PCTips Box

If you have ever downloaded any of the google products like picasa ,google screen saver etc, you may have googleupdater.exe running as a process in your system right now.

You can check by pressing “alt+ctrl+del” to open task manager and click the process tab.

What is googleupdater.exe?

GoogleUpdater.exe is a process which belongs to the Google.com’s range of Internet search facilities provided. This program is a non-essential , can be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems.

Why its running?

This process informs the user about the new version and updates for the all the google products installed. (more…)

Firefox may be my browser of choice but there are times when it is REALLY slow, so slow in fact that I am sorely tempted to defect to Opera or even gasp Safari!

It’s sometimes even worse when you’re opening up Firefox. You click on that little Fox icon and it sits there thinking “hmmm….he wants me to start up…will I or won’t I? Let’s think about it for a few minutes”. Meanwhile you’re sitting there gnashing your teeth and flirting with the idea of walking on the wild side with Flock.

But you don’t have to wail and despair any more! During a little stroll through SourceForge, I found an interesting program called Firefox Preloader which was short on technical details but long on prospects. It claims to be able to “improve Firefox’s start-up time”. (more…)

If you have been following my Boot Camp series in The Daily Telegraph you may have see the recent three-parter on making XP look and behave like Vista (Poor Man’s Vista, archive on Bootlog and the DT Website) Here’s another utility to add to the mix, called Vista Start Menu Emulator. It does what it says, giving XP a Vista-like Start menu, complete with transparent borders and a Live Search facility. It’s looks and works well, though my only complaint is that I can’t seem to shift it from the default bottom right hand corner of the screen, which looks a bit odd if, like me you prefer to have your Taskbar down the right side of the screen. (more…)

Every day I find new Firefox tips and tricks that I didn’t know about and then I find out that other people didn’t know about them either. So here’s what I discovered recently to make you more of a Firefox power-user. Some of them are useful keyboard shortcuts to keep your hand away from that mouse, and others are just regular tips to optimize and improve your use of Firefox.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

firefoxsearchenginebar.pngCTRL and K - moves your cursor up to the search engine plug-in box. Once you’re there, CTRL and the up / down arrows on your keyboard will jump from search engine to search engine. (more…)

It occurs a lot of time when you try to install a new hardware device on your system for which you may not have the driver cd so you start searching for getting some download links of the driver software for that device.

But even after a lot of searching you don’t get the appropriate driver software for your hardware device.

But don’t loose hope if you are encountered with such a situation as there as you could get the driver software for your hardware device.

Here is a smart way i read somewhere about how to find hardware device drivers downlaods easily. (more…)

Vista4Experts is kind of a treat for computer experts who don’t want security center notifications, User Account Control dialogs, automatic Windows Defender scannings, automatic update installations (which cause you to reboot your system if you don’t react quickly enough). People who want MSDN (or google) set as default search engine in the Internet Explorer search bar, who want the start menu power button to shut down the system instead of hibernating it, etc. These and many more fixes are included in Vista4Experts. All of these changes can be discarded, enabled or reversed. Vista4Experts is the first expert utility of its kind and works on every platform. (more…)

This is a cool google search trick to search and download your favourite mp3 song. Let me show you how to use this trick:

intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”song name’ name” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”

Enter the name of the mp3 song instead of ’song name’ name’ in the coded text and search for it in google. for example If you wanted to find a song called get right, You can put like this: (more…)

Before we start you should know that this trick only works with Internet Explorer And Safari(For Mac Only) because Firefox does not have the “save target as” option but you can use this cool firefox extension like down theme all. ok let’s start for this trick, first go to the following website, search.aol.com. Now, in the search box, enter the name of a song, you may have to specify the artist for the more difficult to find songs. For my example song, I will use Faint Linkin Park song to download: (more…)

Snipping Tool is for capturing a portion of the screen in order to save it as an image in various file formats. In other words, Snipping Tool is a screen capture tool that is available with Windows Vista.

You can find the Snipping Tool application within the Accessories of the Vista OS.
Or you can click the Start button on the Start Menu and type Snipping Tool in the search box where Start Search is written by default.

You will see as you type the name snipping that in the results pane under Programs items a shortcut to Snipping Tool appears. (more…)

Firefox is a great browser, but you already knew that, right? Firefox’s keywords facility can be used for a neat search trick. It is best used for a directed search engine that digs specific data for example, a Bugzilla search, IMDb search, LXR search or Marcel/wine search wine-searcher, and so on. Here are the steps:

1. Using Firefox, go to a site that offers a simple search facility (for example, IMDb, LXR or your local Bugzilla).

2. Place the cursor within the search box. (more…)