Remember those hand held games that we used to play like Donkey Kong and Turtle Bridge. You know the ones, they were the games that you could never find batteries for.

I used to play them a lot on camping trips with the family, so they bring back lots of memories. Unfortunately, these games are hard to find these days, and if you are successful finding them, you will need to pay top dollar.

I was very excited when I came across a site where quite a few of these games had been recreated for you to play on your PC. There are around 20 of these classics for you to enjoy.

Everything that the original game gave us is included in these packages. The sounds have been recorded and the graphics have all been scanned and touched up. The only main difference is that you control your character with your keyboard.

While most programs used to play old games are emulators, the programmer of these games was not able to get his hands on the required processor information that could have been used to make an emulator. I read on his site that each game has a unique processor. Instead of making an emulator, he recreated each game by hand. Each game is a separate entity. What this means is that the game may not run exactly the same as the original. Saying that, I couldn’t tell the difference in the games I tried out.

The site also contains a lot of interesting information about converting your hand held games to the PC format, if you would like to give the programming a go yourself. I might have a go at remaking Fire!

Get your favourite games from Madrigal Design.

RSS feeds are a great way to see all the latest updates on your favourite websites. Unfortunately, not all sites offer RSS feeds, and sometimes it would be inappropriate for them to do so. So how do you know when sites have changed their content without having to constantly visit them?

WebMon is a small utility that sits in your task tray, and alerts you if any of your predefined websites have been updated.

You can set it up to monitor any number of websites, and then define the frequency that each of your websites will be checked for updates.

WebMon stores a copy of a web page, and then after a predefined time, it will download another copy and compare the two. If there have been any changes, you will be alerted with a sound, or a pop-up.

WebMon is going to be great for me as I look at the same sites regularly doing research for this site, only to find no updates have been made. I will no longer need to visit each site individually or repetitively, thanks to this program. I read how someone else uses WebMon for alerts when the box office opens. Now he can buy tickets as soon as they are made available. 

WebMon couldn’t be any easier to use. It is also highly customisable. The only concern I have with WebMon, is that it is downloading pages regularly in the background. This could chew into your monthly bandwidth. You can specify how often the sites are checked for updates. Setting your update checks to happen every few days instead of every few minutes, will ensure your bandwidth is not wastefully consumed.

Get your copy of WebMon for free from Colin Markwells website. 

Thanks for the tip Matthew. This will be program I wondered how I ever did without.

Backing up your computer is important, but it can be a hassle. If we have to do it manually, chances are that we will forget one time or another. On the other hand, if we set it up to run automatically to a schedule, we may find it interferes with our normal computer usage.

Vista task scheduler is a very powerful tool. We can set it up to run programs only if the computer is idle. This serves two purposes. The backups will be made automatically and the backups will not interfere with your normal usage.

A huge added bonus is that we can use any backup program we like. We are not limited to backup programs that have scheduling built in. All we need is a backup program that can start backing up as soon as it is launched, which just about all of them can do.

This article is specifically for Windows Vista. XP’s scheduled tasks does not have the idle features built in, though it may be able to be achieved with a third party program.

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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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Autoplay in Windows allows you to setup your computer so that when you insert a DVD into your DVD drive, your favourite movie player will automatically launch and play the film. You can also set up Autoplay to rip DVD’s by default.

If you do a bit of both, it is well worth checking out DiscInsert. You can setup DiscInsert to be the default program to load when you insert a DVD. The opening screen shows you the DVD information, such as actors, the director, and if you are lucky, some box-art.

You then have the option to Rip or Play the DVD. A single click (or less) is all it takes. DiscInserts configuration allows you to setup your favourite DVD ripper and your favourite movie player, with parameters, so that these programs work correctly. You can also set DiscInsert to automatically Rip or Play your DVD after a predefined time.

DiscInsert works in both Vista and XP. It is still in early stages of development so you may find the occasional bug, though it worked perfectly fine for me. It is such a simple concept, executed wonderfully.

Get your copy for free from SourceForge.