» Software

In the world of computers, drivers are very important tools that let your hardware connect or function in conjunction with the operating system that you are using. A device driver or software driver is a computer program that acts as a gate keeper in letting your hardware or program function accordingly. Remember that drivers are hardware-dependent and operating-system-specific meaning certain drivers will only work with a specific hardware and a specific operating system.

Most problems that you incur when you are using drivers is when you upgrade your operating system or software. You will sometimes see that many of the hardware that you are using will not be working properly. Your printer for example, will ask you to insert a CD driver so that you can have it working properly. With out the CD driver, your printer will be useless since your operating system will not recognize the printer.

This is why sites that offer free drivers are important to computer users. They provide a one stop shop of the different drivers that you need when you want your hardware to function properly. No need to keep different CDs. Just surf the internet and type what kind of driver that you want and you can download with ease.

When was your last time you check if all your software’s drivers are up-to-date? It is important to remember that although most of the time it is absolutely harmless having outdated drivers. But when you notice your system’s performance starts to deteriorate and it is likely that one or some of your software’s drivers are out of date and render the system unstable. These are mostly related to the system drivers. What if your digital camera, for example, stops working like it used to?

Unlike other drivers sites, DriversSoftware provides not only system related drivers but also computer hardware drivers such as ATI drivers for your ATI video card to electronic peripherals such as Sony drivers for your Cyber-Shot digital camera, mp3 player and printer just to name a few.

The site is easy to navigate thanks to its organized design. You can search for a particular driver by its maker name in several different ways – through the alphabetical list on the top, by driver type or by operating system. Finally it also offers driver scanning tool for you to scan and update your system’s drivers if necessary.

So you are a blogger and have been blogging for a while, have you ever think of more ways for people to access your blog anywhere anytime? One solution is to mobilize your blog using blog4mobile. With blog4mobile you can improve the accessibility of your blog through cellphone, PDA or any other wireless or mobile devices by storing the content of your blog through the URL of your blog plus your RSS feed URL into their database. One interesting difference between conventional RSS feeder for mobile devices and blog4mobile’s service is that blog4mobile displays not an extract of the content but the actual complete contents from the blog so therefore the readers are reading the contents in full instead of just bits and pieces of them. With this mobility, people can read their favorite blogs anywhere and anytime or when they don’t have access to computers with internet connections.

I also like the fact that instead of just pointing out the “goods” of its services, it honestly and openly lists potential issues and corresponding solutions that may arise such as reading some of the RSS files submitted and issues reading some special characters from some contents. The contents will also be promoted and blog users will receive up to 70% of the advertising revenue!

Another great feature of using blog4mobile is once your blog URL and feed URL are submitted, you don’t have to update them manually as the system will check for updates automatically everyday.

blog4mobile is definitely an innovative web service for bloggers looking to improve the level of accessibility for their readers and potential readers. And it cannot get any better than the fact that the service is free. Finally it also has its own blog for those interesting in news regarding the service.

Have you ever experienced a scenario where one of your frequently used programs stopped working because one of your hardware’s drivers was out of date? And what are drivers?

Drivers are software that all the PCs need in order to communicate with hardware such as printers, fax machines and scanners. One example of such scenario would be for example, in PC gaming, say you had a video card and assume you never updated your driver except the time during the initial installation when you started using your current PC for the first time. You wanted to play a fairly new game, chances are you would need to update the driver of your video card. Without updating your driver, you would not be able to either start the game or play the game in a stable way.

Now you know that your hardware are constantly in need of the most up to date drivers, you might ask, is this going to be tedious work to check for new drivers for all your hardware? Uniblue’s driver update tool called Uniblue DriverScanner will help you do all the scanning. You can get the free trail version from their site as well which scans your entire computer’s hardware/devices and displays to you which drivers are out of date, up to date and the total number of drivers you have installed. Full version will allow you to download required/recommended drivers by clicking the “Download Driver” button. If you are worried that the new driver will cause problems to your computer, the scanner also gives you the option to backup all your drivers as well as ones you have selected to perform a backup. When something goes wrong, you know have the backup to restore to previous stable state.

With this software, you will not have to worry about which driver for which hardware is out of date. With a touch of a button, it will scan your entire computer and inform you which drivers need to be updated. Instead of letting your frequently used programs to tell you they need driver updates and stop you from using them, let this scanner tell you what you need to update before you use those programs.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta last week. I was relunctant to download it and give it a try because of chance of instability not just to web browser but the entire OS, or operating system as a whole. But my curiosity won and I installed it today and writing this review using it.

The first thing I noticed was the Favorites is now part of the top section of the browser where the common File, Edit View etc bar and the navigation buttons are. I found it somewhat pointless if I have more bookmarks that the width of the browser can display because in that case I STILL have to either click the double arrow to the far right of the Favorites or click the Favorites in the File, Edit and View bar like in previous versions. Needless to say, I got rid of that right away, although a Favorites button remains on the top, it still takes up less space than before as I prefer a cleaner browser with as little as possible. Another related feature is the One Click Favorites which will save you a few clicks when trying to favorite a page.

IE7 introduced tab navigations which was long implemented in Firefox and Mozilla, IE8 further enhances that feature with Quick Tabs where you will be able to view thumbnail size of pages in each tab. You can go to that page by selecting the corresponding thumbnail.

On the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 features page, it stated Increased performance. I have yet to notice any differences, and I actually crashed while surfing other websites once. I’m not sure if its a coincidence or because of IE 8.

There are two features that I think are relatively more useful – Web Slices and Compatibility View. Web Slices allows you to “favorite” or subscribe to a web page in your Favorites. When new information is available, the tab will be highlighted, when you click on the tab, it will then display a preview of the updated page. Clicking on that preview will bring you to the actual page. This is very handy for people that often buy/sell on eBay. The compatibility View is also a great feature because I can assure you not every website will be fully compatible with this new version of IE. WordPress for one isn’t 100% compatible. With this new feature, all you have to do is click theCompatibility View button located just beside the Refresh and Stop button on the url section and you can view the page, and only this page, as if you are using IE7.

The URL bar, where you type in a website address also received enhancements. For example, if I type in the word “game”, it will display all matches from History, Favorites and RSS feeds. Neat feature but probably not as useful as the previous two mentioned.
Finally, IE8 also introduces a feature called Accelerators. Basically the idea is to save user’s time by eliminating the copying and pasting. It is sort of like an auto complete by using stored input data. I haven’t had time to play around too much with it.

I have also found a bug that will crash IE8 everytime, at least on my PC. Simply right click on any links and it will crash. Although IE can recover and display the page again. Basically I cannot right click on any links until either I downgrade back to IE7 or wait for an updated version of IE8.

There are some nice features in this version of IE but nothing “must get”. So for those who are not as curious as me, its better to wait for the “live” release. I have not written all the features of IE8 but rather some of the obvious ones but I hope this review can give you some ideas of what is to expect from IE8. For an overview or the full list click here.