Making You’re Laptop Battery Last Longer

I have a old laptop that truth be told can’t hold much power compared to new ones (3600mAH) so I need to get enough out of it to do my basic things so I’m going to tell you what I do for this.

1. Most important one turn the brightness to a minimal, now my Fn button doesn’t work so I have to do this a complete different way so I use PowerStrip which allows me to turn everything down and it saves a lot of power.

2. Use very little programs, if I’m on the battery i try to use just one program at a time for example I have a seperate install of firefox which has no addons or anything like this, means it uses much less resources saving my laptop power.

3. Do not use the CD/DVD drive, these consume a lot of power to avoid these you can use virtual drives such as deamon tools this will allow you to run a image file for your virtual drive. If you have a newer laptop as well you might find a button to disable the drive so using it will also help.

BitLet - A bittorrent applet

The other day I came across BitLet, now I’m a big fan of bittorrent I believe it is one of the best ways to share your podcasts as once you’ve downloaded it you can then share it to the other people downloading it.

A lot of people think that P2P is a bad thing because it allows you to download music or movies but it really isn’t its a lot more something like Utorrent is a amazing client it has all these tools on it such as the encryption some ISP’s do not like clients like utorrent so it includes encryption so that the ISP’s don’t slow your downloads down.

But now if your at work or school and they don’t have a BitTorrent client visit BitLet and start the Java Applet and your ready to download.

Blocking Websites

Today I’ll talk about blocking websites this is a simple method and very easy to add new websites.

First you need to find the host file, if you are running WinPatrol you can find it by going to the options tab and click “view host file” or if you don’t you can find it on windows XP and Vista in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc you can just run this and it will bring up the directory.
A faster way to open it is copy this C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\etc\HOSTS and run it by going to start >> run.

Next you want to right click on the file “host” and open with notepad once this is open you can start blocking websites, so you want to block Google add this line at the bottom “127.0.0.1 google.com” you may need to add another with www. as it can be classed as another domain.

The reason i first point out using WinPatrol is because it can identify the exact location of the host file through the registry files, the file may not work because something malicious has changed the root of the host file so that it can redirect things like bank sites to other sites which are malicious WinPatrol will monitor this file for any changes as well so if you haven’t changed it, it will point out that something has changed it.

Firefox Addon: No Script.

This is one of my favorite addons and a large reason I use firefox over Opera the majority of the time, the script allows you to disable the Javascript on websites well yeah you can go to options and untick the enable javascript box but this is so much more.

Here is a screen shot of it on Jace’s website:

From this screen shot you can see a lot of things for example you can see all the different scripts from different sites like google analytics or mybloglog so you can allow these different scripts.

What is the need for it though, well if you know your stuff about internet security you will notice how dangerous javascript can be to your browsers it is a very dangerous hole in your computers defence, so only allowing sites you trust is a brilliant method or if your not sure you can temporarily allow the websites.

You can download it from the mozilla website here or from their own site here noscript.net.

Bittorrent Server.

Well the other day I came across a couple of bittorrent routers so it got me thinking about making one on the cheap which is just as efficient if not more, so I set out to do so.

So i figured a computer to run around the clock shouldn’t be very powerful strip it down to the minimal 128mb RAM and at the most 500mhz processor, so I asked around and luckely someone was throwing a old computer out which was around 500mhz.

So I considered a lot of operating systems but came to the conculsion of using Windows, it is very user friendly compared to Linux allowing to easily configure and run so i am running Windows 2000 Server Edition, I would prefer to run something like Damn Small Linux because it uses up very little resources which will also cut the electricity bill down but for now I will play with Windows.

Next I needed to find a bittorrent client, one of my favorite clients is Utorrent it has encryption and most of all a web user interface, so we can connect remotly to utorrent.