You insert an USB drive and it is detected, but then you see there is no drive letter assigned to the drive. In other words, you cannot see the drive in your Windows Explorer and, hence, it cannot be accessed. To fix it without downloading any software is to use the Windows built-in tool called Disk Management. To access this tool right-click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk management.

If you aren't familiar with this tool, you can read this post: How to Change Windows XP Drive Letter. It should be very easy to do it as it is just a matter of a few clicks.

Alternatively, you can download USBDLM (USB Drive Letter Manager). This free program can do more than just fixing the letter. It works with Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista.

---

Sometimes you may find web pages with too small text to be read. In Firefox, enlarging or zooming small text is easy. There is no need to install any add-on to be able to do it. So, how?

There are two ways. First, press Ctrl and + at once to enlarge. Or, scroll down your mouse while holding Ctrl. That's all.

---

Lock and protect your important email with encryption. It isn't difficult. No matter what email programs you use, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, or others, eCipher allows you to send and read encrypted messages. In fact, this free program is more than just locker or encrypter. It has more features for your email security.

There are some additional security options you can choose like preventing messages to be forwarded, copied, saved, and printed.

Features:

• Easy to use—requires no training
• Quick and easy to install; so simple, you won't need an IT administrator
• Sends secure email through many email programs (Microsoft® Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail Plus, etc.)*
• Ensures security, validity, and integrity of email messages and attachments
• Recipients with any valid email address can receive your secure messages
• Ensures that only authorized recipients can open your secure email
• Supports Contact Cards and vCards (.csv and.vcf)
• RSA-2048 bit asymmetric encryption
• AES 256 bit encryption
• Encrypts attachments of any file type (Pro version only)
• eCipher’s security remains for the life cycle of the email message—no matter how it is transmitted or where it is stored

This free program requires Windows® Vista*, XP Service pack 1 or 2, or Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 with Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 installed. Visit the site to download it.

---

How many bookmarks do you have in your Firefox? If there are too many of them in the bar, Smart Bookmarks Bar will remove the clutter by hiding the names and show only the icons. The result: you have more space so you can add more. The name of the bookmarks will be displayed on mouse over. You can disable this rollover effect if you don't want it.

The options within the configuration panel:

• show bookmark names on mouse over
• hide bookmark folder names
• hide bookmark name with favicon
• bookmark spacing: minimal, smaller, small, normal
• auto hide bookmark bar

Download this extension from here.

---

Sometimes we may find good typography at other blogs or sites and we want to know how the owner designs those fonts. The traditional way (in Firefox) is to highlight the text, right-click it and select the command View selection source to view the source code in a separated window. Unfortunately, you still have to find the elements class or ID for the selected text. Impractical. Solution? Use Font Finder extension for Firefox.

Simply highlight any text element, right-click, and choose font finder. An alert box will appear with all of the styling information you could require including font-size, font-family, color (in both hex and RGB), line-height, letter-spacing, and much much more....

Click here to download Font Finder extension for Firefox, or here to visit the developer's page.

Font CSS Style Viewer/Finder For Firefox

---

Who says that to combine/merge and split multiple PDF files you need to use Adobe Acrobat? It is a great program indeed, but Adobe Acrobat is just too way too expensive to be used only for combining and splitting PDF documents. Using a free program like PDFMerge will be more than enough.



PDFMerge is a free program made specifically to create a single PDF document from multiple sources easily and equipped with features such as the following:

• Allows the split and merge process to be driven from a list file
• Allows the creation of bookmark trees by specifying bookmarks to be added (bookmarks are also called outlines)
• Allows the import of bookmarks from the merged documents.
• Supports merging of large documents quickly
• Allows population of document title fields

PDFMerge is free and works under Windows 2000 / XP / Vista. Download this program here.

---

Wow, I have just found this great post that lists more than 150 Windows and Office software that can be downloaded and used for free! I have never thought that Microsoft has so many free programs to use. The software are ranging from ebook reader, system tweaking, USB backup and restore, webcam timershot to take and save pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam, and many others.

From now on, instead of going to Microsoft official site to find a program, you can just go to this post. I bet that there are many of the programs listed you will like. There are truly a lot of interesting programs for you to take advantage of. Click here to read the post.

---

The design may look not promising, but the performance of this free program is rated excellent by Softpedia, one of the largest software download site. You can download any video from YouTube or Google Video and then save it to your computer as AVI, MPEG, or FLV. To use it you only need to paste the url of the video into the space provided, specifying which folders you want the file to be saved, choose the file format, and press the start button.


Save2pc light is free to download and use, and works under Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

---

Smart Email Recovery is a free program designed specifically to recover accidentally deleted email and corrupted email in Outlook Express easily. It makes anyone possible to retrieve the emails within minutes in an automatic operation. If you are worried about the safety of your email database, then this application is the right one to use since it won't touch the database. What it does is locating and extracting all the information that can be recovered from DBX files in read-only mode and import them into Outlook Express or other email clients.


Even if your email database is severely damaged, you can still count on this freeware to recover the messages. Interested? Then click here to download the program. Scroll down to the most bottom to find it.

It works on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.

---

While it can be manually tweaked, some of you may reluctant to deal with the registry to remove past notification area in Windows. This PastIconsFlusher, which works only for Windows Vista and XP, enables you to do the removal quickly and easily. It will delete two registry keys and restart Windows explorer. PastIconsFlusher is a free program that can be downloaded without paying anything here.

---

This free software allows you to change the color of desktop icon text for both the foreground and background. Moreover, it can also be used to change the icon size and layout styles: small, large, or tile. This is a very simple software that provides simple features but very practical and useful if you intend to do a bit customization to your desktop icon. Most of us want to look different, right? - Windows only



Download: D-Color XP 1.2

---

Many people still don't know how to open/view pdf files which is I'm sure that it is a too simple question to be asked for most of you.

Opening or viewing pdf files, just like other file formats, is only a matter of finding a program supporting this format. There are many pdf openers/viewers you can find on the web, but only some of them worth your attention and here only two that I'm going to show you.

The first is Adobe Reader. There are lots of complaints about how slow it loads, but this program is the only program that will display all pdf files correctly no matter how they are formatted. If you complain the same things about this pdf opener/viewer, you can read this post : Adobe Reader Too Slow? Make It Faster

The second is Sumatra PDF Portable. This free pdf opener/viewer has gained many compliments because of its speed in loading pdf documents. I like this program too and recommend it to you who want a fast pdf opener/viewer with small size.

---

Claim to be the only free video download program that able to breaks the limitation of anti-leeching technology from video websites like YouTube, FreeVideoZilla is worth to try.

Here is how it works. When you play the video files at the site while FreeVideoZilla is running, this program will cache the video. If you like the video and intend to download it, right click the name of the video file displayed in FreeVideoZilla's window and click the download command.

Download FreeVideoZilla

---

This free pdf search engine, PDFgeni, allows anyone to search only for free PDF ebook and download it instantly. If you don't know how to search PDF files in Google, or you just hate having to type a handful of codes in Google search engine, then this pdf search engine should be enough to make you happy in searching various pdf ebooks.

Just type the name of the PDF ebook or the category of the PDF you are looking for and you will see dozens of ebooks all in PDF format. You can directly see the PDF file inside your browser or download it to be read offline. Visit pdfgeni to search and download free pdf ebooks.

---

Naruto Strikes Back theme is surely excellent for anyone who loves Naruto character and intends to blog about him. Unfortunately, I didn't get much explanation about this theme like if it is widget ready or not at the author's site.

Download Naruto Strikes Back theme for wordpress here. The theme is compressed using rar format, so you need a rar unzipper.

---

Rar is another kind of compressed files. Though Winrar, the program used to create rar files, isn't free, you can find huge rar files on the web. It is because a rar format offers a very efficient method in compressing files. You could download Winrar to test how good it is in compressing your files if you plan to create a rar file. But if you only need to unzip it, there is no need to buy it as there are many free programs that can do the unzipping.

Peazip is one of these programs. Besides unzipping rar files, it can open a lot of other kind of compressed formats like ACE, ARJ, CAB, DEB, ISO, LHA, RAR, RPM, and still many others. Besides the large number of compressed formats it supports, you will love the good looking of this free program.

Peazip is completely a free program to be downloaded and used, supporting Windows and Linux. If you like it and you want to put it in your usb, there is a portable version that you can freely download either. Download Peazip through this page.

open zip files

---

This top defragmenter has previously been reviewed here in How to Defrag Specific Files and Folders, Not An Entire Disk together with other defragmenters. The most obvious advantage of this freeware is the ability to defrag a specific file instead of the entire disk or drive.

Another benefit you can get from this free defragmenter application is you can make it portable. How to do it? Simple. Just extract the installer and move the folder to your USB. That's it. Run the exe and you can defrag files right from your USB.

Download this free portable defragmenter now.

---

Free F-Secure Rescue Bootable CD is a program you can use to remove virus and other kind of malware without having to boot your computer. While how it works is basically just the same as other existing rescue disks, F-Secure rescue CD offers better ways in scanning MPR rootkit infections.

Free F-Secure Rescue Bootable CD virus definition can be updated manually using a USB drive or automatically if your computer has an internet connection.

To learn how to install it, you can read the rescue CD Guide in pdf format.

Download F-Secure Rescue CD 3.00 ISO Zip by clicking this link.

---

There is nothing to be learned much about creating text in bubble or speech bubble since you can do it pretty easy. Wigflip is a free online service that makes anyone, even persons having no design experience at all, able to create it in only several clicks.

You just have to type your words into the box and choose if you like spike left or right with transparent PNG or GIF with a customizable background color, then click the submit button.

You can save the bubble speech image or upload it directly to imageshack.

---

Your taskbar could be lost because one of several reasons. If it is lost because of a crash, then you should read this one: Repair Disappeared Taskbar & Windows Explorer in Windows XP. But if it is lost because of an accidental tweaking or someone else changes some setting without your permission, then you should keep reading this post.

Okay, let's get to the point.

Place your mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen where the taskbar originally exists. If you are able to see it, right-click it and choose the "properties" option. In "taskbar and start menu properties" window, make sure that the option "auto hide the taskbar" is unchecked and "keep the taskbar on top of other windows" is checked off.

If you can't see anything in your screen, not your taskbar nor other windows, it means there has been an error hits your system. Read this to fix it: Repair Disappeared Taskbar & Windows Explorer in Windows XP

---

There have been question about how to save pictures in email. Well, the easiest way that will be working on gmail, yahoo! mail, or whatever, is to capture them using a screen capture. Since I'm using gmail, there is no need for me to use this tool as I can simply right-click and choose the option "save image as". If you want to know the best free screen captures, you can take a look at my sidebar, or you can directly click this link : best free screen captures.

---

Tired of looking at looking your keyboard to decide which characters to be used for creating your password and user name everytime you need to register something? Password Suggest is an online service with which you can create a strong password and unique user name easily. So, how does it work?

Simply enter your words that can be easily remembered into the space provided. Once you hit the button, you'll get several passwords created based on the words. There are several user name ideas generated as well.

Title: Create Strong Password Yet Memorable & Get User Name Ideas

---

How to search movies at megaupload and rapidshare at once without having to type a bunch of codes in Google search? Don't use Google search.

Searching horror, romantic, or whatever kind of movies you want can simply be done with the help of MegaDownload. Just type the title of the movies and hit the search button. The results will be displayed within seconds.

In the search result you will be able to see:

• the title and the extension like avi, wmv, mpg or in compressed format like rar
• the size
• and you will also be able to show similar files or search furthermore for the related file in the web

If you click the download button, you will be brought to the individual page where you can see some other tiny details like the description of the movie, but I prefer to not see this page if possible.

To start downloading the movie in Rapidshare or Megaupload you have to click the download button again in the individual page. From there you will be taken to the related Rapidshare or Megaupload download page where you can choose to use a free or premium account to download. You don't have to install anything for downloading. Interested? Then try it.

---