Welcome to the Newsletter (March 2009):

1. Organise Your Desktop Icons - Free Software
2. Speed up your Internet Connection (especially dialup) with OnSpeed
3. Hotmail - POP3 Access is now Free!

Organise Your Windows Desktop With "Fences"

This is the best program I've seen for months and it's Free!

I see a lot of Windows installations when I'm repairing computers and the DeskTop of the vast majority is a disorganised mixture of files, shortcuts, programs, downloads and folders. It's a wonder that anything is ever found! I recommend a lot of programs on my site and in my newsletters but I believe that this little beauty is one of the best because within 2 minutes of clicking the link your Desktop icons will be organised and you will never waste time hunting for something again.

The program is called Fences. I take a good deal of care with the arrangement of my icons and keep them to a minimum but this tool organised them instantly into Links, Programs, Files, Folders and Recent 'things'. 'Fences' creates small blocks for your icons where you can group them together in a titled, "fenced-in" space. All theses fences are fully editable and movable (size and position) and you can create your own. Ultimately, Fences makes your workspace more workable!

The first thing you need to do is go to the Fences download page and the installation is quick and painless. At the end of the installation you will be asked if you want to choose a predefined layout or create your own fences. Either way is simple. If you click the predefined method, you will then be given a few possible layout choices. Choose the one that best suits your needs to complete the installation.

Faster Surfing with OnSpeed

I go to many customers who have a dialup connection and are unable to get ADSL or broadband. Trying to find anything on line or book flights etc is slow and frustrating. I have installed or recommended OnSpeed. It isn't free: it costs £25 a year which is just over 2 Euros a month. You will benefit by using OnSpeed if you have a connection speed of up to (and including 1mb).

If you are charged by the MB to download from the Internet then you will also benefit because of the compression that is used - less data = less £s!

You may well have heard of ONSPEED before – it has been around for a while. It has a 14 day money back guarantee so there is nothing to lose really. I used it for my first year here on my 1mb ADSL connection until I had my high speed connection installed.

Here is a link to the website where you can download “ONSPEED” to improve the speed of your surfing by up to 10x which makes dialup as fast as most broadband connections and increases broadband connection performance as well. It really does make a difference. To download go to their website. You will also see a link to OnSpeed on the right hand side of my website amongst other software / services that I recommend.

It is easy to install. These are the instructions from the website:

Three simple steps to speed up any existing Internet connection – including Dial-up, Broadband and Mobile connections:

1. Pay securely online - just £25 for a 12-month subscription of ONSPEED.
2. Download the ONSPEED software from the link given once your purchase has been confirmed.
3. Set up ONSPEED by following the easy steps in the auto-installation wizard. ONSPEED takes less than 2 minutes to set up from start to finish.

ONSPEED offers a 14-day money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied.
Your payment details are sent over a secure connection.

It works by reducing the amount of information downloaded by compressing it first and then decompresses it on your PC. Believe it or not, it is faster to compress, send and decompress than it is to just send. It also displays pages intelligently – for instance, the quality of pictures improves as the page loads so that you see all the text and a low resolution pictures immediately which means you can probably see all you need to see and be on another page in less time than it previously took just to download the page.

If you give it a try and you don’t see a significant improvement you can always cancel within the 14 days.

Hotmail - POP3 Available At Last - For Free!! - Again

This is really good news! If you want to use Outlook and Outlook Express (and other email clients on your computer) then this is a good day! When Hotmail and MSN email were first introduced you could access your emails using POP3 at no cost. Micorsoft then decided that you couldn't live without POP3 access and so made it available at a cost - you had to upgrade your free account to a paid account!

Well - No more! Competition from the likes of GoogleMail (my favourite free email and still recommended before MSN and Hotmail) has forced a change of heart!

Here are the settings you need:

1. You will need your hotmail email address and password
2. Enter pop3.live.com for the Incoming mail server
3. Enter smtp.live.com for the Outgoing mail server
4. Make sure that both cases of "This server requires a secure connection (SSL)" are checked.
5. The server port numbers should be 25 for SMTP, and 995 for POP3.
6. Under "Outgoing Mail Server" make sure that "My server requires authentication" is checked.

And that's it. How you put these settings in your email client will vary but this is the important information.

Final Word

As always, I encourage anyone with a comment, suggestion, question, idea, criticism or inspiration to contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Please also see The Inland Magazine Computer Problems Forum if you have a specific IT problem.

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