Firefox has just released another new version. Firefox 7 is out only six weeks after version 6. Version 7 is suppose to use much less memory and therefore may not crash as often when you have quite a few tabs open (like me) or leave it open for long periods of time. Go ahead and update Firefox to the new Firefox 7.

Read more about it here on webmonkey  or just go download it here…

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/

Microsoft Email programs, like Outlook and Outlook Express are good but they are part of Microsoft Packages that cost big bucks.  There are quite a few alternatives for a Quality FREE Email program.

Mozilla Thunderbird for one.  It’s easy to set up by just inputting your Incoming and Outgoing server addresses, your email address and password and your all set.  Many other options such as how you view messages, signatures, and address book are also configurable to your liking.

There is also another  a fine program called Pegasus Mail.  This is another great free program that has all the bells and whistles that an email client can have.  Pegasus has been around the longest and it is well proven by many, many users.

There are others too.  Opera, Mulberry, FoxMail, Dream Mail, IncrediMail, just to name a few…

All of them are Free and Full Featured.  Easy to set up and use.  Whether you are using email through your Internet Provider or your Hosting Account,  give one of these great free programs a try.

Excellent Free Backup Software!

Play it safe and make it a habit to make backups. This software does it all for you and makes it easy. Pictures, Music, Documents, programs!   And an external hard drive is an excellent way to backup all your stuff.  All the computer stores have a good selection of reasonably priced external drives or check out Tiget Direct. They have a big selection and great prices.

Cobian Backup is a multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule and backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories or drives on the same computer or another computer in your network. FTP backup is also supported in both directions (download and upload).

Cobian Backup exists in two different versions: application and service. The program uses very few resources and can be running in the background on your system, checking your backup schedule and executing your backups when necessary.

This is not your usual backup application: it only copies your files and folders in original or compressed mode to another destination, creating a security copy as a result. So Cobian Backup can be better described as a “Scheduler for security copies”.  Cobian Backup supports several methods of compression and strong encryption.

Check it out and download it for free today!!

Unless you have PIXresizer.

I find my self using this software more and more to resize pictures.  The ability to resize a whole folder full of large pictures is the big plus.  So I let the camera take huge pictures and then I can create a whole new set ready for emailing or to use on the web.  Works quite well and it’s fast. 

This is how the author describes it…

PIXresizer is a tool for quickly generating screen-friendly versions of your images with dramatically reduced file sizes. It is a photo resizing program that enables you to quickly resize one file or a selection of image files for use on the web and in e-mail. The reduced files are saved in a different directory, so your original pictures are not changed.

The program offers several different resizing methods to choose from and can automatically recognize image sizes to calculate the best fit. PIXresizer includes a built-in image viewer and you can also convert between graphics formats: it opens and saves in .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .png, and .tif formats. A great companion for webmasters and digital photographers.

This is an excellent program to have around.  Even if you only need it once and a while.  It’s free and you can get it here… 

http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

We are going to try this when we get a chance.  See what you think.  I’m sure other programs can be used but this seems to take you through the basic steps.

How to Make Your Own Free MP3 Ringtones

By: Rex Meneses

In this tutorial, We will guide you in the step by step process for making your own MP3 ringtones.

Tools you need:

• Cell phone that supports MP3 ringtones.
•  Music CD or MP3 Music File
•  Any method of transferring the ringtones from computer to phone
•  Audacity v1.3 beta http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
•  Lame v3.96.1 http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php
•  MP3 Converter (to convert audio cd file to mp3 format if needed)

Instructions:

If you plan to create your MP3 ringtones from a CD, rip the song you want as a WAV (Windows) or an AIFF file (Mac). It’s a good idea to specify a new ripping location, too, so the ripped song wont be mixed up with the rest of your collection. But if you’re creating your ringtones from an MP3 song, you may want to copy that MP3 song into a new folder so that when we edit the MP3 the audio-editing software won’t messed up your original MP3 song.

Now, If you don’t have any of the above mentioned audio file types you can use your own Audio CD. But, you will need to use a separate software to convert them to MP3, Wave or AIFF. You can also download MP3 songs the Internet.

Once you have chosen the song to edit and converted it to our desired digital music format (whether WAV, AIFF or MP3), run your audio-editing software. In this case we will be using Audacity, it is free, open source and runs on both Mac and PC. If you don’t have Audacity you can download a copy of the file here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ .

Also Audacity needs another separate program (actually its called library) for MP3 compression. We will be using Lame, LAME is an MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder, you can download Lame Library here http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php  . Once your download is complete you need to decompress the file. Please take note “where” you decompressed the file.

So once you have all the tools needed, we can start!

Run Audacity, go to Edit/Preferences/File Format menu, and click the “Find Library” button near the bottom of the screen. Navigate to the folder where you decompressed the Lame Library File, and select it. Also set your bit rate to 128 Kbps. You can choose a lower bit rate to save space on your phone, but you’ll get lower-quality sound.

Now continue with Audacity, in Audacity’s File menu, select Open and find the music you want to create for your MP3 ringtone. It might take some time for Audacity to import your music depending on its size, the location and the speed of your computer. Just be patient!

Once the importing is done, you will see your music laid out from left to right. Click and drag your mouse around until you find the section you want for your MP3 ringtone. You can listen to your selection by pressing the spacebar, just play around until you find the part that you want to make as your MP3 ringtone. You’re looking for a phrase of 10 to 15 seconds or so. Once you found what you want for your MP3 ringtone you now go to “File” Menu and click on “Export selection as MP3″.

Audacity comes with several effects; to try them out, leave the ringtone selected in the Audacity window, and then select anything in the Effect menu.Adding these effects is a matter of taste, but I figure it adds a bit of spice to the ringtone and makes it more of an individual statement.

So once all is set and you’ve finalize your mp3 ringtone, it’s time to transfer the ringtone onto your phone. The easiest way to do this is with Bluetooth, assuming you have already paired your computer and cell phone. If your phone came with a USB connection, use that; otherwise, try e-mailing or texting it as an attachment. If you need some info about datacables please go here http://real-ringtones.awardspace.com/datacables.html . Put the mp3 ringtone file into the Audio folder if your phone has one, and then select the new ringtone in your Tools or Options menu. Each brand of phones has a separate way of adding or selecting new ringtones, but this tutorial does not cover that.

So that’s it! I hope you enjoy your new MP3 Ringtone!

Author Bio
Rex Meneses is an author for many successful articles written on the about ringtones and how to get them absolutely free. His website Real Music Ringtones have helped many cellphone users.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com – Free Website Content

If you are looking for digital photo editing software you know that some of it carries a hefty price. If your doing professional work for the printing business it might be different but if your just looking to edit pictures and create nice images and graphics for the web read on.  Paint.Net is the one we use regularly and feel it’s as good as the high price offerings. This software is Free and has the features you will use all the time. Including layering and transparent backgrounds. Photo effects and adjustments that are easy to use. Resizing and cropping is also a breeze. It features a very intuitive, and innovative, user friendly interface that makes all of it’s features very easy to use. You can download it for free at GetPaint.net and see for yourself.

We have tried and used many different FTP Clients over the years but lately we have one that we feel is just right!

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Features, Among others, the features of FileZilla include the following:

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and more
• IPv6 support
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
• Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
• Bookmarks
• Drag & drop support
• Configurable transfer speed limits
• Filename filters
• Network configuration wizard
• Remote file editing
• Keep-alive
• HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-Proxy support
• Logging to file

As FTP Clients go this one is very easy to set up and use and it even checks and keeps itself updated.  The price can’t be beat either.

Get it for FREE here http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client

They also have a Server version that is also free if you need something like that.

So you repaired your computer and installed a new hard drive.  You installed the operating system and the drivers but wait.  There isn’t any CD burning software and I can’t find a cd to install.  Here’s your solution.

CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the features to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface.  Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.

Features Listed

Download CDBurnerXP here http://cdburnerxp.se/

Windows 7: The Next Microsoft Operating System
By: Martin Brinkmann

Windows 7 is tentatively due to hit store shelves sometime around the middle of 2009 and seems to be a slightly revamped version of what Windows Vista should have been. Key amongst the new features include a pair of Mac OS X features that the Redmond giant is borrowing: the Dock & Multi-touch.

In Mac OS X the Dock serves as both a quick-launch area for commonly used applications and folders. It’s unknown how the dock in Windows 7 will function exactly, but it wouldn’t surprise many if the final product looked and operated remarkably like that of their Cupertino-based rival.

Windows 7: The next Microsoft operating system is also going to support a very Mac-like Multi-touch technology. The precise functionality is not entirely certain but it is very likely that the techniques pioneers on the iPhone and later by OS X are likely to become the industry norm. If that does indeed come true then it’d be reasonable to expect everything from zooming & scrolling to be common in all applications as well as rotational control on anything media-intensive such as Photoshop or even the media player.

Speaking of the media player, Windows 7 is due to receive a fairly major upgrade to various core components including Windows Media Center. The exact enhancements are not entirely clear at this time but gadget integration has been reported by many rumor mills claiming to either have a Milestone 1 (M1) copy or have sources that do.

Windows Explorer is another program due for an overhaul and if the trend of Microsoft attempting to catch up to OS X 10.5 Leopard (and 10.6 Snow Leopard) is true, we might see some attempts to speed Explorer up. Both Paint and WordPad are due to receive facelifts and additional functionality and an entirely new multi-line graphing calculator will finally be part of the package.

Bill Gates has gone on record by saying that Windows 7 will make a big step forward in speech technology and handwriting recognition. The first is not difficult to due as once again this is an area where Vista trails OS X, however the handwriting recognition might prove an opportunity for Microsoft to bring some of their Windows Mobile talent to bear. Microsoft has a much longer history in the smartphone market than Apple does and as a result this is one area where they aren’t lagging as noticeably.

Overall the changes in Windows 7 seem rather cosmetic and nagging technical difficulties that still trouble Vista may or may not have been resolved. We’ll find out in 2009 at the very earliest.

Article Source: http://www.fresh-article-directory.com

Martin helps people learn about the next Microsoft operating system. You can read more about the upcoming Windows 7 operating system like windows 7 Server information on the Windows 7 News website.