You installed some kind of software and used it for two weeks. After two weeks you decide you don’t need it anymore and want to remove it. You will probably use the standard windows uninstaller to remove the software. You did that, it’s gone.

Three days later you found out that there is still a folder left with files from this software and you even found out the there are some things left in the windows registry. You start to question: I uninstalled this software, why is this still there?

I am not going to tell you why it’s still there, that’s too hard to explain. What I am going to tell you is how to uninstall software completely, no folders and files or registry stuff left.

Revo Uninstaller is an uninstaller that will remove software completely. It allows you to use the usual way of uninstalling by using the software’s own uninstaller but also three other modes. The three other modes are: Safe, Moderate and Advanced.

Safe mode will use the default uninstaller first, after that it will scan the registry and the hard drive for leftover items that are safe to delete. This is the fastest way.
Moderate mode does the same but scans a bit more.
Advanced will delete every file and registry information that is leftover from the software. This is the slowest way, but I wouldn’t call it slow. Computers these days are fast, it won’t even take a minute to uninstall. If you want to get rid of the software completely, use this mode.

Revo Uninstaller is not just uninstalling, it has also built in tools to manage startup programs and clean junk files.

Another useful feature in Revo Uninstaller is the hunter mode. The hunter mode will let you drag around a crosshair and select anything on your desktop with it. For example you have a shortcut to some program on your desktop, you just drag over the it and you will get the option to uninstall this program. It’s also useful if you don’t know what something is, for example you see some weird tray icon in your taskbar, you drag over it with hunt mode and you will get the option to uninstall it. The hunter mode is something you have to try out, it’s hard to explain. It’s very useful.

The conclusion is that uninstalling software with the standard windows uninstaller will not delete everything, some files will be in your hard drive forever. The result is, if you never delete these files, that your computer will slow down. What you wan’t is to keep your computer clean, fast and organized. Revo Uninstaller has everything you need when it comes to deleting software.

Revo Uninstaller is has a free version which you can download here. There is a paid version also which has some more features, but in my opinion the free one is all you need. Look here to compare the free and professional version.

This tutorial is the follow up to Java for beginners part 1: Set up a Java workspace with BlueJ, you might want to read this one first if you haven’t already.

So hopefully you managed to set up your Java workspace and are you ready to get started programming. I am going to show you how to make a basic Java applet in BlueJ. This can aslo be done in a text editor like notepad, but why do command line stuff when it can be done easier with just one click? That’s why there are Java IDE programs like BlueJ.

Let’s get started, open up BlueJ and start a new project.

You will be asked to make a folder to save the project in, for example C:\Users\YourName\BlueJ Project. Next click New Class… and select Applet.

You will see your applet, now open it in the editor by double clicking on it.

BlueJ automatically implants standard code lines that an applets needs, you should see that there are already some lines of code. Which is useful if you are already past the beginner level of Java programming. Since we are not making a serious applet you can delete everything. This will make it easier for me to explain and for you to understand. We are going to start from scratch. Let the coding begin!

First we want to import some Java packages, this is required for pretty much any Java program. We have to tell the program to import these packages. So our first lines of codes are going to be…

These are two packages that our applet needs. We can now create our class, this is were we put the code in. Add this line of code to your program:

myApplet is the name of the file (myApplet.java), this has to be the same. BlueJ will automaticly change it but if you are using another editor it might not so make sure the class name myApplet is the same as the filename (myApplet.java)
The bracket ( { ) always need to be closed so at the end of your applet you want to add a closing bracket.

Inside the brackets we will put the code that actually do something that is visible, that’s what we are going to add now. We want our applet to display some text. We need the paint function for that, take a look at the code below.

If you are doing good you will understand what happens here. It will paint Graphics under the name ‘g’, most people use ‘g’, because it short for graphics, but if you like to be different you can use any word like ‘hi’ or ‘c’.
Maybe you can figure out what the 50 and 80 stand for. If you are good at math (which you should be for programming) you must know this. The 50 is the x-position of the text and the 80 is the y-position of the text. You can experiment with this by trying different a different x and y.
Anyway, your code should now look something like this:

The applet is now ready to be compiled. Press the Compile button. At the bottom of your editor you can see if there are any errors. There should be no syntax errors if you just did what I did. You can now close the editor and run the applet.

A windows will come up and has 3 options, you can choose to run it in appletviewer or in your web browser (make sure it supports Java). It doesn´t matter which one you choose.
Set the height and width to something like 500, it doesn’t really matter. Now click Ok and your applet should start up.

You have just created you first Java applet, it’s not something special, but you can tell people that you made a Java program.

This tutorials is aimed at people who have not worked with Java before and want to learn it, but don’t know how to get started.

Today I will tell you how to set up a Java workspace. In a workspace… you work on your Java programs. What you want is to develop Java software with ease, you don’t want to have a messed up workspace.

To get started you will need  the Java Development Kit (JDK), you can download it here. You need the standard edition of  JDK.

Install the Java Development Kit, installing should be a problem. Once you’ve installed JDK you can start, but only by using the command line which isn’t beginner friendly.

What you need is a Java IDE (Integrated Development Environments). There are many Java IDE programs, just google it. The one that I recommend is BlueJ. BlueJ is very easy to use and made for educational purpose, which makes it user friendly. BlueJ is free and can be downloaded here. Download and install it.

When you launch BlueJ for the first time it will find your Java version (the one you installed before), it should find it automatically. If it’s not there click browse and look for jdk1.6.0_20 in your Program Files\Java folder, if you can’t find it something must have gone wrong during the Java installation. If the Java version has been found, click launch.

Your Java workspace is now ready, you can now start programming in Java. In part two of the Java tutorial I will get into detail of starting your first Java project in BlueJ

Part 2: Your first Java applet

First of all, you really don’t need an expensive virus scanner! Why not? Because there are free virus scanners too, which are just as good. If you think that you’re getting virus because your virus scanner is not good enough then you are wrong. The main reason why people get viruses is because they are stupid.

Downloading all over the place, clicking ads or clicking on links in MSN. That’s right, by clicking on the mouse button you can get a virus. I am going to give you some tips to not get viruses.

First of all to everyone that loves to games, be careful where you download it. If you download torrents, do not download one which has less or zero seeders. Download the one that other people download and post positive comments on. Even better is to not download torrent at all, but I understand that you might like free stuff.

Adverts, you will not find a site without them. Now most text ads are really not a big problem when you click on it, however there are ads that will lead you to websites that contain viruses. The most annoying ads are pop-ups. In the picture below you can see an example of a pop-up ad that will probably lead to a dangerous site.

You must know that a pop-up like this will be some kind of virus or spyware. Never click on any virus warning except the ones from your own virus scanner.

Another famous ad is one that tells you that you’re the 9999999th visitor on their website, this is bullshit. What these ads do is send you to a website where you have to enter you details or something. What they want is your money, don’t click these stupid ads.

Windows Live Messenger is another source to getting a virus. You might have seen something like this already and hopefully you didn’t click it. Check out this picture:

The person that sends this to you has this virus that will spread itself by automatically send stuff like this. Never click on a link that someone suddenly sends to you through some kinda chat program.

I have never had any bad viruses, because I know what I am doing on the internet. The only software I use to protect myself is AVG free and Windows Firewall. AVG will tell me if something is a virus. That all you need, something that tells you if something is safe or not.

Protecting yourself from viruses is in your own hand, use your common sense when browsing the internet.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to make scanlines in Photoshop. It’s really easy to do.

1) First create a new file, make it 6×6 and make sure it is transparent. Zoom in to like 3000%. Now use the pencil tool and set it to a diameter of 1 pixels. You can now draw the lines just as I did in the picture below.

2) Your scanlines are now done, all you need to do now is to define it as a pattern. In the menu go to Edit > Define pattern. A dialog will come up and asks you to enter a name for the pattern. Once you’ve done that your scanline pattern should be saved.

3) You can now use your scanline pattern. Select the paint bucket tool and select Pattern. Now fill whatever you want with scanlines!

You just learned how to make a Photoshop pattern. If you have any questions, leave a comment.

A userbar is a 350 x 19 pixel sized banned that represents you on the internet. It can be used in signatures on community forums, social networks etc. A userbar can be called a fanbar, underbanner, banner. Here is what a userbar looks like:

You might have been searching for userbars on sites like www.userbars.com, but you could never find the best userbar ever right? To get the best userbar ever make one yourself!

I am going to tell you how to make a basic userbar in Photoshop, you don’t need to have much Photoshop experience to follow this tutorial. It’s just a beginner tutorial anyone could understand.

1) Let’s get started, open Photoshop and create a new file. Set the with to 350 pixels and height to 19 pixels then click ok.

2) The next thing you wanna do is fill the background with a color. You can do this with just one plain color or use the gradient tool to get a mix of colors. I like the effect of multiple colors, so I’m gonna use the gradient tool.

Once you’ve selected the gradient tool you have to pick a color:

I picked green/white. To create a custom color double click the color. Drag with your left mouse button hold down over the empty image. Release the mouse button and you’ll get something like this:

3) Now we’d like to add some text. Select the type tool and pick a font. I always use Visitor TT1 BRK size 10 for userbar text. The color I picked is white. You can download this font here.

Now after you’ve picked your favorite font you want to type some text.

If it’s not on the right place you can move it around by using the move tool.

4) The text looks a bit plain without a border, so you might want to add one. Look at your layers and right click on the text layer you’ve just created. Click on Blending options.

Blending options will allow you to decorate your layer, like adding shadows and stuff like that. What we want to use is the Stroke option. This will add a stroke/border around the text. Set the size to 1 pixel and set the color to any color you like, I picked black. When you’re done click OK.

You will now have a nice border around your text.

5) Next we want to give the userbar a little shine, yes we’re going to add a light effect. First create a new layer, in the menu click Layers > New > Layer or click the layer icon in the bottom right corner.

Next we have to select the place where we want to add the light effect. We are going to use the Elliptical Marquee Tool for this.

Now make sure you have selected your new created empty layer. If you have, make a selection like I did in the picture below using the Elliptical Marquee Tool.

Next, select the Paint Bucket tool. Make sure your foreground color is white.

Fill up the selected area, once filled up you can deselect it (CTRL + D).

To complete the light effect we want to change the opacity of the layer, select the layer and change the opacity. Anything between 20% to 35% should work, I used 30%.

Now you should have a nice effect.

6) Adding a border to the whole thing is the next step. Create another new layer and make sure it’s on top of all other, if it’s not drag it up. To add a border select the whole new layer, go to the menu: Select > All and after that Select > Modify > Border.  Add a border of 1 pixels. The border is now selected, all you have to do now is fill the selection with the paint bucket tool. Now you can deselect the selected border.

A border is now added and it should look like this:

Congratulations, you just made a basic userbar! You might have gotten used to photoshop by now and might want to try to add extra effects or add a logo. For example a firefox userbar, you’d want to add the firefox logo to that.
I added one more extra effect to make the userbar look better, try to do something like this by yourself.

Another popular thing to add to userbars are scanlines. To add scanlines you just make another layer and fill it with the pattern. You can learn how to make a scanline pattern in my tutorial on how to make scanlines.
I hope I helped you with creating a userbar in Photoshop. There’s tons of things you can do with Photoshop, this userbar is just a very basic one. Don’t get mad if your first one sucks, you’ll get better. Experience is the best way to learn.

Does this image need explanation?

Okay, Microsoft Office isn’t that bad that that it’ll crash all the time but the problem is that it costs money. You pay more easily over €100, and that is just for the basic package (the professional package is over €600). Maybe you’ve got Microsoft Office 2003, and are thinking about getting 2010, but do you really need Microsoft Office 2010? To me it’s all the same, except some new nice looking interface or just a few new features. In my opinion upgrading from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2010 is a waste of money and especially if your computer isn’t the fastest one around.

I used Microsoft Office 2000 and later 2003 in the past. 2007 came out and now 2010 is out. I already knew that I was not going to pay for a new version of Microsoft Office, so what I did was looking for a free alternative.

OpenOffice.org, that’s the one I found. OpenOffice is a free open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. It really does everything that Microsoft Office does. It’s also fully compatible with Microsoft Office, this means you can save your documents as OpenOffice’s format (ODT) or just as a Microsoft’s .doc format.  OpenOffice includes Writer (Word), Impress (PowerPoint), Calc (Excel), Base (Access), Draw, Web and Math.

Writer does the same things as Word does, but it’s something to get used to. At first it can be hard to find some things if you’re used to Word. For example, I could not figure out how to add a page number but in the end it was really easy after reading the documentation. OpenOffice has useful help documents.

Impress is just like PowerPoint except it doesn’t have so much fancy-awesome-not necessary effects build in, but is that a big problem?

Calc is the clone of Excel, really easy to use and it’s just as Excel.

Base, something I don’t use much but it just the same as Microsoft Access, it’s even easier in my opinion. In Base you can create and manage databases.

Draw is a drawing program (you could’ve guessed that). I don’t use it so I can’t tell you my full experience with this, but I assume it is pretty good for people that need it.

Web is a simple web editor for creating HTML pages. It’s just HTML, no PHP or something like that. It’s basically a program for people who don’t know how to make websites. I don’t use this one.

Math is a program  to do stuff with math formulas. I haven’t used it yet, I still use my pocket calculator . It looks useful though and I will definitely look into it sometime, I like math and this seems to be good software for creating math formulas.

OpenOffice has also many extensions you might find useful. You can download extensions to add dictionairy of different languages or you might want an extension that will make OpenOffice connect with your MySQL database.

So, get rid of your illegal copy of Microsoft Office and download OpenOffice. Just give it a try, if you don’t want to spend money on Microsoft Office this is the solution.

On the web there are thousands of scripts which can count the visitors and track other website stats, but which one do you use? If you search on Google for ‘website traffic script’ you will find over 4 million results. The solution on which one to pick is easy. I have also spend a lot of time looking for these kind of scripts or tried writing one, but then I figured out Google had one.

Google Analytics is all you need and it’s really easy to setup and use. You can sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, create one. You definitely gotta make use of Google products which can help your website.

Visit the website of Google Analytics and follow the instructions. You should be able to figure it out by yourself. They will ask you to put a script on your site just before the tag. Copy, Paste, check if it works and you’re done.

There is no need to look for a hard to setup PHP script that will track your website traffic. Just use the #1 search engine’s application, Google Analytics.

If you have trouble installing, read Google’s help pages or leave a comment here.

Have you found an epic video on YouTube and do you want to download it to your computer because it is so epic? You must be looking for some kinda program that will let you download and save video to your computer. There are loads of programs if you just search on google for ‘youtube downloader’, but which one do you choose?

I’ll tell you which program I use. I have been using this program called aTube Catcher ever since I wanted to download something from YouTube. Why do I use this one? Simply because it’s really easy. They also built in some extra features like DVD creater and stuff like that (which is useful), but we don’t need that. I’ll show you step by step how it works.

What you want to do first is download aTube Catcher: Click here to download directly. (Website.)

Once you’ve download aTube Catcher you’ll have to start the installation it. Just follow the instruction. (They will also ask you if you want to install some other software, like their toolbar and some registery booster. Don’t install these, you don’t need them. These things are just there because the creators of aTube Catcher will earn money with this.)

Now start aTube Catcher.

1) What you’ll have to do first visit YouTube. Go to your favourite video and copy the link.

(Select the link, right click a click on copy | or press CTRL+C)

2) Once you got the link in your clipboard paste it in the URL field in aTube Catcher. Just click the paste button.

3) Select a location to save the video to. For example: ‘C:\Users\YourNameHere\YouTube Videos’.

4) Choose your output profile, this is basically what you want the video saved as. For a simple video you can select ‘WMV (Windows Media Video HQ VBR). You can also save as MP3 if you just want sound, this is useful if you want to download your favorite music from YouTube.

5) You can choose to Enable Turbo Download, which will make the download go faster. If you want HQ/HD YouTube quality you have to check that.

6) Click on Download to start you download. What the program is doing is downloading the flash video from YouTube and converts it to your chosen output profile. When the program is done a pop up will ask you if you want to see the result.

Now you know how to download videos or music from YouTube. I hope this guide was useful and please leave a comment and ask if you have any questions.