NowITWorks.net

Is your processor 64-bit capable? With SecurAble, you can find out in about 2 seconds.

According to its website, “SecurAble probes the system’s processor to determine the presence, absence and operational status of three modern processor features:

• 64-bit instruction extensions,
• Hardware support for detecting and preventing
  the execution of code in program data areas, … and
• Hardware support for system resource “virtualization.”

Here is the site to download -  http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

It also goes in-depth about Hardware DEP – fun stuff!

To those of us that live in the future and use Vista, (yes, I’m an optimist!) I wanted to share some of the Sidebar Gadgets that I have found the most useful since the time of release. I recently went through an update check on them all so they should be current.  I get most of my gadgets from http://thehobbylounge.com. Please note that you have to register to download.

 
So- what’s in the rar?*

(more…)

If you have a Windows Mobile device, chances are you are less than happy with the mobile browsing experience that IE gives you. It’s pretty bad – there is no Flash Player, pictures take forever to upload (if you can see them at all), and did I mention how sl-ow it is? Well fret no more!

Skyfire has just released their new beta browser and I think I’m in love. It’s fantastic – you can watch videos, listen to music, check your social networking sites or whatever you need from the internet that you couldn’t previously get on your phone. No longer is the IPhone the lone purveyor of  YouTube on the go! No longer is Active X and Flash the bane of your mobile experience!

If you have a Windows or Symbian (Nokia) phone, you owe it to yourself to download this as soon as you have a chance.

http://www.skyfire.com/

I give this 4 out of 4 lightsabers.

(Image source: Wikipedia Lightsaber Collection)

I was tooling around this weekend trying to find a media center that can play Divx, Xvid, H.264, .MKV, etc  video files and I finally found a winner. Windows Media Center does not like any of these formats, though Divx and Xvid will be available with Windows 7 edition.

The XBMC Media Center is an Open source little bit of wonder. It comes in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client and can do pretty much everything you would wish for out of an open source media center. (BluRay support is not quite there yet)

http://xbmc.org/

It’s an 80 meg exe, and pretty lightweight. It ran great on my wife’s old laptop, and streams music and video from other networked devices like a champ. You can also use a Windows Media Center Remote and Transceiver, though it takes a good amount of work.

A recent piece of handy-dandy free software I recently found is Unlocker. It installs an explorer extension that will allow you to see which processes have hooks into the file you are trying to change or delete and can kill them, allowing you to delete or change said file. If after that you cannot delete the file, you can schedule an action on next boot. This is not portable, and must be installed. It is a very lightweight application and I suggest un-checking everything except “Explorer Assistant” when installing so you get the right click context.

(more…)