Opera announced today that they have crossed the 300m users mark. The browser has seen an increasing adoption amongst users across all its platforms. I’ve been using Opera for several years now at a time when it was ad-supported. It’s not my primary browser because I miss the extensive extension support that Firefox and Chrome provide, but it is a good alternative. Till now Opera has been using Presto as the rendering engine. However, this is something that they have been dedicating tremendous resources to maintain and in order to grow, Opera has decided to adopt Webkit and focus its…

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You’ve bought yourself a super fast computer with a tonne of RAM, running the latest processor and you’ve been happy about this. A few months later the super fast computer is no longer super fast. If you’re running 4GBor more RAM, this is where a software like RAMDisk can help. RAMDisk will help you create a RAM disk using your existing memory. A RAM disk, or RAM drive is software that creates a block of main memory made up of DRAM chips on DIMM modules (volatile memory) to unlock the full potential of your available system RAM.  The computer uses…

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During my regular work, I tend to face repeated issues of Excel hanging. This can be really frustrating because a stuck Excel means a painful wait for Windows to figure out what it wants to do with the process. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do about this because it is mainly due to addons that I have installed in Excel, which are required for me to do my job coupled with large files with tens of sheets and hundreds of rows with data. In this scenario, the method that most Windows users do is open up Task Manager and…

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I purchased a Dell laptop in early 2010 and getting drivers from Dell for laptops that old is impossible. On the bright side, there are other laptop manufacturers, like Gateway, who have maintained up to date drivers. I upgraded to Windows 8 around a month back and as part of the process, I had to uninstall my incompatible touchpad drivers. The result was that over the past month I have missed even the simple scroll on my touchpad. After a good amount of hunting, I came across this post in the Windows 8 Forums. These drivers are released by Gateway…

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A few hours back WhatsApp started throwing up an Error: status unavailable for all contacts. This was sufficient to trigger mass panic of users addicted to the popular messaging service and this has brought back several variations of the year old hoax chain message. As you can see below is the error message for my profile. The same error message is displayed for all my contacts. I’ve seen four different chain messages sent by people who really believe that sending them will make them permanent users! Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, the use of WhatsApp…

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The Skype team today released a preview of the Skype for Windows Phone 8 app. Available for download in the Windows store. In this Preview, you’ll get all of the Skype basics in the new, modern design along with many of the new features such as integration with the People Hub and a combined contact list with buddies from Windows Live Messenger. Plus, you’ll start receiving some call and message notifications – even when the app is closed and in the background. Features: Call friends and family with free Skype to Skype voice calls over 3G* or WiFi Make free…

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If you’re regularly blogging, or even just writing, it is important to maximise your speed of typing. Learning touch typing is an important step towards improving productivity. However, if you’re not an expert at touch typing, or would like to speed up still further, then using an autotext software is a very good solution. PhraseExpress, the Text Expander for Windows, helps you to speed up your typing tasks in any editor by saving lots of keystrokes. It is ideal for people who are continually typing the same things over and over, reducing the time spent typing and minimising spelling mistakes….

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For a brief period of time I had an account with Amazon S3, which I mainly used as a test for a project I was working on. The biggest problem I faced then and which is still prevalent is the ability to easily use the interface to move files to and fro your computer. DragonDisk makes file management simple if you’re using Amazon S3® or Google Cloud Storage®, or any other S3 API compatible service. DragonDisk allows you to backup, share and organize your data thanks to an intuitive interface similar to Windows Explorer or Finder.  Key features: Full fledged file…

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If you find yourself frequently loading your iPod or Blackberry or any other portable device with audio and videos from CDs or DVDs, you’ll find the need for a multimedia converter. Format Factory is a free Windows audio, video and photo converter that supports a large range of formats for encoding and ripping. The software a wide range of multimedia formats including conversion to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF and MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV. You can rip movies from DVDs and save them into these formats ready to be loaded onto your portable device. It also allows you to convert your image files to and from JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA,…

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Way back in 2008, I wrote about using SUMPRODUCT to duplicate the functionality of SUMIFS which was introduced in Microsoft Excel 2007. SUMPRODUCT is a powerful excel function and is more commonly used to multiply two arrays. Let’s first understand the syntax of SUMPRODUCT. If you’re impatient, you can skip the tutorial and download the sample excel file from the end of this post. It contains solved examples with the related formulae. We’ll be using the following table in the example. Syntax: SUMPRODUCT(array1,array2,array3, …) Array1, array2, array3, …     are 2 to 255 arrays whose components you want to multiply and…

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