Anti-malware testing group AV-Comparatives.org not only gave Microsoft Security Essentials a top rating for malware removal, but now they've given it their best ranking in their performance test as well.

AV-Comparatives.org ran a series of real-world tests running through common scenarios like downloading, extracting, copying, and encoding files, installing and launching applications, and they also ran through an automated testing suite as well. Once the dust had settled, it became clear that not only is MSE one of only three products that both blocks and removes malware well, but it's also very light on system resources.

Out of all the products tested, Microsoft Security Essentials was the best-performing free antivirus solution, and one of only two that received "very fast" on each of the real-world tests, earning it their top award: an "advanced+" ranking. We've been telling you for a while that you don't need to pay for Windows security, and now with MSE ranked alongside the top paid apps in both malware removal and performance, you might want to consider making the switch.

Hit the AV-Comparatives link for the full report in PDF form, or check out the PC Mag story for the overview—if you can deal with some irritating in-text ads.

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Windows: Ever since ourTunes stopped working after iTunes 7, many iTunes users have been looking for ways to easily download music from shared libraries over the network. AIR app Aethyr fills that gap, once again eliminating the need for an external drive.

Aethyr is pretty simple to use: just open it up and check the dropdown box in the upper right hand corner for shared libraries on your network. After picking a shared library, you can download any songs from it straight to your computer. By default, they'll go into a folder called "Aethyr" in your Documents, but you can change the folder by hitting the home icon in Aethyr's window. A good idea would be to change the folder to iTunes' "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder, if you want the songs to go directly into your iTunes library.

There are certainly a few small quirks with the software—for example, you can't listen to music while downloading songs—but it does more than a good enough job of replacing the functionality we all miss from ourTunes. It's also still being actively developed, and those quirks are still being worked on. The one thing we'd love to see in the future is a Mac version. Right now, you can download songs from Mac libraries, but Mac users can't use Aethyr to download songs themselves.

Aethyr is a free download for Windows only.

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If you've got an iPhone, are a little bored with iOS, and you're interested in moonlighting with Google's Android operating system, you can dual boot Android and iOS side-by-side on your iPhone in a few relatively simple steps.



What You'll Need:

All you'll need to get started is an iOS device; Right now, the iPhone 3G has the best support, and that's what we're using in this guide.

Step One: Jailbreak Your iPhone


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsYou've got a number of jailbreaking options, including PwnageTool, Redsn0w, and Blackra1n. Pick one that works on your platform, download it, and walk through the jailbreak process. (I'm not going to detail the jailbreak here since the latest jailbreaking methods often change a little, but at this point, jailbreaking an iPhone is a relatively simple process.)

Step Two: Install Bootlace in Cydia


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsIn order to do this, you'll need to launch Cydia from the homescreen, tap on the Manage button, select Sources, then tap Edit, then Add. The repository you'll need to add is repo.neonkoala.co.uk. Tap Add Source, let Cydia work its magic, and then tap on your newly added repository and install Bootlace.

Step Three: Run Bootlace and Patch the Kernel


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsLeave Cydia, and launch Bootlace. If Bootlace isn't on your homescreen after you leave Cydia, restart your iPhone and it should be there. Then just launch Bootlace, and let it download and patch the kernel. When it's done, tap on Reboot and wait for your phone to reboot.

Step Four: Install OpeniBoot


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsNow launch Bootlace again, tap the OpeniBoot button, and tap Install, then Continue. OpeniBoot will download and install.

Step Five: Install iDroid


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsOnce OpeniBoot is installed, tap the iDroid button, tap Install, OK, and then wait. iDroid—which is essentially the Android OS customized for your iPhone—will download and install. This will take a while, so be patient, and if your battery is low, you may want to plug in your phone you start.

Step Six: Reboot and Play Around with Android


How to Install Android on an iPhone in Six Easy StepsNow you've installed Android on your iPhone. Time to play around with it. Just tap on the QuickBoot button from inside Bootlace, tap the Android icon (the one of the little Android proudly holding an Apple), and confirm that you want to reboot into Android.

How Does It Work?



The first thing worth mentioning is that Android on iPhone isn't close to ready to use as your full-time mobile operating system. That doesn't mean it never will be, but at the moment, this is more something you'd want to do to fulfill your curiosity, wear as a geek badge, or just have a little fun and (maybe) support a really great project.

You can see how far they've come along with each phone on the iDroid status wiki. As I mentioned above, the iPhone 3G is the best supported iOS device (and currently only it and the 2G work with the method above, I believe). The biggest issue right now with the 3G is power management (PMU on the wiki), which isn't fully functional. Most importantly, suspend isn't yet working, so your battery won't likely last long. It's still come a long way from where it's been in the past, though, and having followed this project excitedly for a while, the progress they've made in recent weeks has been really impressive.

Regarding a few nuts and bolts: Your iPhone's lock button acts as the Android back button; the iPhone home button acts as the Android menu button; the iPhone's volume down button acts as the Android home button; and the iPhone's volume up button acts as... I'm not really sure what. To lock the screen, press the iPhone's home and and lock buttons at the same time. To power off, hold the lock and home buttons for a couple of seconds until the Power Off prompt appears. You can see a few other operating quirks by watching the video above.

As you can see in the video, performance isn't perfect (it's occasionally a little laggy), but again, with time, that could change significantly. Either way, the iDroid project—along with OpeniBoot and Bootlace—is something I remain extremely excited about. As a long-time iPhone user and recent Android switcher, the main thing that sets the two apart for me is the iPhone hardware, which always feels a head and shoulders above whatever Android device I put my hands on. I know a lot of people (including myself) who'd kill to dual boot and iPhone 4 with iOS and Android. (In fact, if you really want to help out, you can donate to the iDroid Project by clicking the Donate button on the top right of the iDroid Project's main page and maybe speed things along.)

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Whether you'd rather keep your Christmas music from cluttering up your library for half the year, or you need iPod-friendly tracks alongside your lossless ones, you can make your life easier by splitting your music into two separate libraries. Here's how.

I recently ripped some of my music in lossless format, but since my MP3 player doesn't play the lossless format, and my favorite media programs don't encode music on-the-fly when I sync to my MP3 player, I still needed both high (the lossless) and low (MP3-player friendly) bitrate versions of all those songs. Unfortunately, this creates a lot of duplicates in my library, making it much harder to sift through. So, I separated my music into two "libraries" within the library: one containing the lossless files of those albums, and one with all low bitrate versions.

Of course, separating your music by bitrate isn't the only reason one might want to manage mulitple libraries: maybe you listen to Christmas music for a couple months out of the year but not the other half, or maybe you just find that your enormous classical collection makes your pop library feel cluttered. Whatever the case, it can be hard to have all your music thrown into one hodgepodge of a library, as most programs do by default. If you think you might benefit from splitting things up, here are a few options for keeping your music libraries separated and organized, no matter what platform, program, or portable MP3 player you have. The examples below will use bitrate as the variable, but you can easily tweak any of these methods for your own situation.

Option One: Use Multiple Library Files

Most music players store library data in a file or folder somewhere on your computer, and you can usually work around this file to create two music libraries, choosing which one you use when you launch the program. However, this method is also, in my opinion, the most inconvenient long-term, since you actually end up managing two compeltely separate libraries. Alternatively, you could use separate players for each library—i.e., use iTunes for the library you want to sync to your iPod and MediaMonkey for the library containing lossless files—but that carries with it the same downsides.

To use multiple library files in iTunes, just hold the Shift key (or Option key if you're on a Mac) while launching iTunes. It will give you a dialog box asking you to create or choose a library. If you create a second library, you can easily switch between it and your original library by holding Shift/Option when starting up iTunes to choose between them. Other players may not have the same options built-in, but you can usually still use multiple library files, it'll just be a little more hackish (see methods for foobar2000 and MediaMonkey, for example).

The problem with this method is that you literally have to manage two completely separate libraries. In my bitrate example, any time you add music to one, you need to remember to add it to the other, and any time you create a playlist on one, you need to remember to create it on the other. The two can get pretty easily fragmented, and after a little while it may become more trouble than its worth. This method works best if your libraries are, in fact, completely separate—i.e., one contains only low bitrate files and the other lossless, or one is your usual music library while the other is solely Christmas music. If the two libraries overlap at all (say, if you only rip some of your music in lossless), you'll have to use the slightly more workaround-y option two.

Option Two: Use Smart Playlists to Your Advantage

While every player is different, most allow you to filter your music in a number of different ways into Smart Playlists, or at least to show or hide files with a certain criteria. With this ability, you can keep all your music in one library, but only show certain files at a time, thus eliminating the clutter (in this case, "hiding" the lossy versions when I'm just listening, and hiding the lossless versions when I'm synicng my MP3 player). The procedure is slightly different depending on the type of desktop player you're using.

Library-Based Players

Library-based players are players that allow you to cultivate a collection of music, from which you choose what you want to play. They may or may not have "now playing" windows in which you can create playlists on-the-go—the important part is that they have both a pane where you can select a library or playlist and another pane that shows what's in that library or playlist. Examples include:

• iTunes (Mac/Windows)
• Winamp (Windows)
• Songbird (Windows/Mac)
• MediaMonkey (Windows)
• Rhythmbox (Linux)
• Banshee (Linux)

There are a few different ways to do this, and while your situation may allow for a fully automated solution, our example does not. We essentially want to divide our library up into two different versions: one containing some lossless files and one in which all files are low bitrate. Note that in this example, we don't have every album in lossless format, just some of them. What we're going to do is essentially create two smart playlists, each acting as a separate music library: one will contain all of our music in low bitrate format, while one will be a mix of low and high bitrate files. We essentially are just making sure there are no duplicates in either "library".

While our "iPod-friendly" library is extremely simple to create—just make a smart playlist that excludes high-bitrate files (see above)—the "mixed" library is a bit more difficult. We can't easily automate a playlist to check for lossless files and then add the lossy versions, so we need to manually tell our music program which songs are low-bitrate duplicates of our lossless tracks. THe easiest way to do so is to use the multi-purpose "Comments" section: just round up all your lossy duplicates and add something in the comments section to tag them (I just add the word "lossy"). Now, you can just create a smart playlist for songs who's comment section does not contain the word "lossy", and you're in business. From now on, instead of hitting "Music" to view your entire library, just hit one of the smart playlists.

Note that some players, like Winamp, allow you to create "Smart Views" instead of smart playlists—the process isn't any different; it just makes it feel like less of a workaround, since it shows up as a music library instead of a playlist.

Playlist-Based Players

While many players (like MediaMonkey) have a "now playing" queue, playlist-based players focus very heavily on this functionality and may not let you view smart playlists in a separate pane before adding them to your now playing list. Usually, they only have two panes: one with your library, and one with the current track queue. Players falling into this category include:

• Amarok (Linux)
• foobar2000 (Windows)

Since we can't create separate libraries (since these players make you add smart playlists to the queue to view them), we have to tweak our method a bit. We're going to do essentially the same thing we did with library-based players, except instead of creating a playlist, the best thing we can do is filter the current view. Again, just add the word "Lossy" to the comment field of low-bitrate duplicates, and filter your library pane according to the library you need to work with. In Amarok, filtering for your mixed library would look something like this, using the filter -comment:"Lossy" (meaning, in plain english, that the Cmment field does not contain "Lossy"):

If you were filtering for your iPod-friendly library, you'd change it to something like bitrate:<400:

In Amarok, you can use their handy filter editor, but some programs (like foobar2000) require you to type in the filter yourself.

This method, while very similar to the smart playlist method, has one minor drawback: you may have to retype or reapply the filter every time you want to switch libraries. It's not that big of a deal, but if your player doesn't save recent filters (like Amarok does), it just means it takes a bit more than one click to move to a different library.

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These aren't necessarily perfect solutions, nor are they the most user-friendly. However, if you find that your music library has too much clutter in it, you may be best cleaning it out by managing a few different "libraries" at a time. Furthermore, separating your library by bitrate is only one example of when this might be necessary. If you use multiple libraries (or you think you need to), let us know your solutions for organizing your media in the comments.

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Windows: If you've put off tweaking the size of your desktop icons because you assumed it would be a pain, it's time to enjoy some hassle-free resizing without digging in menus or replacing icon packs.



You can resize desktop icons in Windows 7 and Windows Vista using a simple keyboard and mouse combination. Lifehacker reader Guard stumbled across the shortcut by complete accident and was quite pleased with the discovery.

You can increase and decrease the size of your desktop icons in Windows 7 using CTRL + Mouse Scroll. It's a great trick for both those who like to tightly fit a lot of icons, and those who have very few icons and want a larger view instead.

I've been using Windows 7 since the beta, and I've never seen this mentioned. I accidentally discovered it when intending to zoom in Chrome.

All you have to do is click on your desktop to make sure it's in focus, then hold down control and scroll up or down to resize. In the image above the middle icon was the default size, the left icon was a small as we could go, and the right icon was as large as we could go—at the largest the icons were 256x256 pixels.

The trick also works in Windows explorer too, check out the video below to see it in action:

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