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.

I’m a person who is very conscious and concerned with my available disk space. When I’m not hoarding and saving everything I come across, I’m looking for quality disk visualization software. I’ve tried probably a dozen of them and none are easier and more straightforward than a little tool I’ve found called Scanner. Let me show you just what Scanner is capable of.

If you’re not yet using Pandora, I don’t think you’re getting the most out of music. Pandora is by far the easiest and the best way to stream music online. Take it to the desktop, on your phone, or in your car. Pandora has helped me stumble across artists I’d have never heard of before and has turned the task of listening to music that I want to hear into something as simple as clicking the play button.

With over 215,000 plays starting since 2008, I’ve always been a firm believer in Last.fm. If you’re into getting social on the Internet, it’s so much easier to link a friend to your Last.fm profile versus going on and on about your musical preferences. Last.fm allows your tastes to be an open book to anyone who might be curious, and I like that. Over the past few years, Last.fm has solidified itself as the best music scrobbling platform online.

This article isn’t for those overachieving, goody-two-shoes gamers with every achievement unlocked in their favorite platformer. Nope, this would be better received by those of you who struggle every day to get past that one level. It may even be nice for some of you who want to put a little extra “speed” in your speedruns. Sometimes you need to skip past the annoying, replayed cutscenes or put your game in slow motion.

Steam’s annual holiday sale just recently ended and I know some of your wallets are really hurting right now. Day after day, flash sales and daily specials hit us in the face and it was hard to resist. Hundreds of titles were discounted on the Internet’s premiere gaming giant, and hundreds of thousands must have been purchased. I’m at a point in time where I’m finding less time that I can put towards gaming, but my shopping habits remain unshaken.

After years of being a loyal Firefox user, I’ve finally made the switch to the same side of the river as many of my MakeUseOf colleagues and jumped to Google Chrome. Albeit late by most of your standards, I’m catching on quickly. The single thing that was keeping me with Firefox was their extensive library of add-ons. Being able to mass download within the browser is a big deal to me because I’m a bit of a hoarder.

When was the last time you actually shut down your computer before bed? I’ve had to ask myself the same thing, and I can’t remember. When you’re trying to save power and potentially preserve the lifespan of your system, it’s something that you’ve got to consider. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I’d like to introduce you to two applications that can change that.

Honing your skills with peripherals like the mouse or keyboard and sharpening your reflexes is something that can help you in general. Games that require no knowledge or game sense and rely completely on skill with the mouse or keyboard act as a way to universally improve you as a gamer, and that’s what I’ve got for you in this article!

There was once a time when I was a naive kid on a desktop who never even considered that I’d have to keep up with the health of my hard drive. Jumping from the world of video games to the Internet, what do you expect? Blowing a little harder on the connector pins of my NES cartridges was what I’d consider to be the pinnacle of maintenance at that point. Since then, much has changed!

If there’s one thing in the world you should hate doing, it’s wasting time when you know there’s got to be a better way to go about completing a task. If you’re one of those people who go through every single photograph they take and edit them one after another, you’ve got reason to be grumpy. That’s time that BatchPhoto can save you. This week, we’re giving away 25 free copies of BatchPhoto Home! Continue reading through my review of the software, and at the end of this post feel free to enter our giveaway for your chance to win. I’ll be reviewing through the Windows version of BatchPhoto, but our giveaway will allow those of you on a Mac to redeem a copy also.

As a regular gamer, I know just how important of a peripheral the mouse is. The mouse offers so much control and, unlike certain areas of the keyboard, your hand is practically always resting on it. It’s a powerful tool! Your average mouse isn’t very flexible on the software end, though. For the typical user, a plug-and-play mouse is all you’ll ever know. Just because you aren’t willing to drop $80 on a mouse doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have full control, however.

Your drivers can be a scary and intimidating thing. The two pieces of the Windows backend that I never recommend the novice user play with are the registry and device drivers. The smallest of errors in handling either of these can result in system instability or a completely bricked operating system, and that’s no fun. As you become a more experienced, savvy, and paranoid citizen of the Internet, you’ll grow accustomed to religiously backing up your system and online data.

MUO readers who know my articles or know me as a person can testify that two of my favorite things in the world are portable applications and automation. How great would it be if a portable application could automate the process of organizing your folders? Download Mover has been one of my best-kept secrets for a while now, and in this article it’s time to shed some light on exactly what it’s capable of doing.

While this Windows feature manages to get the job done, third-party developers always come to the rescue and seem to go above and beyond. The best proof of that in this example would have to be Autoruns. Starter, an application by CodeStuff, is incredibly similar to Autoruns. It’s almost like another flavor of the application. In this article, I want to introduce you to Starter and some of its features and differences from Autoruns.