If you leave your computer on overnight, you may want to consider setting up a scheduled task to mute your speakers after a predefined time. This will protect you from hearing new email notifications, instant message requests and updates from awaking you from your slumber.

I can also see it of being useful in the workplace. If you have a regular meeting you go to each week, it may be worth having your computer mute the sound of your laptop while you are in the board room.

The process is fairly simple. We need to use a free third party utility to allow the mute to take place. There are many utilities you could use for this such as NirCmd or Wizmo, but today to keep things simple I am going to use a program called Mute.

The next step is to set up a scheduled task to enable and disable these utilities. All of these utilities unload themselves from memory once they have run. This means that unmuting can still be controlled through your normal muting methods.

The setup for Vista and XP are slightly different, but you will find all the instructions after the jump.

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I wish I could give everyone who reads this an easter egg, but it’s just not going to happen. Well not with the kind of easter egg you want anyway.

There are more types of Easter Eggs than just the chocolate variety. They come in many forms. Easter eggs are also the name of hidden features or novelty items found in movies, DVD menus, software, websites and sometimes even hardware.

I have put together a list of some of my favourite software Easter Eggs for your enjoyment. I have tried to select examples from programs that are found on the majority of computers. This way you will be able to try many of them out yourself.

We are going to look at eggs in the following programs:

• Pinball
• Solitaire
• Nullsoft Winamp
• Google.com
• Notepad

Read on for your eggs…

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If you make a complaint to your phone company, you may end up feeling that speaking to customer support is getting you nowhere, and that you are out of options.

What do you do now? There is one more step you can take which not many people know about. Most phone companies find it hard to find new customers and it is very important for them to hold onto existing customers. They will do a lot to keep you with them. That is where retentions come in.

Ask your customer support if you can speak with their retentions staff. Retentions is a seemingly small team of people that have more authority than the general customer support staff. They may not be able to help you with your problem directly, but if they feel that you have a case, they are able to offer you credit, refunds or services to keep you on board.

You will obviously get a bit further if you tell them that you plan to end your business with them, or if your contract is coming to an end. I have had some success with this from previous problems.

If they don’t want to help you, moving on is often the best way to go. You will probably get a better deal elsewhere as plans are constantly changing and offering more for your money as technology grows.

My wife came home from the shops the other day and she told me she spent $AU50 on paper diary inserts for 2008. This way she is able to keep her nice binder in use for another year. She uses her computer calendar for very few scheduled reminders, and I couldn’t understand why she would try to use both at the same time.

I use a computer based calendar (Outlook 2007) and find that it does everything I could want it to do. I asked her why she used both when the computer options are free and come with a number of features a paper diary can’t offer. After listing a few of the advantages, I thought it would be wise to do a bit of a comparison.

This article will look at paper diaries vs computer based calendars. I am strongly leaning towards the computer based diaries as being a better option. The only way a paper diary can win this is to bypass all the benefits and answer “I simply prefer paper diaries!”

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There are more than 30 virus scanners available which we can use to scan files to see if they are safe to use or not. They all work in different ways and often give varying results on particular files depending on the virus. Some scanners report key generators and email spam as viruses even though they may be safe to use.

It would be nice if we could test our files through multiple scan engines to find out if a file is dangerous to our computer. The problem with this is that virus scanners fight each other if they are installed on the same machine. Sometimes this will result in slow performance, and other times you may find your computer comes to a halt. There is a way around this though.

VirusTotal

You can upload files via their website or by email. You should receive a detailed report back in your email within 10 minutes. The report you receive lists each scan engine, followed by the result and virus name. Click here to see a previous report.

While this website should not replace your computers main virus scanner, it can definitely help you if you feel a file is safe but your scanner is reporting it as infected.

Visit them at VirusTotal.com