Windows only: Most laptop owners have experienced the frustrations of an unpredictable cursor when your wrist grazes the touchpad. Free, open-source utility TouchFreeze disables your touchpad as soon as you start typing, re-enables it when you stop.

Photo by AlishaV

Although you can always go to your Control Panel and then to Mouse Properties to disable your touchpad the long way, it still means you have to turn it back on when you'd like to use it. TouchFreeze makes things a little easier, and as long as you're not doing any heavy photo editing that might necessitate the simultaneous use of the touch pad and keys, this should be a winner of a program for you.

TouchFreeze sits in your system tray and simply turns off the touchpad when you start typing. It's a dead simple, free, and open-source program that works with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7.

TouchFreeze [via Addictive Tips]

via Lifehacker

In my quest to soil my Mac Pro for the sake of science, I decided to install Windows 7 via BootCamp yesterday. One thing that I felt was a necessity was read and write access to both systems from either system. Snow Leopard has NTFS read support out of the box, but in order to enable write support you must get out the chicken bones and voodo stick.

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name” and copy the Volume UUID (bunch of numbers).
3. Backup /etc/fstab if you have it, shouldn’t be there in a default install.
4. Type “sudo nano /etc/fstab”.
5. Type in “UUID=paste_the_uuid_here none ntfs rw” or “LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw” (if you don’t have UUID for the disk).
6. Repeat for other NTFS partitions.
7. Save the file (ctrl-x then y) and restart your system.

And that’s it!

[UPDATE]

After a few days of running with NTFS write support using Boot Camp, I started to experience random lock ups and program crashes. My Mac became completely unresponsive at times. Especially when running Disk Utility permission repairs.

If this happens to you, I suggest removing, or renaming /etc/fstab

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “sudo rm -f /etc/fstab” to remove fstab, or “sudo mv -f /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak” to rename it.

Our personal computers are like fine automobiles—they need preventive maintenance to run efficiently and avoid major breakdowns.

The following tips can help improve your computer’s performance. These examples use Microsoft Windows XP. Some of the screens may differ from version to version, but overall you’ll find these tips work for all versions of Windows, including Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition (Me), Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

By the way, in no way can you blow up your computer or files with any of these procedures. These tasks use utilities provided within the Windows operating systems to aid you in achieving the best system performance. This article does not address tinkering with the registry files.