What’s This All About?

Laptops are getting every cheaper, a good quality refurbished or secondhand laptop can be purchased over the Internet from eBay or other reliable websites for very reasonable prices. Loaded with Windows Media Center or Vista they provide an ideal platform having all the basic essentials for your “media playback over TV” needs.

In writing this post I checked on eBay and found that a Laptop with HDMI output can be bought for $500 US or £400 (why do we always pay more in the UK than the same product in the USA?). The fact is you don’t need HDMI and a suitable laptop with a Video, S-Video output will do. If you have a TV that will accept VGA or DVI input even better. A quick search shows suitable secondhand laptops with Video/VGA output connectors are available on eBay today for less than £200 or $250 US.

In the picture above the Laptop is sitting just below the top shelf on top of the Hard Drive recorder box, this setup in my lounge includes Logitech surround sound with remote control and a wireless keyboard with touchpad. The laptop connects to my home network and provides access to videos, music and pictures as well as Internet access. It is all connected to a 42” Panasonic Plasma screen.

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or Several Good Reasons for Using Portable Firefox

What is This all About?

Making it easy to use Firefox with different settings for different users and/or different purposes as well as being able to quickly and easily create Firefox backups.

A standard installation of Firefox keeps the programs and data (your profile with all the settings, cookies, cache, etc) in separate areas of your hard drive. Normally (unless you have specified a different location at installation or in your OS Setup) Firefox programs will be installed under C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/ and the data will be stored under your Microsoft “Documents and Settings” area with a path like - C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\.

With a Firefox Portable installation you can have all your Firefox programs and data under a set of folders such as:

• C:\Firefox_Main
• C:\Firefox_Small
• C:\Firefox_Blogging

Or you could have:

• C:\FirefoxPortable\

containing

• • Firefox_Main
  • Firefox_Small
  • Firefox_Blogging

and C; can be substituted for any other drive including memory sticks/flash drive and network drives.

Not only is this easy to quickly backup everything using standard backup software or by simply copying the folder structure using standard copy and paste, but it is completely portable using a portable hard drive or USB flash memory.

This is how have Firefox set up on my main PC and I transfer this complete or in part to other PC’s at home and work on a removable hard drive or flash memory.

(Click on Screenshots to enlarge where necessary)

You could even run Firefox over an Internet connection using remote connection software like Logmein or even Windows Home Server, although unless you have a fast broadband connection this could be very slow and you would be better pulling (downloading) the installation to the local machine.

What Do I Do?

Well, I have already said some of the things that can be done based on what I am already doing. The next screenshot shows the files and folders under my Firefox Portable folder:

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What is This all About?

Most users will think of Windows Explorer (Not Internet Explorer the browser application) as the program they use to access their files. In fact Windows Explore is much more than this, in simple terms it provides the graphical user interface(GUI) between the user and the operating system. It gives access to the all the programs including the control panel and various system utilities such as System Information, System Restore and the Management Console. If Windows Explorer freezes or cashes then you no longer have access to the Windows Taskbar and the Desktop icons amongst other important ways that you interact with your PC to make it do what you need. (Windows Explorer is also referred to as the shell which interacts with the core operating system).

Tip 4 may be the most important Tip as this helps to protect against fatal Windows Explorer crashes

Why Do You Care?

For a multitude of different reasons Windows Explorer may freeze or crash at any time. Windows XP is certainly more stable than earlier Windows operating systems but it still happens, particularly if you load lots of programs and give your PC a heavy workload. This is another reason why it pays to reboot your Windows OS fairly frequently, as the longer he system runs in any one session the more likely it is that it may freeze or crash.

Once Windows Explorer is no longer available then how do you access such things as the Shutdown Menu or your open programs that are still running?

What Can You Do?

First of all, except for the most inexperienced of users of a Windows OS will be familiar with CTL-ALT-DEL (or the 3 finger salute) where you press all 3 keyboard buttons at the same time as an emergency “get out of jail” solution.

By the way – if this doesn’t immediately work give it a minute after which you will need to use the powerswitch or restart button with all the possibilities of loosing data or file corruption. So only ever do this as a last resort!!!!

When you use CTL-ALT-DEL from a User Login/Password system you see the following screen:

(Click on Screenshots to enlarge)

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