Turn Off your LCD with just a click

There may be times when you just want to listen to some music on your laptop and want to turn off the LCD to save battery life. But, sadly, not all laptops have a button to turn of LCD, and when you close the lid, your laptop simply goes to sleep mode. So you end up,

1. leaving the lid open
2. put it in an energy-saving mode
3. lower display stand-by time

But, here’s a solution where you’ll just have to click an icon, and you LCD turns off automatically. ;) Continue reading, and you’ll learn by the time you reach the end of this post. (more…)

Create Virtual Hard Disks [Windows 7]

Have you ever wished you had an extra Disk Drive to set aside your documents, files, etc.? This is one of the new features of Windows 7, that helps you create Virtual Disk Drives, similar to your Hard Disk drives.

If you are not a Windows 7 user, you can always use TrueCrypt, a freeware tool, to create encrypted virtual disk drives. The process is similar.

To start with, right-click ‘Computer’ (My Computer) and click ‘Manage’. Choose ‘Disk Management’ under ‘Storage’ in the left pane. Or type in diskmgmt.msc in the run command to directly open up ‘Disk Management’ window.

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Force Shutdown or Restart from Command Line

If you’ve been using the power button to force shutdown your PC, try this Command Line trick to Force Shutdown and to Force Restart your PC. This Command Line trick allows you to specify normal Shutdown/Restart or if you want to Force Shutdown/Restart and also allows you to specify the time to wait before Force Shutdown/Restart. Shutdown.exe is the process responsible for System Shutdown and Restart. Normal Shutdown is the term we’ve used here to mention the default Shutdown. Force Shutdown will stop all processes and forcefully shuts down your PC. Force Shutdown with time set as a parameter, will force shutdown your PC at the specified time. The same goes for Restart and Force Restart except for the base parameter (-r instead of -s) (more…)

Multiple Instances of Yahoo! Messenger

Basically, Yahoo! Messenger doesn’t offer multiple instances. Use this tiny registry hack to use multiple instances. This works for all versions up to 9.0. We’ll be using Registry Editor and a DWORD value to override it’s default single instance. (more…)

Multiple Instances of Google Talk

Many of you should be knowing this. This trick (based on a parameter) helps you open multiple instances of your GTalk (Client/Software version) which basically is limited to a single instance. To override this, you will have to run Google Talk’s executable file (exe) with a parameter. You can do this in many ways – by directly passing the parameter or by creating a shortcut to Google Talk with its parameter. (more…)

Create PDFs easily with doPDF

Creating PDFs are now as easy as saving a file or taking a print out! Yes, doPDF makes it possible! doPDF is a tiny 1.5 MB application that allows you to create PDFs virtually from any application, from a simple notepad document to a professional Photoshop Image! You’ll just have to make sure the application you are using has Print feature in it. If so, you are all set to create PDFs! (more…)