MSN 8 - My Oppinion

MSN 8 Live, after having MSN 8 for quite sometime, I have began to enjoy its use and its new features. Mainly the search for contacts and the new appearance. The bloat is still somewhat killer, since the 7.0 version but if your a tech savy person you should have heard of the a-patch by now which makes MSN Messenger the powerhorse of 5.0 with the features of 8.0. MSN should never be installed on a computer without the A-Patch and MSNPlus. These greatly increase the way you use your msn. They allow for different tweaks and updates and you can remove all that junk like ads, backgrounds, winks and the like.

If you need an invite give me a shout

CrisCr0ss@hotmail.com

Must Have Customization Tools

THis is my personal choice of the must have customization tools to change the way you interact with Windows Xp

A Graphical Interface mod
UXTheme.dll hack personally I prefer WindowBlinds + SkinStudio but hey its up to you

Dock
I use RKLauncher but many choices exist such as ObjectDock/Y'z Dock/RocketDock

Icons
Loads of Icons exist but for me the best manager is IconPackger

BootSkin+Logon
Since I have TuneUp Utilities i prefer Tune-up utilities to manage these for me

Calander
I love Rainlander looks great works great and has many options

Docklets/Desklets
My personal Choice is AveDesk + Sysstats but many also use Samurize/Konfabulator/Kapsules its all a matter of oppinion.

It was a short post yes but has all the info needed i may make a customization guide sometime later, remember if you need any help or info check www.aqua-soft.org, www.neowin.net, www.winmatrix.com, www.deviantart.com

World Of Warcraft Interface

Since my first introduction to Worlf of Warcraft, I have been an addict, to the game that is. I am not here to boast about the game itself or why you should by it. I am here to talk about its interface and the Mods which I use, I am here to share them with you as each character and person has their own taste, this is what fits me the best and what allows for easy access and navigation around the WoW(worlf of warcraft) world.

I'll begin with the baisic compilation I have decided to use and that is Cosmos. It comes with many useful features but what many don't know is the handy tool Khaos which is an all in one GUI to easily configure your mods. However, Khaos doesn't work with all mods it works will all the ones that come bundled with Cosmos, and I use most of them. To continue I will list the addons I use and what they do.

So here is the list

Improved Error Frame - this little addon gives greater detail regarding errors which may be occuring as well as provides the lines on which the errors are forming on which can be very helpful towards developers to fix these issues

Ace - This is an addon which is needed to run several other addons such as the two I use which are KC_AutoRepair and KC_Mobility.

KC_Autorepair - This allows for automatic repairs as NPC's which repair, I always forget to repair either my items or the things in my inventory, end up going to auction house and finding out i need to repair this saves me a lot of time. And is a dandy tool

KC_Mobility - This allows me to move anything on the interface with a press of the shift button and the right mouse click and drag it to its new location, it helps re arrange my playerframe and various other frames

Archeologist - This addon is one that comes with Cosmos and what it does is it adds and displays information for player bars,party bars and target bars in a method you choose. For example, Instead of having the health and mana prefix prior to the # you can remove them, and if you don't want the number but a percent that can be done as well. This is very easy customizeable through Khaos

Atlas - Another must have addon, it allows for easy navigation through an instance, it displays the entire instance map as well as location of quests and bosses

Auctioneer - A must have for all who use the AuctionHouse (AH) it searches auctions and gives you a list price for how much you should auction your item

AutoBuff - Amazing tool for all those characters who have buffs they always forget to turn on. For me my shaman always forgets Lighting Shield and Rockbitter weapon this little thing casts it everytime they go out. Its very simple to customize

Available Only - Not really an addon more of a hotfix but have you ever gone to your Class trainer and had to uncheck the hide unavailable just so you can find which skills you can purchase and which you can't, well for me i was getting pissed that i kept having to do this so i found this great addon which set that as teh defualt

BetterKeyBinding[cosmos] - Another must have addon allows for more keys to be binded through the options menu. (esc, key binding, and voila)

BGBuddy - A nice little addon for all those who enjoy BattleGrounds

BuffOptions[cosmos]- Has varios options for displaying buffs

Bufftimers - displays a little timer beneath the buff

CastOptions [Cosmos] - has many options for casting skills this is a must for all characters who have casts such as self cast

Chronos[cosmos] - not sure what this does but it is a neccessity for Cosmos to function

CleanMinimap - allows for the removal of various things on the minimap (not neccessary)

CPlayerBar - my action bars always hid my cast bar so this little thing replaces teh position of it and puts it behind player name in the playerframe

CT_RaidAssit - a must for all raiders

DiscordActionBars - I hate the default bars they have all this junk i dont need, but i love my DAB easy to setup (just need to bind a key to its options menu) To understand it is a sinch

EquipCompare [Cosmos] - This little thing is amazing its a little tooltip which is displayed when clicking on an item such as an armor it displays what you have equiped compared to what the mouse is on which is great when making comparisions because you dont need to memorize any numbers and stats

FlightPath - a little tool which displays flightpaths on the map (not minimap) it displays the paths connected with that flight path as well as the cost and displays flight time

Gatherer - keeps track of the mines,herbs you have gathered from

MobInfo2 - adds extra tooltip info to the creep as well as includes mobhealth which displays creep health and mana

MonkeyQuest - I love this little thing displays a bar which is customizeable and displays all your quests also say you need to kill Kobol Warriors when you place mouse over a Kobold warrior in the tooltip it will say how many you have killed/need which is quite handy so you dont need to keep checking your quest book

MozzFullWorldMap - Displays the full map even places unexplored although they will be shaded in another color

PartyQuests [cosmos] - a great little addon with loads of features for quests

QuickLoot [cosmos] - this makes it easier to loot, hides empty loot boxes etc

ReagentData - required for another addon called reagent helper

ReagentHelper - many times you see items but you dont know what they are, well this just adds a tooltip to the item that tells it which profession its required for whether its enchanting blacksmithing finshing engineering smelting alchemy etc

ReloadUI[cosmos] - allows you to reload the UI when you have completed some modifications through a hotkey press or command (/rl)

Restack - does at says restacks items to either numbers you have set out or to the max to save bagspace

Titan - A panel which has a lot of information such as honor, bag slots, time, xp / hour etc

Totem Timers - a must for all shamans displays a timer which lists the lenght a totem will last before it should be recast

That is all, these can all be found through

www.ui.worldofwar.net and www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php

My Software Toplist

These are applications which i think are just outstanding in what they do.

Nod32 Personaly this has got to be the best antivirus program I have ever used. Not one infection since I have installed it, not overpriced, easy quick updates and blazing fast scans. Also the advanced features are so easy to understand that about 10 mins of sensless meddeling and you will know all of the options which Nod32 bundels. This definatly tops Trend-Micro's Pc-Cillin, Nortons antivirus products and Kaspersky which always comes up with false positives.

It can be found at www.Nod32.com

Sygate Personal Firewall, yes this product is discontinued and bought out by Symantec but over the course of its life, it has been the best firewall I have ever used. And If you ever see me recomending another firewall it is this or Kerio Personal Firewall. Its light and does what it does. I used to be a ZoneAlarm fan until they started bundling and my shutdown and reboot speed went from 5-7 seconds to about 10-13 seconds. Only pet peeve I have with this product is its much harder to open ports but there are loads of guides available out there which make this task simple.

It can be found at www.sygate.com

Tune-Up Utilities 2006
Possibly the best all-in-one tweak program I have ever used. Comes with a defragments, disk cleanup, registry cleaner, sticky notes, startup control panel, built in tweaks and mods, as well as the ability to manage bootskins, logins and icons. In my oppinion this is a neccessary for a monthly computer check-up to ensure stability.

can be found at www.tune-up.com

Alcohol 120%
My Favourite Image program. It allows for mounting of images, creation of images and burning of images. It supports multiple Virtual drives and protections. For every image file whether it be bin/cue, iso, img I have used this little beauty. And for my plenty games which I have minigame images are a neccessity I hate having to change cds/dvds to play different games, I wish games worked without cds/dvds then I wouldn't need to create backups. This program works great at making my backups for games and mini-images which take up a few mb and allow the entire game to be mounted on a virtual drive
It can be found at www.alcohol-soft.com

Spyware Blaster
This little tool has got to be a must have for everyone, this software adds things to your registry which block spyware and dialers from being loaded on your computer through Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorerer. Best of all, it uses no memmory just run it once a week, click check update download all updates and enable all protection and exit. Thats it.

You can find this dandy tool at www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

cFossSpeed
I enjoy using P2P whether its to share my files with my friends and family as every other method is far to slow or to download the latest patches and updates. I always noticed that while they were running my regular net surfing would be affected. I read somewhere on the www.utorrent.com forums that cFossSpeed does traffic shaping and these greatly increase net performance. So I was like, 'hey what do I have to lose' downloaded the trial and fired it up, it installs a driver that allows for traffic shaping which I can't really explain how it works so your best bet is to read up on it on their site. And boy did I see performance increase, I can now play World of Warcraft and run utorrent without a hint of lag eventhough my download/upload is maxed. No more choopy gaming or slow page loading. I have never been happier.

It can be found at www.cfoss.de

CCleaner
This is another one of those must have little tools, you run it once a week to clean up your system and with all the junk i accumulate off the internet everytime i run this little thing it clears up about 500mb worth in trash on my computer. It also comes with a little registry cleaner which works nicely with Tune-Up Utilities and Regsupreme.

It Can be found at www.ccleaner.com

Honorable Mentions
Regsupreme
Winamp
Nero 6
Tag&Rename
mIRC
VLC (VideoLAN)
Opera
FireFox
MediaPlayerClassic
PowerDVD
dBPowerAmp

Apple to Roll Out iPod Companions - Softpedia

AppleInsider has published some tasty tidbits of information from their sources who are familiar with Apple's plans.

It would appear that the company's iPod division is preparing to extend its domain into the consumer electronics market by means of several iPod related products early next year.
It seems that Apple is going to be marketing these new products as "iPod companions" rather than "accessories", and are preparing to unveil the first one at the next year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, in the second
week of January.

Details are sketchy at best, but AppleInsider sources describe one of the new products as being a boombox of sorts, "unlike anything seen in boombox world" and strikingly different from "anything Apple has released in the past."
It would seem the gadget looks like an oversized iPod with boombox-type speakers. "It's ideal for use on a bookshelf or on the go," the source said.

This boombox is said to have built in wireless audio streaming capabilities, but it might also work from a built in hard drive, iPod dock, or indeed any combination of the aforementioned three methods.

Some of the earlier reports described the device as an “iPod radio” which does suggest that Apple might have integrated satellite radio capabilities into the device. This doesn't seem too far fetched considering that there have been negotiations between Apple and Sirius Satellite Radio over the past year, but not even the most recent reports on the subject imply a partnership between the two companies has been reached.

Regardless of exactly is going to be on the inside, it seems the Cupertino based iPod maker is expected to market the device as "plug and play music for your home." 

uTorrent

We All know P2P is growing in popularity. It began with Napster led to kazaa and has now left the gates of fast track and into the realm of the bittorrent protocol. Many ask and wonder what bittorrent is, but im not here to explain that, as there is loads of information regarding bittorrent
for example:

Brian's BT Faq
The Official Bittorrent Client Homepage
Bittorrent on Wiki

Those are just some of a few which have plenty of information regarding Bittorrent. Many affiliate Bittorrent with the Warez Scene which is baisically illegal file transfer of copyright material such as movies, games, music and software. But that is not a true sterotype there are plenty of legal use for bittorrent. It is a great way to distribute linux distros and large game patches (world of warcraft for example) as well as large files (such as open office).

I'm going to talk about my favourite Bittorrent Client. But before I begin I will explain the previous ones I had used and my oppinions on them so that you may make your decesion. I began using the original bittorrent client, it worked great at 1what it did but as I began using bittorrent more often I learned of another alternative Shadows Experimental client Bittornado. This one allowed for certain profiles and allowed the option of super-seed which was a new unique feature that ensured each file was uploaded once before continuing to fully seed the file, this allowed for more seeds to be available faster. It also allowed you to throttle your upload and download which the original client was lacking. However, I disliked having multiple windows open for each torrent and wanted some sort of way to manage them in one window. So I got ABC
I used it for about a month but it never capped my speed so I decided to try Azereus. This was probably one of my favourite clients for the longest time, I used it for about a year but the memory and cpu usage began to get heavy and on my old PIII it was killing it. I couldn't do anything without it slowing to a crawl. So i went to seek another alternative, Bitcomet came to be. I loved that client it did everything I wanted it to do. Then uTorrent came along. I remember being referred to it by one of my close friends, and i quickly decided to sign up to the forums to help improve this magnificent client. I was using it since its early version of 0.7 I believe, of course it was still very buggy. My torrents couldnt even connect and it had little features. The developers were anxious to make this one of the best clients and so they heard the outcry from the community. Loads of features where requested and bugs were posted. And now version 1.3 is released. It's a very stable release which now officially supports unicode and DHT. It has a minor footprint in system usage and resources and simply has the versatility of Azereus and Bitcomet combined without the drag on resources.

Here are some pictures of the amazing client


This is an image of the simple layout (Main window)



This is an image of the setting window

This is a test of the new extension BlogThis for the browser Mozilla Firefox. Using the final 1.5. So far All seems well.

This is my New Blog, it will be based on Technology, it will contain reviews of games/movies as well as software and everything important. May it one day be a very popular blog.