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Free Software Downloads |
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| Useful fast & free software that you didn't know about. |
http://www.deskcretary.com/
Last month we featured a nifty tool to add calendars to your desktop wallpapers and hopefully you now have a fancy looking desktop background. But what about that mess of icons littered all over your desktop? Deskcretary helps with that by managing and scheduling the cleanup of your desktop. |
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http://www.tidysongs.com/
Do you have a large digital music collection that has a lot of missing information or artwork? Or perhaps it's just littered all over your hard drive in a big mess. TidySongs is an app which manages your collection and fills in missing data such as artists, albums, or genres. |
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http://batterycare.bkspot.com/en/index.html
Batterycare is a simple application designed for laptops and notebooks to manage and inform you about your battery usage. It also provides recommendations on when you should perform a battery discharge cycle. |
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http://www.immunet.com/user/new
Miro is a video player that is designed especially for streamed video content from sites such as Youtube or Hulu. With Miro, you can also save videos straight onto your hard drive and also schedule shows from it's built in episode guide. |
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http://pidgin.im/
Pidgin is a small and lightweight multi-platform instant messaging program. It supports a wide range of chat networks such as MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo, and so on. Best thing is, you only need this one client rather than having all the others logged on all at the same time (which takes up precious resource usage!). |
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http://www.windowslive.com/Desktop/MovieMaker
Windows Live Movie Maker is the updated version Microsoft's Movie Maker software that you always see bundled with XP and Vista. This new version sports Microsoft's infamous "ribbon" toolbar menu system (as with most of their newer software) and now also supports things like high definition video and built in tools for uploading videos. Live Movie Maker is available for Vista and Windows 7 only. |
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Website Watch |
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Free-OCR
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http://www.free-ocr.com/
Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to change and of your scanned documents into normal text. The service is free however there is a limitation to the amount of OCR you can perform per hour.
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Playlist
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http://www.playlist.com/
Playlist.com is a website dedicated to share and discover new music with other users. The site focuses on free music made available online by artists and allows you to stream the music via their built-in player.
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Techie Tips |
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Often when you have internet troubles, you may hear our support team or your techie mates telling you to do "ping tests" to certain addresses. A ping test is basically your computer attempting to say "Hi" to another. This month we will have a look at how to do some basic troubleshooting using the ping test.
There are several main points of connectivity between you and the internet and it looks something like this:
PC > Modem/router > TPG > Internet
Each of these points has an address in which it can be located and by pinging each one of them, you can find out which part of the link is broken. To do a ping test in Windows, open up your command prompt by pressing Windows key + R and enter "cmd" into the box. Once you have the command prompt open (the ugly looking black window), just type in the ping command followed by an address. Eg. "ping www.google.com"
Here are some examples of the addresses you may need:
PC: "127.0.0.1" - If you cannot ping this address then there may be a problem with your network card or the drivers associated with the network card.
Modem/router: 192.168.1.1 - this is the most common address for modems and routers but may also have slight variations such as 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.254. If pinging your modem/router fails, then your modem or router may have crashed and will need a powercycle.
TPG: www.tpg.com.au or 203.12.160.35 (TPG's DNS server) - If you have gotten this far but cannot ping TPG, this could mean that you are connected, but there is no dataflow. This is usually caused by an outage or a line fault.
Internet: Basically pinging any website will give you an informative result, for example if you are able to ping www.google.com but cannot view the website in a browser, it could mean that you are connected to the internet but your browser is not responding to any requests or something is blocking it such as a firewall. |
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FAQ of the month |
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Now that there's better value ADSL2+ plans available, I want to change my older ADSL2+ plan to one of the new ones. How much will this cost me and how do I go about it?
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If you are planning to upgrade plans (changing to a plan of equal or higher price), upgrading is free of charge with no contract restart. Downgrading plans (changing to a lower priced plan) may attract a fee depending on your contract period.
You can easily make these changes by visiting "Your Account" on the TPG website. Plan/quota changes will take place as soon as they are processed by our systems. |
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Jargon Buster |
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Here are some terms you may be unfamiliar with found on the TPG website.
Static IP address - if your plan has a static IP address, this means that every time your modem connects to the internet it will be assigned the same IP address.
Dynamic IP address - if your plan has a dynamic IP address, this means that every time your modem connects, you will be assigned a different IP address.
Soft phone - A soft phone is basically the same as regular VOIP except everything is done through software on your PC. You can listen and talk through your computer speakers and microphone.
DNS - Domain Name Server, This is the service that translates website addresses into their IP address counterpart.
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