How many tips and articles have you read about getting the most usage out of your laptop battery? Probably a lot.

Now, that's not to say the tips are not useful, because they are. It's just that after all the tweaking and disabling of devices to conserve power when using the battery, you will eventually need to plug the power cord back in and return to normal usage.

But what happens to all those tweaks and disabled devices after you plug in the power cord?

Nothing. Their still tweaked and disabled.

And unless you have a photographic memory or diligently documented every tweak and disabled device, it's could be a long road back to making everything work again.

Or you can just make things a whole lot easier and use hardware profiles that you can boot into those settings when you really need to conserve power.

read more: Optimize Laptop Battery Usage In Windows XP Using Hardware Profiles

Out of office replies, often termed "OOF" for Out Of Facility or "vacation auto-responders" are those automated replies to email when the recipient is away for some period of time.

The returned message typically states that a) they're away from their office/home/whatever and won't be checking email, b) the dates for which that will be the case, and hopefully c) an alternate point of contact for the duration of their absence.

It seems like such a good idea. It can even be quite helpful if you're attempting to contact that person while they're away.

Unfortunately the problems with out of office replies have come to far outweigh the benefits.

read more: Out Of Office? Don't Advertise It

If you are one of those unlucky people who seem to have more trouble since upgrading Firefox to version 3, you probably experienced more crashes than the entire time you ran version 2.x.

And it seems there is no light at the end of the tunnel with the latest security update to version 3.01.

read more: How To View Crash Reports In Firefox 3

With many innovations being made to today's PC's hardware, laptops and desktops have become much smaller and lighter. But one drawback to that light weight convenience is heat.

Computers today can pack more processing power in a much smaller and denser space, if you don't keep them cool, you can pretty much guarantee a hardware failure will occur.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to keep tabs on hardware temperature using a free utility called CPUID.

read more: Windows Tip - Monitor Your Hardware Temperature With HWMonitor

Have you ever wondered if someone has access to your GMail account? Or worse, you can't remember if you logged off your GMail account after checking email on a public computer?

Not knowing if someone has access to your email account can be stressful enough just wondering if your personal information has been stolen, or worse your identity.

Up until now, the only defense to keeping your GMail account safe was to change your password frequently. But that has changed. Google, has added another layer of security that let you track recent sessions (activity) by displaying the IP addresses of the computers that accessed you GMail account.

And for those times that you can't remember if you logged off, you can also sign yourself out remotely so you can quickly change your password.

read more: How To Find Out If Someone Has Access Your GMail Account

Nothing can be more frustrating than having a problem with your Computer. Not knowing the exact cause of the problem can be even more frustrating as you spend hours searching around the Internet only to find incomplete answers that may or may not fix the problem.

You know the kind of problems that drive you nuts, CPU spikes bogging down performance at unexpected times, memory leaks sucking up available memory, hard drive constantly thrashing and slowing your computer down to a crawl, disk space disappearing into thin air and no where to be found, start up times taking forever than your patience can handle. I'm sure there is plenty more than what I can list here.

Many of you have down that road where you either bite the bullet and take it to a repair shop (knowing it's going to cost you an arm and a leg) or you just live with the annoying problem day after day, reboot after reboot.

Then there's always the least desirable fix, starting all over and reinstall Windows (no thanks).

In reality, many computer problems can simply be found with proper diagnostics that pin point the problem and make finding a solution much easier.

And that's exactly what the repair shops do. The only difference with the repair shop and you, are the tools they use.

read more: How To Troubleshoot And Fix Common Windows Problems

For many Windows users who made the jump to Ubuntu, using Nautilus file manager to manage documents, files and directories (folders) will probably be one of the primary application most used.

And just like using Windows Explorer, you'll want to know all the shortcuts available when using Nautilus, One of them being 'Open as administrator'.

By default this feature is not installed during installation, but you can quickly add it to Nautilus right click menu in no time.

read more: Ubuntu Tips For Windows Users: Add Open As Administrator To Nautilus Right Click Menu

Not everyone who uses Windows is a tech geek. But for the average Windows computer person, the time will come when you need to put on your geek hat and open up….the command prompt.

Working with the command prompt is really not that difficult. especially when you know some of the cool tricks. And just like finding windows tips for leaning how to use Windows graphical interface, all it takes is finding similar tips for the command prompt to get you past the learning curve.

To help get you started, here are seven tricks that will make using the command prompt a lot easier.

read more: 7 Tricks To Make Working With Windows Command Prompt Easier