If you’ve noticed your computer getting slower over time you might need to defragment the files and folders on your hard drive. From Windows XP forward a basic defragmenter was included, but it was very poor. Microsoft did include a Windows defragmentation API that could be hooked into to provide better defragmentation.

The reason you might want to defragment your hard drive using something other than the included software would be to defrag files 64 MB and smaller, which are ordinarily ignored, but can still impact overall performance.

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If there are RSS news feeds you would like to subscribe to, and read, but they are written in a foreign language you don’t understand, there is a way to automatically translate those news feeds as you read them.

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When upgrading your hard drive to a bigger faster hard drive the Norton Ghost utility called Copy My Hard Drive can make the upgrade quick, easy, and painless. Copy My Hard Drive used to be referred to as cloning the hard drive.

First we’ll need to prepare the new hard drive. Click the Windows Start button -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.

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On my home network I have a Cisco Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router that has a built-in firewall, and I run McAfee Security Center that also includes a firewall for each machine it is installed on. I tried sharing files and folders, and printers, between a wired PC and a wireless PC, but was denied. It makes no difference on a network if the PCs are wired or wireless, because they all look the same on the network, and use the same protocols.

Since I could see the other PC on the network, but I could not see any printers, or shared files and folders, I suspected the McAfee firewall was blocking the ports needed to share.

Let’s setup sharing between these computers.

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YOURLS is a URL shortening service you can run on your own server, and it comes with a Wordpress plugin called YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter. In the past I’ve used WP to Twitter, but since it doesn’t support YOURLS I’ve had to switch.

I’ve asked the author of YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter to add Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Code with a custom field for authors to add their own identifier, but he has been too busy updating the YOURLS scripts, so I’ve hacked the plugin code to allow us to use Campaign Tracking now.

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