When choosing which tool to review next on our site, we stopped for Driver Scanner 2009, as it promises to address one major problem that people have with their computers: keeping your drivers up to date at any time with minimum effort. Keeping track of driver updates for all components that are included in your system is a time consuming task for everybody, mostly for beginners. Not too many people really know the custom details of their hardware devices, and thus installing the correct drivers for every component is a difficult task. Using a single software for finding, downloading and installing the necessary drivers and updates seems to be an excellent idea. Now let's see how this idea got implemented and whether Driver Scanner 2009 really delivers what computer users need.

Many of our visitors sent us messages with questions about what applications, plugins and tools they should install on their PC so that common computing tasks such as viewing movies, listening to music, browsing the Internet can work from the first try. In order to answer such questions, we invited a few of our friends from other famous blogs and tried to come up with a great list of recommendations. In this article you will have your questions answered by: the famous How-To Geek, Anand Khanse from the WinVistaClub, Joseph Fieber from ITsVISTA.com and Ross McKillop from Simple Help.

When Microsoft designs a new operating system, they must have in mind backwards compatibility, which is always a great thing to have. However, despite many efforts, you cannot have all old applications run correctly in newer versions of Windows. Windows Vista especially suffered a lot from this perspective. Changing so many things compared to Windows XP resulted in many older application not working properly in this operating system. However, there a few things a user can try to make older applications work in Windows Vista, some with a higher success rate than others.

In this article I will show you how to run older software in compatibility mode in Windows Vista.

Why one should use Windows Media Center? The answer is simple: because Music, Pictures and Videos are more than just files!

To explain things better, I will start by briefly describing a typical scenario: you take 200 photos on a weekend trip, you download all of your favorite music and videos and you collect huge numbers of mp3 files. What happens to them? They all end up in folders, on a partition of your hard drive and most of the times you can't remember where they were. Windows Media Center can help you find them. In this article I will present the most important features and issues of Windows Media Center, which is intended to be an important Windows Vista tool for organizing and accessing media files.

For the moment, I will resume the presentation only to the Local Media features, like the Pictures, Videos and Music Libraries. The other features (TV and Movies, Sports and Online Media) will be presented in a forthcoming article.

Note stickers are one of the most useful things ever created. We use them to remind ourselves or others of future chores, ideas that are worth remembering, etc. The problem people might have when using note stickers is that the working space can become rather messy and finding a previous note can become time consuming. This can be easily fixed with the help of virtual note stickers programs. Shock Sticker is a free virtual note sticker application. This program helps you easily create note stickers, memos and can also be used as a scheduler. It also has some other additional functions such as: alarm, password, and hiding features.

In one of my previous tutorials I have shown you how to set your default programs for files of different types. By setting a default application for a certain file extension it means that when double clicking a file with that extension, it will always be opened with that program. However, there are cases in which you want to open a certain file with a different program than the default one. To do this, you have to use the Open With option.

In this quick tutorial I will show you how to access and use this option.

JPG or JPEG is probably the most used file format for images. From the internet to the most common mobile phone camera, we are all surrounded by them. We use them very often because they are small and easy to transfer. However, small size means also lower quality. Depending on how you create or modify a JPEG file, you might end-up having a low-quality image. Unless you use the right tools, quality remains lost forever. The good news is that there is a tool that can fix such problems.

Jpeg Enhancer is an application produced by a company called VicMan Software. This free tool fixes JPEG/JPG images that suffer from low-quality compression or are prone to have a "blotchy look". It doesn’t use any blur effects to hide noise in the image, but instead it uses a series of smart techniques to restore images back to their true form.

Even though we don't generally write about Microsoft Office 2007, we have received many e-mails from people asking us different things about it. One of the most common questions is: 'why Microsoft Office 2007 files cannot be opened by Microsoft Office 2003 or XP?'. That's because this version uses a new file format called Office Open XML. This new format offers a series of advantages, including a smaller file size compared to the format used by the old versions of Microsoft Office. All Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions have an ''x" at the end: '.doc' is now '.docx', '.xls 'is now '.xlsx', etc. By default, older versions of Microsoft Office cannot open files created with version 2007.

However, there are ways to save files created in Microsoft Office 2007 using the old formats. In this article we will describe them for you.

Buying yourself a new computer or a new operating system is very easy. It is more 'difficult' to learn what to do so that you will have a pleasant and safe computing experience. In this article I will share with you a few tips that I have learned during my career. This tips are mostly for people who have just bought a new PC or have reinstalled their operating system. Following them will help you keep your system performance at good levels and have a lesser risk of losing your personal files and folders in case of system crashes. Also, you will be able to easily restore your system if any emergency happens.