Firefox add-ons that save your time

Whether you want to speed access to the Web sites you regularly visit, keep better tabs on your tabs, or protect your system from potentially dangerous active content, there’s a Firefox extension ready to help you out. Jack Wallen shares his list of favorite time-saving, browser-enhancing add-ons.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=402

Improve performance of Visual Studio

If you want to make Visual Studio 2005 work faster you can disable a couple of options
in Tools/Options menu. Here are some settings that can be changed:

1. Turn off background HTML validation. Go to Tools / Options and select Text Editor / HTML / Validation in the tree view on the left side. Uncheck the Show Errors check box.
2. Turn off AutoRecover. Go to Tools / Options and select Environment / AutoRecover in the tree view. Uncheck the Save AutoRecover check box.
3. Close your property grid (View / Properties Window)

World Community Grid

There is a good chance to contribute your idle computing time to fight diseases. It takes only couple of secs to join.
You can join a world-wide computing grid. Then you can pick-up your favorite team to contribute together. There is advanced settings panel you can configure you connection time the way it does not hamper your daily work.

When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!

Here is the link to learn more about World Community Grid.