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Courtesy: Smashing App
Author: AN Jay

How To Completely Restore Your Windows Computer To Factory Settings

Most computers from PC vendors come with certain pre-configured factory settings which are important to the computer’s operation. This is particularly true of laptops, which usually have special function buttons, and touch screen computers, which require special drivers in order to function. Of course, a computer from a factory also has default Windows settings and does not feature any of your own customizations.
There may come a time in your computer ownership that you decide to basically hit the reset button.

This may be because your computer was struck by a virus, or it may be because you are selling your computer and you want to make sure your personal information can’t be retrieved by the person you are selling to.
Whatever your situation, this guide will help you completely restore your computer to absolutely pristine factory settings.

Step 1: Save Files & Folders

Depending on your version of Windows and the recovery system your computer’s vendor uses, some of your settings and files may be saved when you restore your computer to factory settings. However, it is best not to rely on this.

Treat your restoration to factory settings the same as you would a complete re-format of your hard drive. Assume all data will be lost and back up all crucial information to an external hard drive. Don’t bother backing up programs you can reinstall, but make sure to back up everything you don’t already have a copy of.
Also, make sure that you back up your browser information. The help website of the web browser you use should provide instructions on how to back up your browser. If you don’t do this you will lose all of your bookmarks and saved passwords.

Step 2: Start The Recovery Program

There are two common methods for returning your operating system to factory settings. One of these is to simply reinstall the operating system through the operating system’s own repair or reinstall process. With Windows this usually requires access to a Windows installation CD  or the creation of a boot CD. If you have this available, you can refer to our guide on how to re-install Windows.
However, most computer vendors no longer ship out a copy of the Windows installation CD with their computers. Instead, the computer ships with a recovery partition or recovery disk. Each vendor uses their own particular type of solution, but the basics of them are the same. The most common names used by each company for their recovery solution can be found below. Note that manufacturers do change names from time to time – usually it will simply be something with the vendor’s brand name and the word “recovery” included after it.

• Acer – Acer eRecovery
• ASUS – ASUS Recovery Partition
• Dell – Dell Factory Image Restore
• Gateway – Gateway Recovery Management
• HP – HP PC System Recovery
• Sony – Sony Vaio Recovery Wizard

You can start the recovery program from within Windows. Alternatively – if perhaps your computer is having problems booting into Windows – you can usually access the recovery partition during your computer’s boot cycle. Pay attention to the display when your computer boots. There should be text indicating what button you need to press to start the recovery process. Typically, it will be a function key.

Step 3: Restoring To Factory Settings

Each vendor has their own recovery solution, so there is no way to provide a definitive guide to each and every vendor within the scope of this article. However, the general process of restoration almost always works like this.

• First, you will start the restoration program in Windows.  The program will ask if you’d really like to begin the restoration process and warn you that your data could be (or will be) destroyed during the process.
• Once you confirm that you would like to start the recovery process you’ll reach some sort of progress screen.  The computer may reboot to access this, or it may simply exit Windows and boot directly into the restoration program. At this point you’re set in your course – do not cancel the process. This can take half an hour to several hours depending on the speed of your computer.

• Once the restoration to factory settings is complete the computer will reboot and begin the Windows setup process. You will have to set up your user account and your settings just as you did when you first purchased the computer.

Step 4: Finishing Restoration

Ideally, the factory restoration wizard will completely restore everything needed to make your computer fully functional. However, in some situations you may find that a few drivers were not installed. For example, you might find that the screen brightness buttons no longer work on your laptop.
If you run into this problem you’ll need to download the drivers for your computer, which can be found on the vendor’s support website. You can either enter the serial number of your computer to obtain the proper drivers or you can find your model of computer yourself.

Once you have downloaded the appropriate drivers and installed them your system will be returned to its original factory settings. It will work just as it did the day that you bought it.

Author: Matt Smith

Courtesy: MakeUse

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked, you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.
Reason #3 – If the Gmail service goes down (yes, it happens), you will still be able to read your older emails. Gmail outage won’t affect work.

Backup your Gmail Messages Online

There are three services that can help you automatically backup your Gmail (and Google Apps) email accounts online and luckily, they won’t cost you anything.

The first and most obvious choice is Gmail. Create a new Gmail account and under Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Check mail using POP3 –> Add POP3 email account, enter the email address of your main Gmail account that you want to backup.
Within an hour or so, the online mail fetcher program will pull messages from your main Gmail account and will copy them to your new “backup” account. In my limited testing, I found that Gmail’s mail fetcher left all the messages that were either “read” or have been previously downloaded by another POP3 client so it’s not “true backup.”
That brings us to another alternative – copy your Gmail mailbox to Windows Live Hotmail. While you can add a Gmail account to Hotmail using POP3 (just like Gmail’s mail fetcher), there’s a much better and reliable option out there for copying emails from Gmail into Hotmail and it’s called TrueSwitch.

Setup a new Hotmail account and TrueSwitch, an awesome web-based email account migration service, will copy all your emails and attachments from Gmail to your new Hotmail address. If you have a relatively large Gmail Inbox, the backup process might take up to 24 hours but you’ll get an email as soon as the transfer is complete.
Like Gmail, Hotmail too offers “expanding” storage so it can possibly fit your large Google inbox as well. You can then add your Gmail address to Hotmail (click “Add an email account” in the sidebar) and this will ensure that new messages that land in your Gmail inbox in the future are also saved in Hotmail.
That said, both the services discussed above have one common drawback – they’ll always backup your entire Gmail mailbox and you cannot limit the backup process to a specific set of folders (or labels in Gmail). So if you have a fairly large mailbox and don’t want to backup each and every Gmail folder (or label), try Backupify.

Courtesy: Digital Inspiration 

Author: Amit Agarwal

Download Youtube Videos as MP3

 

Video2mp3

Services like Video2mp3 make downloading YouTube videos as MP3 files a simple 3 step process.  It simply allows you to enter the URL, click “convert”, and finally download the MP3 from the provided link.

Grab the YouTube URL:

Head over to video2mp3, enter the YouTube URL there and click “convert“:

Wait a bit for the conversion and then just download the mp3 from the link.  Could this service get any simpler?  Yes, with a Firefox add-on that adds a link to YouTube video pages to directly convert the video.

 

Dirpy

Dirpy is not just yet another YouTube MP3 converter.  This site has quite a few features that set it apart.
First of all, they have integrated a bookmarklet into the mix making getting a video into the studio as easy as clicking a bookmarklet while on the YouTube video page.

Other features include the ability to set the file name and the start and end time of the MP3.
Basically, take what VideotoMp3 does (an easy 3 step process) and add a few very cool features, and a fun-to-say name, and you have Dirpy.

 

Vid2MP3

This happens to be the site I stumbled upon when I was doing my presentation and it did the job in a good amount of time.  The site looks a bit weird but, like I said, it worked out great.
As it turns out, this site offers the choice between standard and high quality.  Using it is as easy as using Video2mp3 and only requires entering the URL:

And downloading the MP3:

And then you’ll actually have to click another link to download it (why?):

Two cool features that VidToMP3 offers are the ability to preview the MP3 in an online player before downloading and the ability to email a friend a link to download the MP3.  You will have to excuse quite a few ads on this site but the results are good and timely.

Courtesy: Make Use

Author: Tim Lenahan

Delete Facebook Apps that Now Have Greater Access to Your Data

At Facebook's f8 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers that Facebook applications would no longer have to dump any data they've collected on you after 24 hours. If you've got apps installed that might have prying eyes, here's how to uninstall them.
Facebook seems to change up its interface, and its settings, every few months, so if you thought you knew the easy way to remove an application entirely before, you might want to take a quick refresher. Not all Facebook applications are out to mine your personal stats for nefarious gain, but if you've kept an app or two hanging around because you thought there wasn't much exposure, here's how ReadWriteWeb recommends you go about showing them the door:

1. Click on "Account" at the top-right of the screen.
2. Click "Application Settings"
3. Change the "Show" drop-down box to "Authorized." This will show all the applications you've ever given permission to.
4. In the resulting list, click the "X" button on the far right next to each app you want to remove to delete it.
5. On the pop-up box that appears, click "Remove" then click "Okay" on the next box confirming the app was deleted.

Courtesy: LifeHacker

Author: Kevin