, viruses, etc, Here are someComputer Security tips to safeguard your PC/laptop against hacker intrusions, malware and different viruses that exploits your PC or Laptops.

6 Computer Security Tips

1) Use a firewall

A firewall is a software system that will handle outgoing and incoming Internet connections of your computer. You’ll be able to clearly use the one engineered into Windows by default, however this can be by no means the foremost Efficient. i will like to recommend Comodo Firewall which is free and straightforward to use. Using Firewall is just one of Computer Security tip that i want to mention

2) Use antivirus

There are obvious reasons to use Anti virus Programs, but there are People that don’t have any antivirus or those who have, they have not upgraded thier antivirus since their permit has lapsed.. However there are quite powerful free antivirus Available. One must Install Antivirus to Protect and Keep thier Computer Secure

3) Updating software system:

New vulnerabilities are found in software system or operative systems like Windows each day. So one must always updates thier software system. Keeping your installed Softwares upto date is Important, as it will Keep hackers away from breaking into your System and its Said that any upto date program Works smooth without any glitch.

4) Use complicated passwords

Users like you and me use too weak passwords that are very simple to detect for hackers, there are so many software which will try all Possible Combinations to Crack your Password, this is known as Bruteforce technique . If your secret word(password) Consists of just 4 or 5 characters, it will easily discover it.

Your Password becomes harder to crack if it consists of 8 or 9 characters which also includes numbers, letters and special characters.To check the strength of your Password, there are plenty tools over internet. This is an important Computer Security tip that everyone must Consider.

5) Use totally different passwords

Most common mistake people make is that they use same password everywhere over internet. Yes, its very hard to remember passwords for all accounts but its highly advisible to have different passwords for different accounts.

This Practice Comes handy if one of your account gets Compromised/Hacked, then your other accounts are still safe.

6) Always Beware:

Finally, Abstain from getting hacked, Always beware while Browsing Internet, don’t transfer and install everything and anything on your PC or Laptop.

Always check the sources of software system and websites that you just use to download programs.

Don’t be silly and amateur hackers won’t be able to do anything to you (while serious and skilled hackers will not have any interest to hack you)

Do you have any Computer Security tip that you will like to share ? Feel free to comment below.

How to Check Original Installation Date of Windows

Many a times we want to know more and more about our System, What if a Friend of yours asks you some Questions about your PC and you fail to answer it, You may be Curious to Know the Original Installation Date of Windows. We all want to know when our windows was First Installed, How many months or Years have passed since you are chugging without Refreshing your System.

The Process to know the Original Installation Date of your Windows is Very Quick and Simple, Stay with me, read on and i will tell you how to do it Step by Step.

Steps to Check Original Installation Date of Windows

Step 1: Hold Windows key and Press R key to open Run, Type CMD and hit enter to Open up Command Prompt.

Step 2: Type systeminfo.exe in Command Prompt and Hit Enter.

Step 3: Just wait a Few Seconds to Gather all the Data , Boom- You will Get all the info of your System in just a few seconds including the Original Installation Date which we are looking for.

Step 4: With this Command you Get all the Necessary info about your System but If you Just want to know the date on which your windows was Installed on your System then type this Command systeminfo | find /i “install date

You can see its showing that i have installed my windows last month as i had to Refresh my Windows, its pretty much Accurate.

Thats it guys, in this tutorial we saw how to check our system info including the Windows Installation Date.
If you have any trouble related to this article, have a go and Speak your mind in Comment box. I will be more than happy to hear from You.

Increase battery life of laptop Easily

Every laptop or Netbook user these days have the same headache of limited backup time of batteries. As far as your system is new , you will have a good backup time but when it becomes a few months old you will definitely face problem of limited battery life.

So here I am giving you a solution to Increase battery life of laptop upto a sufficient extent.

There is an inbuilt command in your computer to Increase battery life as well as the performance of the system but not all users are aware of it. Some laptops directly provide an interface with option termed as “ POWER SAVING MODE ” but if your laptop is old or don’t have this feature by default , you need not to worry because you can do the same task manually.

If you have a laptop with Windows 7 installed, you can use the ‘powercfg‘ command . It will display useful information about your laptop’s energy consumption and usage. If you can understand and maintain it correctly then you can extend your Battery life and performance by great amount.

Steps to Increase battery life of laptop

Step 1: Click on the Start Menu and type “ CMD ” in the Start Search bar.

Step 2: The search will start and it will then display an icon of “ CMD ” . simply right click on it and select Run as administrator.

Step 3: It will open command line, now simply run the command “powercfg -energy” without quotes. (For windows 7 users.)

Windows 8 users can Simply run the command “powercfg /energy” without quotes.

Step 4: Now Press “Enter”.

Once you successfully execute this command , Windows will run a complete scan of your system and it will find some ways to improve performance and power efficiency.

The results of this process will be saved to an HTML file, which is commonly present in the “System32”folder of most of the systems.

To access this file, simply follow the path which will be displayed in command prompt window after completion of the command. Read This file to understand that what program in your system is consuming more power and degrading the performance. Fix the Problem to Increase battery life of laptop.

Some More Usefull Tips to Increase battery life

Eject or Remove External Devices like Pendrive/DVDs/External HDD if not in Use
Run Apps that don’t Eat up much RAM
Disable Bluetooth of your Laptop if not in use.
Reduce Screen Brightness, This takes away lot of your battery, Reducing Brightness will help
Turn of Internet if you are not using it.
Make sure your Laptop’s Temperature remains Low

I am quite sure Performing these Tasks will help you to Increase battery life of laptop.

How to Convert any Word Document or webpage to pdf

Many times when we are randomly opening pages of some websites or going through different sites , we see some topics which seems really interesting. Often when we are looking for some particular topic , we reach to some other post which is interesting too but we have to continue to our search and leave that page half heartedly. Many of you might be aware of the default option provided by browsers for saving web pages to your computer and read them later while you are offline . You can do it by using option “ Save Webpage As…”

But these web pages saved by this method are not that good quality files. When reading , it seems that we are still looking at the website and not in our computer. So today I am going to tell you a trick to Convert Webpage to PDF and saving it to your computer simultaneously.

How to Convert any webpage to pdf

There are two very simple and automated methods to Convert Webpage to PDF format.

Method 1 : PdfMyURL.com

Pdfmyurl.com is a website that provides service of converting any webpage to pdf format and make it available to save on your system free of cost with the blink of your eye. It is very fast .

All you have to do is Simply open PdfmyURL website and paste the desired URL or website address which you want to convert to pdf and click on button placed at right side of text box. It will convert that URL into pdf format and ask for saving to your system.

Method 2 : Using Nova PDF

You can convert webpage to pdf from popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Chrome by installing a Nova PDF creator that works as a virtual PDF printer. Once the printer is installed, you can simply print to it and a PDF file will be generated.

Just Download this software from their official site here : DOWNLOAD

Install it to your computer and then it will automatically add a new option to your browser’s print button i.e. Nova print server . Select it and click on print. It will save that url as pdf. You can also set margins of page using page setup before downloading the pdf to set the size of pdf file you want.

So this was all about saving a web page as pdf document now I would also like to tell you about How to convert word document to pdf file.

It is a simple task to convert any word file to pdf file. It can be done online or by some software. The best way to do it is using wordtopdf.com

This site will do your work in three simple steps. Browse your file , Enter your email address , click onconvert it and within a few minutes the converted pdf file will reach to your inbox. There are many other sites as similar to wordtopdf.com so if this site doesn’t work for you , simply google it.

Above methods guides you to Convert any webpage or word documents to pdf format easily.

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