Tweak Guides Updated

Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound) has updated his excellent guides to installing, tweaking and optimzing Windows XP and Windows Vista in preparation for his Windows 7 guides. I used his guides to set up Vista on my laptop and I've been very happy with the results.

TweakHound's Blog is also one of my favorite RSS feed subscriptions - highly recommended.

Read More: Tweak Guides Updated

Free Windows Utilities

AVG Antivirus - AVG provides basic protection against viruses and spyware. It's compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

CCleaner - A system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.

7-Zip - A file archiver with a high compression ratio. The program supports ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, GZIP, TAR, ISO, MSI and more.

Tray It! - Saves Taskbar space for minimized windows. For each application which applies TrayIt! it creates a small icon in the System Tray. It is particularly useful for background tasks you typically keep running on your PC all day, like your favorite E-mail client.

ERUNT and NTREGOPT - Registry Optimization, Backup and Restore for Windows.

Tweaking Windows Vista

I've been using Windows Vista for about three months now. It came pre-installed on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop and to tell you the truth, in spite of all I've heard, I haven't had any problems with it. In fact I like it quite a bit, it's a nice looking OS if nothing else.

The only thing I can find against Vista is that uses a lot of memory, and the solution to that is more memory. I also found and highly recommend this excellent tutorial on tweaking Vista from TweakHound. Tweaking Windows Vista. TweakHound is "My Favorites" link three.

A Word to the Wise... Backup.

Welcome to The New Brucified

Welcome to the new Brucified. I have decided to transform this blog from it's formerly political self into something a little more personal. Since I am, for the most part, a webmaster I’ll be blogging mostly about being a webmaster. No big surprise there, but I also hope to include an occasional little something on what it really means to be, as I am, Brucified.

Along the way I will provide you with some tips that will make your website or blog better, faster and more fun. I’ll be writing about modifying Google’s Blogger, search engine optimization, getting traffic, building websites, making money, computers and some of the techniques I've learned in my over 10 years as a webmaster plus whatever else I think will be informative or at least entertaining.

And I’m going to start right now by explaining...

Why I Chose Google’s Blogger.

1. Blogger is simple. Most people can get the hang of Google’s blog platform quickly. The downside to this simplicity is that Blogger is often accused of not being as customizable or robust as some of the other blogging platforms. That’s a problem I think I can solve.

2. It’s Google (dammit!). Today Google is the most popular search engine in the world. That may and probably will change, but today is today and to get traffic to our sites we have to respect Google’s dominance in search. I use Blogger because I believe it helps me get into Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). Although I have absolutely no proof of this, I am sure that using Blogger will not hurt my efforts to get my blog noticed.

3. I’m familiar with Blogger. While that’s not a good reason for you to use Blogger it may be a good reason to stay with whatever blogging platform you are most familiar with if you already have a blog. My posts specifically about Blogger may not be relevant in your case, but I do have something to say on the many other issues you’ll encounter running a website or blog.

So hang out, and hang on because the next post is coming right up.