A firewall is essential when it comes to preventing malicious software and hackers from gaining access to your computer. With Windows 7, you can actually fine-tune your firewall settings to match your daily usage while still keep your computer well protected. To access the advanced settings and help you get started right away, follow these next few steps.

First of all, you need to disable your Windows firewall to gain access to recommended settings. To do this, go to Control Panel> System and Security > Windows Firewall and then click on the “Change notification settings” link on the left panel. Disable both private and public network firewall and click apply to continue. At the Windows Firewall control panel page you see after clicking OK, you will notice a new button labeled “Use recommended settings” — this is what we are after — so go ahead and click the button.

A popup will ask for your confirmation, and you can safely click Yes to continue. Windows will analyze your current computer state, along with installed applications, and determine the right firewall settings for your computer. After the process is completed, you can continue with fine-tuning the firewall settings to suit your needs.

To access the advanced settings for Windows 7’s firewall, click “Advanced Settings” on the left panel of the Windows Firewall control panel page. You will see a new page with Inbound Rules, Outbound Rules, Connection Security Rules, and Monitoring links on the left panel. You can disable available rules or create new ones — for Inbound and Outbound Rules, this is essentially important and allows you to set the firewall to work according to your needs — and manage monitoring preferences from here.

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Some sites like Gmail have problems with the cache of browser. If you are a regular user of Gmail, you may encountered this issue where it just doesn’t load and you have to manually clear the cache to make it working.

Here are some keyboard shortcuts to load a web page bypassing cache: that can help you a bit

1. For Internet Explorer: Hold the Control key and click the Refresh button on the toolbar.
2. For Firefox: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.
3. For Safari: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload toolbar button.

Simple yet effective tip.

Source

So recently I have to change my laptop’s hard disk. It is always a big pain to move files, bookmarks and other info from one laptop to another. More so, moving means all the installed programs would need to be re-installed on the new machine. If you are a blogger like me, you will have other softwares like Windows Live Writer too.

This time when I moved, I wrote a quick check list which I ‘m sure would prove to be quite handy to all of us in future.

Take a scan of your system using Belarc advisor:

Belarc advisor creates a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, etc and displays the results in your Web browser. It also shows the keys/licenses of installed softwares. I would recommend to take a print of this web page created by Belarc and keep it in a safe place.

Back up ALL your important files in a USB or a CD’s . I use my classic 80 GB Ipod for these purpose. Like any USB devices, it proves to be quite handy and fast.

Back Up Firefox bookmarks and related profiles:

Firefox bookmarks, cookies, Google Toolbar data for firefox all resides in a folder inside.

C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Profile Name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The folder would have some name like eid50wk9.default. Take a copy of this folder.

Back Up IE favorites:

Take a copy of IE favorites that reside in

C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Profile Name>

Back Up Memento Notes:

I use Memento Notes as a Post-IT for my laptop. It’s a small, no-frills program that sits quietly in my task bar. If you are taking a back up of Memento notes, make sure to copy both memento.exe and memento.notes. Memento.notes is like a database where all your Post-ITs reside.

Back Up Windows Live Writer (WLW):

If you ‘re a blogger I ‘m sure you must be using this great application from Microsoft. WLW inherently does not provide any means to take a back up of stored drafts, settings, external plugins etc. Scott has created an excellent Windows Live Writer back up utility.  After a quick installation, it takes a single click to take ‘Backup’ and then one more click to ‘Restore’ your settings on the new computer. Note that while restoring, Windows Live Writer should be closed otherwise it may throw an error. Also if you don’t see your posts after restoring, don’t fret. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your profile>\My Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts and double click on one of the posts , you will then see all posts inside WLW right hand pane.

Back Up Email client:

It will depend on the kind of client you are using. For Mozilla Thunderbird, back up means simply copying the mail folder to the back-up location.

I trust these points would be useful for all of us. I suggest you to bookmark(Ctrl-D) this post for future use.