Remember when cell phones were just for making telephone calls? We use today’s smartphones for much, much more. They function as tiny held-hand computers that browse the web, send and receive e-mail, create and view documents of all kinds, and run a myriad of apps that can do everything from lighting up the night to reading and interpreting the barcodes on products.

Some of us could probably get along just fine with a data plan and no voice minutes at all, if our carriers would let us. It’s easy to forget that the primary purpose of a phone is to make, receive, and manage actual phone calls. But the nice thing is that the software on today’s phones — both the built-in features and the apps we install — can make them much more functional as phones in addition to all those other functions. In this article, we’ll look at how you can make the “phone” part of your smartphone work better for you.

Block unwanted calls

Whether it’s a “zombie” bill collector who thinks your number belongs to someone on his debtor list and you’re just covering for the deadbeat, a not-so-secret admirer whose affections you don’t return, a recurrent wrong number, or someone else whose calls you prefer not to take, the ability to block unwanted calls is a big benefit of today’s technology. Carriers often offer this service, but you might have to pay an extra monthly fee for it. Instead, you can install an app to give you the same capability, for only a small one-time price.

One such app is Call Guard ($2.99 USD), for Android 2.0 and above, which will block both voice calls and SMS text messages from specified numbers. You can create black lists, or you can create white lists and block all other calls, as shown in the figure below.

With Call Guard, you can choose to have the calls sent to voicemail or use pickup/hangup mode where the caller doesn’t even get to leave a voicemail message. Another option is to simply set the phone to mute the ringer for specified calls. There’s a lot of flexibility; you can block hidden numbers or all numbers not in your contact list. You can even block SMS messages that contain specified keywords, and you can use filters to block by time of day or day of the week.

You can also block outgoing calls, which is useful if you share the phone with someone else, and you can password protect the app so the other user can’t change its settings. At $2.99, the price is more than reasonable and pays for itself quickly when compared with purchasing an additional carrier service to do the same thing.

Manage your call log

Your smartphone probably provides a call log where you can see the history of calls you’ve made and received, but some leave a lot to be desired. Call Log Manager Pro ($1.99 USD) can log calls to your calendar, and it lets you group calls not just by the usual types — incoming, outgoing, missed — but also by date, by contact, or according to custom filters that you create yourself. You can also write your call history to a .CVS or XML file, and you can delete call records by type or for specific contacts. You can search the log or get graphical analysis information about your calls. Best of all, it gives you detailed information about the calls.

Talking Caller ID

When you’re using your phone in the car or another hands-free environment, it’s really handy to be able to hear who’s calling before you answer. Sure, you could just set a custom ringtone for every person in your address book — and if you only know ten people, that might work fine. Otherwise, something like the Talking Caller ID app can be very useful. It will speak the name or number of the incoming call so you don’t have to look at the phone to find out who’s calling. There’s a free and a paid version ($1.49 USD). The full version is very customizable; you can have it speak over your ringtone or silence the ringtone, choose to use it with only calls from your contacts, only calls from non-contacts, or only calls from specific contacts.

Record calls

It’s often handy to have a full recording of business phone calls, so you can go back and verify what was said — either for your own use (e.g., someone provided detailed instructions on how to do something and you didn’t get it all down in your notes) or to “prove” what you or someone else said if there’s a disagreement about it later. One app that you can use to do this is Total Recall Call Recorder ($7.96 USD). It allows you to record phone calls manually or automatically, and you can have it automatically send you or someone else the audio file via email.

Unfortunately, on some phones, it won’t record both sides of the conversation (check the list of phones), and you should always be aware of the laws regarding the recording of phone calls in your jurisdiction, as they vary according to your location. You can test the free trial before you buy.

Google Voice

One of the most useful apps you can get for making the phone calling experience better on your smartphone is Google Voice for mobile. You can make calls (and send text messages) from your Google Voice number (which can be configured to ring any or all of your phones — mobile, home, work), and it integrates with your Google contacts and your phone’s address book.

One of my favorite-by-far features of Google Voice is the ability to get my voicemail messages as e-mail transcriptions. That way, instead of having to play and listen to the message, I can just read the text of it as an e-mail. That’s much less disruptive if, for example, I’m in a meeting and don’t want to hold the phone up to my ear to hear an audio message. I have to note, though, that the transcription works better with some voices than others. Some of the transcripts are almost perfect, whereas certain accents or dialects can throw it off completely, resulting in gibberish or unintentionally funny results, such as when I got a message from a very businesslike man I know that was transcribed as “Hi, babe” instead of the “Hi, Deb” that he really said. Here’s another transcription that didn’t turn out so well:

The good news is that the e-mail with the text transcription also includes an attachment that’s a .wav file with the audio version of the message, so if you can’t figure it out, you can always listen.

With Google Voice on your phone, you can set up custom greetings for different callers. Best of all, it saves you money. You can make lower cost calls to international destinations than what your carrier charges, and you can send text messages through the Google Voice app at no cost, whereas most carriers charge you a monthly fee or 10-20 cents per message.

When you have Google Voice installed on your phone, each time you dial a phone number, you’ll get a dialog box asking whether you want to call with Google Voice or without it. If you go through Google Voice, your phone will first dial a local number for GV, and then the GV service will dial the person you’re calling. The recipient will see your Google Voice number on caller ID, rather than the number of your cell phone. This is useful if you prefer to keep your cell phone number private.

Google Voice apps are available for Android, BlackBerry, the iPhone, and with other phone operating systems, you can use the web-based version of the service.

Put simply, QR codes serve as an ultra-fast reference for something that someone can look up immediately on the spot, or at a later time. By using your cell phone and a QR code reader app, scanning a QR code might yield a Web address, name and address, phone number, email address, pre-filled text message, or some other similar data type. To give you a better visualization of how it works, consider the following 3 short scenarios:

Scenario 1: You’re walking around in a town you’ve never been to before, collecting menus from restaurants that you’re hoping to find some decent local food from. But instead of simply handing out takeaway menus, you notice many of the restaurants are providing an eco-friendly QR code for you to scan to see their menu and effectively have it with you at all times on your phone.

Scenario 2: You’re out at a concert, listening to one of your favorite bands, when all of a sudden, you notice the guitarist is wearing a shirt with a giant QR code on the back of it. Being in the 7th row and knowing what a QR code is, you take out your phone so you can get a picture of it to see what he wants you to see. Lo and behold, you’ve just earned a secret backstage pass right there on the spot that no one else can win now because you were the first to access it!

Scenario 3: You’re flying over a city about 15 minutes out from landing at your destination, when all of a sudden, you notice an incredibly massive QR code that has been painted on the top of an entire building. Once again, you take out your phone and quickly take a picture so you can see what it’s all about (be it a URL, phone number, text message, or otherwise) once you’ve got cell service again.

Those are just a few scenarios, but there are TONS of scenarios that companies and individuals are currently utilizing QR codes for. Just the other night, I was practically inundated by QR codes while out eating dinner at a restaurant: their menu had a QR code on it so you could have a copy to go right there on the spot, the ketchup bottle on the table had a QR code on it so you could visit the manufacturer’s Web site, and someone had printed out a QR code on a sheet of paper and stuck it on the mirror in the men’s restroom.

Now, what do you do when you see a QR code? Well, you either need a camera or a phone with an in-built camera. If you have a phone with an in-built camera, there are plenty of QR code apps you can download from your respective app store/market that will allow you to scan a QR code and it’ll show you the information contained within it. If you only have a camera, then you can simply take a picture of a QR code with which to upload later to a site like ZXing Decoder Online. Lastly, if you’re interested in creating your own QR code, well, that’s just about as easy as decoding one, what with online QR code generators like this one.

For as quick and convenient as QR codes are, they aren’t 100% risk-free, since all kinds of data can be contained within them. Wikipedia spells it out best in their QR code risks section:

Malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer’s contents and user’s privacy at risk. They are easily created and may be affixed over legitimate QR codes. On a smartphone, the reader’s many permissions may allow use of the camera, full internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes.

Risks include linking to dangerous websites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. These actions may occur in the background while the user only sees the reader opening a seemingly harmless webpage.

In other words, the information waiting on the other side of a QR code might not be all roses and sunshine — even if it’s something as simple as a derogatory plain text message.

So, with all that said and now that you know everything you need to know to make use of QR codes, what are you waiting for? Start by scanning the QR code you see in the upper right-hand corner of my post (I promise it’s not malicious) and see where it leads to. From there, be on the lookout for QR codes all around you as you’re shopping, eating, vacationing, working, browsing, etc. Before long, they may just start making life a little more convenient for you!

An old social-engineering scam appears to have taken on new life lately, targeting PC users worldwide.

Ironically, the scam doesn’t use a computer at all—at least, not initially. Instead, it starts with a phone call from someone who claims to be affiliated with Microsoft or another legitimate company or government agency.

The caller then asks for the primary computer user in the house, who is told: “Your computer has downloaded a virus.” And, of course, the caller is ready and willing to fix the problem. All you have to do is navigate to a web site, click a link to install some remote-control software, and allow the “technician” to get to work.

The perps are using legitimate remote-assistance software, like the Ammyy Admin program from Ammyy Software Development, which posted a warning that included some reports the company has received from scam victims:

“I got call from an India based consultant who said to me that he is calling from a govt. organisation in Melbourne, Australia. He made me to log into my computer to track some files and without advising me he wanted me to download a software application from ammyy.com and get remotely connected to a technician to delete some files…”

“I was recently called by what I thought was my internet service provider technician who used Ammyy to gain remote access to my computer – after I stupidly granted him that permission. It turns out that he was nothing to do with my internet service provider. When I became suspicious and began questioning him he said he would show me who he was and opened a website of a company – the web site triggered my virus software and I then demanded that the remote access be terminated…”

The scam has been around for a few years. Charles Arthur at the Guardian UK wrote about a similar scam last year, noting that it had been “going on quietly since 2008 but has abruptly grown in scale this year.” He wrote about it again in March 2011.

In June of this year, Microsoft published a warning about the scams, including results from a survey it conducted in the U.K., Ireland, U.S. and Canada. The survey showed that across all four countries, 15 percent of those surveyed reported having received one of these phony support calls.

Of those who received a call, 22 percent, or 3 percent of the total survey sample, were deceived into following the scammers’ instructions, which ranged from permitting remote access to their computer and downloading software code provided by the criminals to providing credit card information and making a purchase.

The vast majority (79 percent) of people deceived in this way suffered some sort of financial loss. Seventeen percent said they had money taken from their accounts, 19 percent reported compromised passwords and 17 percent were victims of identity fraud. More than half (53 percent) said they suffered subsequent computer problems.

The latest outbreak appears to be another wave, judging from the sudden increase in complaints I’ve seen recently.

I’ve heard from Windows users and legitimate support specialists who’ve seen this scam in action in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Recent reports from Microsoft indicate that the scammers have widened their net and are now working in languages other than English, targeting Windows users in Poland and the Czech Republic.

I also got one reliable report from an extremely trustworthy source: my mother.

A caller with a thick accent tried to run this scam on my mom, who peppered the caller with questions. What’s your name? What’s your company’s name again? What’s your phone number? (She raised six kids. She’s used to social engineering attempts.)

My mom’s Caller ID said the call originated from 999-910-0132; the caller claimed to be from a company that sounded something like Alert Center, and she gave a callback number of 609-531-0750.

If you plug those numbers into a search engine, you’ll find that they lead to a group of companies using identical website templates under different names, including TechResolve, Itek Assist, and—bingo—AlertSoft. A company with the unimaginative name Custom Design Firm, at the same address in Kolkata, India, also offers custom web-design and search-optimization services at exorbitant prices.

My mom eventually hung up on the scammers, but others haven’t been so lucky. If a victim falls for the scam, the next step involves a credit card, naturally, as this victim reported:

Posed as troubleshooter, got into my system, used a “safe code” to get into my computer. Claimed my machine has been hacked into and infected with a virus. Tom and John, heavy Asian accents. Wanted to install “lifelong protection” for $130. I balked. They have my name and number and have been calling incessantly. I’m concerned that they might have planted something in my computer that allows them access.

Indeed, that’s a legitimate concern. Once a victim has granted an intruder remote access, it’s impossible to tell exactly what sort of damage they’ve done. If you know someone who has fallen for this scam, you should assume their computer has been compromised and respond appropriately.

Most readers of this blog are sophisticated computer users who would laugh out loud at an attempt like this. But you probably have friends, family members, or clients who could use a heads-up on this one. If you get a call from someone claiming to have detected a virus on your PC, just hang up.

Takeaway: Greg Shultz shows you how to take advantage of the natural language search feature in Windows 7 to get more accurate results.

Back in March of this year in a blog post titled “Taking Advantage of Search Filters in Windows Explorer,” I showed you how to take advantage of the Search filters built in to Windows Explorer’s Search Box in Windows 7. As you may remember, to access the Search filters you just click in the Search box and you’ll see a drop down that shows the Search filters in blue, as shown in Figure A. I then explained that by using Search filters you can quickly and easily narrow down the results and find what you are looking for.

Figure A

The Search filters will appear at the bottom of the Search box.

While I find that Search filters are a great tool, I was recently reminded that Windows 7’s Windows Search supports a natural language search feature that really makes it easy to find what you are looking for because it enables you to search for things using a more natural sentence structure.

In this edition of the Windows Desktop Report, I’ll show you how to enable the natural language search feature in Windows 7. I’ll then show you how to use it to your advantage.

How it works

The natural language search feature works similarly to Search filters, in that it can use filter-like words, but it doesn’t require the adherence to the rigid syntax. For example, rather than typing kind:music INXS you can just type music by INXS.

The natural language search feature is designed to recognize the keywords that you type in your phrase, strip out the unnecessary words, and then conduct the search operation. For instance in the above, the natural language search feature will strip out the word by and search for the keywords music and INXS.

Enabling natural language search

Before you can use the natural language search feature, you must enable it. Click the Start button and type Folder Options in the Start Search text box. When it appears in the result, just click it. Once the Folder Options dialog box appears, select the Search tab. Now, locate and select the Use Natural Language Search check box, as shown in Figure B. Then click OK.

Figure B

The Natural Language Search check box is found on the Search tab of the Folder Options dialog box.

Other examples

Once you enable the natural language search feature, you’ll need to experiment, but you’ll quickly get the hang of it. For example, I can now use the following searches:

• Email from Greg –> Any saved email messages from Greg
• Pictures of Greg –> any picture files named or tagged with Greg
• Documents created last week –> Any documents created last week
• Documents by Greg –> Documents where Greg is the author
• 4MB MP3 –> MP3 files that are under 4MB in size
• “Adobe Acrobat Document” created last month –> Any PDF documents created last month

Mobile apps have become an embarrassment of riches for iPhone and Android. In a world with over 500,000 iPhone apps and over 250,000 Android apps, the toughest part is finding the most useful stuff.

For iPhone users, I’m going to throw you an assist by sharing my top 20 (this is an update of my 2010 iPhone list, and I will update my top Android picks next week). My iPhone picks are all third-party apps that can help you be more productive, streamline regular activities, reduce the number of gadgets in your life, and take advantage of the top benefits that mobile computing has to offer.

1. Dropbox

Dropbox is a great cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of files between multiple computers (Windows, Mac, or Linux). This app extends Dropbox to the iPhone and includes a built-in reader within the app for PDFs, image files, and Microsoft Office files.

2. Evernote

Once you get used to typing on a virtual keyboard (and it honestly took me over a year to do it), then these devices are great for note taking, and Evernote is a great note taking app. It is similar to Dropbox in that it saves data locally but syncs it across all your machines and devices.

3. Due

There are a ton of to-do apps on iPhone but I prefer Due for its simplicity and its audio alerts. However, this is an iPhone-only task list. If you want something that can sync with your PC, Mac, or the Web, then try 2Do or Things.

4. Tripit

I love Tripit. It is by far the best app I’ve found for keeping track of all my travel itineraries. It is powered by some excellent backend systems. You simply forward your confirmation emails (or use the Gmail plugin to do it automatically) for your flights, hotels, rental cars, and more to Tripit and it automatically organizes them into trips with all your details and confirmation numbers.

5. Analytics App

For some reason Google doesn’t have an official app (for either iPhone or Android) for Google Analytics. The best one I’ve found to go deep into all of the data is Analytics App.

6. Ego

Even better than Analytics App for a quick-glance dashboard is Ego. It shows basic data from Google Analytics as well as a bunch of other sources, including Squarespace, Twitter, and Feedburner.

7. Twitter

The official Twitter app (formerly known as Tweetie) is still the best Twitter client on iPhone (although Osfoora is catching up). Twitter itself is an amazing instant-intelligence engine. Two other great social media apps for iPhone are Google+ and Foursquare.

8. Reeder

Twitter has largely replaced RSS for me for finding and filtering the latest news. However, I still track some RSS feeds and the best tool I’ve found to do it with is Reeder. It syncs with Google Reader so it’s easy to flip between the mobile app and the desktop, plus the app lets you share to Twitter (and Facebook) and save to Instapaper and ReadItLater.

9. Amazon Kindle

I’ve never fully warmed up to the Amazon Kindle e-reader, but I’m a big fan of the Kindle iPhone app. Since it was released I’ve read a lot more books simply because my phone is always with me and I can pull it out and read a few pages anytime I’ve got a couple minutes free. Alternatives: Nook, iBooks, and Kobo.

10. Audible

As much as I like the Kindle ebooks, I actually consume more books as audiobooks via Audible. In the past you could download these and sync them via iTunes. But Audible now has its own app, which lets you connect to your Audible library and download over the air, and even gives you a self-contained player optimized for audiobooks.

11. Podcaster

Sure, you can use iTunes and the built-in iPod app to listen to podcasts, but if you’re an avid podcast listener (I regularly follow This Week in Tech, Buzz Out Loud, and Tech News Today) then the app Podcaster offers a better experience. You can download over the air (so that you don’t have to constantly sync to a computer to get the latest episodes), you can skip forward and backward 30 seconds, you can increase playback speed to 1.5 times normal speed, and the app is even compatible with AirPlay.

12. Photoshop Mobile

Photoshop is, of course, the best known photo editor in the world and its mobile app doesn’t do anything to hurt that reputation. But while the desktop version is known for having a zillion features, the mobile app is distinguished by its simplicity. It’s the best iPhone photo editing app for simple crops, brightness adjustments, and sharpens, for example. However, once editing is built into the native Camera app in iOS5, editors such as Photoshop Mobile may quickly become unnecessary.

13. Pano

Pano makes it easy to take excellent panoramas with the iPhone. It helps you line up your shots and it automatically corrects many of the imperfections. My wife is a photographer with a big, expensive Nikon camera and she’s regularly jealous of some of the shots I can get with the iPhone and Pano.

14. Instagram

The camera and camera app on the iPhone are now good enough to replace a point-and-shoot. You can even take pictures that are worthy of saving in your family albums. For those, I upload them to Flickr using the iPhone app. For the everyday photos that I just want to quickly post on social media, I use Instagram. It is very quick, dead simple to use, and very social media friendly. But, do me a favor and go easy on the filters. They are badly overused by most Instagram users, while 90% of photos are better with no filter at all.

15. Navigon Mobile Navigator

I used to carry a separate Garmin GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions but I eventually got rid of it and decided to just use the iPhone instead. In researching the various apps, I eventually decided on NAVIGON, which is a company that makes a lot of the built-in navigation systems for many cars. Tip: Make sure your iPhone is plugged in to power when you run a GPS navigation program like this because otherwise it will quickly drain your battery.

16. Where To?

A great companion to a GPS system is the app “Where To?” which lets you quickly look up various types of shops and services, from Cuban restaurants to medical specialists to animal hospitals to local museums and much more.

17. RunKeeper

This is a great little app that can save you from buying a pedometer. It uses the iPhone’s GPS to track the miles you’ve run or walked, and it compiles the data into some nice dashboards that you can view on your phone or on RunKeeper’s website.

18. Nutrition Menu

Another app for all of you health-conscious geeks out there is Nutrition Menu. This thing is a mobile compendium of nutritional data. It has calorie information on common foods and most major restaurants, and it has calorie-burning information for many types of exercises. It also allows you to track your daily weigh-ins and makes notes on your progress.

19. GroceryGadget

This is an app plus a website and you can quickly sync between the two. The way it usually works for me is that my wife makes a grocery list, enters it into grocerygadgets.com, and then it syncs to my iPhone so that I can swing by the grocery store and pick up the stuff.

20. RedLaser

This is a great app for shoppers. It turns the iPhone camera into a barcode scanner and it’s quite accurate. You simply scan a product’s UPC code and let the app go to work to find it in Google Product Search and TheFind. For food it will even look up allergen information and for books it will scan to see if you can get it in a local library. You’ll be amazed at how fast it works. A similar product is SnapTell, which not only scans barcordes but you can also take a picture of the cover of a book or DVD and it can look them up that way. These apps are great when you’re shopping at a retail store and want to check the prices of products online before buying. It also reads QR codes.

Takeaway: Much of what you hear about boosting PC performance is outdated — and some of it was never true to begin with. Here’s the real story.

Computer lovers are always looking to get more speed out of their computers. Unfortunately, a number of incorrect or outdated performance tips have been around long enough to become myths. Here are 10 of these myths — and the truth about them. As always, I am sure you’ll be able to think of plenty more. So be sure to post your own myth-busting in the forums!

1: Vista and Windows 7 require many times more RAM than XP

When people first move from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 and bring up a RAM usage meter, they often panic. What they see is something like Figure A.

Figure A

Does Windows 7 really use more than 8 GB of RAM?!

Wow, that looks scary, doesn’t it? The system is doing just about nothing (1% CPU usage) but needs 8.84 GB of physical RAM to run. Here’s what is really happening.

Starting in Vista, Windows got aggressive about RAM use. The engineers at Microsoft made it pre-allocate RAM and pre-cache commonly used items, even if they were not actually in use. For example, if you use Word a lot, it will keep Word in memory ready to be used. Obviously, this lets it chew up a ton of RAM, and why not? It isn’t like you were using the RAM anyway, and you will eventually be using it, most likely for the purposes Windows is preparing for. Applications start much faster as a result.

2: More RAM is always faster

More RAM is not a guarantee of a faster machine, although more RAM has never hurt. Actually, that isn’t quite true, either! Many times, the bigger RAM runs as a slower bus speed than the smaller RAM chips. So in theory, more RAM can be mildly harmful to performance. More important is the Dual Channel vs. Triple Channel RAM issue. If you have a choice between 12 GB of RAM using Triple Channel, and 16 GB of RAM on Dual Channel, the 12 GB of RAM will be faster, so long as you rarely need to go to the swap file. Also, since Windows does pre-allocate RAM and cache often-used items, having that extra RAM could conceivably make a difference, assuming that you are a huge RAM user.

3: Anti-malware apps kill performance

Yes, anti-malware apps have an effect on performance. And at one time, that effect was massive. Back in the day, many PC slowdown issues could be solved by removing applications like antivirus. In recent years, things have changed.

It used to be that anti-malware apps essentially had to hijack the OS to see what was going on with the file system and RAM, and this was where the slowdown occurred. That is no longer the case. Windows now provides hooks into the OS for anti-malware applications to receive files and sign off on them in a regular fashion. As a result, anti-malware apps still have a performance hit, but it’s very minimal.

4: If you clear the browser history, you’ll gain some speed

On a regular basis, I see advice like this bandied about:

• Delete your browser history to speed things up.
• Clear your cookies for more speed.
• Empty your browser cache to make the Web fly!

Guess what? It’s bunk. The only thing that clearing the history could make faster is the display of suggestions from your browser (which quietly pares the list as needed for performance anyway).

Dumping the cookies won’t do anything, since they don’t sit in memory; they are merely read and uploaded to the server when requested, and they’re so small that they won’t slow things down noticeably. And the browser cache? It makes things faster! Think about it: What’s going to be faster when your browser needs an image, CSS, or JavaScript file — re-downloading it from the site or pulling it off the local hard drive? Emptying your cache was a storage space tip in the 90s when drive space was at enough of a premium that the browser cache could be a big chunk of it. Somehow, the tip eventually morphed into a bogus performance trick.

5: Registry cleaning is a miracle worker

This is another one I see all the time, too. In theory, yes, a smaller registry will have an effect on performance. But that presumes that your applications are constantly hitting the registry and that your registry is in such poor shape that the junk is a significant part of it. And even then, guess what? You’ve optimized the data in a database that is already designed to be fast, that resides in RAM, and is a few megabytes in size anyway.

Unless you’re running on a PDP-11, working with a database the size of the registry is so blazing fast that you could slash it to 1% of its current size and still not have a real difference. That said, cleaning the registry could have some benefits (especially getting rid of entries for apps that were uninstalled but that you may reinstall), but performance is not going to be one of them. This is a tip that made a lot more sense a long time ago, but is no longer important.

6: Having more cores is always better

Having more CPU cores is not going to be slowing you down. But in many cases, you are simply wasting your money. Few applications are multi-threaded and follow a true parallel processing paradigm in which the application is grinding away on all your cores at once to solve hard problems. Writing parallel processing code is hard to do (I know from first-hand experience) — and it’s even harder to do right.

Many of the most demanding applications, like games and graphics processing, often push the hardest processing onto the GPU, not the CPU –even non-graphics work (like bulk cryptography), in many cases. So yes, while having extra cores is great, don’t expect that putting dual quad core CPUs in your box is going to give you anything extra on speed, unless you run those rare applications that are really optimized for it or you do a ton of work with virtual machines.

7: Drive RPMs are all that matter

When measuring drive performance, people love to look at the RPMs that the platters spin at. While faster RPM drives can theoretically read large chunks of data faster and perhaps seek a little faster, the better number to look at is actually the seek time. Little data transfer is done in long, drawn out reads or writes; most of it is small random access. Seek time is therefore very important to performance. Also look for larger caches on the disks and the total transfer speed number.

8: You should empty the Recycle Bin for more speed

This is another of those tips that made sense 10 years ago but is outdated now. Emptying the Recycle Bin will obviously free up disk space. But where is the performance boost going to come from? I suppose that if you have a huge amount of data in the Recycle Bin and dump it, and then perform a defrag, it is possible that you’ll suddenly get such a well-optimized disk that there will be a noticeable difference. This presumes, of course, that you regularly create large amounts of data in the middle of the physical disk and then remove it. Unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling large applications, and creating and then removing large amounts of data, emptying the Recycle Bin is not going to give you a noticeable speed improvement.

9: You need a fancy hard drive for ultimate performance

For a long time now, specialty drives like the Western Digital VelociRaptor have been used to get the best disk speed around. There’s no doubt that these drives are fast. But did you know that you can get just about the same speed from less expensive drives? The secret of the VelociRaptor’s performance is that it uses small platters, so the heads never have far to move. If you can find a drive with similar performance stats for cache and RPMs, you can “short stroke” the disk. Essentially, you partition the drive in half and then format and use only the partition closer to the inside of the disk. This gives you the benefits of the smaller platters without the cost of the specialty drive.

10: One big disk is fine

People think that just because it’s rare for multiple applications to be pounding on the hard drives at the same time that just having one large disk is okay for performance. Yes, it’s unlikely that you will have two applications simultaneously trying to grab a ton of disk access, unless you are running a server, running VMs, or doing some crazy multitasking. Splitting your data between two disks (like the common OS and apps on one disk and documents on another scheme) really does not give much performance gain. At the same time, multiple disks can be a huge performance boost… when put into a RAID. Check out the information on Wikipedia about what different RAID levels can do for the read and write times of your PC, and you’ll see why RAID is a hidden performance gem.

E-mail notifications are an important part of social networking services like Facebook. If you have to continually visit the site to see what’s new, you lose much of the excitement that comes with comments on your photos or other shared items. If you forget to check for a day or two, you might miss an invitation to an event or an opportunity to connect with a long-lost friend who’s in town for a day or two.

But e-mail notifications are also a security risk. If an attacker can create a realistic-looking imitation of a Facebook notification, you might find yourself clicking on a link that can lead to malware or attempt to steal your login credentials.

Unfortunately, phishers are getting better at what they do, and spotting a fake isn’t as easy as you might think. I’ve assembled four Facebook notifications that arrived in my e-mail inbox recently. Can you tell which are real and which are fake? (Click any image to see it at full size, or visit the accompanying gallery to flip through all four screens at full size.)

Here’s one that arrived last week. As with all the images, I’ve blurred personal information but otherwise these messages are shown in full, as they appear in Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane.

If you guessed that one was a fake, congratulations. It led to a website that was flagged as dangerous by Microsoft’s SmartScreen Filter, by Google’s Safe Browsing feature, and by Safari. If you were using an outdated browser such as Internet Explorer 6 or 7, you would have seen an attempt to install a fake Flash update that was actually a password-stealing Trojan.

OK, let’s try another. Real or fake?

Do you think that odd e-mail address indicates a fake? Confusingly, Facebook notifications come from the facebookmail.com domain and include a suspicious-looking sender’s name. The long, complicated URL might also look suspicious, but this notification is a legit one from Facebook.

OK, here’s a third test. Real or fake?

Hmmm. The previous, real notification included a long complicated URL. This one has a pair of buttons that you’re supposed to click to see the comments a friend supposedly added to your shared link. That’s a favorite trick that phishers and spammers use to disguise misleading links. Surprisingly, this one is legit.

OK, last one. Real or fake?

This is a particularly convincing fake. The graphics, fonts, button design, and links are all indistinguishable from a real Facebook notification. This particular phishing attempt led to a fake online pharmacy, but it could just as easily have led to a malware installer.

One of these fakes was good enough to slip past my spam filters. In that case, the only way to determine that it wasn’t legit was to allow the mouse pointer to hover over a link or button to see what its true destination was. Here’s what it looked like:

That’s certainly not a legitimate link. Here, by contrast, is what a link from a real Facebook notification looks like:

It’s a challenge to get nontechnical users in the habit of checking links before they click, but the results are well worth it.

One of the more powerful, and probably least used, set of keyboard shortcuts involves the Windows Logo key which is common on most keyboards packaged with a Windows-based personal computer these days.

Table A lists the keyboard shortcut combinations associated with the Windows Logo key and what each combination will do. Take a good look, there may be a key combination or two you can use regularly that will make your computing life just a little more efficient.

Table A – Source Microsoft