Soft District

I hope you enjoyed the last trick related to the Windows clock, because today I have a new one. This time, you won't learn how to display more clocks, and probably some people would consider having a custom time format useless, but for those that enjoy having a nickname written all over their operating system, adding "George"or "Paul" to their time could be vital, so here it goes...


As you can see above, the default time format has nothing special to it, since you can choose the 24 hours display mode, or the AM/PM one. Today's trick is more interesting if you are using this last format, and you'll see why right away...

- Press the Start Orb, and type "regio" to find the Regional and Language Options applet. If you really have time to waste, you can also go to Control Panel>Clock, Language and Region>Regional and Language Options, but I don't advise you to do it this way...

- In the Formats tab, left click on Customize this format.

- Add short strings for AM and PM hours. Unfortunately, you won't be able to add "Good morning, John" or "Good night, Jane", because there is a limit of about 8 characters, if I am not wrong (enough to say that I wasn't able to use "SoftDistrict" as my string...)

- Check the results I got on my computer. Pretty cool, isn't it?

If you are using the 24 hours format, then you'll only be able to add one string, but I am sure that if you consider this trick interesting, switching to the AM/PM time format isn't such a hard step to take. I hope you will enjoy this, and if something doesn't work, be sure to drop me a comment, I'll be more than happy to help you!

Search engine optimization, usually called simply SEO, is "the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines", but most people think it takes a specialist to do this for them, and SEO experts are not cheap at all...

While this is usually true, sometimes you can grab a software to do this, and Web CEO is one of the most notorious software applications in this field. Obviously, I tell you all this because I have just found out about a new release of this program, so here you go...


The list of new tools in this program includes the Dashboard, a new way to check your site's statistics, enhanced site map generation and submission to search engines, more indicators of keyword popularity, an improved e-mail delivery system, as well as easier and more flexible settings for the built in task scheduler.

Until the 17th of November, you can take advantage of a time limited offer and purchase Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed for $149, instead of $339, and Web CEO Professional Unleashed, for $249, way down from a regular price of $479.

To download a free edition of this program, go to this page. You will be able to upgrade it to one of the commercial editions after a while, but be sure to do this before November 17th, so you can take advantage of the promotional prices I mentioned above!

As it happens with a lot of hardware items, hard drives are not usually used to their full potential by the operating system, when using the default settings. Obviously, I am talking about Windows Vista and the recent drives using the Serial ATA interface.

How is the above possible? Well, while Vista comes with built-in support for these drives, it only enables write caching, but advanced write caching features available only for SATA devices are not enabled.


As you probably figured it out already, I'll show you how to enable these features in Vista, speeding up your hard drive (unfortunately, you won't be able to speed up older drives that use the Parallel ATA interface).

- Press the Windows key+R, type "devmgmt.msc" and press Enter to open the Device Manager. If you want to follow the long way, then go to Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Device Manager, and you'll achieve the same result...

- Once the Device Manager opens, expand the Disk drives section and right click to bring up the context menu, then click on Properties.

- In the Device Properties window that appears, check Enable advanced performance in the Policies tab, and then press OK.

You can disregard the warning shown in the Policies tab, below the Enable advanced performance option, but be sure to backup your data on a regular basis, because with or without this feature enabled, data loss can occur, in case of power outage. Good luck and may you get a hard drive even faster than before!