How To Cut Down Your Cellphone Bill By Using FREE Android Applications!

Are you heavy on sending Text Messages but you want to save more on your mobile bills ? With these Android applications, you can send free sms (not just locally, but even to all 146 countries worldwide) and monitor your mobile usage, so that you’ll never have to go over your monthly mobile allowance. But wait, of course you need to have an Android Phone to be benifited from this trick!

To do this, we will use two Android applications:  HeyWire for sending free local and international sms, and Droid Stats to monitor our monthly phone usage. Both of these applications are available for free from the Android market, so head over to the market, and install them when you are ready.

Free SMS

HeyWire, developed by Media Friends, offers free sms in over 146 countries worldwide. HeyWire lets you send sms over WiFi, or your data plan, so you do not have to worry about consuming too much of your data plan when you have a free WiFi available for you to use.

Check your HeyWire number by tapping the “Settings” button. You and your friends have to use this number to exchange sms.

You can use HeyWire beyond sending sms; you can even use it to update your Facebook status. Just tap the “Chat Services” button, and you can add your Facebook account to HeyWire.

Monitoring Your Monthly Mobile Usage

If you’re puzzled on why you keep exceeding your talk time or sms allowance, then you might want to monitor your mobile usage with Droid Stat.

Droid Stat’s setting screen consists of four menu: the monthly limit menu, the billing menu, the application setting menu, and the actions menu.

The monthly limit button lets you configure your phone allowance, the billing button lets you configure your phone charges, and the application settings button is where you can set Droid Stat to warn you when you are about to reach your monthly allowance.

The monthly limit screen lets you configure your monthly call, sms, and data allowance.

Tap the free minute, sms, or data, to set your monthly allowance.

Once you’re done setting up your monthly allowance, head over to the “Application Setting” screen, and set Droid Stat to send notifications when you are about to exceed your monthly limit.

Sometimes, despite all of our best and honest efforts, we still exceed our monthly mobile allowance. The best thing we can do is to evaluate our monthly mobile usage, and pick a different plan to accommodate our average monthly mobile usage.

Feel free to share your tips to us on how to save money on mobile phone, just write them in the comments section.

How To Enable Macbook-style Two-finger Scrolling in Windows Laptop

After using my new Macbook Air for the last week, it’s almost painful to switch back to my PC laptop—using two finger scrolling has become second nature. Here’s how to get the same feature on (most) Windows laptops.

This technique only works for laptops using Synaptics trackpads—if your laptop is using an Alps or something else, you’re probably out of luck, since we’ve not been able to find a solution for those.

How to Tell What Type of Trackpad You Have

Figuring out what type of hardware you’re using is extremely simple—just type mouse into the Start Menu search box, or head into the Mouse section of Control Panel. Once you’re there, head to the Hardware tab, and you’ll be able to see what type of pointing device you’re using.

You can probably also see an icon in your system tray for the pointing device you’re using—thankfully that’s easy enough to remove.

Enable Two-Finger Scrolling with Synaptics Drivers

Your laptop probably has the default drivers from Microsoft or the drivers for your laptop vendor—for instance, if you’ve got a Dell laptop like the one I’m typing on, it has Dell-branded versions of the Synaptics drivers, which may not support two-finger scrolling. It’s worth taking a trip into the Mouse settings to see if there’s an option, but otherwise you’ll need a different solution.

The actual Synaptics drivers from their site support two-finger scrolling gestures natively, so what you can do is simply install those instead of the drivers from your laptop’s manufacturer. Head to the the driver downloads page, install them, and reboot your PC.

Now when you head into the Mouse Properties window in Control Panel, you’ll see a Device Settings tab, where you can click the Settings button to get into the advanced settings page.

Head to Scrolling –> Two-Finger Scrolling on the left-hand side, where you can enable vertical or horizontal scrolling with two fingers—you’ll probably want to enable the EdgeMotion setting as well, which keeps scrolling when your fingers hit the edge of your touchpad.

You’ll probably want to also check out the Pointing –> Sensitivity settings and do some tweaking there—if you’ve got the PalmCheck feature or the Touch Sensitivity cranked up too far, the scrolling won’t work well.

It’ll require some testing, but you should have two-finger scrolling.

You’ll probably also notice that the drivers enable Pinch Zooming, and they even let you do three-finger gestures. Sadly they work better in theory than in practice, but you’re encourage to experiment to see if you like them.

Enable Two-Finger Scrolling with a Freeware Add-on

If you’d rather not mess with your drivers, there’s another add-on that works, though it only works for Synaptics touchpads. After doing a lot of testing, we’ve actually found that this is a preferable solution that works really well.

You’ll need to download TwoFingerScroll, extract the zip file somewhere safe that won’t be deleted by accident, and then just launch the utility. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a new icon in your tray, where you can quickly enable or disable the scrolling, and more importantly, head into the Settings.

The Settings panel’s Scrolling tab has a couple of options that you’ll want to tweak—set Scroll type to Linear, and Scroll mode to Smart. This will enable significantly better scrolling than the Compatible mode.

If you click the Help link you’ll see a popup dialog that explains how each one works—the important one is Smart mode, which actually does smooth scrolling mode most of the time, until you hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt while scrolling, and then it switches into Compatible mode for that single application.

This is a great way to get the most of both worlds—if the regular mode doesn’t work, like for older applications, you can use the hotkey sequence to enable compatible mode, which should work.

You’ll probably want to head to the General tab and make sure that it’s also set to start up with Windows.

We tested both of these techniques on a Dell Studio 1555 laptop, with great luck—the TwoFingerScroll utility worked a lot better than the Synaptics driver method, but your mileage may vary, or it might not work for you at all.

How To Access Hidden Regional Themes in Windows 7

To access the regional themes copy and paste the following path into the search box and press enter

 

C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT

In the MCT Folder you will find additional themes for Canada, Australia, South Africa and Great Britain

You can go in and grab the wallpapers or go into the theme folder, double click the thumbnail to add it

This is a neat trick that will let you customize Windows 7 with hidden themes already available.