1. Defragmentation – After using your computer for awhile things start to become unorganized. Installing and uninstalling programs can leave files scattered throughout your hard drive decreasing it’s efficiency. Defragmenting your computer organizes the files spread throughout the hard drive decreasing the time that your computer has to search for them.
2. Check for viruses – Viruses, worms, trojans, malware, spyware….they are all bad. While each are meant for a specific task they can have a big influence on how your computer runs. Viruses, worms and trojans can affect files and settings which in turn can cause your computer to slow down or even crash. The more you run your computer the more often you should perform a virus scan.
3. Clear the prefetch folder – Windows takes a snapshot of a program when it first starts and saves the settings so that next time it doesn’t have to figure out the settings. It can just take a quick peek at the file and figure out what needs to be done. If you have uninstalled programs before the files can still exist which can slow down your computer because it has to search through them.

   The prefetch folder can usually be found inside of the Windows directory.

4. Trimming down auto-start programs – The more programs you install on your computer the more chances you have of that program trying to load itself when Windows starts. When Windows starts it not only has to load it’s own programs but also the programs that you have installed. Most programs have an option to load on startup which you can turn off under a settings/configuration menu.
5. Delete temporary internet files/folders – When browsing the internet, your web browser may create a temporary file or folder and they don’t always get deleted. These files can start to add up and cause excess storage requirements and slow down your computer when it has to search through the hard drive. Read more on how to delete temporary internet files.

While the stock patterns that Adobe provided with Photoshop haven’t been updated in quite awhile there are many people that have created custom patterns for Photoshop and have made them available for download. There are many sites out there that have a huge collection of free photoshop patterns available for download, a quick Google search should provide you with a nice start.

The file extension for a Photoshop pattern is .PAT and most websites provide the .PAT file inside of a .zip file for easier downloading. Installing the Photoshop pattern is quite easy because all that you have to do is extract it from the archive and place it into the Patterns directory within the Presets directory of the Photoshop install location on your hard drive. A default install of Photoshop might look like C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Photoshop CS3PresetsPatterns. Of course depending upon which version you have the aforementioned installation directory may look different.

Once you have the pattern file placed inside of the Patterns directory it only becomes a matter of starting up Photoshop, selecting a document to edit and off you go!

How to change your homepage in Internet Explorer

1. Open up Internet Explorer, click on Tools in the main menu
2. From there click Internet Options
3. Type in the URL of the page you would like to display or click on Use current if you are already on that page
4. Click Apply in the bottom right hand corner and then click OK

If you are using Internet Explorer 7 and cannot find the Tools option, right click in the area next to the tab and select Menu Bar from the menu.

How to change your homepage in Firefox

1. Open up Firefox, click on Tools in the main menu
2. Select Options, click on the Main tab if it is not already selected
3. Enter in the URL of the page you would like to be displayed or click on Use Current Page if you are already on that page
4. Click OK and you are all set

How to change your homepage in Safari

1. Open up Safari, click on Edit
2. Click on Preferences from the drop down menu
3. Make sure the General icon is selected and enter in the URL of the page in the Home page: text box.

How to change your homepage in Opera

1. Open up Opera, click on Tools
2. From the drop down menu select Preferences
3. Enter in the URL of the page or click on Use Current if you are on the current page
4. Click OK at the bottom of the window

There you have it, how to change your browser’s homepage in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. If you have any further questions or would like to know how to set the homepage in another browser you can send an email using the contact form or just ask your question in the comment form below.

As usual, the methods are slightly different in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox.

Internet Explorer 6 Instructions

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click on Internet Options
3. Click the Delete Cookies… button, click OK
4. Click the Delete Files… button, check the Delete all offline content button and click OK

Internet Explorer 7 Instructions

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click on Internet Options
3. Click on the Delete… button under the Browsing history section
4. Click the Delete files… and the Delete cookies… buttons

Firefox Instructions

1. Open up Firefox
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click Clear Private Data
3. Select the Cache, Cookies and Offline Web Data checkboxes
4. Click the Clear Private Data Now button

Not only will these simple instructions keep others from possibly viewing the websites that you have visited but it can also free up space on your computer by removing files. If you browse the Internet a lot and have never done this there is a good chance that doing this will clear up a good amount of space on your computer making it run quicker.

Deleting Internet history in Internet Explorer 6

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click on Internet Options
3. Under the History section click on Clear History

To keep your internet history from being tracked change the Days to keep pages in history box to 0.

Deleting Internet history in Internet Explorer 7

1. Open up Internet Explorer
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click on Internet Options
3. Click on the Delete… button under the Browsing history section
4. Click on the Delete history… button, click Yes

To keep your internet history from being tracked click on Settings under the Internet Options dialog box. Inside the window that pops up change the Days to keep pages in history box to 0. Click OK and you are all set.

Deleting Internet history in FireFox

1. Open up FireFox
2. Click on Tools in the Menu Bar, click on Clear Private Data
3. Check the Browsing History box
4. Click the Clear Private Data Now button

To keep your Internet history from being tracked click on Tools in the Menu Bar and then select Options. Click on the Privacy icon and uncheck the Keep my history for at least check box. Click OK and you are all set.

So I decided to write up this guide to teach you how to delete stuff from your desktop, arrange files, organize files and overall just keep a nice clean desktop that allows you to easily find what you are looking for.

How to delete files on your desktop

This is quite easy and is the same process as you would normally use to delete a file. Although there are a few ways to go about it.

• Right click the file you want to delete and select Delete from the menu
• Select the file that you would like to delete and hit the Delete button on your keyboard
• Click and drag the file you want to delete onto the Recycle Bin located on your desktop

Quick Tip: Instead of having the file go to your Recycle Bin you can have it deleted permanently by holding down the Shift key and the hitting the Delete button.

How to organize files on your desktop

Now that you have gotten rid of unused icons and files on your desktop it’s time to arrange the remaining files into a more organized pattern.

If you are using Windows XP right click on your desktop and mouse over Arrange Icons By to see the available options.

The above image shows you the available options that you have to arrange icons on your desktop. The word icon just represents the files, folders and images that are on your desktop. While most of the options are self explanatory I will give a quick overview of some of them.

• Align to Grid – If you drag the icons around you may notice that they “stick” to a certain invisible line on your desktop. This is know as the grid and checking this feature will keep them lined up in a straight line
• Lock Web Items on Desktop – Prevents you from moving the icons on your desktop
• Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard – A Windows program that can help you remove items that you have not used in a long time

Windows Vista will give you the same options just split between 2 different menus after right clicking on your desktop.

How to add icons to your desktop

I realize this kind of goes against the whole point of this guide but it can help you in making things a bit more organized and provide access to your most used applications and programs. Instead of having to click through all the different levels of the Start Menu you can add an icon straight onto your desktop.

Manuever your way to your favorite program that you commonly access in the Start Menu as in the above image. Click on the icon or name of the program and then drag and drop it onto your desktop in order to create a shortcut to that program. Thats it! Now the next time you want to access that program just find it on your desktop and open it up.

Hate the image or color on your desktop background and want something more you? Learn how to change your desktop background.

Defragmenting your computer can lead to

• Overall improved performance
• Quicker boot up times
• Quicker program load times
• Faster searching of files

When you defragment your hard drive files are moved from the place that they currently reside into an open area that is closer to the center of the hard drive. The closer the file is to the center the quicker it can be accessed.

Defragment your computer in Windows XP

In order to begin defragmenting your computer you need to load up the Disk Defragmenter that is automatically installed on Windows XP. Click on Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools-Disk Defragmenter.

Once you have done that the Disk Defragmenter will load up and we can begin the process.

From here you can choose to either Analyze the drive in which Disk Defragmenter will scan it and let you know whether or not it believes that it needs to be defragmented.

You will notice at the bottom of the screen is a legend explaining what colors mean what. Because this is a default installation of Windows Xp there is still a lot of free space on the computer and barely any fragmented files. Your results will probably have a lot more red, blue and green and less white.

If the Disk Defragmenter decides that your computer does not need to be defragmented you can still continue the process. Just click the Defragment button and let it run.

This is what you will see after clicking the Defragment button. You will notice that the lower gray bar shows the status and below that there is a Pause and Stop button. It is advised that while defragmenting your computer not to work on it and have as little programs running as possible. Anything that moves files or updates them on your computer can cause the defragmenter to slow down or even possibly start over.

The status bar at the bottom of the window alerts you to what exactly is going on as well as a progress bar.

Once the Disk Defragmenter has performed it’s task a dialog box will pop open explaining that it is complete and giving you an option to view the report or close the window. Viewing the report just gives you detailed statistics on what exactly went on such as the percentage of files that were fragmented, the free space before and after along with other information. See the updated image? Notice how the blue is one continuous color now, the files have been compressed together making your programs load quicker.

Defragmenting your computer can help with increasing performance but it can take some time depending upon the size of your hard drive, the amount of files and the fragmentation of those files. I’ve had some computers run overnight when I defragmented them!

Defragment your computer in Windows Vista

I have heard a lot of complaints that the default disk defragmenter in Vista doesn’t perform as well as the one in XP. However, I am still going to provide instructions on how to use the one in Vista.

Click the Windows logo->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter.

From here you can schedule the Disk Defragmenter to run daily, weekly, monthly and so on. Once you are ready to defragment your computer click on the Defragment now… button.

From here you can select to defragment all the disks on your computer or select certain ones. Once you select which drives you would like to defragment click the OK button.

As you can see, not a whole lot of information is given in the Vista version. No progress bar, no graph of the files, no pause button…the only thing that you can do is cancel the defragmentation. The only indicator of progress is the line of text saying that it could take a few minutes of a few hours. I know it’s not very helpful at all but like I stated before, a lot of people have been irritated with the defragmenter.

Disk Defragmenting Programs

Auslogics Disk Defrag

UniBlue Disk Rescue

Diskeeper 2008

If you have any other programs to defragment your computer that you use and would like to recommend to CLG readers, feel free to recommend them below in the comments section.

But how exactly do you download YouTube videos to your computer? Fortunately there any many websites that have figured out a method to do this and they make it quite easy as well. I am not all too sure why YouTube never decided to enable this feature in the first place, although I assume that somewhere deep down inside of their Terms and Service there is something saying exactly why.

Most of the sites that allow you to download YouTube videos just ask for the url of the video. From there on it goes to save the video usually in .FLV format but some allow you to save the videos into other formats.

YouTube Video Download Sites

DownloadYouTubeVideos.com – For some odd reason this site has an AdultFriendFinder ad listed on the front page. So if you are at work or prefer not to look at scantily clad women I would suggest you try another website in this list.

KeepVid.com – Allows you to enter a url of a video to download it. They also provide a bookmark that you can use in your web browser and all that you have to do while watching the video is click the bookmark and it will automatically download the video for you.

GoogleSystem.Blogspot.com – This post specifically shows you how to download YouTube videos in MP4 format. It seems as though downloading them in the standard .FLV format can produce low quality videos and apparently .MP4 provides much better quality.

Techcrunch Article – Just a simple download script that saves the files in .FLV format. Nothing special or no fancy features.

Zamzar – Zamzar goes a little bit above and beyond the above listed websites and allows you to download videos into multiple file formats. The only downside is that it looks like it sends the file to an email address instead of directly downloading to your computer.

DownloadAndSaveYouTubeVideos.info – Quite a long url but provides a simple service for download YouTube videos. Also contains an adult ad on the main page, not advised to view this site at work or if you prefer not to look at half naked women.

Software For Watching .FLV Videos

Of course now that you have downloaded your favorite YouTube videos to your computer you want to watch them. You may find out that you don’t have a media player that can actually play the .FLV files so I’ve decided to provide you with a list of media players that can play the .FLV extension.

VLC Media Player – One of the more well known media players and very highly popular among thousands of people.

FLV Player – Another media player that has quite a few downloads according to download.com. Commenters stated that it does not work with Vista however it states that it does work with Vista in the features list.

Applian FLV Player – Allows you to zoom in all the way up to 2x zoom as well as providing an audio recording option.

Wimpy Desktop FLV Player – Not much information on the page other than the fact that it is a new 3.0 version of the program. Provides support for both Mac and Windows computers.

I hope that you have found this list useful. I know that there are a lot of people out there that want to download YouTube videos and I as well have wanted to download them a few times myself. If you have any other websites that you use or media players that can play .FLV files, feel free to post them up in the comments below!

It’s Easy! If you know what you are doing

A lot of people are in fact afraid to even try formatting their computer because they have no idea how to actually do it. When in fact it is a relatively simple process and while it can take a fair amount of time to actually format the steps to do it are quite easy.

Considering I want to keep this as simple as possible there are 2 ways that I am going to show you; using the command prompt and using Windows Explorer.

NOTE: Before you try this be fully aware of what the consequences are and what will happen. Should you decide to format your computer ALL of the data WILL BE ERASED on your hard drive. It is possible to recover data from your hard drive but those tools and methods are not guaranteed.

Using the command prompt to format your computer

Without going into a huge amount of detail the command prompt allows you to create, delete, edit, move, copy, rename and a whole lot of other functions on your computer. The only difference is that it is all text based and there are no graphics, meaning unless you know the right commands a new computer user will have no idea how to use it let alone even access it.

If you are using Windows XP, click on Start and then click on Run. Once the dialog box opens up, type in cmd and hit Enter. If you are using Windows Vista, click on the Windows icon, type in command and hit Enter.

You should see something similar to the above image pop open in a new window. This is the command prompt and one tool that you can use to format a computer. Once the command prompt is open it is time to actually issue the command.

If you are wanting to format your default drive on your computer it will most likely be the C: drive. Otherwise, figure out which drive you are wanting to format. Once you have selected the right drive, type in

format C:

and hit Enter. A new line will be created telling you the file system of the drive along with a warning message.

The warning is there for good reason too. Notice it says, WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST! Now, considering it is in all caps and ends with a ! it must mean you need to read it and realize what is going to happen.

Should you decide to proceed, type in Y and hit Enter. The computer will then go through the necessary steps to format your computer so that you can start with a clean slate.

Using Windows Explorer to format your computer

This way is a little bit easier for most people to follow as you will just be using the Windows interface which most are used to. There is no typing involved or weird commands or command prompt screens.

If you are using Windows XP open up My Computer and if you are using Windows Vista open up Computer. Both can be found in the Start Menus on the default installations of each operating system. Right click on the drive in which you would like to format.

Select Format… from the drop down menu and a new dialog box should pop up giving you further options.

This box will tell you the size of the drive, the file system type, allocation unit size, an input box for the volume label and a few other options.

Disregard the first 3 settings; capacity, file system and allocation unit size. You can also not bother with Volume label and just let Windows automatically name the new drive (you can always go back and change this later).

Quick format will erase all the files on your drive without checking it for bad sectors which could cause further issues in the future if you choose to skip this and your drive does in fact have bad sectors. Unless you know for a fact that your drive is fine I would recommend leaving this unchecked and letting it run its course.

Enable compression compresses the files and folders on the new drive when they are created giving you extra space to put even more on your drive.

Create an MS-DOS startup disk is an option available should you have a floppy disk drive connected to your computer. This will create a disk for you that lets you boot up your computer so that you can install the operating system. Not needed nowadays for newer computers and operating systems as they can be installed directly from the discs that they come on.

Once you have configured all the settings, click on Start and wait. Depending upon the size of your drive and the settings you chose, it could take anywhere from 1 hour to 12+ hours.

That’s it for this guide, hopefully you were able to understand it and learned something from it. If you did, why not leave me a comment and let me know how I am doing? I enjoy knowing that I have helped others.

I thought that this was a great topic to post about considering I myself use a free antivirus program. The program that I use is called Avast Antivirus and I have been using it for about 2.5 years now. During that time I have been to quite a few sites and every single time that something tried to invade my computer or a file tried to execute a virus Avast was there to catch it.

In fact before I had started using Avast I was using Norton Antivirus, a pretty popular piece of antivirus software. Honestly, Norton wasn’t able to catch a few of the viruses and while none of the ones that it let slip by caused much harm the whole point of the software is to protect my computer.

Yeah but you are missing out on all of the great features that you get when you pay for a product! Actually…no I’m not! I was hesitant at first but after using Avast for even a short amount of time I found it to provide plenty of features while not bloating my system. Avast antivirus provides real-time live scanning of all files and even your connection to the net. So instead of you downloading a file with a virus and catching if after the fact, Avast catches it beforehand.

Now I’ve only ever used Avast because really it’s provided me with everything that I have needed. With that said, I haven’t tried out any other free antivirus programs yet but I do know that they are out there. Of course there are also the pieces of software that cost money as well. Not that it is wrong that they cost money, Norton provides a great piece of software though it does come with extra features that you don’t necessarily need.

I was recently browsing the net and found a great page talking about how to check if you have a virus and they provided some really great tips. In the end, from my experiences, free antivirus software is definitely worth it. I think that you just have to find the right company that is providing quality software and Avast provides just that.