The first step is to download and install Thunderbird. You can head over to the Thunderbird home page and download the installer (simplest for Mac or Windows), while Linux users will likely want to install Thunderbird via their distro’s software repositories.

Now we’ll need to ensure that Gmail is configured to allow POP3 access. So click this link (make sure you’re logged into your Gmail account) to view the POP/IMAP settings.

As you can see above, we’ve turned on POP3 access, which will allow us to use our Gmail account with a Desktop client, in this case Thunderbird. Also, note that under option 2 (under POP Download), we have chosen to “keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox” when messages are accessed with POP. If we use this option, then nothing we do with Thunderbird (such as accidentally marking a message as “read”), should affect anything we see in the Gmail Web interface.

Note: we’ll be showing the POP3 configuration instructions in this article, but you can check out this link to see Google’s ideal configuration settings for IMAP mail clients, if you were wanting to use Thunderbird as an everyday client. We chose POP3 as our backup method, as it will download all your emails, and not simply new emails as they arrive.

Next, launch Thunderbird by double-clicking its Dock icon or Desktop launcher, selecting its Start Menu entry, or… whatever.

Now we’ll enter in your account details, so go to the Edit menu and then Account Settings (menu names/locations may be slightly different on different operating systems).

When the Account Settings window opens, choose Add Mail Account from the Account Actions menu.

Now simply enter in your Gmail info. Thunderbird has a database of many different email providers, so should automatically fill in the correct server info. The only thing to think about at this point is whether or not to switch from the default server (IMAP), to the alternative (POP3, as we did).

Now, before leaving the Account Settings window, click the Server Settings tab, then make sure to change the “Check for new messages” setting is reduced to 1 minutes (at least while we download your old emails), as well as checking the “Leave messages on server” option, while making sure the next two options (“For at most” and “Until I delete them”) are unchecked.

Now move to the Junk Settings tab and uncheck the “Enable adaptive junk mail controls” option. As Gmail already has good spam filtering (and we’re only using Thunderbird to archive our Gmail account), this will ensure that every email is downloaded.

Finally, click the Disk Space tab, and make sure the “Don’t delete any messages” radio button is selected. This way, no messages will be deleted, simply to conserve disk space. This should be the default option, but it doesn’t hurt to double-check.

At this point, you can go ahead and clock the entire Account Settings window and return to the main interface. If it hasn’t started archiving your Gmail messages, click the Get Mail button in the toolbar, and the process will begin.

Depending on how many emails you have, this process could take quite a while, but when you’re finished, you should have a full backup of your POP3 server.

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For example, I have a printer attached to my Windows 7 computer in my home office and I wanted to be able to print to it from my MacBook Pro running Lion. I thought it was going to take a long time, but luckily it didn’t! In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps to share a printer from Windows XP or Windows 7 to your Mac.

Note that the part about adding the printer to your Mac is the same regardless of whether it’s from Windows XP or Windows 7. The only difference is the way your share the printer in XP and 7.

Share Windows XP Printer

The first thing that needs to be done is the share the printer. In Windows XP, you can do this by going to Control Panel and clicking on Printers and Faxes.

Next, right-cick on the printer and choose Properties.

Finally, click on the Sharing tab and choose Share this printer.

It’s probably a good idea to keep the name of the printer short (less than 8 characters) and also not to include any spaces or special characters. Just keep it to letters and numbers. Click OK and you’re done. Now skip down to the adding printer to your Mac section for the rest of the instructions.

Share Windows 7 Printer

In Windows 7, the process of sharing a printer is slightly different. First, go to Control Panel and click on Devices and Printers.

Next, right-click on the printer and choose Printer Properties. In XP, you had to choose just Properties.

Finally, go to the Sharing tab and check Share this printer. That’s it for the Windows part!

Add Windows Printer to OS X

Now for the final part. In OS X, go to System Preferences and click on Print & Scan.

Now click on the little + button at the bottom of the box that shows you the currently installed printers.

Now you’ll get a pop up dialog that has a few options across the top. In our case, we want to click on Windows. This will automatically find all the Windows computers on your network! Sweet!

Click on the name of the computer with the shared printer and you’ll be asked to connect to it as a guest or registered user. In my experience, I was only able to connect as a registered user and only to Windows computers that had a username AND password. If you don’t have a password on your Windows user account, you won’t be able to connect and therefore won’t be able to see the shared printers. I can’t figure out a way to get it to work without having a password on the Windows account.

Now you’l see the last box on the right will have the name of the shared printer(s).

Click on the printer and then at the bottom you have to choose how to print. You have an option for Generic Postscript or Generic PCL, but normally you’re going to want to choose Select Printer Software. By default, OS X has a lot of drivers for the most common printers.

They even had my Lexmark 7600 printer in the list, meaning I didn’t have to worry about downloading the latest Mac driver for my printer and installing that.

And that’s about it. The software will be installed and you should be able to print. If your printer is not in the list, then you had to choose Other in the drop down and then choose the driver manually. You’ll have to download the latest Mac driver for your printer in order to do that.

Having trouble connecting to the shared printer on your Windows machine? If so, post a comment here and tell us where your process failed. Enjoy!

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Unfortunately, when you search about merging partitions, the vast majority of solutions suggest you download third-party software to mange making changes to Windows partitions. With all the choices and options, it quickly becomes a daunting task for the average PC user.

In this article, I’ll try to show you a simpler and easier way to merge two partitions without any third-party software. It’s not as robust as using a third-party and in some situations you will have to use a separate program, but it will get the job done for most people.

Basically, what we do is backup the second partition, then delete it, then extend the first partition to include the free space created when we deleted the second partition. Here’s how we do it in Windows 7.

Merge Partitions in Windows 7

First, right-click on Computer on the desktop and choose Manage.

Next click on Disk Management in the left hand navigation pane:

Now on the right hand pane, you’ll see a  list of volumes at the top and the list of disks at the bottom.

As you can see in the example above, I have a C and E volume. The C volume is my System partition that includes the operating system and paging file. The E volume is just a second primary partition that’s about 10 GB in size. What we want to do here is to merge these two partitions so that the C partition becomes 60 GB instead of 50 GB.

The first thing we need to do is to right-click on the E partition at the bottom and choose Delete Volume.

You’ll get a warning stating that deleting the volume will erase all data on it. You should make sure you have backed up anything on that volume first before you do this. Once you delete it, you’ll see it becomes Unallocated space.

Now to merge the partitions, simple right-click on the partition you want to extend (C in my case) and choose Extend Volume.

The wizard will open, so click Next. On the Select Disk screen, it should automatically select the disk and show the amount from any unallocated space.

As you can see, the wizard found 9999 MB of unallocated space which I can use to extend the C volume. Click Next and then click Finish. Now you’ll see the first partition (C volume) has been extended and includes all the space on the disk.

That’s it! Yes, with this method you have to delete a partition and back up the data, but at least you don’t have to worry about any third party software and paying for anything. It’s not too hard to just copy some data to an external hard drive and then copy it back later. If you have any questions, post a comment! Enjoy!

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One disadvantage, on the other hand, is in an online program’s relative inflexibility. If Google says “these are your font options,” then you really don’t have any choice but to use what they give you, as opposed to your own computer, where you can pretty much install and use any font you want. At least, that used to be a problem. Recently, however, Google added the option to use any of the Google Web Fonts in your Google Docs word processing document. Here’s how to change the font menu so you can have all your favorites only a couple clicks away.

The first step is to open up Google Docs, then a word processing document. It can be a new document or one you already created.

Next, click the font menu. You should see the standard list of fonts appear.

To add fonts to your font menu (or remove some of the fonts on it by default), scroll to the bottom of the menu and select the Add Fonts option.

A new overlay window should appear. This is your font selection pallette.

Here you will see a large list of fonts. Keep scrolling down and the list will keep expanding, adding new fonts as necessary. There are different types of fonts, of course, and you can view them individually or as a list. By default you’ll see all fonts, but if you want, you can view only the fonts of a certain type, such as Display, Handwriting, Serif or Sans Serif.

You can also sort the fonts. Viewing the fonts by Popularity is the default, but you can also view the fonts Alphabetically, by Date Added, or Trending (a measure of how popular a font is lately).

In addition, along the right side of the font window, you’ll see a list called My Fonts.

This list is not the complete list of fonts you saw in the standard font menu, but many of them. The ones shown above (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Corsiva, Droid Sans, Droid Serif, Syncopate and Ubuntu), can all be removed, while the rest (Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Narrow, Times New Roman, Wide), are considered too basic to be removed.

So, how do you go about adding fonts? Simply scroll through the font list, and when you find one you like, click it. The font name will immediately turn blue, and a blue checkmark will be placed along side it.

Change your mind? You could simply click the font name again, and it will go back to normal. Or, if you don’t want to scroll through the list of fonts, simply click the “x” beside the name of the font as shown in the My Fonts list.

When you’re done, click the OK button in the lower right corner of the screen. You’ll be returned to your word processing document. To see your new fonts in the font menu, click it like before. All the fonts you added should be there, and the ones you removed should be gone, unless the document you’re viewing requires one, in which case it will remain. One night feature is that all the fonts you just added will be highlighted in yellow.

They’ll only stay yellow the first time you open the font menu after adding them, however, so pay attention!

For a lot of people, online office suites such as Google Docs are a fantastic option. They’re generally pretty snappy, have features a lot of users want, are handy (as we mentioned, they’re everywhere you are, as long as you have an Internet connection and a supported web browser), and with the addition of a configurable font menu with hundreds of great fonts to choose from, Google Docs just got that much better.

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We took Google Drive out for a spin on our Windows 7 machine, to check out the synchronization between the Desktop and the Cloud. Here’s how our experience went.

The first step is to go to your Google Drive page, and click the “Download Google Drive” link.

Next, accept the Terms of Service.

You will now be asked to save a small file to your hard drive.

Once downloaded, go ahead and run the installer. It will need to be run as an Administrator.

The installer doesn’t require any user interaction, so go ahead and wait a bit, and you’ll eventually see verification that the installation completed.

Once you close this window (or completely on its own, if you wait to long to close the window), you’ll be asked to sign into your Google Drive account.

You’ll now see two different “Getting Started” screens. The first explains that a new folder will be created on your hard drive; this folder will be where your Google Drive documents are synchronized.

The second screen explains a bit more (including that all your Google Docs document will be synchronized), or lets you view Advanced Setup options.

If you choose to see the Advanced Setup options, you can choose which of your folders are synchronized locally (everything is synchronized by default), the location of the local Google Drive folder, and whether or not to synchronize your Google Docs documents. You may not want to synchronize them, as they will only be able to be viewed if offline; you can only edit them when connected to the Internet. You can also choose to start Google Drive automatically when you start your computer.

You’ll notice at this point that you have a new icon in your taskbar. Click the icon to view the following menu.

Here you can see the sync status, pause all syncing, view your Google Drive folder, go to Google Drive on the Web, and more. The “Preferences” option, just as a note, is the same as the Advanced Setup window we just viewed.

When you do visit your Google Drive folder, located at C:\Users\Username\Google Drive\ by default, you can see all your Google Drive documents. Anything fully synchronized will have the little green checkmark in the lower left corner.

All in all, the first release of Google Drive setup was pretty nice. As mentioned, Google Docs are only viewable in offline mode, not editable. This is too bad, as Google Chrome users can turn on offline functionality for Google Docs which includes editing, so this feels like a bit of a step back. Still, this is far advanced to simply using your Gmail account as a file system, and while there is no Linux client currently available (there is a Mac version available), one is apparently in the works. As said, it feels like a good first step, and the fact that it includes 5 GB of space and is completely free is a bonus as well. Time will tell how Google Drive progresses in the future, but for now it’s enough.

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