However, there is one tool that could help you in situations like these. Laptop Alarm.

Laptop Alarm is a free software tool that monitors unusual behavior when you’re away, setting off an alarm whenever it detects a possible theft. Laptop Alarm sounds an alarm whenever your laptop’s power cable is unplugged, the mouse is moved, or the laptop is shut down. This can be enough to deter a thief from running off with your laptop

However, do remember that it is not entirely foolproof and can only act as a deterrent.

Download Laptop Alarm.

But why would you want to convert your laptop into a hot spot? Imagine a situation where there are several people, probably attending a conference, but there is just one ethernet connection. How could everybody connect to the internet?  Simple, convert one of the laptops into a hot spot and share the single ethernet connection with everyone else.

Let’s see how to do that. It is actually much easier than you would imagine.

In Windows Vista:

• Connect the laptop to the internet using the ethernet cable.
• Open the control panel and go into the Network and Sharing Center.
• Set up a new connection called a wireless ad hoc network.
• Give it a name and setup the desired security options.
• Deselect Save this Network.
• Finally, click on Turn on Internet Connection Sharing.
• Now anyone can connect to your laptop’s Wi-Fi.

In Windows XP:

• Make sure your laptop is connected to the Internet using the ethernet cable.
• Go to Control Panel and open up Network Connections.
• Right-click on your wireless connection and select Properties.
• On the Wireless Networks tab, check Use Windows to configure my wireless network setting.
• Under Preferred networks, click Add, and name your network.
• Select shared, and provide a password.
• Click the Advanced button and select Computer-to-Computer (ad hoc) networks only.
• Go back to the Network Connections control panel and open the Properties dialog for your wired internet connection.
• Go to the Advanced menu and check the box next to Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s internet connection.

It looks like a lot of steps for XP, but when you actually do it, you would be up and running in a couple of minutes.

If you already have a working dual monitor system you would notice that while you can port any window to the secondary monitor, the windows taskbar only appears in the primary monitor. Windows will not extend the TaskBar to the other monitors and all windows will be shown on the single windows taskbar on a primary monitor.

Multimonitor Taskbar is a free tool that addresses this problem. What it essentially does is, it adds a second taskbar to the extended desktop on Monitor 2.

This second taskbar shows only applications that are open in that monitor. Similarly, the taskbar in your primary monitor will now show only applications open in the primary monitor. Multimonitor Taskbar supports upto two secondary monitors. So if you have a third monitor, a windows taskbar will be displayed in the third monitor.

Multimonitor Taskbar also adds a convenient Move to Monitor button to windows applications.

Download Multimonitor Taskbar

Recently, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on the company’s Live search engine as well as a survey of the company’s employees. The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.
Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert. They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

They found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study. About a third of the subjects “escalated” their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said.

Here is a sample of his explanations.

Blog - a Talk Show with call-in guests (e.g., Bill O’Reilly) — while guests and callers can comment on the conversation, at the end of the day — it’s Bill’s show.

Wiki - a Talk Show with a panel (e.g., The View) — Everyone contributes to the conversation.

Link to Mike’s post What’s the Difference between a Blog and a Wiki?

However, both Word 2007 & Excel 2007 offer an option to save any new file in the older format. But if you are mostly using the older versions of the file and also if the files created by you are to be shared on other computers which have earlier versions of Office, you may want to save all your new documents in the older format. Of course, you could save each new file you create  in the older format, but that would create duplicate files and is also cumbersome.

A better option would be to set Word 2007 and Excel 2007 to default to the older format. That way even the newer files would be created in the older format i.e. .doc and .xls.

Here is how to do it. The procedure is the same in both Word 2007 and Excel 2007. So let’s see how we do it in Excel.

1. Open Excel 2007.
2. Click the File menu in the top-left corner (the circular button with the Office 2007 logo), and select Excel Options. (In Word it would be Word Options)
3. In the Excel Options window, select Save.
4. Locate the Save Files in This Format option and click the down arrow, and make a selection
   from the resulting drop-down list. You will find a lot of options, but if saving in the earlier format is what you are looking for, then select Excel 97-2003 Workbook(*.xls).
5. Click OK to close the window.

That’s all to it. Henceforth, all new Excel files will be created in the format you set as default.

Printwhatyoulike makes it easy for you to convert any web page into a printer friendly one. Just visit Printwhatyoulike.com and enter the url of the web page you want to format. In the next step you would see the particular web page displayed with the formatting tools in the left. You can now select any element on the web page and remove it or isolate it. You can also apply page-wide formats like changing the font size, changing the font type, removing the background and removing images.

Once you have finished formatting and are happy with the results, you can either print the page directly or you can save the resulting page as a pdf document or an html file. This is very convenient, since, if you don’t have access to a printer immediately, you can save the page and print it later.

Visit printwhatyoulike.com

Whatthefont.com can help you here. What the font is a font recognition system that helps you identify a font. All you need to do is upload a scanned image or a screenshot of the font and Whatthefont will instantly find the closest matches in its database.

Instead of uploading an image you could also use the url to an already existing image on the web. WhatTheFont supports most common image formats, for example GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP. In the the font is in a paper publication, you could either scan the image or even a neat photograph with a digital camera would fetch good results.

Here are a few tips that can help you get accurate results.

The number of characters in your scanned image makes a significant difference in the accuracy of the search results.

• • Max components (characters): 50
  • If you are identifying a font that is very similar to others:
    • use as many characters as possible or a total of 25 and;
    • use characters that are unique to this font
• If possible, space the characters apart more than normal
• Max image size is 400,000 pixels (width x height)
  • ideal max. size of file containing NO descenders:
    1666 x 120 pixels
  • ideal max. size of file containing descenders:
    1250 x 160 pixels
• Scan images at 300 dpi
• Best file format: Tiff, Grayscale, 300 dpi

Here are a few sample images that work well with Whatthefont.com.

Visit Whatthefont.com

Just right click on an empty part of the desktop or a folder and select View. You would be able to choose between Large, Medium, and Classic icon sizes. The Classic is actually the WinXP style and is the smallest of the lot.

But what if you are the picky type and are not satisfied with any of the three available sizes? As long as you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can further fine-tune the size of your icons. Click anywhere on the desktop or inside a folder. Now hold the CTRL key down and scroll the mouse’s wheel up or dwon to grow or shrink the icons. It works just like you would use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of a web page.

Remember, that this works only in Windows Vista, not in XP.

You may also want to read 6 ways to use your mouse wheen to do more in Firefox.

Once you get used to it, using the XP start menu doesn’t feel good at all.

Good news!! Now you can get the same Vista start menu functionality in XP with a tiny free application called ViStart from Lee-Soft. It is a <1MB file and requires no installation. Just run the tool and the XP start menu begins to function exactly like how it does in Vista. Even the look of the menu matches that of Vista. Now, instead of traversing numerous sub-menus, you can quickly start any program or open any file by just typing in the first few letters. It works beautifully.

Download ViStart