Most of you have probably seen different program launchers on various sites. For those who are not familiar with them, program launchers are applications that allow you to choose your most-used or favorite programs and add their corresponding shortcuts to a custom menu.

This is very convenient as you won’t have to go searching through the default Windows start menu to open your favorites apps. This can also reduce clutter on your desktop since you can just have your regular list of apps on your launcher and remove their shortcuts from your desktop.

Sounds good right? The question now is, which one to use? There are a number of great program launchers but I’ll put the spotlight on one of the less known launchers.

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It’s a safe bet to say that most people have tons of videos. They have it on their mobiles, computers, and other portable media devices. Most of the time, you want to transfer a video from one device to another but don’t want to spend time looking for a free program that will convert your video to the proper format. If you have a lot of patience, you can look at the numerous video converters that support different types of formats. Finding the right one might take a while.

If you don’t have the time or patience to look for the converter you need, no need to worry. I’ve got just the thing you need.

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Windows Vista Media Center is a very good media center, and best of all it’s free. One nice feature within Windows Vista MCE is the media-only mode which gets rid of the windows minimise/close buttons in the top right so that your full screen is dedicated to your media.

Unfortunately there isn’t an option within MCE to enter this mode automatically, but after some digging around yesterday I found a way to enter media-only mode at startup:
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I’m really not having a good time with my PCs at the moment.  Last week my Windows Home Server died, taking with it a lot of my music and photos. Now my main PC has died and won’t boot into Windows.  I don’t know why all my bits and bobs are all failing at the same time, as my laptop is playing up as well.

I’m really annoyed as I’d decided about 5 mins before the latest crash that I was going to bring forward the PC upgrade I was going to do in April.  My plan was to order a new processor, motherboard and memory with the old components going towards a building a 2nd media center for my new home.

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I haven’t written a lot of posts this week as I’ve spent most of the week trying to recover files from one of the hard drives in my Windows Home Server that has stopped working.  I have several disks in my WHS machine, and if any of the other drives had failed I wouldn’t have cared so much, but this drive just happened to be the one with all my photos (and some music) on it which obviously can’t be replaced and are priceless to me.

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