Being a master of your system really means knowing what’s available to you under the hood and how to get to it. Nothing is truer when using Windows, as there are a lot of configurations available to you that can be unlocked through the registry or by other means. Windows 7 “God Mode” is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Sysinterals and NirSoft are just as heaven-sent, being two names that will resonate beautifully with Windows enthusiasts like myself.

Do you still use any desktop email clients? The last one that I ever made any significant use of was Outlook Express, and that feels like forever ago. Since then, I’ve given both Thunderbird and Postbox (which I was very impressed with) a spin, but desktop email clients in general seem like a lost cause to a Gmail user like myself. Nothing beats the Gmail web interface, in my opinion. My opinion isn’t the law of the land though.

In the middle of February, I dropped an article on you guys that introduced you to everything you ever wanted in Diablo III – all in another game. That game is Path of Exile, and since my article, the game has done nothing but grow increasingly more popular. I’ve played the game for about a month and, though I feel like it’s a pretty bold statement to make this early, I truly feel like Path of Exile is one the best games I’ve ever played on the PC.

When the Character Map becomes a staple of your work routine, you have two options: find some third-party application to more easily bring the characters to your fingertips, or memorize the Alt keystrokes for each character. Although I do know around 25 of those keystrokes off the top of my head, I’m going to show you three solutions to that first suggestion.

Once you’ve tried Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, is there anything left? The browser is generally considered to be the most important part of your home PC experience. It’s the vehicle that lets you stroll out into this wonderful Internet that we all know so well. Once you fall in love with a particular browser, it’s very tough to be pulled away from it. I only recently made the transition from Firefox to Chrome, and many would say I’m a good year late on that.

Some of us cringe at the thought of having a desktop covered with shortcuts and other icons. Although that’s technically what the Windows desktop is used best for, we often prefer to be free from such a mess so that we can show off our snazzy wallpaper and other desktop gadgets. There are several alternative approaches you can take to easily access your most commonly-used applications, like using the Start menu or an application to launch programs via hotkey.

Just this last Christmas, I treated myself to a brand new gaming keyboard and mouse. Razer is the Nike of gaming peripherals and I’ve never given their products a try, so I went for it. This article is no endorsement of Razer and their products, but one of the most interesting perks of owning Razer gear is a certain piece of software that allows you to help manage your hardware.

If you’ve frequented any forum in the past couple of yours, you’re probably familiar with BBCode. BBCode is a markup language that many message board systems, such as vBulletin and phpBB, used to make it easier for their users to format their posts with HTML. Basic HTML, like changing your font size or font color, is already extremely easy to learn, but BBCode makes it even easier.

When I’m listening to music downloaded to a local drive, I don’t need Spotify or iTunes in charge of my music. I’ve slowly started to fall in love with a new, free, and portable alternative to Winamp Lite that seems to incorporate the same elements of simplicity while also offering some really awesome extra functionality. Let me tell you about Hokrain!

Despite breaking the single-day record for sales of a PC game, at 3.5 million, I feel as if Diablo III has turned out to be a bit of a flop. The game had a rocky start with a release that was riddled with crashes, and a huge base of players have severe gripes about the game’s difficulty and gameplay in general. Luckily for me, Path of Exile has just come out of closed beta and is available for anyone to play.

Certain things are just not meant to exist online forever. Sometimes the Internet can feel extremely constricting. Have you ever posted your email address on a forum somewhere? It goes from that forum, to the Google search engine, to a mess of spammers and scrapers, and thus the entire web. Virtually everything you publish online will exist in text for a very long time thanks to caching and archiving.

One thing that has managed to turn me away from Spotify for quite a long time is its limited support in hotkeys and media keys. Spotify works great with a select few Logitech keyboards, but not so much with hundreds of others. For years, I’ve been a loyal user of Winamp Lite because of the awesome support for global hotkeys. Spotify has yet to improve in this area, but luckily enough there are third-party developers who are willing to pick up that slack for them.

I’ve run into a bit of a problem lately. I’ve started using one browser for basic purposes, then another for everything Flash-based (such as games). Flash just feels faster in one browser, without heavy add-ons or extensions, compared to another. And then how many IM clients do we all use? I personally still use ICQ! I’ve got friends there who refuse to budge. Skype is also a necessity. How many programs must we run, simultaneously, that ultimately do the same job?

Every now and then I’ll learn a little tip that makes me think “well, if I known that a year ago then it’d have saved me hours of time”. I vividly remember learning how to use the copy and paste functions, all on my own, as a kid. It was like the entire Internet had just become twice as easy for me. Environment variables are a little-known detail of Windows, if you’re a novice user. They belong in this same realm of time-saving conversation.

It recently came to my attention that there are people who are under the impression that to allow a program to run at startup, you’ll need to either enable it in the included program’s options or preferences or expect it to be shown on your System Configuration page (for those of you using Vista or 7, as it doesn’t exist in 8). That’s just not the case. Anything and everything can be launched on your Windows startup.