Tips from a college student

Dumblittleman has a guest post that is great for college students. It has some great websites that every college student should use that are free. Check out the list here

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I've been looking for a while for Christmas music, because listening to the same Cd's over and over gets old fast. And I hate the radio because I don't get good reception with my stereo. I had been using Itunes and listening to shared music on my college network, which is a good option, but I now have found my favorite solution: free XM radio on AIM.

If you are logged into AIM then you can look at the bottom of your buddy list and see the headphones button. If you click that you have access to a lot of radio stations, I know some of them are XM, I'm not sure if they all are or not. These stations are commercial free and good quality, much better than over the air radio.

What I have done is hook my computer into my stereo through the front input on my stereo and a cord I bought at Radioshack out the headphones jack on my computer. With this setup I can hear whatever is coming out of my computer speakers through my surround sound system.

I liked listening to the shared network on my Itunes, but that is only available on campus, it takes a long time to load, and Itunes seems to slow down my computer. I normally have AIM running in the background anyway, so this doesn't hog any more system resources. I also don't have to download the music, so it saves me a lot of hard drive space.

I don't know how long AIM has had this feature, but I'd be willing to bet that not many people use it. It is a good service though, as it is free XM radio. So if you are looking for some holiday music or any other kind of music, give it a shot and see what you think. If you don't have AIM, you can go to aim.com and download it. I don't know many people who don't have it though.

Have fun listening to your music!

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Have you ever run a spy ware detector on your computer? I hope you have, because I can guarantee you that it is full of spy ware. I have discovered that most spy ware/viruses/trojans/whatever else bad gets on computers gets there through internet explorer. I have started instead using Mozilla Firefox, which is an alternative to Internet Explorer. When using this program, I get about 10% of the junk on my computer that I was getting before.

I also like the layout of Firefox better than Internet Explorer. I find it difficult to use Internet Explorer, and confusing to change settings. Firefox has had many features for a while that IE is just incorporating into their newest release, IE7. My favorite is tabbed browsing, where instead of opening a new window from a link you just open a new tab. This is now becoming a common feature in all browsers, but Firefox has had it for awhile.

Another feature that I like is the bookmarks toolbar. I have my favorite bookmarks to the right of my menu (file, edit, view, etc), so I can easily access them without having to open up the favorites folder and navigate to them. I have my favorite RSS feeds in the bookmarks toolbar too, so I can view them with one click while I am on any webpage.
I encourage you to download Firefox, as it is in my opinion the best browser available right now.