Programs like XP Quick Fix Plus. The tiny, portable application launches a dashboard with one-click fixes for 40 common Windows XP problems. Quick Fix makes short work of irksome situations like a disabled task manager, missing Device Manager tab, and the infamous CD/DVD missing/not reading bug.

The program is essentially a collection of registry fixes, since that's where most of these problems originate. You might want to create a system restore point prior to running Quick Fix (or backing up your registry) just in case.

XP Quick Fix is a free, portable download and - not surprisingly - runs on Windows XP systems.

Google Wave is an innovative new communication tool, but part of innovation is that it's not always intuitive to use. Early adopters have been jumping into Wave with little guidance on how to take advantage of all its features. I guess you could watch the 90-minute Wave video, but that's not exactly a quick-start guide.

Well, there's a saying almost as old as computers themselves, and it goes: RTFM. Read the, um, flippin' manual. Now Google Wave has a flippin' manual that you can read, but it's not from Google: it's from Lifehacker's Gina Trapani and Adam Pash. Sounds a lot better than "watch the frickin' 90-minute video," eh?

Gina and Adam's guide is quickly making the rounds on the web, being promoted by the likes of Mashable. I'd like to add Download Squad's endorsement to the list. The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a straightforward, well-organized volume that goes a long way toward demystifying a new and complex tool. It's available to read online for free, but you'll be able to buy it as a DRM-free PDF soon, and in print in January.

Still don't have Wave? Go throw your name in the hat for Download Squad's Great Google Wave Invite Giveaway.

If you aren't sure whether your favorite Mac apps are compatible with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, SnowChecker can help. It scans your hard drive for apps, and then checks their compatibility against the info posted at snowleopard.wikidot.com. Not only does SnowChecker show you whether your apps are incompatible, it also gives you details notes about which features are broken.

To quickly see which apps are going to have issues under 10.6 and might need to be updated - either by you or by the app's developer - sort the list by status. Red Xs are apps whose functionality is completely borked in Snow Leopard, while yellow alerts represent apps where one or more inessential functions don't work. SnowChecker will sometimes even offer a workaround for these, like running the app in 32-bit mode or disabling Google Gears. Snow Leopard has been out for a while, but if you're just installing now, you should run SnowChecker first to figure out what your compatibility options are.

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable.

"Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear."

As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the students weren't thinking them through. Rather, his frustration was with questions which found their own answers.

Students seeking his help would begin to explain the problem they were working on. More often than not, they wouldn't finish explaining before having an "Aha!" moments; That tiny moment of clarity every developer, admin or desktop analyst seeks as a part of their job.

Being forced to explain the problem had some effect which thinking about the problem alone didn't. How can you achieve the same mind-altered state without bugging the sysadmin, or taking a handful of Adderol and Xanaax*?

The weary sysadmin found a brilliant solution. He attached a teddy bear to his desk, and forced anyone who wanted to ask him a question to address the bear and explain the problem.

So, the next time you're halfway through asking a collegue a question and find yourself saying, "Wait, I think I just got it, never mind!", remember to thank them for being your teddy bear.

* Download Squad does not condone the abuse of Adderol, Xanaax or any other prescription drugs. Just sayin'.

NirSoft has developed a truckload of useful little applications over the years, many of which you're probably carting around on a USB flash drive if you do any admin work.

Now, thanks to the availability of the NirLauncher beta, Nir's applications are easier to download and use than ever. Included with the NirLauncher executable are more than 100 applications including password viewers for various apps, command line utilities, web video tools, and loads more.

As Nir points out on his blog post, at least one of the apps in the suite is probably going to trigger a false positive from your antivirus app of choice.

If you've ever wondered what you'd take into a disaster zone to help bring back network connectivity, then Make's Internet Relief Kit is just the ticket.

Just to make it clear, we're not talking about a relief kit for first-world dilemmas like "Twitter is Down" (if you're wondering, that kit typically contains tequila, triple sec, with lemon or lime juice) - oh no - we're talking about relief kits for massive humanitarian disasters, the sort that destroy telephone and data infrastructure such as hurricanes or floods.

The package in question here is (unsurprisingly) a satellite-based system that, when connected to a laptop, allows emergency responders to use email, voice chat, video calling and the Internet on disaster sites.

As satellite systems go it's highly portable (fitting into a backpack) and costs around $3,500 - though you'll want to activate that satellite subscription before the world as we know it ends....

[Via Boing Boing]

I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. I love the functionality it gives me, but I hate how over time it slows down and acts like a bloated pig. Two of the biggest factors that will make Firefox drag are the amount of history it maintains, and defragmentation of the Places database. We've already told you how to fix both of those issues, but it turns out that there is now an extension that takes the place of pasting a command into the error console in Firefox to vacuum the Places database and remove any fragmentation.

Vacuum Places Improved is a very simple Firefox extension that adds a small vacuum cleaner icon to your status bar in Firefox. When clicked, it vacuums your Places database, just like the command that Lee described in his post in August, but with a single click of the mouse. In my case, the results were remarkable - starting Firefox went from taking about a minute and a half to about ten seconds.

[via Lifehacker]

Moneyseize is a very straightforward single-screen platformer with charming 8-bit graphics and music. The goal in Moneyseize is to, well, seize all the money.

You're in charge of the 'gentleman', and your job is to jump around in each level and collect all the gold coins. Your gentleman is attempting to build a skyscraper, and needs to collect 1000 coins to complete it. There are critters in most levels, and they also hold coins, and you must also avoid the various obstacles and hazards, like the prototypical spikes.

An interesting twist in the game is that while there are 25 coins available in each level, in many levels it is not possible to reach them all. As you progress through later levels, you can press switches that will occasionally change the layout of previous levels, making once impossible-to-reach areas reachable. Since you control which levels you visit from the map screen, the game takes on a bit of a puzzle flavor to go along with the straight platform style, which feels very reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

While I can't imagine actually completing MoneySeize, my building has already grown far larger than I ever intended it to get, just in testing it for this post. That's usually the sign of a good game.

Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.

Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.

So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.

I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.

Software gurus Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood released Stack Overflow last year, a site for software developers to pose questions and help each other out with answers. Since then they've been busy putting together more sites on the same engine. They now have what they are (just for fun) calling their "Stack Overflow trilogy": Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User.

Since we already know what Stack Overflow is all about, let's have a quick look at Server Fault and Super User.

Server Fault

Server Fault is a question and answer site for system administrators. It's the place to go if you need help with networks, servers, or managing many user's PCs. Typical topics include configuring mail servers, Active Directory, routing, and network security.

Super User

Super User is, in my mind, the most interesting of the three. It's a site dedicated to computer enthusiasts, otherwise known as power users. They're the people out there that are not necessarily programmers, not necessarily network administrators, but still know how to make their computer system bend to their will, and if they don't know something, they can eventually figure it out. Super User might make the job of figuring out your next problem a little easier, since it allows you to browse a huge database of questions, and pose your own questions that other power users can answer.

Since Super User only released to the public yesterday, it's still pretty fresh and just getting going. But I suspect it serves a very large market that is hungry for a solution like this, and it will grow very quickly.

YAPM is free, requires no installation, and open source to boot. I won't go so far as to call it completely portable (the .Net 2.0 framework is required), but I'm all for applications that don't make me click through a setup.

Even if you don't have a Gmail account, you may have seen an email message from a Gmail user with "on behalf of" in the "From:" field. This occurs when someone uses Gmail to send a message from a consolidated address that they've added to their account, but the message is delivered by Gmail's SMTP servers. Google has introduced a fix for the superfluous, confusing "on behalf of" language, though.

To fix the issue, you just have to set up your alternate account to use its own mailserver instead of Google's. Go to "accounts" in your Gmail settings, and under "Send Mail As," you should see your alternate addresses. Click "edit info" and "next step," and you should find the option to send using your own SMTP server.

You'll just need to enter the username and password, and you're good to go. Goodbye, "on behalf of!"

[via Lifehacker]

One of the most common problems I tackle on Windows computers is the removal of rogue antivirus programs. Just what is a rogue antivirus? It's malware that disguises itself as a legitimate antivirus program.

Unlike Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, Norton, or any of the other real antivirus options out there, a rogue will do nothing to protect you. Rather, it's going to try to deceive you into paying for a full version or removal tool. It may even open a backdoor to your system and start downloading other annoying, nasty programs.

How do these programs get on people's computers in the first place? Usually through deceptive pop-ups on web. Often these "alerts" will try to trick you into thinking:

• porn and illegal files have been found on your computer
• a scan has found virus and malware infections on your system
• your system is totally unprotected

They're all scare tactics designed to get you to clicking something that you really don't want to click. Some go to great lengths to deceive, copying actual Windows screens as closely as possible.

TeamViewer is my app of choice when it comes to remote support, and their developers continue improving on an already impressive product. Version 4.1 has added some very handy new features, and it's ready for download.

Since I last wrote about TeamViewer, the connection speed has been improved a number of new additions have been made. My favorite by far is the ability to create an account and save a list of client addresses for quick access without needing to ask for IDs. The list can be accessed from any TeamViewer 4+ instance and it's also available in the Flash-based web application (also a newer addition).

New in 4.1 is the quick-sharing button (pictured) which can be enabled on application title bars. Click the button and select one of your TeamViewer contacts, and they'll be instantly connected in presentation or remote control mode and locked to that application window.