Many mobile phones have allowed us to change the ring tone, depending on who is calling us. This can be helpful as we no longer need to get our phone out to see who it is. The ring tone will audibly tell us. Why not create the same custom tones for our incoming email?

Email consumes us each day. We often check our email whenever a new message comes in, only to find out it is spam or non urgent. Setting up your email with audible alerts depending on urgency, subject and sender is another way to streamline your email usage.

Setting this up will allow you (with a little self control), leave all your non urgent email for a certain time of the day, and remain focused on your work. You will know when an urgent email has been received, as you will be familiar with the alert. We do all this by using simple email rules.

This is just as useful if you are someone who does not check their email regularly, but would like to be alerted when an important message has come in.

This article is written for Office 2007 running on Vista. This works in both Outlook 2003 and 2007 and the setup is very similar for both. Read on. 

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The main reason you may want to sync folders on a single machine is to backup your data. You would probably be best to find a backup utility to do this.

If you want to sync folders over networked drives, this guide may help you also. There are more detailed articles at Inspect My Gadget on syncing documents between two networked computers. Find them here.

On the very odd occasion you do want to sync folders on a single computer, it is not too hard to achieve. There are a number of applications available to help you do this, but many of them cost money. Windows has a solution by a command in the command prompt which will work on all Windows PC’s. Microsoft also offers a program called SyncToy which does the same thing with a nice GUI interface.

This is a two part article. In Part 1 we looked at using xcopy to sync your folders, and in Part 2 will look at how to use SyncToy.

Part 2 will cover the following topics.

• How to get SyncToy
• Configuring SyncToy
• How to schedule SyncToy to run a sync at a set time.

SyncToy is a great solution for people who require to sync local or networked folders, as it is easy to use and it can be scheduled.

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The main reason you may want to sync folders on a single machine is to backup your data. You would probably be best to find a backup utility to do this.

If you want to sync folders over networked drives, this guide may help you also. There are more detailed articles at Inspect My Gadget on syncing documents between two networked computers. Find them here.

On the very odd occasion you do want to sync folders on a single computer, it is not too hard to achieve. There are  number of applications available to help you do this, but many of them cost money. Windows has a solution by a command in the command prompt which will work on all Windows PC’s. Microsoft also offers a program called SyncToy which does the same thing with a nice GUI interface.

This is a two part article. Part 1 will look at using xcopy to sync your folders, and Part 2 will look at using SyncToy.

Part 1 will cover the following topics.

• How to use xcopy
• How to put xcopy into a batch file
• How to schedule the batch file to run a sync at a set time.

The reason I like xcopy is that it is quick to setup, and you do not require any additional software to get it to work. This means it is good for 1 off syncs. SyncToy will be the best solution for most people who require to sync more frequently.

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There are many ways to replicate a signal across multiple monitors. Some methods work much better than others. The price difference varies greatly as well. The more money you spend, the more control you will have and the better your results will be.

Generally, there are not a great deal of consumer reasons for wanting to do this. It is much more suited for commercial trade shows where you have multiple screens all around a stall. The reason I looked into this was because I needed to split my signal between my TV and a second monitor.  

This article will explain some hardware options you can use to get from one video source, to multiple screens, replicating the same image on each screen. This is not a true dual screen setup.

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There are many good reasons to have a list of what movies you own. It can make it easier to choose a film to watch, give you film information and it provides a record of what you had in case they get stolen. I have wanted to catalog my movies for a long time in case they got stolen but did not get around to it as all DVD cataloging software I could find, was shareware and costed money. Besides, I thought I had a good idea of what I had.

Last year my fears came true, I had my entire collection of 400 DVD’s taken from my house. I was lucky as later in the evening, some were found in pawn shops and on the people who carried out the crime, the rest could not be tracked down.

Insurance covered a certain amount of the DVD’s which had vanished, in the form of a voucher. I created a list of the DVD’s from the pawn slips and included the ones I received that night from the cops. Then I headed to the shop to replenish my collection. I thought I would have a good chance of buying the same DVD’s that had been stolen. I ended up not really having a clue, and instead I ended up purchasing a whole heap of DVD’s that were different to what I previously owned, and then ended up missing badly. If only I had a comprehensive list of DVD’s before the series of unfortunate events happened.

This article will show you the Ant Movie Catalog. There are two parts to the software. One part is the editor, which does not look all that great, but it does work. Secondly is the Ant Movie Viewer, which you can see a screenshot of in the picture above. It looks nice and does what I want. Best of all, it is the only free DVD catalog software that I have found which is worth using.

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