Auslogics Blog

If you spend a lot of time on the Internet, particularly on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media, if you are a blogger, and if you subscribe to various news feeds, then Flock is the web browser for you.

Flock is powered by Mozilla corporation, which means a lot to me, as I trust Mozilla and love Firefox. Plus Flock supports Firefox add-ons, which is really great. Flock uses Firefox 3 technology, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and it speaks 12 languages. It calls itself The Social Web Browser. Why? Simply because it makes social networking easier and more enjoyable than ever before.

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Adobe PDF is just about the best format for sending and receiving documents. For example, as a classical music lover I can tell you that most music scores available online are in PDF, because PDFs are small and are easy to upload and send via email. But what if you need to create or edit a PDF document, or fill in a PDF form? That could be a problem if you don’t have Adobe’s software installed. Well, not really. There is a number of free tools to create and edit PDF documents that don’t need to be downloaded or installed – you can use them from any computer that has an Internet connection. Here are 5 top tools to create and edit PDFs online.

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If you’ve recently visited the Firefox add-ons website, I’m sure you liked its new design and organization. Now it’s a lot more user-friendly and finding and installing add-ons has never been easier. But that’s not all – the new Collections and the Add-On Collector extension are the real corkers!

So, what are Collections? Simple, really – they are packs with various add-ons, themes, and language packs. For example, there is a collection called Reference Desk, which is really handy for students. This collection consists of 13 add-ons, including Hyperwords (one of my favourites), Merriam-Webster dictionary, and Read It Later – a handy little add-on that lets you bookmark pages you want to read later without adding them to your actual bookmarks.

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Computers can be really frustrating, especially when all of a sudden they become slow and start freezing up. I know that when mine does that, I feel like throwing it out of the window! Why do they do that? Well, for a number of reasons – viruses and other malware, badly fragmented disks, too much junk, faulty apps, and other “joys” of Windows.

However, most likely it’s either a legitimate Windows processes or an application making life difficult. Some processes, like svchost.exe, are known to consume 80%-100% of CPU and some applications, like Firefox, can use large amounts of RAM. Whenever this happens, your computer becomes a lot slower and might start freezing up. Or the problem could be caused by malware pretending to be a harmless Windows process. That’s why it’s very important to know how each process affects your computer performance.

That’s why we created Fileinspect Sidebar Gadget. We though that opening the Task Manager, browsing through processes and then researching them online is more trouble than it’s worth and it’s a lot more convenient to have all the information you need in the sidebar.

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If you’re on Windows, then I bet you encounter Cannot Delete Folder/File the Source File May Be in Use error from time to time.

Sometimes the error goes away after you close all running applications, sometimes you need to reboot to actually delete that file or folder, and sometimes you are stuck. Why does this happen? Well, you get those errors when the file you are eager to delete is used by an application or a process, which doesn’t let you  delete the file.  Or you might be getting Access Is Denied error – that usually means that you are not logged in as administrator and don’t have enough privileges to access that particular file or folder.

But what if you are logged in as admin and are still getting all those errors? There are some great programs to help you.

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On May, 21 Google released a new version of Chrome, announcing some substantial improvements and even greater speed. I’ve been using Chrome v2 since its release, liked it in general, but hated other things.

New Features

This version of Chrome has some new features that we all missed – a form autofill feature that means you don’t have to type in usernames and passwords every time you visit a page (just make sure the website is fully loaded – otherwise your details won’t be saved), full-screen mode (hit F11) that is especially handy for netbook users, and an option to remove individual thumbnails from the New tab page, so that nobody will know that you were wasting time at work or watched… hmmmm… something inappropriate.

I’m really glad Chrome is catching up with Firefox and IE – they both have  full-screen mode and form autofill. And removing individual thumbnails from the New tab page is a handy feature if you don’t want it to get cluttered or don’t want a certain website to appear there.

The interface hasn’t changed, which in my opinion is good, because I like the minimalistic approach. If you were waiting for any interface changes, you’ll be disappointed.

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