A number of years ago PC Magazine started providing collections of downloaded files, tools and applications to users to help them manage their systems. These programs used to just be available on the CD-ROM’s that you’d get when you purchased an issue of their magazine, or they’d send it to you when you paid for a subscription.

Now those applications have become worthy software components of their own. One of those programs that have been developed and tweaked over the years into a robust and very useful application for many users is Startup Cop 4, which is now celebrating it’s …read more

One of my personal computing pet peeves is to have a cluttered and ridiculously overloaded system tray of applications and processes that are running at boot-up. For one thing, having all kinds of unnecessary processes running at start-up on the chance that you might use seems like a waste of resources to me.
If you’re running Windows XP Professional there’s a really easy way to configure at the operating system level what applications have set themselves up to run on startup and to disable them.
Just follow these steps:

Go to Start > Run
Type in “msconfig” in the window (minus the quotes) and …read more

The ability to minimize programs to the system tray has been made possible for a reason. There are always programs which we don’t intend to exit but do not use as frequently.
During work, e.g., we open a web browser – because we are so used to it – but more importanly have several other programs opened simultaneously. While navigating from Microsoft Outlook to Eclipse to the work folders using Alt + Tab, it is irritating to find Mozilla Firefox in between. Also, the task bar has only this much place.
Still, most of the web browsers like the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox …read more