Download Music for Free at Jamendo

If someone had told me a couple years ago you can legally download music for free, I’d wink twice and give him an elbow nudge. Times, they have a changed!

Simon Slangen from MakeUseOf.com—which is quickly becoming one of my favourite sites—recently reviewed four sites where you can download free music. Here’s what he had to say about Jamendo:

“All the music available on Jamendo is released under the Creative Commons license. This means that it can be freely listened to and used and redistributed under the same license.

The artists then get rewarded via user donations and revenues from the Jamendo’s commercial programs and partnerships.

You can browse through over 150,000 tracks by artist, album and genre, or you can use the tags for quick navigation.

All of the tracks and albums are available for download without any needed registration and can be shared over the internet using widgets.”

Learn about more sites to download free music here.

Boost Computer Performance with This Easy Check

There’s little in life more frustrating than a painfully slow computer. I know—I’m currently using one. If you’re using Windows, you can improve your machine’s performance by ensuring your IDE drives aren’t operating in a slow, ineffective transfer mode.

From MakeUseOf.com via Lifehacker:

“When fresh from the box—or your workbench— your computer should have had all it's IDE drives set in Direct Memory Access mode. This is a far speedier method of disk access than Programmed Input/Output mode. The technical side of the two modes is dense but let it suffice: DMA is a the fast and preferred method and PIO mode is the slower method Windows defaults to after having six redundancy checks fail. Things like power outages, doing a hard reset and other disk interruptions can cause these errors. Your Windows box may be operating in the slower transfer mode because mistakenly thinks that your system is unstable or that there is something wrong with your disks. The fix for your computer downshifting into PIO mode is simple. Go to your Control Panel, click on the System icon, open up your Device Manager and pull up the properties for your Primary and Secondary IDE channels. Under the Advanced settings tab you'll be able to set the Transfer Mode to "DMA if available". Reboot and you should be in business. MakeUseOf has a full step by step guide with screenshots if you'd like a visual reference.”

3 Easy Tools to Record Streaming Music as MP3 Files

Until now I never even considered making MP3 files from streaming music. My life is forever changed. If you’d like in on this action, check out these three tools (step-by-step instructions on the source site):

1. ClipInc 4

ClipInc is available for Windows. It comes with hundreds of preset internet radio stations, and with the free version you can record up to three audio streams simultaneously.

2. Streamripper

Streamripper is a plugin for Winamp and as such it is platform independent.

3. TheLastRipper

TheLastRipper is available for Windows, Linux, and in a beta version for OSX. What really makes this tool a winner is that you don’t have to deal with commercials, badly cut tracks or alternating quality.

Speed Up Your Computer’s Performance

In today’s super fast paced world, we expect everything to work instantly. Can you imagine how much patience a dialup connection once took, let alone life before the Internet?

A slow computer is enough to drive one bonkers.

There are a few simple ways to optimize your computer’s performance. Basically, it’s about getting rid of things you thought you already got rid of.

The blog Computer Tips n Tricks offers the following suggestions:

1) Check registry files to make sure they are properly installed and in good working order (you can use what is called a registry scanner to do this).

2) Remove icons you don’t need or use from your desktop. This will free up memory and increase the speed of your computer.

3) Deleting a program alone is not enough. Use a program uninstaller to remove all traces of unwanted programs.

4) Make sure to remove all unwanted programs from the taskbar as well.

Protect Your Laptop from Data Loss Disasters

Way back, like ten years ago, when I went to school, we still used a pen and paper to write notes. Nowadays, laptops are the norm.

And while they are super convenient and efficient in many ways, they are not perfect. As with all computers, the biggest risk is the potential loss of data. And there is nothing as frustrating, and true, as the excuse “the computer ate my homework”.

So whether you’re a student, or someone who simply prefers to work on a laptop, it’s good to keep the following in mind:

• Be gentle. Laptops are reasonably robust, but they do not always survive rough handling.
• Backup. At least once a week if not more on a CD, DVD, USB flash drive or online.
• Keep your anti-virus up –to-date and run it regularly.
• Use the auto save function. Losing a document you have spent hours slaving over is devastating.
• Pay attention to your battery. If your computer suddenly shuts off, you may lose your work.

Photo, wvs