Entertainment

Knowing how to use Google Chrome’s media control options comes in handy, as it allows you to manage the media content you have open in Chrome, from your current tab. This is particularly useful for those of us with a short attention span, who jump from one video or song …

It is improbable that you haven’t heard about Harman Kardon: maybe you’ve seen speakers, audio receivers, headphones, or even notebooks that have this brand stamped on them. Did you wonder what Harman Kardon is, why it’s such a big name on the audio scene, or why the devices made by …

Spotify is one of the most beloved music streaming services in the world. It managed to gather the most comprehensive music library of artists, albums, and songs available on any platform. To play all your favorite music, or even podcasts, on Spotify, you only need an app or a web …

With Google’s Wallpapers app, you can get a new wallpaper for your Android device every day, for free. If you get bored easily by the images on your Home and Lock screens, but can’t find the time to change them, or if you want to be surprised daily by your …

If you’re using a computer with an AMD Radeon graphics card, and you install the official Adrenalin drivers for it, you may encounter an annoying feature: when you are playing games or using full-screen apps, you see a Radeon Software prompt in the corner of the screen, prompting you to …

One of the recent additions to AMD’s lineup of video cards is the Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU, for which the company didn’t release any reference cards. The good news, though, is that other manufacturers, such as ASUS, have already released their own implementations of the Radeon 5500 XT. In …

The ASUS ROG Chakram gaming mouse is one of the most innovative devices that ASUS has announced in 2019. It’s a mouse that not only promises top-notch performance and excellent quality, but also has a built-in joystick! Did you ever use anything like that? Well, ASUS made it a reality, …

One of the great things about Windows 7 is the fact that it has a very strong visual personality. It includes a very diverse set of wallpapers from a long list of visual artists. The funny thing is, the wallpapers which our team likes best are all created by one …

Many people have been using Google’s Picasa photo management software to store and share their photos in the cloud for years. It’s free, easy to use, and makes sharing your photos with other people about as simple as it gets. But, as we’ve seen, Windows Photo Gallery offers a lot …

Have you ever tried to explain something to someone and completely failed to get your point across? Have you tried to simplify a complicated concept for someone else and gotten nowhere? Supercommunicator‘s subtitle is “Explaining the complicated so anyone can understand.” Since I’m like many people and sometimes run into …

Ever notice those annoying black bars on the sides or along the top and bottom of a video? Oftentimes, the culprit is an incorrectly set aspect ratio. In Movie Maker, it’s easy to mistakenly save a movie in the wrong aspect ratio, thus creating these black bars in your final …

Not too long ago, ASUS revealed the ASUS ROG G752VT: a new high-end gaming laptop from their Republic Of Gamers series. Obviously, this device is aimed at gamers who want to be able to play everything, anytime, no matter if they’re at home or if they are on the go. …

Huawei is an electronics company best known for its Android smartphones. However, their portfolio is more diverse than that and it also includes portable Bluetooth speakers. One of their more recen t models is called the Huawei Swan Portable Bluetooth Speaker (AM08), a portable speaker with a very interesting design. …

Razer is a company with a name that has become a synonym with quality gaming computers and accessories. One of their most popular devices is the Razer DeathAdder Chroma . It’s a gaming mouse that features an incredible 10,000 DPI optical sensor, which translates into perfect precision on most surfaces. …

Trust GXT 865 Asta is one of the most affordable mechanical keyboards that you can find in shops. It is simple, with modest looks, and it includes only the basic features that you expect from a keyboard. Does its low price mean that you get a low-quality product? Fortunately, that …

At the installation of Windows 7 you are prompted for your country and language. Based on your selection, a group of themes will be installed. Apart from that, Windows 7 will copy on your hard disk some additional hidden themes that you aren’t aware of. There are a few hidden …

Windows 7 ships with the new Windows Media Player 12, which looks and feels very similar to Windows Media Player 11, but with a few new tweaks and additions. The interface has been somewhat pared down and that tabbed navigation of Windows Media Player 11 has been replaced with a …

We will continue our series on customizing the appearance of Windows 7 with an article about logon screens. Even though now you can customize lots of visual elements directly from the Control Panel, you still cannot change the logon screen. As with previous versions of Windows, you need to use …

Windows Media Player 12 elegantly pulls off the challenge of including numerous view modes and a complex library system without inundating you with options and arcane buttons. Navigating Windows Media Player 12 is surprisingly simple, given how many different ways to sort and organize your media files there are. In …

Playing music – whether it’s a digital audio file or a CD – is Windows Media Player 12’s core function and most likely what you’ll use it for the most. To continue our series, I will discuss how to play songs and other audio files that are in your Library …

Windows Media Player 12 allows computers with built-in CD and/or DVD burners to quickly and easily create audio CDs, data CDs and Data DVDs. This functionality makes creating mix CDs and copying audio CDs for playback in car stereos and other CD players incredibly simple. Alternately, Windows Media Player 12 …

Windows Media Player 12 has one very cool feature which allows you to play your entire media library from any Windows 7 machine over the Internet. That means everything: songs, videos, photos, even purchased media. This is useful for when you want to enjoy your Windows Media Player 12 library …

Earlier, we walked you through how to stream Windows Media Player 12 library over the Internet, which is a great way to take your movies, music and photos with you wherever you go. But for a faster, more secure way to share media between Windows 7 machines, you can also …

Windows Media Player 12 is designed to replicate many of the features you’d see on a physical home stereo or theater system, complete with a mixer, EQ and other audio tweaking devices. The software equivalent of the myriad knobs and sliders you’d see on high end stereo equipment are called …

Most Windows 7 users value Windows Media Player 12 because it allows them to conveniently and intuitively import, organize and find their audio and video files. But did you know that Windows Media Player 12 can do the same for pictures? Using Windows Media Player 12, you can sort, tag, …

Playlists allow you to create themed mixes or restrict playback to songs based on a certain criteria, such as your favorite songs, newly added songs and other parameters. Creating, saving and editing Windows Media Player 12 playlists and auto playlists (sometimes called “smart playlists”) is incredibly easy to learn but …

Plug-ins allow you to expand upon the core functionality of Windows Media Player 12 in various ways. These plug-ins easily integrate into Windows Media Player 12 and can be enabled or disabled on the fly without irreversibly altering the way the application works. In this tutorial, we’ll explain the different …

In an earlier tutorial, we showed you just how easy it is to extend the functionality of Windows Media Player 12 by installing plug-ins. As a supplement to that guide, we figured we’d rundown the coolest Windows Media Player 12 plug-ins available for download. You can find some of these …

Skins have long been a staple of media players ever since Winamp 2.x busted onto the scene in 1998 (over a decade ago!). Windows Media Player 7 was the first Microsoft media player software to support skinning and now the floodgates have been opened. Because Windows Media Player 12 is …

In our earlier post, we showed you how to download, install and apply Windows Media Player 12 skins. So, why not give your new found knowledge a whirl by checking out some of the top 7 Windows Media Player 12 skins that are worth a download? These aren’t being by …

Windows Media Player 12 has an answer to the iTunes store via its online store browsing capabilities. You can browse Microsoft’s own Windows Media Guide to check out free trailers, music videos and singles from top artists directly in Windows Media Player 12. Or you can visit other online content …

Windows Media Player 12 plays video clips and DVDs as well as it does audio files. Video clips in your library will automatically be organized for you and can be played easily with a click of a button. In this tutorial, I’ll show how to play imported and downloaded video …

In terms of file compatibility, Windows Media Player 12 is by far the most ecumenical to date. Where Microsoft once tacitly shunned third-party file types – such as Apple’s Quicktime (.MOV) and DivX – it now supports an impressive number of file types out of the box. Still, avid media …

For all Starcraft 2 fans, we have something special – Starcraft 2 theme packs for Windows 7. I have created 5 theme packs for the most popular resolutions used by our readers: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050 and 1920×1200. Each of them contains different images that will be used as desktop …

After our Starcraft 2 theme pack, we moved our attention to Mafia 2 fans and created a theme pack for Windows 7. Because we were really impressed of how cool the soundtracks for this game are, we used part of those to create the sound scheme for our themes. We …

Did you know that, beyond the basic personalisation of Windows themes, there’s a slightly more hidden but more powerful way to customize visual settings? With the help of the Window Color and Appearance window, you can change the background color used by certain applications, you can increase the size of …

Witcher 2 – Assassins of Kings is one of the best games of 2011. We played it ourselves and we enjoyed it a lot. While playing it, we started searching for Witcher 2 inspired themes for Windows 7. Unfortunately we did not find many options, so we decided to create …

There’s an old saying, “When all else fails, read the directions.” Unfortunately, software and hardware don’t come with much in the way of “directions” these days. Help files are often not helpful, and if you have to read the manual on your computer, what happens when the computer doesn’t work? …

After having met Mihai Fischer and Georgiana Girboan, in today’s article we’ll introduce another Romanian photographer: Andrei Niculescu. Andrei’s work includes impressive panoramas and, recently, street portraiture. To demonstrate his skills, he will share with us photos that cover these two themes. If you are ready to find out more …

One of the most famous zombie games of this year is Dead Island. Some of us played it for a bit and enjoyed it enough to think about creating and sharing a Windows 7 theme for this game. If you enjoyed this game as well, you might want to give …

Reading the title of this book review – I’m sure you have an ironic smile on your face. Why would a blog about Windows, for Windows users, review a book about Steve Jobs? Because no matter how much he berated Microsoft and Windows, Steve Jobs had a great influence on …

In the past we covered Windows Media Player 12 extensively and we’ve shown almost anything you can do with it, including changing its looks by using skins. We would like to resume the discussion about this application and share with you some good looking skins you might want to try. …

In a world that most of the time looks in shades of gray, its colored parts should be appreciated. In today’s article we invite you to see the world and its colors through Ionut Caras’s perspective. We will unveil through a Windows 7 theme some of Ionut’s best photographic manipulations, …

Windows Movie Maker was first introduced as part of a service pack for Windows XP, and quickly proved to be very popular. It made creating videos very easy, so much so that many people didn’t even need to read the directions. (Like me—I created a couple of silly parody videos …

One of the differences about Windows 8 is that its themes are not compatible with Windows 7. The extension with which they are saved is different, as well as the way they are packaged. Therefore you cannot copy and paste a theme from one operating system to another. That’s why …

As soon as it was launched, I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, installed it on two computers (a desktop and a laptop) and started using it. From now on, I plan to use it regularly, a few hours per day and evaluate how great or bad it is, especially …

Many people enjoy chit-chatting on Twitter these days—even people who swore they could never fit everything they wanted to say into 140 characters. Businesses are taking notice of this and getting their own Twitter accounts, both to keep current customers and to attract new ones. The concept of “social media …

Are you looking for a new theme to freshen up your Windows desktop? We have for you a custom made theme, inspired by Ubuntu version 11.10. It includes most of the official Ubuntu wallpapers and it was tailored to replicate Ubuntu’s colors and sounds in Windows. It looks beautiful and …

We would like to introduce you to an artist from Romania, who has a varied portfolio of photographic works at a very young age. In this article we would like you to meet Felicia Simion and enjoy some of her conceptual work, in the form of a downloadable theme for …

In the early 1960s, my parents bought my youngest brother a box of LEGO bricks. That was the beginning of our family’s appreciation for LEGO, which continues to this day (I recently gave my LEGO robot mini-toy to my favorite 9-year-old, but I still use my LEGO gym bag and …

Let’s face it, being a “geek” (as people understand the term today) often involves lots of sitting around staring at a computer or video game screen. Geeks have avatars who do incredibly active things in virtual worlds, while the person behind the avatar is basically just sitting on a chair …

Since Windows 8 themes are not compatible with Windows 7, we would like to return with new themes for Windows 7, inspired by the new Windows 8 Release Preview. The first theme includes the desktop wallpapers used in Windows 8 Release Preview, while the second includes the wallpapers used for …

Lately, I notice a strong debate about Windows 8. People tend to either hate it or love it. There are no moderate verdicts being shared. Those who hate it share mostly the same complaints, many of which I think are wrong. That’s why I decided to share my view on …

Indifferent if you are a Diablo fan or not, you must have heard about the Steelseries Diablo 3 mouse. This mouse is one of the hottest mice of the year and… I was lucky enough to get my hands on one. After testing it for almost two months, I have …

Unfortunately Windows Photo Gallery does not provide native support for viewing RAW photos, created with modern digital photo cameras. Also, when trying to view or edit such pictures, you get errors with weird codes like 0x88982f61. If you have a digital camera shooting RAW pictures, then read this guide to …

As of today, Windows 8 is available through different official channels. And we would like to celebrate this event and share with you three Windows 7 themes that include the wallpapers and high-resolution images bundled with Windows 8. Until you get your hands on Windows 8 you can have your …

Today, I would like to publish an interview with one of our readers: Milan Benes. He contacted me a few weeks ago and since then we have been in touch on a regular basis. Together we have found some great solutions for Windows 8 puzzles. Milan is the inspiration behind …

All of us know the feeling you get when you hear a song on the radio but just can’t remember its name. It’s frustrating. There are also times when you fall in love at first hearing with a song you’ve never heard before and you want to know its title, …

Windows 8 themes are not different from Windows 7 themes, at least not when you look at them for the first time. The process for creating and customizing themes is the same in both operating systems but the theme files that result from the process have a different file extension …

In recent weeks we encountered major issues with our anti-spam system. It malfunctioned very often and, even though it was blocking lots and lots of spam, it was also blocking most of the legitimate comments people were submitting. Thanks to a couple of readers who shared their issues with us, …

Windows Photo Gallery has many great features. One of our favorites is face recognition, which allows you to identify and tag people in your photos. The more people you tag, the easier it is for Windows Photo Gallery to suggest tags and correctly identify people. Another great thing is that, …

Windows 7 and Windows 8 include a great little application you can use to record sounds – Sound Recorder. All you need is a sound card and a microphone plugged in, or a webcam with a microphone built in. Your recordings are saved as Windows Media Audio files and can …

Do you remember those little disposable panorama cameras? They let you take a few very wide photographs on a roll of 35mm film. Since the advent of digital cameras, making panoramic photos has been done by merging several photographs together and, in the beginning, that was something you could only …

I recently searched for good and free screensavers. What I found was pretty distressing. Free screensavers appear to be a favorite delivery system for malware more than anything else. However, all is not lost. If you want a really good, free screensaver, you need look no farther than the contents …

One of the things I like Ubuntu is that it bundles high quality wallpapers with each new version of the operating system, just like Windows does. For their 13.04 version, Canonical has organized a wallpapers contest which received some amazing entries. Therefore, Ubuntu 13.04 has some of the best wallpapers …

Anyone who’s taken digital photos for any length of time has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures stored on their hard drive. And the more photos there are, the harder it is to find any particular one—unless you’ve identified them in some easy-to-search way. We’ve seen how to tag photos with …

In a previous article, I talked about adding People tags to images in Windows Photo Gallery. If you’ve looked at Photo Gallery, you already know that people tags aren’t the only identifiers you can add to your images. In this tutorial, I’ll talk about adding Geotags and Captions. Adding such …

Many people like to publish images on Flickr, a justifiably popular image-sharing site. While there are several ways to do this, if you use Windows Photo Gallery, you’ve got one of the easiest publishing methods right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you can publish as many photos …

While Windows Photo Gallery doesn’t have the sophisticated editing tools that some other programs do, it certainly has enough for most people’s needs. In this tutorial I will cover the basics of editing your photos, so that you get the results you want. NOTE:This tutorial assumes that you have photos …

I like some of the patterns used by Microsoft on Windows 8’s Start screen and I thought I could be using them as Desktop wallpapers. But the problem is – where are they located? They are not stored in any of the usual locations used by Windows to store its …

Where can you find the images used by Windows 8 as wallpapers for its default Desktop themes and for the Lock screen? It turns out that they are placed in the same folder and you can copy and paste the images from there with ease. Here’s how: The Wallpapers Used …

Did you know that, with the help of your Microsoft account, you can connect your Windows 8 PCs or devices with your Xbox 360 console? You can view what’s going on on your console, from Windows 8, remote control the Xbox 360. Then, with the help of the Games app, …

Microsoft has mentioned for a long time now, their strategy of “three screens and a cloud”. As always, there were many naysayers who criticized it even though it was never fully implemented. That’s until the end of 2013, when Windows 8.1 and Xbox One will be launched to market. What …

Windows 8.1 offers more personalization options than Windows 8 and Windows 7 do. One of the things that can be configured in more detail is the Start screen itself. For example, in Windows 8.1 you have more options for setting the wallpaper (background image), background and accent colors. You can …

I’m very excited about my upcoming trip to the US. It will start on December 1st and end on December 11th. I will be going to Washington DC, Indianapolis and Los Angeles. If you live in any of those areas and you would like to meet, send me a message …