My first big purchase online was in 2000 when I purchased the Acer TravelMate 508T laptop for RM5000+. Having a laptop with a 12.1 TFT screen with a 500 MHz processor was kind of exciting back then.

For a while the laptop served me well but it wasn’t long before problems started to crop up. I had to repair the hinges twice; which cost me around RM300 each time. While the laptop is still working today, I’ve stopped using it a couple of years back when the hinges broke again for the third time.

Perhaps, the easiest way to ‘remember’ all your passwords is to use password manager software like RoboForm. Alternatively, the built-in password manager in most browsers should suffice most for most people.

However if you are after something more natural that involves the use of your memory, here are some tips to help you out.

Using your memory has its advantage in that you can still login to any website even from a computer that doesn’t have access to your password manager data.

In case you don’t know about this already, Alexa has released a toolbar for Firefox. What this means is that more Firefox users can now be counted towards a site’s overall Alexa ranking. This will effectively improves the accuracy of the Alexa ranking as more Firefox users decide to install the toolbar.

Previously, the official Alexa toolbar only exists for Internet Explorer.

Once installed, the toolbar sits quietly in your browser status bar at the bottom right showing a site traffic trend, reach meter and traffic rank. In addition, a new related links menu is added to your browser menu bar.

Here’s another cool tip for Firefox I came across recently. If you have a favourite website where you search frequently, a feature called Smart Keywords will let you search that website right from the Location bar.

Let say you are always curious to know any blog’s Technorati ranking and you visit Technorati.com all the time to do the search. Normally, you go to Technorati.com and click in the search box and enter domain name and click Search .

Smart keyword will make these steps redundant. To create a Smart Keyword for Technorati.com, visit their page and right click on the search field.

If you’ve been spending time on the Internet for any amount of time, I am sure you have a handful websites or blogs that you visit daily for a dose of information or inspiration. For most people, typing the domain name in the address bar or lunging for the mouse to access the bookmarked site would be the routine.

Those who are a fan of keyboard shortcuts will be happy to know that you can actually access your bookmarks faster using a nifty feature in Firefox which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut.

RedFly Marketing has released a Firefox extension that let you see what searchers in other countries are seeing for a particular search.

You can also use it to compare organic search results in different countries or if you want to see how your AdWords PPC campaigns appear in different regions.

Previously, I’ve been manually appending &gl=country to the query string in my search URL to view the search results in a particular country. For example, if I want to see who are paying for the keyword “free stuff” in the US, I constructed the following:

Like most software, you can access all of Mozilla Firefox features via the menu bar or the in context popup menu with your mouse.

However, sometimes using a mouse actually slows you down. The precious seconds it takes to move you hand away to move you mouse can add up over the course of a full day. You can save time and avoid reaching for the mouse if you are familiar with keyboard shortcuts.

The following keyboard shortcuts will make web browsing with Firefox even more fun and productive.

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension that adds a new functionality to your Firefox and Mozilla browsers in that it allows you to easily see how any site is performing.

Once installed, SearchStatus sits unobtrusively on your status bar. You can view any info about a website by left clicking on the extension to access its popup menu as shown below.

The performance information includes the site’s Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming link, Alexa related links, and backward links from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I upgraded my operating system to Windows Vista Ultimate a few days ago without having to wipe Windows XP from my hard disk. It involved installing Vista on a separate partition in my hard disk so that I can still run Windows XP anytime I like.

By doing so, I’ll have an OS to fall back to in case my Windows Vista installation goes horribly wrong. But I didn’t have a choice, I would have to make Vista works and I am glad it did.

A few months after I wrote about my intention here and here to upgrade my operating system to Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, I finally did it on Saturday last weekend.

I managed to grab an OEM copy for RM680 after shopping around at Karamunsing Complex in Kota Kinabalu.

Getting Ready For Vista

I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor, an application that helps Windows XP users identify which edition of Vista meets their needs and whether their PCs are ready for an upgrade and I passed with flying colours.