Over years most of us have grown immune to irritating sound of physical alarm clocks and mobile phones. What does solve our purpose are the alarm clocks on our laptop devices. Why? Because not only can you set the song of your choice as alarm tone but also set it at your convenience and if you are as lazy as me the latter will help a lot.

As far Justin’s question is concerned, yes you can set alarms on your Macbook Pro and Macbook devices. You can do it either with built in “iCal” utility or you can download a simple iTunes utility that would turn your Macbook Pro into a fully functional Alarm Clock.

The free iTunes utility comes by the name of iTunes alarm and is currently Version 2.1. It is a wonderful app that does everything and more than what a physical alarm clock could do. Once you set the alarm , it can put the computer to sleep and when its time , it will wake the computer first and then rouse you from your sleep with whatever music or radio station you choose. You can also change form one playlist to another to be played to wake you up

Other features of iTunes Alarm include:

1. Unlimited number of nameable alarms
2. Wakes the computer from sleep automatically
3. Configurable snooze button
4. Pick from any playlist – including folders, or ones that contain radio stations or, use the random feature to let the alarm choose for you.
5. Sleep button makes falling asleep to music easy
6. Use playlists on shared libraries, iPods, or CD’s
7. Choose 12 or 24 hour time

You can download the free app from here.

Speed: As far as speed is concerned, Google Chrome leads the pack followed by Safari 5 and Opera 10. 52. It loads quickly form the desktop and installs without a fuss.

Simplicity: Like the Google Homepage, Chrome’s browser window is clean and simple. The features like Omnibox, and drag and drop tab management makes working in Google Chrome a charm.

Security: Google Chrome comes with built in malware and phishing protection. While browsing the web in Chrome, if you encounter a phishing site, it will warn you and ask for your approval before actually loading the site.

Google Chrome also updates automatically to its latest version so that your security is not compromised at any point.

Extension Support in Browser: If you want to use Google Chrome for more than just browsing, you can install extensions to enhance the functionality of the browser. These work in way very similar to addons in Mozilla Firefox . There are numerous Chrome extensions that you can choose from.

Translation in Browser: If the language displayed on the web page does not match the language preferences set in the browser, Chrome automatically asks for your approval to translate the page to your preferred language.

Incognito Mode: When you don’t want your website visits to be recorded in your browser history, you can browse in incognito mode. This is especially very effective if you browse the web on a public computer. Just enable the incognito mode and enjoy secure and safe browsing without leaving any traces.

Themes: You can style your Google Chrome browser with official themes as well. These themes are available in a wide range of designs form developers around the world.

Other important features are Omnibox, Tabbed Browsing, and enhanced stability measures with advance crash support.

You can download Google Chrome for Windows XP from following links.

Official Link

Filehippo.com

For anyone who is facing problems in signing into Gmail, please first read this article where we have detailed common tips which you can use to solve the problems. Also take out time to read this article about changing DNS address, in case the problem is with your Internet Service Provider.As far as Jenson’s question is concerned the answer to that is yes. You can check your mails without using Gmail Login. In this article we will focus on following alternate ways to view your Gmail mails.

1:  Use alternate Gmail Login Addresses

2: Use a desktop Email Client

3: Using Offline Gmail

4: Forwarding it to another Email address

5: Use Google Toolbar to Login into Gmail

6 : Use iGoogle to View Gmail Messages

7: View Gmail Inbox Messages with a Feed reader

8 : Other Methods

1 . Using Alternate Gmail Login Addresses

Here is a list of URLs that you can try if you are finding it hard to login at www.gmail.com.

a) https://www.gmail.com/ : It is Gmail’s SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) login page. It would show a security certificate error if date and time settings on your system are not up to date.

b) http://mail.google.com/mail : It is Gmail’s standard URL. You can see this URL after you log in into your Gmail account.

c) https://mail.google.com/mail : Secured version of above

d) http://gmail.google.com/gmail : Old alternate URL

e) https://gmail.google.com.gmail : Secured Version of Old alternate URL

f) http://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser : This URL forces Gmail to skip test for browser compatibility and load in Standard Mode.

g) https://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser : Secured Version of the above

h) http://mail.google.com/mail/h : Simple or basic html mode. If you have a slow internet connection, make sure you use this.

i) https://mail.google.com/mail/h : Secured version of basic HTML mode

j) http://m.gmail.com : Mobile version of Gmail. In normal browsers the login window is small but the Gmail loads in basic HTML mode.

k) http://mail.google.com/mail/x/ : Another URL for mobile devices and PDA. The difference between the two links for mobile devices is that if you use this link in web browser, it will load with the similar interface as in mobile devices while the m.gmail.com loads in basic HTML format.

l) https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ : Secured version of the above.

m) https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ : Secured Inbox feed URL for reading the feeds with a RSS reader. Use this if nothing of the above works. You can view feeds of messages in your Inbox.

n) https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail : Another Secure URL to access Gmail Login Page.

o) Gmail App for Mobiles: An advanced Java app for using Gmail on your mobile phones.

2: Download Gmail Messages with Desktop Email Client

Desktops Email clients download all your mail messages (excluding Spam and Chat messages). You can login into these email clients if all the above links can’t get you to the Gmail Login Page. You can also compose and send messages through desktop email clients.  There are several such clients available but I personally prefer, Thunderbird. It’s free, it’s open source and it set ups automatically within seconds. By the way, Gmail currently supports the following Desktop Email Clients.

1. Apple Mail 3.0
2. Outlook Express
3. Outlook 2002
4. Outlook 2003
5. Outlook 2007
6. Thunderbird 2.0
7. Windows Mail

Read this article to learn how to setup these desktop email clients with Gmail.

3: Use Gmail Offline Mode

Last year Gmail launched Offline Gmail, for people who wished they could access their Gmail even if they didn’t have internet access. It’s a great feature and works pretty well. If you want to use Gmail to browse through your old messages, you can use Gmail Offline Mode.

Once enabled, Gmail offline mode downloads all the current messages (inbox, archives, outbox ,chats etc) to your computer and will keep it updated till the last login on that particular computer.

You can read this article to learn how to setup offline mode in Gmail.

4: Forward Gmail messages to another email address

Even the free version of Gmail allows you to forward your incoming mail messages to another email address (Yahoo, hotmail, Rediffmail etc) . In case you are facing problems logging into Gmail, this is perhaps the best solution for you. You can forward all your incoming mail messages to any valid email address.

Read this article to learn how to forward your Gmail messages to another email address.

5: Use Google Toolbar to access Gmail

Browser like Firefox and Internet Explorer give you the ability to use install custom toolbar and access various services of the toolbar provider with one click. One of such and perhaps the best toolbar is Google Toolbar. It is currently available only for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Once installed in your browser, click the Gmail icon on the toolbar and it will automatically redirect you to the login page. You can download the Google Toolbar form here

6. Use iGoogle to View Gmail Messages

You can also iGoogle to sign into your Gmail account and check mails. Just Sign into your iGoogle account at google.com/ig and add the following Gmail Gadget to it. You can enjoy all the features of Gmail with this method.

7: View Gmail Inbox Messages with a Feed reader

Gmail has a RSS Feed for inbox messages which can be read through your any RSS reader which supports “authenticated feed”. Authenticated feed means you have to authenticate with your username and password to view the feeds.

FreeMyFeed supports this feature. Alternatively you can load RSS feeds in Firefox or Chrome itself. Browsers will show only snippets of your unread inbox mail messages.

8. Other Methods

Other methods include

a. Using Google Desktop

b .Using Google Talk to access Gmail

c. Using other Google Services like YouTube and Orkut to login into Gmail .

d . Using Gmail Manager plugin to Login into your account.

Here are the currently available alternative Gmail Login URL’s

1: www.gmail.com : This one is the Gmail URL used by most of the Gmail owners around the world. It automatically redirects to the mail.google.com/mail.

2: https://www.gmail.com : It is the secure Gmail login page. Here the HTTPS refers Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It ensures that all your data is sent across networks in encrypted form and is safer than using the plain and simple http.  Https mode in Gmail is turned on by default and uses port 443 as opposed to the port 80 used by http.

3) http://mail.google.com/mail : This is the standard Gmail URL . To understand what I mean by standard Gmail URL you need to first understand the Gmail Login Process.

Gmail Login works something like this. Whenever someone tries to login into his Gmail account with any of the URL’s mentioned in the article, he is automatically redirected to Google accounts login URL at https://www.google.com/accounts/. Once the user fills in the username and password combination he is redirected to http://mail.google.com/mail. All the activities by the users like reading messages, replying to emails, chatting with friends are carried out on this URL i.e. the standard Gmail URL.

4) https://mail.google.com/mail : This is the secure version of the standard Gmail URL. It provides 128 bit encryption for information transfers across the networks while using Gmail. By default Gmail redirects to this secured version of the standard URL , however this can be changed through the settings in users Gmail account.

5) http://gmail.google.com/gmail : In its initial days , Gmail used this URL address as the standard Gmail URL. However it changed to the current standard URL on 22^nd June 2005. If you use this URL to login into your Gmail account you will be redirected to the current standard URL.

6) https://gmail.google.com.gmail : It is the secure version of the above.

7) http://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser : Gmail has two versions  – The standard version which uses Ajax heavily and thus requires modern browsers to load in full functionality and a basic HTML mode – which uses plain html and can load in almost any existing browser in the world.

At the time of login Gmail checks the browser compatibility and accordingly suggests the user to login into basic HTML mode. This URL will force Gmail skip the browser compatibility test and load in standard mode by default.

8 ) https://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser: This is the secured version of the above alternate Gmail login URL.

9) http://mail.google.com/mail/h : You can use this alternate Gmail login URL to login into Simple or basic html mode. It lacks some of the features of the Standard Gmail version and is the recommended version if you are using a non compatible web browser or in case you have a slow internet connection. You can check out the differences between the standard Gmail mode and Basic HTML mode in our earlier article here.

10) https://mail.google.com/mail/h:  This is the secure version of the above.

11) http://m.gmail.com:  This is the standard Gmail URL for Mobile phone users.  This is basically a stripped down version of Gmail for the users who need to login into their Gmail accounts via mobile phones. It is suited to mobile phones of all display sizes and loads pretty quickly.

It can also be used to login into Gmail in normal web browsers.

12) http://mail.google.com/mail/x/: This is another alternate Gmail URL for mobile phones and PDA users . The interface is similar to the standard alternate URL for mobile devices, the only difference being that this URL also has a secure login option.

13) https://mail.google.com/mail/x/ : Secured version of alternate Gmail URL for mobile phones and PDA.

14) https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/ : Standard Gmail Inbox feed URL for reading the feeds with a RSS reader. You can use this URL if Use this if nothing of the above works. You can view feeds of messages in your Inbox.

15) https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail : Another Secure URL to access Gmail Login Page.

16) Gmail App for Mobiles: An advanced Java app for using Gmail on your mobile phones.Alternative Gmail Login URL’s

I personally prefer the new design as it lets me integrate the bookmarks toolbar pretty easily and looks great too. But for users who prefer to change the location of tabs, Firefox 4 gives you option to change their location to either the bottom or the top of address bar. Here is how you do it.

Step 1 : Right Click on the down Arrow at the right end of the Tab bar or right click just before the “http://”  in the address bar.

Step 2 : In the options

1 : Click and select Tabs on Top to see the tabs on top of the address bar.

And click and uncheck Tabs on Top to see the tabs below the address bar.

Modern browsers have made it easier for us to surf the web. Most of the advanced browsers integrate the important options like Print , Refresh , View Source , Back , Forward ,Select and others in the right click menu items. This is the one feature I love with all my browsers.  However with Internet Explorer it becomes a drawback too.

The problem with the world’s most used browser – Internet Explorer is that sometimes when you install third party software, the software may infest the menu items with its own entries. This makes the list longer and longer and hard to use to. This is the problem that users like Trisha are facing.

Here is a complete step by step guide on how to remove external right click menu items in Internet Explorer.

Step 1: Press Windows Key+ R to open Run command box.

Step 2: Type regedit and hit enter. Click Yes on User Access Control pop up if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Step 3: Navigate to the following key.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt

Step 4: You will see many sub-keys in the MenuExt registry branch. Each of these represents the right click menu items in Internet Explorer. The names of folders are generally same or are similar to the menu entry and are easily identifiable.

To remove the menu items, just right click on the corresponding registry keys, and select Delete.

Step 5 : Restart your Internet Explorer browser to see the results.
With this method you will be able to remove all the entries which were infested by the third party software in your Internet Explorer, however you won’t be able to remove any of the default items from the right click menu items.

However this is only the start of the real problem. Most of the users today can fix this by starting the Task Manager and terminating the process. The actual problem is that the despite the failed install, users are not able to restart the installation process again. This is because the “Install wizard” does not start again as the previous setup was not completed. There is no entry of a failed installation in the “Add or Remove” programs list which makes the end users really helpless in such situations. The install can’t either be rolled back to older versions of Office (such as Office 2007) due to midway termination of setup.

To fix Office 2010 installation errors, follow these steps suggested by Microsoft

Step 1: Download and install the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility.

Step 2: Run Windows Install Clean Up.

Step 3: Highlight Microsoft Office 2010 entry in the list and then click Remove.

Note: If there are any other old or redundant office entries such as Office 2007 or other Office standalone  products such as Visio in the list, do highlight and remove them together.

Step 4: Quit the Windows Install Clean Up when cleanup process finished.

Step 5: Close all applications.

Step 6: Click Start, in the Search box, type regedit and press Enter to run Registry Editor.

Step 7: Expand the registry tree on the left pane and locate the following two registry subkeys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office

Step 8: Right-click on the registry subkeys and click Delete to delete those keys.

Step 9: Open Windows Explorer, and then browse to the C:\Program Files and/or C:\Program Files (x86) folder.

Step 10: Perform the following actions:

If it exists, rename Microsoft Office to “Microsoft Office OLD”

If it exists, rename OfficeUpdate to “OfficeUpdateOLD”

If it exists, rename OfficeUpdate14 to “OfficeUpdate14OLD”

Step 11: Click Start, in the Search box, type %Temp% and press Enter.

Step 12: Empty (delete all files and folders inside) the Temp folder.

Note: If some files can’t be deleted, just skip them.

Step 13: Empty the Recycle Bin.

Step 14: Restart your computer. Try to install Office 2010 again.

These steps should fix the Office 2010 failed installation error.

Organizing does make things easy and simple. You can access files without having to waste time searching for them. As far as Brian’s question is concerned there are basically two methods by which you can remove this clutter of folders.

The Ctrl + A, Ctrl +X, Ctrl +V technique

It works by cutting and pasting entire contents from one folder to other. Now that sucks big time, especially if you are as lazy as I am. But this technique works in every Operating System and anytime

Merging Folders in Windows 7

Second is by merging the folders in Windows 7. It is very simple process and would hardly take seconds. We will learn how to merge two folders in Windows 7 with an example. Assume there are two folders Folder1 and Folder2 and we want to merge Folder 2 in Folder1.

1: Make sure that the two folders you want to merge are in the same directory (e.g. D:\Audio\Folder1 and D:\Audio\Folder2)

2: Now select the folder you want to merge (in our case Folder 2) and rename it as the original folder (Folder 1).

3: Windows will prompt you about the change.

4: Click Ok to merge the folders.

Note: One important thing worth noticing is that while merging all the files with the same name will be either renamed or replaced. E.g. If there is a file example.docx in Folder1, and a similar file example.docx in Folder2, and you merge both the folders , Windows will once again prompt you to take action and either rename or replace the existing file.

.

So this is how you Merge folders or subdirectories in Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

1: World Cup Essentials

One of more popular Android apps available for FIFA 2010 World Cup is World Cup Essentials. It brings to you live scores, updates, team statistics and countdown of all the major events of the FIFA World Cup. Among its features are standings, calendar, match history, stadium details, local timings, Mascots and more.

Install it from here

2: World Cup Soccer 2010:

It is another powerful android app for the FIFA 2010 World Cup. You can get latest information on the ongoing and played matches, team’s statistics, groups, venues of the games and much more. This app will also power you android set to get the latest news and updates from FIFA, Google, Yahoo, Reuters, AP and BBC. It also includes Photos and Videos from Flickr and YouTube.

Install it from here

3: World Droid Cup:

Another cool app with the same features as the android apps we discussed above. In addition it also provides stadium visualization in Google Maps and boasts a Real Time Match System (RT). It is the most downloaded Android app developed for Android phones. Overall the navigation is plain and simple.

Install it from here

In this article we will learn how to export and backup your Gmail contacts for further use.

1: Sign into your Gmail account and click “Contacts Link”. See image for assistance.

Alternatively login into your Google contacts account  here.

2: You will find several options on the contact page . Look on the right hand side some where just above the middle of your screen . You will see three options Import , Export and Print.  Click on “Export”

3: Select “Everyone” in who do you want to export? & choose an appropriate export format from the three options as per your need.

1. Google CSV format (for importing into a Google account)
2. Outlook CSV format (for importing into Outlook or another application)
3. vCard format (for importing into Apple Address Book or other application)

4: Click Export.

That’s how you backup your Gmail contacts in a few seconds.