Kiran Upadhyay

Windows 7’s  Homegroup  feature makes sharing printers on your local network easy, but what if you want to share a printer over the Internet? This has traditionally been very complicated, involving print drivers, firewall rules and IP addresses. Google Cloud Print, built into Google Chrome, simplifies online printer sharing. We’ve written about using  PrinterShare  to share printers in the past, but Google Cloud Print is a much easier alternative. After you share your printer with someone, they can print to it from their web browser – you can even print to your own printer from a browser if you’re away from your computer. Setting Up Cloud Print You’ll need the  Google Chrome  web browser installed to set up Cloud Print. After it’s installed, launch it and open its  Options  page. Click over to the  Under the Hood  tab and scroll down; you’ll find the  Google Cloud Print  option hidden near the bottom. Clic...

Whether or not you are a fan of Microsoft, one good thing that can be said about MS Office products, at least, is how easy it is to integrate each of them with one another. Just think of the power that comes from having incoming emails automatically generating new tasks or new calendar appointments, or having a completed task automatically email your boss with the updated status report from the task description. If you do it right, you can cut your entire day’s workload by a boatload just by automating things in an intelligent and efficient way. If you follow my writing here, then you know that in the past I’ve covered things like integrating web browser features into Excel, automatically maximizing application windows, or automating chart updates in Excel. Well, in this article I’m going to cover another automation task – actually one that I’ve used often more recently – to automatically update an Excel spreadsheet with all of your remaining active Outlook tas...

Chrome 17 has just been released, offering pre-rendered web pages and malware protection. If you’re a Google Chrome user (and haven’t blocked automatic updates) you’re now using version 17 of the browser. As is typical for Chrome, the update doesn’t add any drastic changes, but it does include a few new features. Most noticeable of these is pre-rendering. When you enter a URL into the omnibox and it auto-completes, Chrome will begin to load that site before you press enter. If you’re on a fast connection the page might seem to appear instantly because it has been rendered before you were done typing the URL. I’m a Chrome user myself, so I took this feature on a test drive. It works as advertised. Sites will sometimes load instantly. Your connection speed will determine how well this feature works for you. The other feature added by Chrome 17 is protection from files that contain malware. Whenever you download a file the browser will check it against a list of k...

After what seems like forever, Google Music is finally out of beta. The program has been invite-only for some time, but now it is available to everyone. One fear many users had was that Google would charge once the service went public, but it appears as though those fears were groundless, because users can still upload up to 20,000 songs for free. To sign up to Google Music, simply head to  music.google.com  and log in with your Google account. Users will need to download the Google music program on their computer and at the moment, you must be resident in the United States. If a user has an enormous music collection it will take a while to upload, but once it does, users will be ready to listen to all of their favorite music anywhere they want. In addition to going public, Google has also added a music store on the  Android market . Their music store offers more than 13 million tracks. Music can...

Firefox has been steadily losing ground to Chrome and Opera in the past few years. I find this sad, as Mozilla were groundbreakers at the time and rescued us all from an IE-only world. I, myself, switched to Chrome a while back, but now that  Firefox 8  is out, I decided to give it another chance. But Firefox is not perfect (it’s OK, neither is Chrome). So why not make it better? Here are 5 excellent add-ons, which when combined, will revolutionize your Firefox experience. You can, of course, try only one or two, you’re still bound to feel the difference. Mar Mod Mar Mod probably deserves an entire article of its own. This is an enhancement add-on that tweaks so many things, it might take you a while to remember all that it’s doing. Remember or not, you will feel the difference right away. Just from this screenshot you can see that the orange menu has turned into a nice icon, a  “Restart ” option has been added to the menu, along with a new “ Addons ” menu wh...

When it comes to keeping your website or your blog healthy and strong in search engine listings, regularly checking for broken or otherwise bad links on your website is a very good idea. Not only is it good for your site’s overall standings in search listings, it’s also good for your visitors. No one wants to encounter broken links on a site – it’s a sign of a poorly cared for website. Then again, regularly checking your site for bad links can be a tedious chore. We’ve covered a few tools here at MUO that can help you stay on top of things if you have the time, like Ann’s article on  Xenu Link Sleuth , and Saikat’s article on  Hyperlink Checker . Those are good solutions, but again, they require your time. Checking for bad links takes work. A better solution would be to set up an automated script on your own server (or any computer connected to the Internet) to check your website for bad links and then issue a report with all of the results. Better yet, schedule it to ...

A lot of times when you need to get something done on your computer and think that perhaps there’s a program that can do it for you, you most likely go to your favorite search engine and research away. By the time you’re an expert looking for the best free software, you might find yourself a fan of freeware, so you might even look forward to receiving updates on cool new programs. Sound familiar? Looking for software online has actually become easier these days. Do you want to see a comparison of all similar software for a specific task? There’s an app for that. Do you want to see all alternatives to a specific program? There’s an app for that too. You probably knew this from using the many rich repositories of software available on  FileHippo, SourceForge, etc . However, there are other more recently developed applications with interesting approaches to listing software that might just help you find what you need quickly and painlessly. Use  CatchFree  To Compare...