Tech, Mobile Phone and Software

Archive for July, 2011

Do you want to download games onto PSP? Hardly anybody doubts the usefulness and many facets of the Sony PSP, but a lot of people feel that the games themselves are considerably overpriced. If you do your research, you can find the right places and methods to download games onto our PSPs, and we can even do this without breaking the law!

How to Download Games onto PSP- Step 1-
Your standard PSP games will come on disc, or UMD as they are called. As you download games onto PSP however, they will go directly on to a memory stick/card. (Although some people call them memory sticks, and others refer to them as memory cards, there is no difference between the two.) The standard PSP memory card of 32mb will just be big enough to do the job with modern games. PSP owners as a rule should get the biggest and best card within their budget. It is not difficult any more to find reasonable deals on 2 or 4 gig models on eBay and Amazon. When you have acquired your memory card, it will need to be formatted before you can use it. This will effectively wipe the card clean, and is an essential step, so don’t leave it out.

How to Download Games onto PSP-Step 2-
One of the biggest problems is finding a place to download the games from. It is not difficult to find places that will let you download games onto PSP, but so many of them are unreliable and dangerous. Apart from the risk of downloading something that will be different from what was promised, you could even find your computer infected with a virus or spyware. Not good! Make sure you find a reputable site to download PSP games from. The trustworthy ones will charge a small fee in advance, and for that you will get access to unlimited downloads.

How to Download Games onto PSP-Step-3-
As you start downloading to your computer, make sure you only download files that end in “PSP” or have “PSP” in the title, as otherwise the file will not be compatible. Sadly it will often be found that the untrustworthy sites out there will trick you with all sorts of different files as downloads, so make sure you are very careful about a file before you download it. A very good idea when downloading the games is to save them to their own folder on your desktop called “PSP Downloads”. This is the most logical place to put them!

How to Download Games onto PSP-Step 4-
Once you have quite a few games downloaded, you can then transfer therm from your PC onto the memory card of your PSP. This is not complicated, and will only need a standard USB cable to connect the two, and the PC should then accept the PSP and think of it as some form of removable drive, like a flashdrive or removable HD. When everything is connected, you need to open up the PSP using the PC and drag and drop the needed files onto the PSP memory stick, just as you would with any kind of removable drive. It is important that as you do this, you put the files into folders marked PSP, and then GAME on your memory card. You must create these files if they are not there already, and it makes sense to use all capital letters.

How to Download Games onto PSP-Step 6-
As soon as you have transferred the games to your PSP, you should be able to play them by opening up the GAME menu and choosing the game you want from the stick. You may get error massages, and these are often caused by incompatible firmware. This happens most often with downloading homebrew games. It can mean that you have to downgrade the firmware for your PSP to be able to play these homebrew games.

It really is quite easy to download games onto PSP when you have learned how to do it, the hardest part is finding a reputable download source!

Many people are interested in making the most of their hardware. So here are 10 simple tips on how to make your Windows XP computer run faster without having to purchase additional hardware.

1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data

One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. When files are fragmented, the computer must search the hard disk when the file is opened to piece it back together. To speed up the response time, you should monthly run Disk Defragmenter, a Windows utility that defrags and consolidates fragmented files for quicker computer response.

* Follow Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
* Click the drives you want to defrag and click Analyze
* Click Defragment

2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors

Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing difficult or even impossible. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It’ll search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for faster performance.

* Follow Start > My Computer
* In My Computer right-click the hard disk you want to scan and click Properties
* Click the Tools tab
* Click Check Now
* Select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box
* Click Start

3. Disable Indexing Services

Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. By indexing and updating lists of all the files on the computer, it helps you to do a search for something faster as it scans the index list. But if you know where your files are, you can disable this system service. It won’t do any harm to you machine, whether you search often or not very often.

* Go to Start
* Click Settings
* Click Control Panel
* Double-click Add/Remove Programs
* Click the Add/Remove Window Components
* Uncheck the Indexing services
* Click Next

4. Optimize Display Settings

Windows XP is a looker. But it costs you system resources that are used to display all the visual items and effects. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave the following:

* Show shadows under menus
* Show shadows under mouse pointer
* Show translucent selection rectangle
* Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
* Use visual styles on windows and buttons

6. Disable Performance Counters

Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC’s performance. These utilities take up system resources so disabling is a good idea.

* Download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/exctrlst-o.asp)
* Then select each counter in turn in the ‘Extensible performance counters’ window and clear the ‘performance counters enabled’ checkbox at the bottom button below

7. Optimize Your Pagefile

You can optimize your pagefile. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile.

* Right click on My Computer and select Properties
* Select the Advanced tab
* Under Performance choose the Settings button
* Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change

* Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file.

8. Remove Fonts for Speed

Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require.

* Open Control Panel
* Open Fonts folder
* Move fonts you don’t need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:\FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain.

9. Use a Flash Memory to Boost Performance

To improve performance, you need to install additional RAM memory. It’ll let you boot your OS much quicker and run many applications and access data quicker. There is no easiest and more technically elegant way to do it than use eBoostr (http://www.eboostr.com).

eBoostr is a little program that lets you improve a performance of any computer, powered by Windows XP in much the same way as Vista’s ReadyBoost. With eBoostr, if you have a flash drive, such as a USB flash thumb drive or an SD card, you can use it to make your computer run better. Simply plug in a flash drive through a USB socket and Windows XP will use eBoostr to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.

The product shows the best results for frequently used applications and data, which becomes a great feature for people who are using office programs, graphics applications or developer tools. It’ll surely attract a special attention of laptop owners as laptop upgrade is usually more complicated and laptop hard drives are by definition slower than those of desktops.

10. Perform a Boot Defragment

There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster.

On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. To make sure that boot defragment is enabled:

* Run the Registry Editor
* Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
* Set the Enable string value to Y if it is not already set to Y.
* Exit the Registry
* Reboot

Building professional looking websites can definitely be challenging.

While anyone in the world can learn the basics of html and get an operational site up and running on the internet, making a site that looks attractive can be another story altogether!

The internet abounds with cheap-looking mom and pop sites that look like they were designed by a first year html student.

Do you want your web sites to look like that?

I hope not. Especially when it is so gosh-darn easy to make your sites look more professional using Microsoft FrontPage.

Here are 5 ways FrontPage can instantly make your websites look more professional.

1. High Quality Photos And Clipart Collection – Few people actually know how great the Microsoft Clipart collection is. This collection of images is created and maintained by one of the richest corporations in the world. It absolutely crushes any other collection I’ve seen on the internet in terms of quantity and quality of available pictures.

Best part…It’s free for FrontPage owners!

There are over a million clipart pictures and photos, all searchable by keyword.

And if you have an active internet connection, you can search this online gallery from within FrontPage while you work.

Adding some original looking, nice photographs to each page of your site can instantly take up space, add a professional look. This is better than simply having the affiliate link.

2. The Interactive Button Features – In Microsoft FrontPage 2003, there is a new feature called ‘Interactive Buttons’.

Basically, you can choose from over 200 different types of ready-made buttons to use on your website. These buttons look fantastic and can be created and edited with 1 click.

Before you would have to pay a graphic designer or spend hours creating these types of rollover buttons yourself, but FrontPage 2003 does it all for you.

Using these buttons can add a big dose of professional looks to your site in a matter of seconds.

3. Using HTML Tables – It goes without saying that the content of your webpages should usually be placed in some sort of html table. FrontPage makes it easy to create tables and add content, simply by using a button on the toolbar.
You can use this to center the content on your page and create neat looking tables once you get the hang of it (it is easy). This way, your content isn’t scattered all around the page.

4. Included Content – This feature of FrontPage allows you to make changes to hundreds of webpages, simply by changing the content of one html page. For example, I mentioned above that you should use the interactive buttons feature to create a navigation system. You can also ‘include’ this navigation system on all of your webpages with a special feature in FrontPage.

This way, if you want to add another category or link to all of the pages on your site, you simply need to open up one webpage, the ‘navigation.htm’ page, and change the contents of that page.

The changes will immediately be reflected on hundreds of pages on your website.

You can see this is 10,000x more easy than going through and manually editing the links bar on each page!

5. Web Forms – Using the web forms feature of FrontPage, you can create a feedback form for your website. Not only do these forms look nice, but they also can help you to alleviate your spam problems.

Many a webmaster has paid extravagant fees to other companies for form processing, when it has been available to FrontPage users free and easy for years.

You can create any kind of feedback form in a matter of minutes, and have the results of the form submission sent to any email address that you choose.

To conclude:

I have just given you 5 very valuable tools for creating professional looking websites fast.

While it may not sound like much, consider this:

Let’s say you spend $50 and get a nice looking banner graphic for your new affiliate website.

Then you create a neat html table, past in the banner, and use the interactive buttons feature of FrontPage 2003 to create a navigation system.

You can use the same general template for each new page you create (for articles, and other information about the product you are promoting).

After that, you top each page off with a nice looking photo or two from the Microsoft Clipart collection.

Using these basic techniques, in only an hour or 2 you can easily put together a professional looking website site.

You can get more website building tips via the tips newsletter at http://www.fphowto.com