Category Archives: How To

How To: Thunderbird (Part 1) – Basics

By Bish | Published: 08/05/2006 – 22:26 | Posted in How To, Software | Comments (0)

This is gonna be the start of a series of posts on making the most of the quality, open source, email client, Thunderbird. Brought to you by Mozilla, the people behind the now cult browser Firefox, Thunderbird is lighter and faster than many other mail clients and is fast approaching the feature list of Outlook. Similar in their approach to Firefox, the Mozilla team have implemented the Extensions system for Thunderbird allowing users to customise Thunderbird’s appearance and features, both easily and quickly. This approach to features prevents much of the ‘app bloat’ found with recent versions of Outlook, its generally less resource intensive and yet many of the extensible features are there should you wish to implement them.

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How To: Fit a Zalman VF900-Cu VGA Cooler to Your Graphics Card

By Bish | Published: 04/04/2006 – 21:48 | Posted in How To, Technology | Comments (0)

Ok, a quick and dirty ‘how to’, to replace the stock heat sink / fan on a standard Connect 3D ATI Radeon X800 with Zalman’s premier GPU cooler, the CF900-Cu (see the review here). This Zalman VGA cooler has got to be the overclockers cooler of choice for your GPU and must be considered the next best thing to water cooling. Dropping the temperature significantly over the stock coolers and the majority of its competitors products, its also seriously quiet and comes complete with a basic fan control.

continue reading How To: Fit a Zalman VF900-Cu VGA Cooler to Your Graphics Card

How To: Replace the Joystick Unit on your PSP

By Bish | Published: 15/03/2006 – 22:46 | Posted in Gaming, How To | Comments (102)

The need to replace my joystick came about after a heavy gaming session over Christmas mostly by my brother Oli. After a marathon Virtua Tennis session the PSP was passed to me and after about my first serve the joystick finally gave in and I was left with a pretty unusable PSP. As I had imported it 9 months earlier from Japan I didn’t fancy sending it all the way back to be repaired and thought I could have a go at repairing it.

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How to: ‘Energise’ the Appearance of XP – Energy Blue Theme

By Bish | Published: 12/02/2006 – 16:18 | Posted in How To, Software, Windows | Comments (2)

With Apple’s OSX and the advent of Vista, Windows XP has begun to look really pretty stale and dated. This is understandable for an operating system that has been available for nearly 5 years but there’s a pretty simple stop gap solution that can keep us going until the next big Windows release.

The Energy Blue Theme originally came with Windows Media Center 2005 and then was released as part of an ‘Enhancment Pack’ for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. This slick and fresh theme has since been made available as a seperate download (one of the Tablet PC’s power toys) from Microsoft, but still no release for XP Home or Pro.

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How to: Del.icio.us Part 1

By Bish | Published: 06/02/2006 – 23:11 | Posted in How To, Internet, Web, Web2.0 | Comments (32)

This is part I of a II part guide to making the most of Delicious, the social bookmarking service.  Part I is intended as a ‘Getting Started’ or a ‘Beginners Guide’ to Delicious, pitched at the user who has never heard of Delicious or has just signed up (its free). Part II will follow, though a continuation, it is aimed at the more experienced web user who’s interested in developing the way they use Delicious to make the most of this excellent service and the extras that have been made available.

“Del.icio.us?… Social Bookmarking?… pfft! What’s all the fuss about?”

continue reading How to: Del.icio.us Part 1