Hacksar

If you’ve ever found yourself on a computer that doesn’t belong to you, you’ve probably had the lost feeling of not having all of your favorite programs at your fingertips. If you are trying to work with images, Microsoft Paint just doesn’t cut it; you need the real powerhouse of image editors: Photoshop. You have the software at home, but that may not mean you have it on every computer. Also, you most likely don’t have administrator priviledges on this alien computer, so you can’t even install your own copy of… whatever.

That’s where Portable Apps come in. For those of you wondering what a Portable App is, let me just say, they are one of the best creations for all computers. A portable application is a program that has the ability to run straight from one file, without any installation. They can even be run directly off of a USB flash drive, eliminating all needs for installation and admin rights.

Now, you may recall that Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 is not only a powerhouse image editing program, but the full installed version runs at a whopping  MB. So, you may think that you can never use this wonderful piece of software on any computer other than where it’s natively installed. Guess again. Keep reading to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 as a portable application straight from your flash drive, with no installation required.

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Does the clutter of the taskbar below look familiar to you?

If you’re anything like me, your taskbar probably is constantly cluttered. I find that whenever I’m working on some intense project (whether it’s making a website or just some research paper), my taskbar seems to just explode with various programs. They’re all different programs, so I can’t even group them; eventually, it becomes difficult to even read what file is open where, so sometimes even just alt-tabbing to the right program becomes difficult. Many times, you don’t need all of the programs at the same time, but they still need to be running. (The classic example is iTunes, or whatever music player you use. You don’t actually look at the program if it’s on random shuffle all, but it still needs to be running.)

Thankfully, there’s an incredibly light program called TrayIt! that lets you minimize any program to the system tray. (That’s the little set of icons found next to the clock in the bottom right of Windows.) Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to set up and use this cool program.

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So, you’ve heard about this thing called “BitTorrent”, and have no idea what it is. You want to download various things, such as songs, software, movies, tv shows, etc, but don’t know how to get started. Here’s a detailed guide on how to get BitTorrent savvy in just a few minutes.

BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol, but you don’t need to concern yourself with how it works. What you do need to know, however, is how to use BitTorrent. To use it, you need a BitTorrent client. This guide will be using the client uTorrent (v 1.8.2), a free, open-source client that many people say is the most secure, lightest, and easiest client out there.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.
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