Raymond.CC Blog

Benchmarking your system can be a fun and interesting way to see how fast your PC hardware performs compared to other users around the world. It’s also handy to help spot any areas where potential performance is not what it perhaps should be. For years Futuremark had been the daddy when it comes to benchmarking software with their 3D Mark and PC Mark suites. The free versions are a bit limited in their operation, but Futuremark does have a massive online database of scores from 1,000’s of users to compare with.

Auslogics Benchtown has actually been around for several months, but it is really in more recent weeks the software has been made a lot more accurate with its scoring system and the Benchtown website now has close to 1,500 results to look through for comparison. Benchtown can give you scores for your core system components; CPU, Memory, Hard drive, 2D grapihics and 3D gaming graphics.

I have always been a huge fan of free tools developed by Nir Sofer. One of his latest tool is BluetoothView that claims to allow you to monitor the Bluetooth activity around you. Basically BluetoothView periodically tries to detect any discoverable Bluetooth devices in background and then logs it in the program Window with information such as Device Name, Bluetooth Address, Major Device Type, Minor Device Type, First Detection Time, Last Detection Time, and more. You will also receive a balloon notification when a new Bluetooth has been discovered. Since most modern laptop comes with Bluetooth, you should be able to use BluetoothView with the standard Bluetooth stack of Windows XP/SP2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

D-Link are very well known for their networking products and I personally own a router, USB wireless adapter and an IP camera of that brand. The IP camera that I have is a pretty old one without a built-in webserver. All it does is capture and stream images without fancy features such as Dynamic DNS, motion detection, and auto sending captured images to an email address or FTP. So whenever I am not around for a couple of days, I will have to connect the IP camera to a Windows computer and set it up with a third party software such as webcamXP in order to receive notifications when a motion is detected.

Although it works, but I find this method flawed because if there is a power failure, the computer will instantly shut down and will not auto startup when the power is restored. Other than that, I do not like to waste electricity because the computer has to be turned on 24/7 until I get back home. Fortunately the newer range of IP cameras by D-Link comes with a complete system with a built-in CPU and web server that transmits high quality video images for security and surveillance. It even has motion detection and notification via email feature built-in which means the IP camera can work independently without a computer connected to the camera.

Lexmark printer drivers and software have long been known as a bit of a pain if you no longer use the printer and want to use something else for your printing tasks. With most other printer software this isn’t a problem, just go to Add/Remove and uninstall. Unfortunately, some Lexmark software doesn’t completely remove itself from Windows and leaves behind a bit of data in the Spooler service. This may mean you get an error similar to the one below (or an error 1068) when trying to use the replacement printer and software:

Sharing folders in Windows XP is so much easier compared to Windows Vista/7 because of the Simple File Sharing. Simply right click on a folder, go to Sharing tab, check “Share this folder on the network” and anyone on the network is able to access the shared folder without logging in. When it comes to Windows 7, Simple File Sharing is no longer available and you will need to manually add the user and set the permission level. Setting the wrong permission level could be dangerous as it will allow unauthorized users to mess with the folder or files. Rather than checking everyone single folder if the permissions are set correctly, you can use NTFS Permissions Reporter tool which is a great time saver in automatically listing down NTFS permissions all the way down your directory tree.

People tend to write with consistent styles. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you should know how do I normally write my articles and the usual grammatical mistakes that I make. Even if I were to buy unique articles and post them under my name, some of you could detect that the article is definitely not written by me. Even if there were bloggers that writes very closely to my style, the level of technicality in research is definitely different.

Other than that, the words that are used in an article can disclose identifying features such as determining an author’s gender. There is an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, that can predict the gender of an author. The analysis is based on how many feminine and masculine keywords being used to determine if the author is female or male. Hacker Factor, the same company the sponsored FotoForensic’s website has implemented the algorithm and named the service Gender Guesser so that we can all use it for free to estimate the gender of an author.

I have seen a user desktop that has so many programs running and when he hit the Alt+Tab key, there were actually 4 lines of icons. Probably he got used to it but to me, it is just messy and possibly slowing down what I can do on the computer. One way to fix that is to have multiple monitors which can be very productive for advanced computer users because they have more space on-screen and be considered as having a multiple desktops. However it would also mean spending more money and also having more cables lying around. An alternative free method to have multiple desktops is to use a software called Dexpot.

There are many virtual desktop software but one of my personal favorite is Dexpot. It has been around for many years and still in constant development today. Dexpot is lightweight, takes very little memory usage and most importantly it supports customized desktop icons where I can have different desktop icons for every different virtual desktop. Other than that, Dexpot supports a lot options can be configured to suit how it should work.