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Yahoo + MSN = Now talking
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that their messenger programs will soon be able to communicate natively. This narrows the playing field for messenger giants, as AOL's messenger is still the largest (based on usage). Microsoft and AOL are said to be talking about collaboration however.
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Repairing Windows Update
Q. I recently tried using the Windows Update website, but it wont let me download any new updates, and gives me an error message. What's wrong?
A. There are a few spyware threats that, when removed, while corrupt the components that are required for Windows Update to function properly. There are a number of files that need to be repaired to repair Windows Update. Tutorial in the forums.

Fake Windows XP Service Pack 3
Microsoft released an advisory that a third party has released a collection of updates and labeled it as Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Microsoft Windows XP. Users are strongly cautioned to not install the SP, as it is not an official Microsoft release. The real SP3 for XP is slated for a post-Vista (2006 or later) release date.
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Awstats - Open Source Web Log Analyzer
Awstats is another great open source and free program that will process the data from your Apache or IIS web server and put them in a very nice format for easy tracking and statistics of your websites. It can easily handle multiple domains, automatic updates (via a scheduled task), password protected stats, and in-depth details of your audience.
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Spambayes - Open Source Outlook Bayesian Filter
Spambayes is an open source and free program that integrates easily with Microsoft Outlook (integrates with other mail clients as well, tho more setup is involved) that will "learn" from your decisions about what is good mail (ham) and bad mail (spam). It will then use this as reference to filtering your future mail. Awesome project and highly recommended.
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Free Microsoft Antispyware
Microsoft purchased Giant company and has re-released their antispy product as a free beta. The program is expected to remain free for home and personal use after the beta period. It's detection rules catch lots of files, programs, and settings that many of the current antispyware programs do not catch. Supporting realtime scanning, scheduled scans, and a system explorer, similar to Hijack This, it is a must have for most home systems.
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System32 folder opening at startup?
You may have an invalid entry in your registry, under the run commands. Check the following locations to make sure that there are no entries with missing or empty locations.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Please make a backup of your registry before editing it.
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Speed up Windows XP's interface
Right click My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced tab -> Performance
Select "Adjust for best performance", then scroll to the bottom of the list and turn the last and third from last object back on. There is very little visual difference, but menus open much quicker. This can really help slower, older computers.
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Free up unused visual memory
For another performance boost, right click the desktop and choose properties. When the display properties dialog box opens, click the settings tab. From there, set color quality to 16bit. 32bit color is overkill unless you are running games or high-end graphics programs, but it can increase performance nicely on slower systems that have low-memory graphics cards.
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How many watts of power does your computer need?
A form to tell you how many watts you need to have in your power supply by selecting the components in your system. Really nice utility to determine if you should upgrade the PSU when you upgrade the other components in your system.
PSU tool