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Have you ever done something on your computer that you kind of wish you hadn’t done? For example, install that program you found on the internet; tried to find a crack to unlock a game you downloaded; or even visited a naughty website; and afterwards your computer went haywire?

Maybe it wasn’t one of those reasons and you just changed a setting on your computer and now it doesn’t work. Whatever you did (or didn’t do), when your computer stuffs up or think you may have a virus, what can you do about it; how do you fix it?

The good thing is that Windows has something called System Restore which allows you to restore your computer to how it was a day before, or even a month before.

So What Exactly is System Restore and What Does It Do?

You have probably first heard about System Restore on Windows XP. What it essentially does is restore your computer to a state that is back in time. The good thing about it is that it doesn’t delete your files. It does delete any programs or .exe files you have such as program installs you might have downloaded.

Using System Restore on Windows XP

Before you use System Restore, you must make sure that it is activated. To do this, simply right click on My Computer and select Properties. In the System Restore tab, make sure System Restore is turned on for all your drives (or at least C: Drive)

Once activated, your computer will automatically make system restore points regularly or when you install new software.

If you ever run into trouble on your computer, you can then restore your computer back to that stage. To do this, open system restore by going to Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> System Restore. Once opened, you should see two or three options to choose from. The first option allows you to restore your computer to an earlier time, and the second option allows you to create a restore point. This is great if you are about to do something that you think may upset your computer. The third option will only appear if you have used System Restore before and this lets you undo the restore if it didn’t fix your problem or made things worse.

We want to restore our computer, so select the first option and click next.

On the next screen you will be presented with a calendar and all dates that have a restore point will be in bold. Select a recent date and choose a restore point on that date to one that you know your computer was working.

Once done, select next and agree to the warning message and then press next.

Your computer will restart and reboot and the program you are having should be fixed. If it’s not, you can go back to a previous date or undo the restore as I mentioned above.

Using System Restore on Windows Vista

To access System Restore, just follow the same steps as in Windows XP Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> System Restore.

Here you can select the latest restore point or choose a different restore point. I would recommend choosing a restore point.

If you want to show all your restore points, click the checkbox on the bottom left. Simple select a checkpoint, press next and agree to the confirmation.

Using System Restore on Windows 7

Using System Restore is not much different to using it in Windows Vista.  You can access it by going to Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> System Restore.

Simply select a recovery position from the list and click Next and Finish on the next screen.

As I have not used Windows 7 before (apart from the RC and Beta versions), I believe there are a few more options other than System Restore that you can use to help repair your computer. However, most of these require your installation DVD. By reading a post on Microsoft.com, there are a few repair options to choose from which you can access when you press F8 when booting your computer to enter the recovery console. If you want perform a certain recovery option, visit this link for more information.

One final option is to use the Backup and Restore option which can be found at Control Panel –> System and Security –> Backup and Restore. Using this method, you can create a backup image of your computer and restore it at a later date – but this will be for another post.

So I hope you now know how to repair your computer yourself if you ever run into trouble. System Restore is a lifesaver (it has helped me hundreds of times) and could save you a lot of money compared to taking your computer to a local computer repair shop.

If you have any problems about using System Restore or general backup questions, feel free to ask in the comments or at MakeUseOf Answers.

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What if I told you that you could download entire websites, or select “chunks” of the Internet to your laptop or to a portable hard disk, and then browse that saved piece of the Internet while you’re traveling on a plane, train or bus without the Internet? This is something that would allow students and researchers the ability to read through websites whenever it’s most convenient, even if they are not online.

In this article I’m going to introduce you to a cool freeware app called WinWSD, written by Attila Keszi of Hungary.

This application is similar to the apps Tina covered in her mini series about offline browsing, where she covered Scrapbook and HTTrack. However, WinWSD is a bit unique because it lets you identify not only a single website, but multiple “start pages” that it will crawl through and download the entire section of the web you’ll need to later browse each website from those starting points.

Downloading An Entire Website

The most common use for applications like WinWSD is to download a “mirror” of an entire website. This will basically let you browse every single page on an entire website even though you’re offline. Obviously many external links or images won’t work properly, but all of the local files, scripts, images and videos will all work without an Internet connection.

Initiating a download is easy. Once you’ve installed WinWSD, just go to “New Project“, create a new folder for your local copy, and then the Project Settings window will open.

The Project Directory will be the directory you’ve just created before this window. The project name can be whatever you like, but most important is the “Starting URLs” field. To download an entire website, insert the root domain of that site in this box. You can click or unclick any of the boxes to define how the program will crawl through the site, but default settings are usually fine. Once you’re done and back on the main page, just go into the “project” menu option and click “Start/Restart.”

This initiates the crawling script, which will go through all links, starting from the “starting URL” and it will download each entire page including all images, videos and more. As the process goes on, you’ll see 5 threads (downloads) running at once at the bottom of the screen. You can increase or decrease the number of threads depending on your processor power.

The window to the left shows the download and website statistics – things like the download speed, the hard drive space consumed by the mirrored site on your drive,  and any errors.

The large center pane of the application is basically a web browser. Once you have an entire website backed up to your hard drive, you can use this application to browse through the website while offline. You can also browse the site using any Internet browser of your choice by opening the index.html file in your project folder with that browser.

You can see the location of the file that you’re viewing at the lower part of the browser window. You know you’re browsing offline when you see that the location starts in “file:///” and the url is the project location you defined in the settings.

The file structure for a site mirror is basically a directory for every web page, which includes all files like html pages, images, videos and whatever else makes the page load correctly. Local links on the page go to the directory for that new page. External links remain the same, so obviously those won’t work while you’re browsing offline.

Download Entire Websites From Several Start Pages

Now, this application really stands out when you want to conduct offline research using articles from multiple websites. Let’s say that you’re working on a research paper and you’re conducting Google searches for good reference material. You’ve got a trip coming up, so you don’t have time to read through those websites, but you jot down the URLs in Notepad.

One option you could use if you want to read through those entire web pages offline is to take a mirror of those pages using the article URLs you found as the “Starting URLs” in the Project Settings.

Here, I’ve pasted three URLs I found for some research on a speech that President Obama gave in Michigan. I set the three references that I found as the Starting URLs for a new project, and then clicked on Start/Restart under “Project.”

As you can see above, such a search takes a lot of space (1,483 files in this example), but if you have a portable hard disk, it shouldn’t be a problem. Basically you’re downloading the entire page with images and other files, as well as downloading the entire page of any internal sites that page links to. This way, while you’re reading those articles offline, you can click to any other internal pages and those links will still work.

Here is what offline viewing looks like, and you can see the offline location as well as the subdirectory for this particular “Project.”

You can create a new project for every research topic you want to work on offline, which helps keep all of your work organized. If you travel a lot, WinWSD can really help optimize your research work even though you have no access to the Internet.

Have you ever used WinWSD? What do you think about the software? Do you know of any other offline browsing alternatives? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Internet and Future by CJLUC

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Are you driven crazy by your wish list of projects and goals? Have you got a pile of things up your sleeve to be done someday that you never seem to find time for in the midst of all your everyday thoughts? Do you wish that there was a way to isolate just the relevant pieces of information and focus on one aspect of your life at a time?

Most of us need to mix up our organising with a little creativity to keep ourselves motivated. We need to be able to see not just the tasks at hand, but reminders of our goals and all the useful things we found along the way. What we need is a way to bring it all together visually and memorably. To have all your pictures, links, tasks relevant to this aspect of your life together and ready for action. This is where Netvibes becomes an amazing asset.

It doesn’t really have to be Netvibes. iGoogle or maybe another similar RSS/portal/start page would do the trick just as well. The goal here is to create a place online where you can easily access a selection of your favourite life focus points, projects or whatever. One online destination, many tabs for your goals.

I’m personally a fan of Netvibes as a start page for many reasons. It’s not my main feed reader, but there are good reasons for duplicating a few RSS feeds in to Netvibes. You’ll see why soon as I outline how you can use Netvibes.

The Set Up

It’s surprisingly easy to set up, too. Head over to Netvibes and get an account. Create a new tab for your goal. For instance, I’ve chosen to make a “Holidays” tab. A project you might have in mind could be your online job search.

You can choose how you want the column layout of the tab to be by choosing “edit”.

Now, you want to add a module for your tasks. If you’re using Remember The Milk, there’s a great ready-made module. If you can’t find a widget for your usual task manager, see if you can get an RSS feed for your tasks. Then you can simply add the RSS feed as a module.

You can find modules on Netvibes for most of the popular online to-do lists. Remember The Milk is my to-do list of choice, but each to their own.

Set up your task module so that it only shows the relevant tasks for this part of your life. In RTM, it’s easy to pick a pre-made smartlist (the picture above shows how to save a search as a smartlist in RTM). For others, you might be able to filter by tag or something.

Now, make a module for your links. If you’re using Delicious or some other link manager with RSS, you can use an RSS widget to bring in your relevant links. For instance, links tagged with “Holiday” would be brought in to mine.

Also grab a few pictures that remind you of your goals. There’s a Flickr module which brings in a grid of pictures using RSS. I love this module particularly because the feed doesn’t have to come from Flickr – it can be any picture RSS feed. Bring in relevant picture RSS feeds from your albums on Flickr or ideas on Tumblr. Bring in Flickr group photos that remind you of your goals.

Take a look at the sorts of RSS feeds you can get from Delicious bookmarks. Mix that with a little strategy for organising your studies using Delicious and you can see that we’re able to get some extremely useful information by RSS.

Then add a few inspiring RSS feeds of blogs relevant to your goal. For instance, in my “Holidays” tab I’ve added travel advisories, French travel blogs and French learning blogs. If you want to mix and match your RSS feeds before importing, use something like Yahoo pipes to tweak them first.

As you can see, with everything together like this, it’s hard not to feel motivation towards your goal. Also, when you focus the page on the tasks you really want to work on, then you’re not going to wind up feeling like you should be doing everyday tasks instead of focusing on your goals.

Do you use a system like this? Which apps do you use? What priorities have you dedicated a tab to and why? Let us know your great ideas!

Image Credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

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I often find myself with proprietary disk image formats. For example if one person in my company uses Nero Burning Rom to create an ISO (or disk image) the file extension will be .NRG but if you are using another application like Roxio Easy CD Creator then the extension will be GI. Each application has its own extension.

If the image was an ISO you could use IMGBurn to burn an ISO file, but what do you do if it’s not? How do you burn the image onto your thumb drive on a friend’s computer without the software it was created with?

Well you can download a little 2.0MB file called ISO Buddy. ISOBuddy will help you burn your images. What it does is convert some of the most popular disk image extensions to be an ISO image. Once you have the image you can burn the ISO file easily.

The file formats that are supported by ISOBuddy are as follows: GI, NRG, CDI, MDF, IMG, B5I, B6I, DMG, PDI, BIN and CCD to ISO image.

After downloading and installing the application you will see a screen that looks like this:

To begin we will attempt to open an image file. I clicked on the Edit menu button and then chose to open an image file:

Go ahead and navigate to your disk image. We do not need to tell it what application created the image. It will show you on the Image Format Is: line. You can see that I used a .GI image from Roxio and ISOBuddy correctly identified it as a Roxio Global Image.

If there are multiple sessions on your CD or DVD we can choose which one we want to select. Most commercial disks will only have one session on them. Next we need to specify where we will be saving our new ISO image to. We do this by clicking on Edit –> Save as and choosing a path and file name.

Now go ahead and hit the start button and your conversion will start. You can see the progress at the bottom of the interface like so:

When the conversion is complete you should see a message box like this pop up:

Go ahead and hit OK. Now that our conversion was successful we can burn our ISO or simply copy it elsewhere.

Let’s take a look at how to burn the converted ISO using ISOBuddy. Click on the burn button and you will have the option to burn the source image or the output image. You have to burn the target image so choose that one and then you can click on the burn button.

Clicking the burn button will bring up the built in burning utility like so:

Simply select the drive you want to use to burn the disk and hit the start button. You can optionally rescan for new drives if you had not plugged yours in when the initial scan occurred. You can also hit the settings check box to get this menu:

You can click through to the other tabs to see those options as well:

Click start and your image will be on its way to being burnt!

Do you have another free tool that helps to create and burn ISO files? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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As a blogger and owner of multiple websites, it isn’t often that I personally have the need to make free webpages that aren’t hosted on my own webhosting account, or accessed from my own registered domain. However, as anyone who has become entrenched in the world of Web 2.0 knows, there are so many available resources that it’s sometimes difficult to remember all of the sites where you’re a member, or to keep track of all of the information you want to receive updates about every day.

I’ve previously covered 4 free websites where you can make a web page for free, hosted by the site where you create them. Additionally, if your intent is to generate a start page for yourself, Aibek covered a majority of them in his review of the top 12 start pages.

All of the resources listed above are excellent tools for organizing your own online interests, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a resource from Google – the place where you get your email, handle your blog analytics and read your RSS feeds? Aibek mentioned iGoogle in his list of start pages, but even iGoogle doesn’t have the sort of flexibility that lets you do anything you want with the page. You can add widgets and re-title a few elements, but that’s about it. That’s why I was very happy to discover that now, even Google offers a free website building tool called Google Sites.

How To Make a Web Page for Free On Google Sites

Of course, if anyone could simplify the website creation process even more than most other free website creator tools, it would be Google. The nice thing is that your Google Site is tied directly to your Google account, so you never have to worry about remembering what the site was or the URL, just log into your Google account, go to Google Sites, and there it is.

When you first visit Google Sites and log into your Google Account, just click on “Create Site,” and you’re presented with a very easy form to fill out that will immediately generate your free webpage. Of course, the first step is to select the design. You’ve got several standard templates to choose from, or you can review the template library.

You could also use one of the common templates, but I usually like to use templates that are as unique as possible so as to reduce the possibility of having a site that’s identical to someone else’s. Additionally, the templates offered by Google are not your run-of-the-mill website templates.

If you want to have a project wiki website, there’s a template specially designed for that. If you want to have a family site, a school webpage, or even a professional website for yourself – there are templates for those purposes too. Each template has a unique design and features that are conducive to each purpose.

Even though I have a domain for my own name where I host a blog with updates from my online writing work, I don’t really have a professional website that collates all of my work, testimonials from clients and everything else into one easy to follow presentation. So, as an example website I’m going to use Google Sites to create my own professional bio page.

Once you fill out a few details on the form for your site title and description and then click submit, your site is ready to go using the template you’ve selected. All of your editing and other tasks are located at the upper right of the page.

Now, the cool thing about the Google Sites approach is that it’s configured like a content management system – so when you choose to “edit” the page, what you’re editing is just the content area. If you want to make any changes to the site template itself, you need to click on More Actions -> Manage Site, and then click on Site Layout from the left menu. This is where you can alter the left navigational bar and of course the site logo that, in this case, features your image.

Adding or removing navigational sidebar items is fast and easy in this area as well. Add or remove pages, or include text or widgets into the sidebar right here in one place, and it takes effect across your entire site and all pages.

Google has really done a fantastic job making it easy to customize and manage even large sites that have lots of pages. Of course, tools that you use all the time on your websites are built right into your Google Site, like Adsense. All you have to do is select to enable it.

The thing that separates the useful CMS tools from those for kids is the ability to integrate it with your own registered domain. Luckily, if you choose “Web Address” in the site management area, you’ll find that you can use any domain that you like with Google Sites. Keep in mind that the site is still hosted at Google, but at least you can use any custom URL that you like, rather than the generic Google Sites URL.

In the General Settings area, you can see just how integrated other website Google tools are into Google Sites. Just by pasting your Analytics ID, you can enable Analytics for the site (no need to copy and paste code into the footer of all the pages you want to track). Google Webmaster Tools verification is built right in as well.

For anyone who has ever wanted a monetized website with Google Analytics tracking, but never got around to it because it always seemed too complicated to integrate into your own website – with Google Sites, Google makes it an absolute breeze. Without further ado, here is the first draft of my own professional bio website called DubeWriter at Google Sites.

Take a look and let me know what you think. Keep in mind that the site was created in under 15 minutes, using the tools provided right on the Google Sites CMS.

Have you ever tried Google Sites? Do you find it easier or harder to use than other free website creators out there? Share your opinions and insight in the comments section below.

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