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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A lot of Mac users choose to install Snow Leopard from scratch; this is very good if you are thinking about starting fresh, because you will surely notice the performance difference of a clean install. However, upgrading from the previous OS X version is not bad at all. You can save a lot of time installing Snow Leopard, and you will still be able to enjoy new features and improved performance.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is insert the upgrade disc and hit install. Snow Leopard will select your primary drive, and all you have to do next is to wait for about 45-90 minutes for the upgrade process to be completed. What you need to do before upgrading is what’s important. Why, because there are apps that work fine with Leopard but won’t with Snow Leopard. A crucial step is to make sure you delete iStat Menu and system preferences related applications before installing Snow Leopard; if you skip this step, you will see that Snow Leopard takes forever to boot up and System Preferences will cause errors.

It will also be best to check other installed applications for compatibility issues. The best way to do this is to use SnowChecker to help you. You will be able to spot incompatible applications instantly and check if updates are available; you don’t have to remove them before upgrading to Snow Leopard, but if you see too many incompatible applications then it would be best to wait for updates for the applications before upgrading to Snow Leopard.

I followed blogger’s instruction while setting up a custom domain name on blogger and was not able to set up my domain name. Luckily, while searching on the net, I hit a comment on one of the sites, followed the instruction there and it worked like charm. Here are the modified blogger instructions (in bold):

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You’ll be directed to the Domain Manager page.
3. Click the domain that you’d like to use with your blog.
4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records link at the bottom of the section entitled Total DNS.
5. Select the A Name entry and delete it using X button on the right.
6. Come to CNAMES. By default Godaddy create a CNAME with host NAME as www pointing to @. Click the pencil icon on the right to edit it. Change the “Points To Host Name” to ghs.google.com. Leave other options as it is.
7. Now, Click Add New CNAME Record in the box labelled CNAMES (aliases). For the NAME enter “domain.com“[Your domain name] and for “Points To Host Name” again enter ghs.google.com. Leave the default TTL option
8. Click OK, and then click OK again.
9. Relax and give a couple of hours for DNS entry to propagate.

Note: These instructions are for those who have domain(s) registered with GoDaddy, for other Domain Name Registrars follow blogger’s instruction here.

Also, the instructions above would not work if your domain is hosted somewhere else and you wish to host a sub-domain with blogger. I mean it wouldn’t work if your domain www.domain.com is hosted at XYZ host and you want to host blog.domain.com at blogger.

Well, for the uninitiated, with the help of custom domain, blogger gives you the facility to change to a domain name of your choice. For ex: If you have www.domain.blogspot.com you can change it to www.domain.com.  With some minimal settings blogger would automatically redirect all your traffic older domain to new one.