I found this post at makeuseof.com. Tracy and I have been talking about challenging each other to motivate ourselves to touch type. When you spend all day in front of a computer like I do it is silly not to use the keyboard well. It's like learning to drive by only turning left - sure you can get somewhere by going around the block but it takes longer! Along with the recommendations here I have been using the free program from Rapid Typing. Anyway try them out and if you want to brag about your typing speed put a comment on the post or email me. Which Mulligrubber do you think types the fastest?

If you’re spending considerable amount of time of your daily life in front of the PC then you should consider learning touch typing.

Although it may take anywhere from a couple of weeks to 2-3 month before you can master your keyboard it totally pays off in the long run. Plus there are plenty of free programs and websites that make it an easy and fun process.

Whether you’re a beginner or simply want to improve on your current typing speed, these free typing exercises can help you improve the accuracy and the overall typing speed. You will learn how to type fast, using all of your fingers, without looking at the keyboard. There is something for everyone here, from online games to excellent typing programs.

Practice Touch Typing Online

TypeRacer

TypeRacer is an online speed typing game. We have covered several online typing games before but this one is one of a kind. Here you can practice your typing accuracy and speed by “typeracing” against other people in real-time. The goal is to type-in the given text accurately and fast, and get your car to the finish point ahead of the others. Be warned, the game is quite addictive. Read more …

Keybr

This one has been my favourite online touch typing practice tool for a long time now. Not only does it help you improve on your typing speed but it also lets you learn to type without looking at the keyboard. This is one important feature that is not usually present in other online typing exercises. To get started, simply select the preferred keyboard layout and you’re good to go. Read more …

Free Touch Typing Software

My very first touch typing software is Bruce’s Typing Wizard. I used it to learn the keyboard layout. It can be used both by beginner and advanced level users. Depending on your present level you can start with typing lessons where you basically train your fingers to the keyboard layout or with Typing Practice to gain some speed. The program should work on any Windows machine.

Another good one is TypeFaster. Typefaster claims to teach you how to touch type within 20 dedicated lessons and one 3D game. FreeSoftwareMagazine covers it in detail here

I have been keeping an eye on the reviews for AVG Antivirus 2008.

You will see in the past I have recommended AVG as a very good product available for free. The new version looks to be very good and includes:

• A refreshed user interface. This just means it looks nicer :)
• Link checker included
• Anti-Spyware included
• Improved scanning speed

Read the details below for more information. One of the things I really liked about AVG in the past was that it used so little system resources. This means on older/slower computers particularly those with low memory it still ran well and didn't bog the PC down like, say, Norton would. I haven't installed and run the new AVG myself so let's hope this still holds true with the update.

So if like me your machine has started flashing the ads asking you to upgrade to (the paid version) of AVG 8 jump over to the website and download the new free version.

Download available here

 

Review from Makeuseof.com

It’s one of the mysteries of the internet that I have never been able to get my head around - why anyone would want to pay through the nose for anti-virus software when there are perfectly good free alternatives out there. For the past five years, I have been using AVG from Grisoft and I have always been amazed at how great it is. The other day, they rolled out their 2008 free version and it blew my socks right off.

To give you an indication right off the bat of how good it is, a friend of mine has Norton Anti-Virus (for which he pays for) and it failed to detect a virus. On my recommendation, he downloaded AVG Anti-Virus 2008 - and it detected the virus immediately. My friend is now so disgusted with Norton that he has uninstalled it from his computer and he can’t stop raving about AVG 2008.

AVG does everything that a virus checker normally does - real time virus checking to begin with. When a virus enters your computer, AVG immediately flashes a warning sign on your screen with the location of the virus and it asks you what you want it to do. Obviously you want the virus moved immediately to the secure virus vault and once you make that choice, AVG moves away to do it and you can then continue with what you were doing before *cough* looking at naughty websites *cough*.

Secondly, AVG also scans your incoming and outgoing emails if you download your emails to an offline client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. It quarantines and zaps suspicious attachments, especially if it has a file type “exe”.

So far, nothing to make you go “WOW!”. It’s all fairly standard stuff so far. So let’s see what Grisoft has done to the 2008 version that has impressed me personally :

First of all, they have radically re-designed the interface. The designers have really gone to work on it to make it aesthetically pleasing. I like companies that go that extra mile to make their products look nice.

Secondly, they have introduced some new features. I can now tell it to remove malicious tracking cookies from my computer. This was not available in its predecessor (at least not in the free version of AVG). What it also does is real-time monitoring of malicious tracking cookies whenever you visit a website. So when you visit a site and that site tries to put a bad cookie on your computer, AVG will instantly flash a warning sign on your screen asking you what you want to do. You are given the option of looking up the cookie in the online AVG database for more information before deciding whether to nuke the cookie or ignore it.

Also, when I make searches on Google, AVG tells me if the search results are safe to click on or if the pages have spyware in them.

The green arrow indicates a safe site (I presume a bad site is a red cross). My only complaint about this is that the checking process can take a while (thereby slowing down my searching) so I may eventually switch this feature off in the AVG options.

The next new feature is that you can control the speed of the virus checking process. You can choose between “slow scan”, “automatic scan” and “fast scan” :

But regardless of this feature, AVG 2008 overall is MUCH faster than its predecessor. You will notice a much improved scanning speed. It’s like the older AVG on steroids. I don’t know what the AVG engineers are feeding their virus scanner to make it go so fast but it must be good!

If you have the older AVG, I strongly recommend you upgrade (you will need to uninstall the older version of AVG first). If you don’t have AVG, I strongly recommend you uninstall whatever it is that you’re using and you start using AVG instead because this little beauty is the King of the Anti-Virus Jungle.

Grisoft Rolls Out 2008 Version of Free AVG Anti-Virus | MakeUseOf.com

Here's a list of free games to try.

101 Free Games 2008 at 1up.com

There are games under the categories of:

• Action,
• Adventure/RPG,
• Arcade,
• Fighting,
• Puzzle,
• Shooters,
• Simulations, and
• Strategy

These are all completely free and there is something here for all tastes

And if 101 games isn't enough how about last years list too:

101 Free Games 2007 at 1up.com

I thought this was interesting with some useful suggestions. See my suggestions too - MATT

Most of you reading this have encountered people asking you to solve problems on their computers - more than once. You’re an expert in their eyes, and they want you to solve the problems they’re facing with their PCs. They might be your family members, your colleagues or whatever.

If you frequently encounter situations like this, you can arm yourself with the following tools and make things easy for yourself and others when you’re working on a problematic computer system. Feel free to suggest your favourite softwares in the comments section below.

Anti Spyware

You gotta have one. Install Spybot Search and Destroy and/or Ad Aware. Both do a good job, but the former is a bit slow when compared to Ad Aware.

Don't forget Windows Defender from Microsoft. Free for XP and built in to Vista

Anti Virus

Avast! Free - That does a lot for being free, I should say. The On Access Scanner is the best part and you’ll have to leave it installed on the PC - the next time any of your closest ones click on a ‘Congratulations, you’ve won $$$’ banner, their PCs are protected for sure thanks to Avast’s on access realtime web traffic scanning.

Another good antivirus is AVG, does a lot of stuff, but still Avast! wins. You can read a comparison of AVG and Avast! here.

I have also read some good things about Avira Antivir free

Junk File Removers

You surely must have seen disks filled with nothing but junk. Sometimes they go up to a few GBs or more, and that’s the place where tools like these get handy.

CCleaner -That’s the best junk remover I’ve ever used. Has all that you might need in one place: a junk file cleaner, an uninstaller and also a registry cleaner. It’s more reliable than other such junk removers.

HijackThis - Scans the nook and corner and checks and reports to you. You can remove bad items from start up and take down other suspicious services. But beware - be sure of what you’re doing with this program.

I have a paid subscription to JV16 Powertools which is a good program but for free CCleaner is the go

PC Decrapifier

Rightly named, this tool removes the nuisances that come pre installed with your Windows PC. If anyone from your family has just got a new PC installed with Windows, you gotta run this program to cut the crap. Download it here.

If you buy a new PC like my Dell laptop they load it up with all sorts of custom applications. Some are useful but most are not. This program strips away all the excess rubbish and will usually make your new computer run faster as a result.

Partition Manager - GParted Live CD

Sure you’ve tried many partition managers else before, but I can’t resist myself by putting this up here. GParted is open source and is very very light. It can do copying, resizing, moving operations in around a dozen filesystems.

Ultimate Boot CD - Recovery Tool

It’s the ultimate Swiss Army Knife that comes packed in with tools that do varied jobs like memory tests, hard disk diagnosis, partitioning, system benchmarking and lots more. Definitely a must have. Get it here.

UBCD for Windows

UBCD4Win is similar to the above mentioned software, but runs directly on Windows.

I have used UBCD before and I have found it to be easier to use than some of the Linux 'Live' CDs

DriverMax

DriverMax lets you copy your current hardware drivers and reinstall them later if you don’t have the setup files of each of your hardware drivers.

Quite useful, but the person on whose computer working on must already have a driver backup that’s been done using this software.

There are a number of similar programs and that's because backing up your drivers is a good idea.

gOS

Ahh! You can ask why this is listed here, but what if you can’t get your PC’s OS to work? You want the internet to work and need something desperately done, but XP won’t start.

Not a problem if you have a Linux live CD in hand. Just pop the CD in, access the internet, send the email that you had to send or do whatever you wanted to get done. All without writing on to your hard disk and not damaging anything that’s already there.

I’m mentioning gOS here specifically because it has got quite good integration with Google services and pretty much works out of the box.

There are many other Live CDs available, you can check here for that. Make sure you download one and have it burnt on a disk for emergency uses.

Best Software Tools for the Family Tech Support Guy