If you’re in web development or web design, you probably know how hard it is to get sites to work correctly in all the different browsers. The most difficult of them all, most people would agree, is Internet Explorer. Not only does it do funky things when it renders web pages, but each version does [...]

Do you use Gmail or Google Apps for your email? If so, you might want to check out the Windows program iContact. iContact gives you desktop access to all your Gmail/Google Apps contacts. Why do you need to use this? Well if you need to use contacts in more than one program or service (like [...]

Do you dual-boot Windows and Linux? If you do, then you’re probably familiar with the different file systems that the two operating systems use and the difficulty in transferring files between the two. While most modern Linux operating systems can read and write to Windows file systems (NTFS and FAT/FAT32), Windows can’t read or write [...]

Computer memory is in high demand as you play, err, work on your computer, and performance can take a big hit when it runs low. Control the programs that use more than their share of memory using the Windows program Minimem, which moves unused or unnecessary memory pages to the hard drive. I tried it [...]

A Firefox extension called iMacros will save you some time by recording a group of routine tasks in Firefox and letting you repeat them whenever you want, with absolutely no programming required! Once you get the hang of it, you can do more than just repeat a set of steps, and start scripting some very [...]

Anybody with a website (especially a fairly new one) probably wants to know how their site ranks in a Google search. Google Webmaster Tools is an extremely valuable tool for any webmaster, which can show you various pieces of information such as crawl statistics/errors it found when crawling your site, allows you to submit sitemaps [...]

KallOut is a very simple, yet very functional, Windows program. For highlighted text in many programs (including Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and Notepad) it puts a small icon next to the highlighted words, which looks like this . When you hover your mouse over that icon, it gives you a menu to [...]

We’ve already talked about Linux and why you should try it, but probably the hardest part of getting used to Linux is getting it in the first place. For Windows users, the simplest way is to use Wubi. But there are some drawbacks to installing with Wubi. For one thing, you can’t suspend or hibernate to save power, which you could do if you had the regular install (i.e. burned and booted from the CD). Also, because Wubi doesn’t get its own partition, it actually uses the Windows boot loader to boot from a disk image of a Linux partition on your Windows drive; this results in slightly reduced disk speed and a dependence on the Windows boot loader (you can’t ditch Windows entirely and run Ubuntu as your main OS). So, Wubi may be good for people who want to test Ubuntu, but once you’ve decided to use it on a regular basis, Wubi probably won’t cut it.

So, the other option is to use UNetbootin, which downloads the contents of a CD image to your flash drive, makes the flash drive bootable. So, as long as your PC can boot from a USB drive (most can), you can install a Linux distribution without burning a single CD.