PCTips Box

The long awaited, highly anticipated Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will finally be available by Microsoft. For many, SP1 is the promise land for fixing those annoying performance, compatibility and slow file copy problems that have plague Vista since it’s release.

Only time will tell.

Regardless of what happens, pre-cautions should be taken to ensure a successful upgrade to Vista SP1.

Below are five steps you should follow BEFORE installing SP1, that should help with achieving a successful upgrade and ensure no data is lost. (more…)

Do you know the fastest way to open a file location of any desktop shortcut? i.e the directory where that file is located.

The most simple method to do this is to right click on the shortcut and then select properties and click the open file location button.

But if you have noticed in vista this feature now comes integrated with windows vista itself (more…)

When I bought my Sony Reader, I planned to buy e-books from Sony’s on-line ebook store. But I soon realized that a lot of ebooks are available on the internet for free.

Project Gutenberg offers thousands of titles (mostly fiction) in txt format, while manybooks.net provides an impressive array of books in Sony format (as well as several other formats).

The motherload of free ebooks, however, is books.google.com. The Google folks are busy digitizing every book they can get their hands on. As of this writing, they have reportedly digitized over 10,000 public domain books, which anyone can download for free in pdf format. (more…)