Ever since the release of the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry, and having these two products take over the smartphone world, Microsoft has been a little behind with its smartphones. However, with the new release of the upcoming version of “Mango,” this will hopefully bring Microsoft into the forefront with its two main competitors. This new release plans to be unveiled before the 2011 Christmas season, which will help boost the advertising of the various devices it will be released with.

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Windows XP is a great and classic operating system; however, through the years with its heavy usage, the performance of the operating system may seem to be somewhat sluggish due to the many files and technologies we install as software progresses. If you have a lot of files on your computer, and constantly perform searches to look for your files (whether they are Microsoft Office documents, MP3s, or even small text files), you may be slowing down your Windows XP operating system without knowing it. With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to a simple housekeeping step that you can use to speed up your OS.

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I ripped a bunch of audio CDs in Windows Media Player and now want to convert them from “.wma” format to “.mp3″ format so they’re more compatible with my various audio players and devices. Is there an easy way to convert wma to mp3 in Windows?
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Every time I double-click on a .JPG image in Windows 7, I find that it opens up the wrong program. I don’t want Photoshop, I want MS Paint to open because I almost always just want to scale or trim the photo. How can I change the default program?

Dave’s Answer:
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When you are performing maintenance on a Windows-based PC, you always want to have a set of tools that will help you acheive the goal that you have in mind; however, sometimes the case may be that prior to diagnosing the Windows PC you are about to work on, you do not know what tools you will need to fix the obstacle course in front of you. With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to a software CD that has always helped me in times of trial, and it has acted as a Swiss army knife-like tool for the computing world. This CD that I am referring to is called Hiren’s Boot CD.

This quality CD (available from Hiren & Pankaj’s website) offers many tools for any troubleshooting scenario that you can think of. For this edition of WindowsDailyNews, I would like to bring your attention to some of the most commonly used tools that I employ when I need to utilize Hiren’s Boot CD, and I have provided a list of these tools below so that you can get a snapshot of how useful this CD is.

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Have you ever upgraded your operating system or computer before and had to perform the cumbersome task of re-entering ALL of the passwords to your favorite websites? If so, and if you are a Mozilla Firefox user, you do not have to go through this dawnting task anymore!

To avoid having to re-enter all of your passwords after your upgrade, I would like to bring your attention to a Mozilla Firefox addon called Password Exporter. This handy addon easily installs into your Firefox addon list by clicking on the green “Add to Firefox” link located on its listing page via Mozilla.org.

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In some situations, there may be an instance where you will need to network various Windows-based machines together to gain network/internet access. Windows XP provides an easy way to perform this by using a method called Internet Connection Sharing. If you are unsure of how to set up Internet Connection Sharing, please follow the steps in the tutorial that I have provided below.

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For reasons that I can’t figure out, my Windows 7 laptop thinks that everything’s fine with the sound system, but I can’t actually hear anything when I try to play music or watch videos on YouTube. Is there some easy way to diagnose these sort of sound or audio problems on Win7?

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This blog is a great place to find content-rich news pertaining to all distributions of the Microsoft Windows operating system; however, if there is something that you cannot find here on the WindowsDailyNews Blog, you may want to try browsing our quality WindowsDailyNews Directory.

This link directory contains unique user-submitted websites that are organized by Windows-related categories of which I have provided some examples of below:

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If you use various workstations at one time from your Windows PC and multitask between the two, this blog post is for you. When working with multiple workstations, you are forced to work with multiple keyboards and mice to interact with these workstations, which clutter your desk and make things difficult and confusing. One solution to this is to use a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) unit, which can be quite cumbersome, because you always have to manually select the other workstation that you want to use. With this in mind and to make life simpler, I would like to bring the application of Synergy to your attention.

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