DriveLocker: Hide Any Hard Drive Partition on Your Computer

I have partitioned my hard drive into 2 parts: C and D. C, as is normally, is dedicated for installation files and such. My D drive is dedicated to songs and all types of personal files. Since I often have friends over who use my computer, I was looking for a way to hide my personal drive from them. I need a way to hide my D drive. And that way was excellently provided by DriveLocker.

DriveLocker is a wonderful program for Windows computers that hides any hard drive partition of your choice. Through the images and description below, you will see how it works.

First of all, you will need to download the program’s ZIP archive that is only 23KB large. Then you will need to extract the executable within this archive. Opening this EXE file will run the program, no installation will be required. This is what the program looked like on my computer:

Initially both drives will be unchecked. This means that I can view both my drives listed under “My Computer”.

To hide my D drive, I selected the corresponding drive in the DriveLocker program and clicked on the “Apply” button.

The result of this was exactly what I wanted. My D drive was hidden when the “My Computer” folder was opened.

You can see that the D drive is absent from the Folder view on the side as well. This completes the hiding the process.

To make the hard drive reappear, simply unselect the D drive in the program, click on the “Apply” button and reboot your computer.

Note that by hiding a drive through DriveLocker, you are simply hiding it and not locking it. In other words, when my D drive was hidden it was still accessible by other programs. It only appeared to be absent to the average computer users. This is a major advantage as it does not disrupt the performance of programs that need files stored in the D drive.

[Download DriveLocker]

Lost Emails From Gmail Inbox ? You Are Not Alone.

If you are a Gmail user and suddenly find that a lot of email messages or past conversations are missing from your Gmail inbox, here is something very important.

The other day one of my friends sent me a message on Facebook that all his emails at Gmail have suddenly disappeared from his inbox. He is able to login to his inbox but all the past conversations, sent mails, archived messages as well as attachments were missing. It appeared as if someone has completely wiped out everything from his Gmail inbox, as the email account appeared to be a fresh Gmail account with nothing in it.

First I thought that his Gmail account has been compromised and someone else has successfully logged into his Gmail account and deleted all the emails, sent mails, chat logs, attachments and everything else. But reports are coming in that hundreds of thousands of other Gmail users are facing the same situation – lost emails in Gmail, ZERO Inbox.

The Gmail support forum witnessed similar concerns from users across the globe. Some example messages from the Gmail forum thread:

I logged in and everything was gone. I’m now trying to fill out that form and I must say it’s hard to recall exactly when I started using Gmail! Tell me if you get everything back. I’d hate to start all over again.

I am using Google Apps Free Edition though. I was on my email normal and when I refreshed all my account settings, email, labels, contacts etc has just disappeared. I was running at 80% capacity is that anything to do with it? Is there a way that one can restore all of that?

The point is that affected Gmail users are able to send and receive new messages but the earlier conversations are simply not there. While none of my Gmail or Google Apps accounts were affected because of this technical glitch, this is indeed an alarming situation for web workers and folks who have stored hundreds of thousands of important messages in their Gmail inbox.

One Google employee responded quickly to the message thread and updated their App status dashboard with some crucial information.

Update 1: Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by February 28, 2011 3:50:00 AM UTC+5:30 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

This issue affects less than .29% of the Google Mail user base.

Update 2: Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

This issue affects less than 0.08% of the Google Mail user base. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users will be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts.

Hence, it appears that this is definitely one of the major technical glitch Gmail has faced over the years. More than 500,000 Gmail users have been affected by this technical Glitch, and Google is working to fix the issue and bring back the lost emails to your Gmail inbox.

There is nothing you can do here, your account wasn’t hacked or compromised in any way. Be rest assured that this is a technical fault and your Gmail account is safe and protected from any unauthorized access. Google Engineers are currently working to fix the issue and we are waiting from an update from their side.

However, it might be wise to setup a secondary email account at Windows Live mail or Yahoo and autoforward all the incoming emails from Gmail to those secondary accounts. Your secondary account will come in handy, when you can’t find that particular email in Gmail or when Gmail is down or experiencing technical problems.

How to Autoforward Emails to Multiple Email Addresses in Gmail

Sometimes you may want to forward emails from an account to other email addresses you have. Do you know that you can automatically forward emails from Gmail to multiple email addresses using filters. Here is a brief tutorial which works with Gmail as well as Google Apps accounts.

Automatically Forward Emails to only one Email address

1. Log in to your Gmail account and go to “Settings”. Click the “Forwarding and Pop/IMAP tab.

2. Select the radio button that says “Forward a copy of incoming mail to”. Enter the email address where you want to forward the incoming emails.

3. Hit “Save changes” and you are done.

Now all the emails sent to this email address will be automatically forwarded to the email address you specified above. Read this guide if you want to receive all incoming emails in desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook.

Automatically Forward All Emails to Multiple Email addresses

Gmail and Google apps do not support forwarding emails to multiple email addresses. However forwarding to multiple email addresses can be achieved by using a Gmail filter as described below:

1. Login to Gmail, click “Settings” and go to the “Filters” tab.

2. Click “Create a new Filter” and you will be shown something like the following:

3. Enter the current email address in the To: field.

4. Click “Next Step” and enter the email address where you wish to auto forward all the messages.

5. Hit the “Create Filter” button and you are done. Now all the emails received in this email address will be automatically forwarded to the second email address.

Quick PDF to Manage your PDF Files in a Better Way

PDF files are always been an important part of everybody’s life. There are many PDF managing tools available, but most of them are unable to give their best shot. Here comes Quick PDF, a superb tool that lets you manage your PDF files in every possible ways. It basically works from within Windows Explorer. It’s a handy tool that allows you to do more with your PDF files than just look at them.

Key Features

• Preview PDF files.
• Convert almost any image to and from PDF
• Edit Attachments (Attach, Remove, Edit).
• Edit PDF layout and magnification.
• Edit PDF properties (Title, Author, Subject and Keywords).
• Edit document restrictions.
• Extract bookmarks to a text file.
• Extract formfields and form field data.
• Extract CSV formatted text with data.
• Extract embedded images to disk.
• Split/Merge selected PDF files.

Once Quick PDF is installed, it will appear in the Windows context menu. Just right-click on a PDF to access Quick PDF Tools. You can preview the file without opening a separate PDF viewer, edit the file’s metadata, convert it to an image or text document, edit bookmarks, extract text and images, add passwords, and more. You can access all these features from the comfort of the shell menu from your Windows Explorer.

You can edit custom metadata, add and edit attachments, add and remove JavaScript. It comes with an online Help file that provides complete description of the program’s capabilities. Quick PDF is available in free and professional editions. Quick PDF is compatible with Windows 2K / XP / 2003 / Vista / 7.

Download Quick PDF

How to Use the Excel VLOOKUP Function for a Range of Unknown Size

If these are the only products we will ever stock, or if the catalogue only grows very occasionally, then that is ok. We can edit the sheets and formulas as and when required. But what if we are adding new products often?

Thankfully there is a smart way that we can still use VLOOKUP but with a dynamic range. How do we do that? Read on…

VLOOKUP with Named Ranges

Ordinarily when we use VLOOKUP we specify a precise range, such as =VLOOKUP(A2,A2:C10,3) where the range is from A2 to C10. Obviously if we were to add a new product we would need to make it C11 and so on, every time our product list changed.

The first step in simplifying this is to instead use a “named range”. So rather than A2:C10 we would use the name “product”.

Select the area of cells that you wish to name and click Define Name in the Name Manager.

Then supply the name you wish to use, checking that the range is correct.

This approach now transforms our VLOOKUP to look like VLOOKUP(A2,Product,3) etc. Changing the range then would be simply done centrally in the Name Manager.

Dynamic Named Ranges

We don’t want to have to keep going into Name Manager though. Ideally we want it to “self correct” and just work. The good news is a solution does exist.

When we create the named range, instead of a straight forward range, instead we use a formula.

=OFFSET(‘Product List’!$A$1,1,0,COUNTA(‘Product List’!$A:$A)-1,3)
The OFFSET function asks for a row count, but we can even dynamically supply this by using the COUNTA function. Any time we add products this count will increase, giving us our dynamic range.

Summary

A standard VLOOKUP is a great way to speed up your data entry but requires you to edit your formulas or at least the named ranges. Making your named ranges dynamic by using a formula to select the range allows you to focus purely on the data entry, leaving Excel to worry about where your lookups are pointing.

Facebook PDF Creator & Facebook PDF Converter Apps

These days most of the internet users have a Facebook account. Every brand has its own Facebook page. Many people spend much time on Facebook when they are on the web. When you are on Facebook, you come across many PDF files that you want to convert to DOc. In this article I present Facebook PDF Creator and Facebook PDF converter apps. You can use these apps to convert PDF files into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, or vice versa.

Click here to get started with PDF Creator. Once you are in the page, you’ll be prompted to allow PDF Creator access to your email, Facebook Wall, and other data on your system. Click the “Allow” button and PDF creator will access your files. This app has a neat interface without any fancy buttons or options. You can easily convert Word, PPT, and other documents to PDF format. Simply select the file from the browsing window on the main interface, in order to convert it to PDF format. Instantly the files will be converted and stored in a folder named, “Your recently Uploaded Files”.

Click here to get started with Facebook PDF converter. Once you are in, again you’ll find a clean interface. Here you can convert PDF files to Word document. You can send/receive PDF files to/from others. After converting the PDF files to Word format, you can easily edit it.