Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Computers & Technology Tips, tricks and things we like

Rick, I've just networked my two desktop machines with a (CAT 5e)crossover cable. You could also set up a simple wireless network. With just a little bit of configuration you can easily share files between the two.

"Easily" being a relative term. I'm a woodworker, not an IT guy.
Before I was done I almost took a crowbar to both machines.

Rick... there are a number of programs that will let you do this, but I doubt that your company security would allow this. I haven't used them in a while, but used to link with my son's computer to solve problems... uses the same technology.
Here are a few possibilities:
https://secure.logmein.com/US/home.aspx
http://www.uvnc.com/
http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

Here are my favorite programs, which anyone can get by using Google, putting in the name of the program and "free download"... because i don't use any programs that aren't free.

Open Office 3 -- works same as Microsoft Office, costs $300 less

Irfan View -- best all round file for pictures... for creating slide shows, tweaking pics, resizing, and converting virtually every kind of picture. Plian vanilla program, but hugely powerful. If you download this small footprint program, remember to also download the "plug ins". If you're into picture editing, I think this is better and more versatile than Photoshop...

Alsong -- music player, that automatically links the music on your computer to lyrics and shows them karaoke style on the screen. Plays all music. Also Alzip, an easy zip file program.Doesn't cover all songs, but the most popular one are there... If you have a favorite that doesn't have linked lyrics, you can upload your lyrics, and synch the words to the music. This is a really great FUN program. I have linked up most of the unknown Johnny Cash and Sarah Brightman songs.

Radio?Sure! --Direct connection to 12,000 streaming radio stations. Can sort by genre,language, country, call letters, etc. Instant connection live... no wait, and a fade in from one station to another. Country, Jazz, Classical, Pop etc.

Fences -- A slick clean desktop organizer easily to customize or leave as it is... intuitive sort of links, programs, recent, folders etc.

Google Chrome -- I would never go back to Internet Explorer. Chrome is fast, clean, intuitive, and doen't take up much room at the top of your desktop. Use the URL space as the Google search. Tons of features that you don't see but which work. Tabs are fastest. History is available with a click, and downloads show integrally with the basic window. Google Chrome is great!

Picasa 3 --- Google picture organizer, editor and lots more. Most recent is face recognition, where you can let google scan all of your pics for faces, and allow it to put all of the pictures with that face into a single folder. I have 57K pics on my computer, and let Googles search and organize by faces. Because it doesn't copy or move pics it doesn't take up any space. This is a fun program.

VLC Media Player -- If oyu "do" a lot of music and or video's, this is the very best program. Plays every kind of file. IMHO, there is no comparison between Microsoft Media Player and VLC... One of the nicest features of VLC, is that it updates codecs on a regular basis, so it plays every kind of file... even as file formats proliferate. It works fas, and doesn't have the "bulk" of Windows Media Player.

MSE Microsoft Security Essentials-- Again, IMHO, the best. Free. Microsoft doesn't offer it automatically because of a conflict of interest possibility between McAffee, AVG, Kapersky, Norton etc. Best is that it's free, and works without a lot of hoopla. I've used free AVG forever, but it has become too overblown and slows my computer. Don't take my word for this... Google MSE reviews, for opinions from the entire tech community.

Ubuntu -- I call it Linux for dummies, because it's so easy to load and run. It does it all automatically. If you have any spirit of adventure and wondered what Linux was all about, this the the place to start. Frankly, I have no idea of how it works, but it works great, and in many ways, is more simple than windows. It automatically gets all new downloads, so is always up to date. When I get bored, I run Kubuntu, and learnas I go along. It' a great program to load on that old computer that you don't want to spend money on, to update to XP or above.

Fast Stone Capture-- a program that allows you to save whatever is on your computer screen, Either the actual screen, or a scrolling screen. You use this to save information that you can't "copy" or "download" Easy to use... I wouldn't be without it.

Everything -- I found this about two months ago, and give it the "Itstarted" Academy Award. It does a scan of your computer and all drives, and gives you a search box. Put in a word, a part of a word, a file extension, like ( *.jpg ) or sort your gazillion files by name, date or whatever. A name search finishes in a nanosecond... Yeah... I know, impossible, right?... It just works, and it's free. This is a five star special, in my opinion. If you try it, PM me, and let me know what you think...

I only use free stuff, and keep my eye out for the best of the best.

Rick, it will depend largely on your OS. With Win7 it is actually very easy to connect 2 computers as you describe.

Itstarted -- I love Fences.

Is Fences still free? I was using it during the free beta but I thought it had gone to a pay version. This post is going to sound a bit like a mac commercial but hey, it's my main platform.

Some "did you knows":

-Did you know you can highlight ANY text and drag it to your desktop and OS X will create a rich text clipping file for you? I use this all the time to quickly grab a recipe I come across, for filing later. Microsoft lets you do a version of this within it's apps (ie you can do it within Outlook and word etc to the desktop, but you can't just grab from say Firefox to the desktop, this is also as of XP, I have not touched Vista or Win7 yet, not my main platform and work hasn't switched yet)
-Did you know the built in OS X Spotlight feature does exactly what ItStarted's Everything app does. Actually, MS has a similar search feature, but I find it slow and when it does it's intermittent indexing your computer becomes a dog. Again, this is as of XP. If you use Outlook, it does index your email so it IS handy there as you can search your email from the search box on your desktop.

-Remote Desktop Connection included in every windows pc since XP and a free download for the mac that allows you to remotely connect to a windows machine (assuming it's on and is set to allow the incoming terminal connections). You will get the other Windows machine desktop on your local machine. Handy if say you are like me and work from home occasionally but need to access files that must stay on a machine in the office. It can be a bit slow but it's better than driving in.
-iStat, this is another mac one, this is both a widget and a menubar tool, will show you various stats about your machine, network up and down, temp, hard drive capacity, memory usage, cpu usage. Handy for figuring out at a glance why your system is bogging down, mousing over the cpu gauge tells what apps are using the most cycles, mousing over the mem gauge tells what is using the most memory (top 5).
-Connect360, have an xbox 360 and a mac? Want to stream your itunes library and/or movies through the 360? Bingo! It's a pay app but it doesn't cost much and the updates have been free for almost 2 years now.

--I have a "free" laptop that has a very strange processor.
It's a dual core Centrino, which means it's a dual core slug.
This is a very rich feature laden lappy that would be a five star machine if it wasn't for the ghastly slow procs it is burdened with, and I am wondering if maybe it's time to consider using it as a guinea pig for an Ubuntu install.

My only concern, and I've never been able to get it addressed by the unfortunately somewhat snotty Linux power user community, is that I would want to use the machine to transfer files from a Firewire enabled hard drive that I use with my camera. Call it "data wrangling".
I have never been able to determine if Ubuntu will allow me to load drivers for a Firewire/USB PCMCIA card.
If I could figure that out I'd have loaded this puppy with Ubuntu a long time ago.

I also have another Pentium3 lappy which would be an ideal candidate for Ubuntu. It's something of a dog on XP Pro as well, and maybe if I could be confident that there would be no difficulty surfing the web and reading email I'd also load it up too because I'd like to give it to a friend who needs a computer. I don't want to give him a dog which will frustrate him...it has to be able access YouTube, Facebook and all the popular social networking sites which are rich with multimedia content.

I just started using Fences and it was free as of a month ago

You left out the most important bit of information: Do you want to do this when you are in the office, with your laptop on the desk next to your company PC? Or do you want to do it when you are not in the office?

If it's the former, then your laptop should be able to connect to the company network via ethernet cable or 802.11 wireless networking. Then you just need to map your desktop drive into your laptop's network places. That process varies depending on the particular OS you have in your PC, but they all do the same thing: Let you select your desktop drive (or some folders on it) just like they were drives on your laptop. On your desktop, you set those drives or folders up for sharing with the access limited to just you. (Hint: Simplest if your desktop and laptop use the same user name and password.)

If you want to do that from outside the company network, then you need your IT department's cooperation to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client on your laptop. If you have your laptop on the internet, you use the VPN client software to tunnel in through the firewall and appear as a PC on the company network. Then you can see the shared drives or folders on your desktop PC (assuming it is running). Your desktop PC doesn't need to have anybody logged in locally, so you can just leave it running. (Only problem is if the power fails, you need somebody to go turn on the desktop PC.)

I can't believe that I forgot this.
It's a fabulous screensaver from Weather Underground.
It's a continuous series of nature photographs that blend and sequence on your monitor.
I hadn't run a screensaver in years until I found this. It updates itself, so that you continuously see new pictures. If you enjoy nature, this is a great item.
Here's the download site:
Wunderground Screensaver free download site.

I like it so much, that I schedule it to run after 4 minutes of idle time. Hope you'll enjoy it too.

Wow, did not know about this, just loaded it and it is real nifty

By the way, this and lots of other free stuff is available at download.com

It is run by cnet and so is reliable source

you can set the search criteria to only show you free programs

Also, you can get an idea of which programs are most popular with other people