On the other hand, there are too many stories of an update that fixes the bugs it was intended for, but also causes problems for certain users.  If that update was installed automatically, then the user would be trading one problem for another, and who’s to say that the second problem – the one caused by the update – isn’t actually worse?  So, there are good reasons to have automatic updates turned off as well.

Thankfully, this isn’t a setting that’s too difficult to configure in Windows.  The first step to configuring your automatic update behavior is to open the Start menu.  Do this by hitting the Windows key on your keyboard, or clicking the Start orb.

Now click All Programs to view all your installed programs, and not just those pinned to the start menu.

Finally, to configure your automatic update settings, click Windows Update (it should be fairly near the top of the list, before all the folders.

Once Windows update has launched, click Change Settings in the lefthand sidebar.

The recommended behavior is to download and install updates automatically.  If you do this, your computer will check periodically (every day or on a particular day of the week, at a time of day you set), and will install them once downloaded.

There are three other options available. You can also download all updates, but only install the ones you select.  The next step toward doing nothing is to check for updates, but only download and install the ones the user wants. Or, finally, you can never check for updates, which will turn off Windows Update entirely.

Now, assuming you have Windows Update configured to at least do some checking, downloading and installing, there are a couple other options.  First is how Windows Update treats recommended updates.  There are two types of updates: important and recommended.  If you have this setting checked, your recommended updates will be treated exactly the same as important ones, so if you have important updates scheduled to be installed automatically, this will be true of recommended ones as well.

You also have the option to allow any user to update Windows, or with this option unchecked, can keep the privilege for only the administrator.

The first of the last two options allows you to check for extra Microsoft software (such as Microsoft Security Essentials or Silverlight), and allow those to be updated as well.

Finally, in conjunction with the above option, you can choose to receive detailed notice when there is new Microsoft software available.

This will include not just updates, but also software not currently installed on your computer.

Once finished, click the OK button at the bottom of the window and you’re all set.  Windows Update will begin using your new settings immediately; no restart necessary.

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We’ve already shown how to extract audio from a FLV file (using FFmpeg), and that’s helpful since many YouTube videos are in FLV format.

However, it would also be nice to be able to use a single program to both download and convert your videos.  Happily, a program called Downverter exists, and as a bonus it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.  Here’s how to install and use this helpful program.

First, head over to the Downverter website.

Now, scroll down a bit until you reach the download buttons.  As mentioned, there are Mac and Windows versions, as well as both 32-bit and 64-bit installers for Ubuntu.

Note: For non-Ubuntu Linux users, DEB installers can be converted to RPM (for Red Hat, Fedora and other distributions), TGZ packages (for Slackware), and other formats, using alien, which we discussed here.

Once you’ve grabbed the download for your operating system, go ahead and install it.  Here’s the Ubuntu installer.

Once installed, go ahead and start Downverter.  When it opens, you’ll see its single-window interface.

Once you’ve found a YouTube video you want to save and/or convert, paste its URL into the entry bar.

After this, simply set the configuration options the way you want.

As you can see, one of Downverter’s strong points is a nice range of options for device presets.

You can choose to convert the video for a format suitable for a particular device, such as iPod or PSP, as well as to a format, such as WMV or AVI.  You also have the option to simply the audio to MP3 format, or simply download without conversion.

Once all your settings are to your liking, click the large green Download & Convert button to begin the process.

You’ll see as the video is first downloaded and then – if you chose to convert it, that process as well.

Once you’re finished, you’ll notice the original file in your download folder, as well as the converted file, if present.

All in all, Downverter is a nice little program.  It could be a bit more configurable for some tastes (the quality settings in particular are very basic, with just high, medium and low options), but for quick and easy downloading and converting, plus the advantage of working on Windows, Mac and Linux, Downverter is a great tool.

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Once you’ve done this, you use the Windows Live Writer Insert Image button to add your image to your blog post, only… your image is now different!  Instead of displaying its exactly-correct 580 pixels width, it’s now… quite a bit smaller, left-aligned and with a drop-shadow!

It also has a drop shadow.  And even if you’d previously set your paragraph text to be centered, you’ll find that the image is now left justified.  This is all fixable, but if you look through the Windows Live Writer preferences, you won’t find any image settings, unfortunately.

However, this is one of those instances where the solution happens to be hiding in plain sight.  Part of this is that you don’t actually see any image settings on the toolbar ribbon until you’ve used the Insert Picture feature to add an image to your post or have highlighted an image you’ve already inserted.  So to change our settings, go ahead and add an image.

Note: if you already have an image in your blog post, you could avoid adding another one and highlight an existing one instead.

Once you’ve added an image or selected one, you’ll notice the ribbon has changed to now show Picture Tools.

Here, finally, we can modify how Windows Live Writer treats pictures.  First, click the Size button on the left side of the ribbon.  A little pop-up will appear where you can change how Windows Live Writer resizes your images by default (or simply leaves them alone).

If you want to resize your own images in a separate program, choose the Original option as shown above.  However, if you have uses for Small, Medium, and Large settings, you can choose one, or if you have a use for those settings, but the default settings aren’t quite the sizes you want, click the Set default sizes option (as shown in the image above), to change those default sizes.

When you’re satisfied with the Size options, click the Picture Borders button to choose what – if any – border will be placed around your image.

By default, Windows Live Writer uses a drop shadow, but you can set it to no border, or one of the other options, such as rounded corners, thick black border, or even rounded corners.

When this setting has been configured, click to change what kind of alignment your image has.

You can choose to place your image inline (text flows around it), left justified, centered, or right justified.

By default, these are the only three things Windows Live Writer changes about an image when you upload it, its size, border and alignment.  However, If you want to keep going, there are a couple other optional settings you can choose to have it change.

First is the Rotation of your image.

You can choose to rotate your image 90 degrees to the left or right, or to have it tilted askew.  Finally, you can adjust the margins around your image.

This is nice if you want a bit of space above and below your image, or to switch how close text will flow around it if placed inline.

Once you’ve selected all the settings you want, click the Set To Default button.

You won’t receive any feedback that any changes have been made (not even a “Your Settings Have Been Saved” window or dialog), but the next time you insert an image into a blog post, your settings will be used, and not the default ones.  And that’s about it!  As mentioned, these settings aren’t hard to change, and they’re actually right out in the open.  But since they’re not mentioned at all in the Windows Live Writer Options, and are only discoverable when inserting an image, hopefully this how-to tutorial will be helpful.

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Second, software often gains new features, even between major updates, so a free upgrade might well mean that a program works better on your computer than the currently installed version.  Third, as programs become outdated, they are often not supported any longer, so any bugs or security risks (in the case of web browsers) may never be fixed.

Of course, in Windows, you have the Windows Update feature.

This is all well and good, but the only programs and bug fixes that come through Windows Update are the operating system and assorted Microsoft programs.  What about keeping the rest of your software up-to-date?  Windows users have quite a few options for software update monitors, but one we like is called Software Update Monitor (or SUMo for short).  SUMo is a free program that scans your computer for installed programs, then compares that list to its own database, so you know if a new version is available.

Now, don’t a lot of programs already include automatic updates, or the ability to check for updates from within the program?  Yes, they do!  And we’d suggest using those features for programs that offer them, because they’re easy to use.  But let’s say you have 30 programs installed, and ten of them offer update checking.

That means 20 programs don’t.  That’s 20 programs where you need to visit the program’s website and look to see if there’s a new version.  Therein lies the benefit of SUMo… it does the checking for you – for ALL of your programs – in one easy step.  Here’s how to use it.

First, head over to the SUMo download page and scroll down to the “Sponsored FREE Software” section.

Now, be careful which download you choose.  The default download (“Click Here”) is bundled with optional sponsors via Relevant Knowledge software (which can later be installed).  Their own description mentions that Relevant Knowledge can sometimes be flagged by anti-virus software (even if it isn’t actually malicious), but there’s no need to install it, so grab one of the installers from the More section.

We’re grabbing the 7z file, but there is a ZIP file, or even a basic EXE installer available.  However, grab the 7z or ZIP file, as even the EXE installer requires you to opt-out of certain toolbars and new search engines.

Once you’ve downloaded the program, expand the file, if necessary.

If you grabbed the 7z or ZIP file, you can simply start using SUMo.  So navigate to the sumo folder and open the application.

The first time SUMo opens, you’ll be shown the First Run Wizard.

If you choose the “Automatically detect installed software” option, SUMo will quickly scan your computer for installed software.

When the scan is finished, you’ll see a list of your installed software.

Note that this isn’t an exhaustive list.  There are no Microsoft programs, as they’re considered part of the operating system, which Windows Update will take care of.  If, however, you do want Microsoft software include, that – and other options – can be found in the Configuration window.

Also, if a program includes small utilities, those generally aren’t included.  However, if you have a program like Calibre installed, you’ll notice that LRF Viewer shows up on the list, even though it’s impossible to update one without updating the other.

It’s now time to scan the installed software against SUMo’s list, so click the “Check” button (from the image above), or the “Check for updates for your installed software” button on the First Run Wizard.  SUMo will begin the process of comparing your list against its database.

When this scan is complete, your list will now show you which programs have available updates.  The updates are categorized as Minor or Major (Having Adobe Reader 10.1.0 installed when 10.1.2 is available is a minor update, while having Firefox 8 installed when Firefox 9 is available is considered major).  When you see a program you want to update, highlight it and click the “Get Update” button.

You’ll now be taken – in your Web browser – to a kcsoftwares.com page for the program you want to update.

You won’t automatically receive an update to the software, but you can use this page to go to the program’s home page, where you can download the update.  In the above image, you would click the little caret beside the Mozilla Foundation link, which would take you to the Mozilla home page.

From there, simply download the available update and install.  That’s it!  SUMo isn’t a perfect program.  If it were, it would be able to download the new software for you, and install it in the background.  This isn’t a perfect world, and there are so many installer options as to make this a fairly big pipe dream.  However, what SUMo does in providing you with a one-stop place to check for updated software is a very good thing, and something well worth checking out.

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In this article we’ll be talking about Firefox’s about:config system, which is where all default and user-modified configuration options reside.  In fact, there are more than 1000 of them!  To access this system, open Firefox and type about:config into the URL bar.

If this is the first time you’ve used this system, you’ll be asked to acknowledge that things could go wrong by changing certain settings.  To advance to the configuration interface, click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Once there, you’ll see a huge list of all the different configuration options.

Don’t let the interface intimidate you, though.  It’s actually easy to use.  What we’re going to do for the rest of this article is change a few settings (and create some of our own), to help speed up Firefox in a couple different ways.  These options won’t actually speed up your Internet, but they will hopefully make Firefox feel quicker and more responsive.

Stop Firefox From Scanning Downloads For Viruses

The first option we’ll change is to turn off Firefox’s default behavior (only in Windows), of scanning each downloaded file for viruses.  There’s nothing bad about this, but many people already have anti-virus software installed, so this duplication may be unnecessary.  To access this setting, type browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone into the filter bar.

By default this feature is turned on; we want to turn it off.  To do so, simply double-click the entry line and you’ll see the line turn bold (which means it was modified by the user), and the Value change from true (turned on) to false (turned off).

You’ll notice another entry below the one we just changed (services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone).  Leave this alone (it should be turned on (true) by default.  It simply tells the Firefox Sync system to use your setting when synchronizing your prefs.

Turn Off Firefox’s Countdown When Installing Extensions

Next we’ll turn off the annoying 4-second countdown that appears whenever you try to install a Firefox extension.

When you think about it, there’s really not much of a point to the countdown, since even with it you need to click to confirm installation.  Turning off this setting simply means you don’t have to wait 4 seconds to do it! To remove this “feature” type security.dialog_enable_delay into the filter bar, then double-click to modify the value.

By default the value is set at 2000 milliseconds.  To turn this off, change the value to 0 (zero), and you’ll never have to wait for the countdown again.

Turn On Pipelining

Pipelining is the behavior (turned off by default) where Firefox will send multiple requests to the web server, without waiting to receive a response.  Generally your computer will send a request, wait for a response, then send another request, back and forth.  With pipelining turned on, your browser sends multiple requests simultaneously. then deals with the responses in the order they were requested.  To turn this feature on, type network.http.pipelining into the filter bar, then double click to change the value from false (turned off) to true (turned on).

If you set the above example to ‘true’ then you will want to modify the number of requests in each pipeline.  By default, the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests option has a setting of 4, but since the pipelining preference was turned off, the maxrequests option wasn’t used.  If you don’t change this setting, up to 4 requests will be sent at once, but we’ve set it higher, as you can see, which means your computer will send up to 8 requests at a time.

Change Page Rendering Delay

By default, Firefox waits 250 milliseconds (or .25 seconds), to begin drawing a web page, which gives it a little time for data to load (in order for there to actually be something to draw). To change this behavior we’ll actually need to create a new setting.  To do this, right click anywhere in the about:config settings list and choose the New option, then click Integer from the submenu.

You’ll see there are options for String, Integer and Boolean settings.  String preferences will include something other than numeric characters.  So if you were to set your search engine via the about:config interface, the setting would have a string value.

Integer settings are simply numbers, while Boolean settings are like switches: they are on or off, true or false, yes or no.  In this instance, our setting will be a number, hence selecting Integer.  We now need to give our setting a name, to type or paste nglayout.initialpaint.delay into the dialog that appears.  This will be the preference’s new name.

Then give the preference a value.  Since this is an Integer setting, we need a number.  We’ll use 0 (zero), which will tell Firefox to not wait at all before rendering our page.

Setting it higher, on the other hand, would force Firefox to wait before beginning rendering, but would have the added result of there being more web page to render.

Modify Page Redraw Interval

Our final change is to modify the interval Firefox uses between page redraws as a web page is loading.  By default, Firefox redraws a web page every .12 seconds, which is good because you aren’t kept waiting for the full web page to load.  However, many redraws can actually slow things down.

This is a setting you’ll need to create, as it doesn’t already exist.  It is an integer setting, just like the last one.  The name of the setting is content.notify.interval and you’ll want to use 500000 as your value, which will force Firefox to wait 500000 microseconds (not milliseconds like the previous option), which is half a second, before redrawing the page.

It is not recommended to set this any lower than 100000 as it will negatively impact performance with too many reflows.

In order to get Firefox to use this setting, however, we need to create the content.notify.ontimer setting, which is a boolean setting.  Set it it ‘true’ to turn it on, which tells Firefox to use the reflow interval setting we just created.

As mentioned, none of the settings mentioned here actually make your computer or Internet any faster.  They don’t turn Firefox into some super web browser with power unheard-of by Google, Apple and Microsoft.  What they do is tweak Firefox, just slightly, in a few different ways which will hopefully make it feel faster to you.

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