We all are familiar with IP addresses, but what about MAC address? It's a unique identifier of the network interface card (NIC) present in the computer system. MAC address is composed of 6 hexadecimal numbers (e.g 2E-AA-45-B1-7F-1E). Every NIC has unique address that identifies it from all other NIC's that have produced till date on this planet. Sometimes, systems in the network are given restrictive access to resources on the basis of their IP's or MAC addresses. How to change the MAC address and bypass the filters?

During manufacturing, the unique ID (MAC address) is hard coded on the card and cannot be changed. But we can make such changes that the operating system fetches a different address leaving the real address behind the curtains. To change the MAC address follow this simple procedure.

1. Open your netowrk interface card's properties window. Choose Client for Microsoft Networks.

2. Click Configure in Windows 2000 Professional. If you are using Windows XP, choose Advanced tab.

3. Choose Network Address property from the list.

4. By default you will find Not Present optioned checked. Choose the Value option and type in a new MAC address in the format (1E224EA72F88), excluding the dashes as shown earlier. Click ok and you are done.

Google has released a major feature upgrade in GMail. Addition of Video Chat and Voice Chat right inside GMail interface.

It will work on systems having Windows XP and later releases. To enable this feature you are required to download the voice and video chat plugin, and of course you must have a web cam. If you are unable to get this feature enabled in your account, there is no need to worry. Feature integration in all GMail accounts is under propagation, and will be available to all GMail users in 24 to 48 hours.

Do you take your USB drive to office or use it on shared computer? Are you worried about the sensitive data in your flash drive? Often our USB drive is prone to unauthorized access leaving our important data at the mercy of other users. How to cope with this situation by keeping our important files safe and secure?

Cryptainer LE is an excellent USB drive locking software, that creates a secure encrypted disk volume on your flash drive for safe storage of data. The software is completely free and very easy to use.

Cryptainer LE uses strong 128 bit Blowfish algorithm to encrypt the data making it virtually unbreakable. The software is directly installed in the flash drive, and prompts for creating a volume to store sensitive data, after installation. You are required to provide the volume size, name and password through an easy wizard. Once the volume is created, all you need to do is to drag and drop your files in this secure encrypted drive. The dropped files are automatically encrypted giving double protection.

Any third person who tries to access your files from this encrypted volume will see this drive as a single file filled with junk characters.

Often we want to clone entire hard drive for quick installations on multiple systems, or to save our critical data in aging hard drive. There are many commercial as well as free solutions to clone the hard drives. I tested about 4 free solutions, each one having its own pro can cons. Following software passed all tests and is an absolute gem for cloning hard drives.

DriveImage XML is a free hard drive cloning software that has some great features at par with commercial solutions. The software allows you to backup, browse and restore the drive images with ease. It also offers direct drive to drive cloning

DriveImage XML can only run on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista as per official manual, but I have tested it on Windows 200 Professional and it runs fine without any glitch . During backup process, two files are made viz.. .XML containing the drive description and .DAT containing the actual data as raw binary image. During cloning process, you can also lock the partition so that no unnecessary updates occur during the cloning process.

Google SMS Channels is one of the coolest service that enables you to send free alerts and messages to your subscribers containing your preferred content. For Indian subscribers it is completely free.

Creating sms channels takes just a couple of minutes and you are ready to distribute your favorite content to you subscribers via mobile devices. For creating an account, you must verify your mobile number through a verification code sent to your mobile device. Once you have completed the verification process, you can create sms channels for your subscribers.

An ideal use of this service is to set alerts for your blog posts and keep your readers updated whenever any fresh content is posted on your blog. To get a taste of it, you can subscribe to my sms channel to get latest updates of my MintBlogger blog.

MintBlogger: Latest Post Updates By SMS (For Indian Subscribers only)

One of the reasons of slow Windows start up is list of programs that are scheduled to launch at boot time. Sometimes a resource hogging program delays the Windows start up eating up memory and precious time. The only solution is to either de-activate them or completely delete them from start up queue. Here is an excellent software to manage the same.

Quick Startup is a perfect piece of software to manage the start up programs of Windows OS. Quick startup let's you delete, de-activate or add new programs to be run at Windows start up. It also displays resource usage rating for each entry in start up list, that gives good indication of each program and their load on start up. We can easily short list the most resource intensive programs and can de-activate them.

If you are unsure whether a program in the start up list is important system program that must be run at start up, you can right click programs in the list and can watch their properties to get fair amount of idea about their usage and importance.

Quick Startup is a freeware, completely free from any spyware or adware.

There are plethora of Windows security settings and performance tweaks that an average Windows user do not know. Some of these settings are available to general users via regular Windows interface, but some tricky settings are hidden deep inside system directories. If you want to fine tune your Windows security settings, then grab this excellent free software.

Cerberus Security Guard is an ultimate Windows security settings tweaking software for Windows.

The software has 5 different tabs giving tweaks for following categories.

1. Security
2. Services
3. System
4. IE/Mozilla
5. Media Player

A novice user may get overwhelmed by the sheer number of tweaks and settings, and sometimes you may not be able to understand the effect of a given tweak. Advanced users will love this software, as they will get lots of tweaking options.

The security and IE/Mozilla tabs are my favorite giving me some very good security settings and performance tweaks. In case, inadvertently you get into trouble by altering some important settings, the systems default settings button is there to rescue. This button will bring the system back into previous state.

Converting video files from one format to another becomes a necessity at times. Sometimes, we want to reduce the file size compromising on quality, and sometimes our video player doesn't support the format. Whatever be the reason, video format conversion software are very handy in crunching the video stream and giving them our desired shape.

Mux is an excellent online video file conversion service that can convert your video file into almost any format. After conversion, you can download it to your PC, share it privately over web with your friends or family, and you can even convert into format that is suitable for the mobile phone, and can send it directly to a mobile.

Advanced users can also use the Mux Developers API to add video sharing and conversion ability to their web sites and blogs.

There are dozens of photo editing programs available on Internet. Normally, professionals use Adobe Photoshop for editing the digital pictures. If you do not want to spend on your photo editing software, here is an excellent alternative for Photoshop. People call it 'Poor Man's Photoshop'.

PhotoScape is an awesome free photo editing software that is light on system resources and has lots of features. PhotoScape is not just an image editor, it also has the following integrated modules.

1. Image Viewer
2. Image Editor
3. Batch Editor
4. Page
5. Image Combiner
6. Animated GIF
7. Advanced Image Printing
8. Image Splitter
9. Screen Capturing Module
10. Color Picker
11. Batch Renaming
12. Raw Image Converter

You can also create stunning banners and logos with the help of this amazing photo editing software. The integration of color picker and screen capturing module makes it an absolute essential part of your desktop.

There are many shareware programs for creating screen presentations, SnagIT and Camtasia Studio are popular among them. Screen presentations gives a professional touch to our demos and have the power to influence and convince the clients/readers effectively. Although there are many free screen recording programs, but most of them do not work efficiently and the presentation quality is not up to the mark. I found this excellent piece of free software that is free and create good quality screen presentations.

Screen2Exe is an excellent free software for recording screen for demos, presentations and tutorials. The free version creates a highly compressed .exe file for presenting the screen recording.

Apart from screen capture, the audio feed from microphone is also supported. The software also lets you add text, images and annotations to the recorded stream in edit mode after the capture is complete. The edit mode also support zoom in, zoom out and fade effects, which is a very powerful feature in the free version. You can also introduce delay in between the clips and can also cut selective frames from the recording. This much of features are excellent for the free version.

Screen2Exe also runs on Vista, apart from Win 2000,XP and Win 2003.