Tag: Windows

How to give your laptop a funky makeover

Laptops can look lacklustre and uninspiring well before they need upgrading. The solution? Cool, cost effective, mini-makeovers that make your PC look fresh and funky. There are hundreds of ways to dress up your PC and give it a new look. This tutorial will have your PC looking fashionable for £5 or less, and you can get the whole job done in around three hours. It’s a fun project to complete, too.

For this project, you need to buy a roll of self-adhesive foil, which is available from most craft and DIY stores. It comes in a variety of different prints and patterns, from leopard print to marble. I opted for a wood effect but you can choose whatever design you fancy. And you don’t need to worry if you change your mind six months down the line – it’s easy to remove the foil with adhesive remover. This tutorial was written for and published in Windows: The Official Magazine.

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Rachael Sharpe

How to create personalised Royal Mail photo stamps

If  you’ve got something special to send, why not make like the Queen for the day and have stamps printed with your photo on? Your recipients will be treated to mail with a wow factor. It’s the perfect way to inject some extra personality into invitations, announcements and thank-you notes, and make sure your mail stands out from boring everyday letters and bills.

Snapfish has a wide range of stamp designs available. There’s something for every occasion – whether it’s a baby announcement or a wedding invitation. You choose a stamp to complement the photo you want to use, decide on either a rectangular or circular frame and whether you want sheets of 10 or 20. As a Royal Mail product, facilitated through Snapfish, you’re guaranteed a first class result. And you can create it on your own PC in just an hour. In this feature for Windows: The Official Magazine, I show you how.

Rachael Sharpe1 Comment

Published: Network with Facebook’s branch BranchOut App

It’s not what you know, but who you know. We all know there’s some truth in that old saying and that’s one of the great things about Facebook application BranchOut. You get to network with your Facebook friends but in a new, professional way where you can see exactly what they do and where they work. One of the most important aspects of BranchOut is being able to find connections through your extended friend network – inside connections you can make use of. Search for a company on BranchOut and see a list of friends and friends- of-friends who work there.

Setting up a profile is a pleasant experience and because BranchOut is a Facebook application, you only need to log in once and can keep your account up to date without logging into another site. The app also operates the largest jobs board on Facebook, so what’s not to like?

I show you exactly how to use it, in this feature for Windows: The Official Magazine. 

Rachael Sharpe

How to…Measure your online influence using Klout

Ever wonder how much influence your social media input has? Find out with Klout, a free tool that measures your online power and even rewards you.

While we’ve always had the power to influence other people, that power, which is being democratised, is much easier to harness with new social media tools. But how much influence do you have over others? Do your Facebook ‘likes’, retweets, posts and comments go unnoticed, or are you an online mover and shaker? This is where Klout comes in, measuring your influence based on your ability to drive action in social networks, and providing you with an updated Klout Score each morning.

Klout provides insights to help you better understand your own power – whether others trust your opinions online, what topics are you the most influential on and how you compare with your friends. Your Klout Score measures your online influence on a scale of 1 to 100, but the average Klout Score is 20, not 50 – bear that in mind when you get yours.

In this tutorial for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how to get started with Klout.

Rachael Sharpe

A tutorial for the shopaholics…

If, like me, you find it difficult to keep your receipts together, with the pesky paper ones always getting lost and the digital ones waiting to be accidentally deleted from your inbox, you’ll love OneReceipt. It keeps paper and digital receipts in one place.

Indexing your spending records might sound like heavy work, but OneReceipt has made the process easy. The software will sync to Google and Gmail accounts, automatically pulling receipts into your personal space. Use a different email address? Simply forward your receipts to OneReceipt. Paper receipts are dealt with most impressively – simply take a picture with your phone and email it. The software does the rest.

Organising your receipts is child’s play with OneReceipt’s easy-to-use categorising and tagging system, and its filter search function makes it easy to find things, too. Plus it’s free. In this feature for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how to get the most from it.

Rachael Sharpe

How to… Create a master password

Today you need a password for pretty much everything. You need one for Windows Live ID, another for your email address, one for each of your social networking accounts and then there are all your banking logons… The list goes on. Hopefully you already know that you should have a different password for each account. If not, a single mistake can leave all your accounts vulnerable to attack.

But although they’re safe, and preferable to using a single insecure password for everything, multiple strong passwords can be difficult to remember and keep track of. That’s why I love KeePass, a free open source password manager that helps you create strong passwords without the need to memorise them all. You put all of your passwords into one database, which is locked with a master key, so you only have to remember one set of login details. In this tutorial for Windows: The Official Magazine I show you how.

Rachael Sharpe
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