Do you face any lagging problem in Windows Media Player 11? While changing the track, it can take up to 5 seconds to change to the next song. To solve this problem, please follow the steps below:

1. Open Start Menu -> Type “Sound” in the search bar -> Select “Sound“.
2. In the “Sound” window, select the “Speakers” and click the “Properties” button at the bottom right.

3. The “Speaker Properties” window will pop up. Go to the “Enhancements” tab.

4. Make sure that “Disable all sound effects” option is unchecked.
5. Done!

Program blocked during startup in Vista? Don’t worry! There are solutions for it. One of the easiest way is to disable UAC. But it is not recommended as it is not a good practice to disable UAC. But there is another solution to enable the program to run during startup which is to use Task Scheduler. headcrash industries have a full instruction on how to unblock program that requires administrator privilege during startup.

Since I’m not from US, I’m not interested in their politics. Recently, there have been a lot of submissions at Digg that related to the upcoming 2008 US election. Since there are a lots of Ron Paul supporter in Digg, this whole category is flooded by Ron Paul related submission. I find it kinda irritating. Yes, you can customize Digg so that the particular section is removed from your view, but this isn’t apply to the RSS feed. So, the only choice is to filter the RSS feed using 3^rd party tool such as FeedRinse. FeedRinse will filter out your RSS according to the rules that you set in the feed option. For my case, I’ll filter out all news items that contain the word “Ron Paul”. You can get the feed here:

http://www.feedrinse.com/services/rinse/?rinsedurl=da7344d6ac29c8c36d197c2633d65c08

This feed is not updated as fast as the official feed, but it is still acceptable.

If you had read my previous post, then you’ll know that Google just added the IMAP functionality into Gmail. You can refer to the help section in Gmail to learn how to configure your mail client to work with the IMAP service. Unfortunately, there is no step-by-step guide for Windows Live Mail Desktop. But why Windows Live Mail? The reason is because Windows Live Mail is the only application that you can use with your Hotmail account in Vista. And Outlook Express has been replaced by Windows Mail, which is not compatible with Hotmail.

Before you start configuring the client, you need to enable the IMAP in your Gmail settings.

Step 1: Go to settings

Step 2: Click “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”

Step 3: Go to IMAP access and select “Enable IMAP”

Step 4: Click the “Saves Changes” button to save the settings.

Now you can go to your Windows Live Mail to configure it with the IMAP.

Step 1: Click on the “Show Menu” button located at the top-right

Step 2: Go to Tools -> Accounts. An “Accounts” window will pop up.

Step 3: Click “Add”.

Step 4: Select “Email Account” and click next.

Step 5: Fill in the details. In the name field, you can put the name that you like to appear in your email when you can send an email. The email address is your full Gmail address. Uncheck the “Automatically determine my login ID” option. The login ID is your full Gmail address. Check the “Manually configure server settings for email account” option. Click next.

Step 6: You can copy the following settings. In the drop down box, select IMAP.

Incoming Server Information:

Incoming server: imap.gmail.com

Port: 993

Check the “This server requires a secure connection (SSL) option.

Select “Log on using clear text authentication”.

Outgoing Server Information:

Outgoing Server: smtp.gmail.com

Port: 465

Check the “This server requires a secure connection (SSL)” option.

Check the “My outgoing server requires authentication” option.

If you have a lot of emails in your Gmail, it will take some take for the client to download the list of emails.

That’s it! Now you can start using your Windows Live Mail to read your Gmail email!

I just found out one very useful keyboard shortcut today, which is reverse tab! Ok, this won’t allow you to create a tab to the left side, but you can use Shift+Tab in forms so that you can go back to the previous selection (ie: text box)!

One of the things that I hate about email that forwarded to me is all the extra symbols such as the ‘>’ that added in front of every line! It is damn frustrating if you want to remove it one by one.

Thank fully, I found a website that can help you remove all the symbols!  Check out the e-mail Cleaner! All you need to do is paste your email in the text box and click a button to clean the email. It is that easy!

I’m sure that most of you that use Megaupload will face this “All download slots assigned to your country (xxx) are currently in use. Please try again in a few hours or install the Megaupload Toolbar for immediate access - with the toolbar installed, there are no more slot limitations for you!” problem. It can be very frustrating since the download slot doesn’t seem to free up. Megaupload will suggest to you that installing the toolbar by them will solve this problem. But one of the drawbacks is that the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer and I think it is quite unsafe to install these kind of toolbar (spyware).

Firefox user, don’t worry! There is a work around for it! All you need to do is to change some a setting in Firefox:-

1. Type “about:config” (without the quote) in the address bar.
2. Put “general.useragent.extra.firefox” in the filter.
3. Double click the name.  A box will pop up.

4. Add “MEGAUPLOAD 1.0″ at the end of the text. (ie: Firefox/2.0.0.3 MEGAUPLOAD 1.0″).
5. Click OK and you’re done!

Recently, Microsoft just released the final version of Internet Explorer 7. One of the feature that I like about IE7 is the ability to add custom search engine in your quick search bar. But Firefox doesn’t have this feature, which is kinda bad. Both IE7 and Firefox 2 support the OpenSearch standard. The only easy way to add new search engine is to use Mycroft. But some of the search engines are out of date and would not work. Fortunately, I manage to find a Firefox extension that allows you to add your own custom search engine. The extension is OpenSearchFox. It is easy to add a new search engine using OpenSearchFox. All you need to do is to right click at the search box and select “Add OpenSearch plugin”. But please remember that this extension is only available for Firefox 2 and above. So, for older Firefox user, you have no choice but to use Mycroft. (or you can update your FF to ver2 ;))