Symbian's dominance isn't evident here in the US, as it's driven by smartphones—like Nokia's N series or Sony Ericsson's P Series—that don't really have much of a market/mindshare outside of Europe. We've even gone so far as to declare it too marginal to include in our smartphone OS guide.

But there are still plenty of UIQ and S60 phones around, and they all suffer from the same sense of staleness—a stagnation that's obvious, whether it's because of Symbian's global popularity and fragmented nature or despite it. So what do you do to shake the feeling that you're toting a last-gen device? Try this:

Get a new browser
Oddly enough, lots of Symbian phones actually ship with not-so-bad browsers, like S60's, which is based on WebKit just like Mobile Safari and Mobile Chrome. Unfortunately, most of these phones also ship without touchscreens, and depend on a clunky d-pad navigation system. This makes panning around fully-rendered pages a bit of a pain—a problem not helped by the browser's often slow performance. Luckily, there are plenty of alternatives.

Opera Mobile/Mini: Opera has made an appearance in every last one of my smartphone revival stories, and with good reason. Each version offers its own advantage for Symbian: Opera Mobile brings fast-ish full-page rendering with inertial scrolling—only really a boon if you're lucky enough to have a touchscreen handset like the XpressMusic 5900. The newer 9.5 beta, complete with Google Gears support, can be had for UIQ phones, but S60 handsets will have to settle for 8.65. Opera Mini, a Java app, will work on virtually any phone. It's not the prettiest browser, but server-side data compression and clever formatting tricks make it a good fit for smaller-screened Symbian hardware. Bolt is another Java-based browser in the same lightweight, data-conscious vein, and it matches Opera's app feature for feature. You know, six of one...

Skyfire: This surprising little browser takes the Opera Mini/Bolt rationale a little further, running everything through server-side compression, including Flash video. What does that mean, in a word? Hulu. Unfortunately support is limited to Nokia N and E series phones.

Work On Your Communication Skills
Out of the box, most Symbian phones take you as far as emailing. With a few downloads, though, you'll be privy to the same range of messaging capabilities as your smug iPhone and BlackBerry-toting friends, and then some.

Fring: This isn't your locked down, Wi-Fi tethered iPhone Fring. No, this is the real deal: Multiprotocol IMing, VoIP over 3G and Wi-Fi and most importantly, background processing. Skype is supported, sans video.

Truphone: A dedicated VoIP app that integrates rather seamlessly with your S60 handset, Truphone can save you a pretty penny on international, long-distance and even in-plan calls. By routing calls through Truphone's network over Wi-Fi or a cell data connection, Truphone can connect you to other users for free, and connect international calls for a few cents a minute. Other perks include voicemail-to-email forwarding and Google Talk support, but discounted calls are the star of the show here.

Agile Messenger: It may lack the VoIP accouterments of the previously mentioned apps, but for straight up instant messaging you really can't beat it. All the big protocols are here, accessible through the same simple interface. You can send videos and voice messages, but not engage in full conversations—this app is about messaging, and message it does.

And All The Rest
Once you've updated your browser and messaging software, you've edged much closer to a modern smartphone experience. Now to fill in the blanks:

Google Maps: Google's superb maps app is as good here as it is anywhere else, with GPS integration, local search and a clean, intuitive interface. Perhaps most importantly, it's not just for fingers; Google Maps is well-suited to d-pad navigation.

JoikuSpot Lite: It's tethering+1: Any Wi-Fi-equipped S60 3rd Edition phone can operate as an access point with JoikuSpot. The Lite version is free, and adequate.

Qik: Qik is a cool app that can only be described in ways that sound utterly stupid. Lifecasting? Live vlogging? Either way, with the right phone, Symbian can do it well.

Nokia has some ongoing beta projects to check out, and a few of them are worthwhile. SportsTracker feeds a GPS-tracked record of your run or bike rides to a handy web interface. WidSets is a widget dashboard for a rich variety of web apps. ShareOnline provides basic portals for media uploads, whether it be photo, video or audio content.

And finally, we have Mobbler. A lovely little Last.fm radio client, Mobbler is an iffy addition to this list because Last.fm is cutting off third-party radio support at some point in the near future, so it probably won't work for long. But it's good, so use it while you still can.

If what you see so far isn't overly heartening, hold on: The Ovi App Store for S40 and S60 is on its way, hopefully in May. Symbian's laissez-faire take on the App Store, it promises a slew of applications and media downloads, installable through a handset client. This could end up two ways: As a consolidated Symbian app aggregator, collecting the above apps and others into an easy interface, or as an attraction for new developers, who'll be drawn by the large audience and easy publishing features of the store. That latter scenario may be better, but neither is bad.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Most hardware doesn't age well. PCs can quickly become too old to salvage, entire cellphone generations pass in about three years and the country is moving on from outdated CRT display tech en masse. Newly idle gadgetry is the dark side of every upgrade, but there are responsible, beneficial ways to get rid of it.

Sell It
You know, one man's garbage, et cetera. There are a few ways to sell you stuff, and although most old hardware won't net you big bucks, finding a decommissioned gadget a new home is particularly satisfying.

If you think you've got something with niche appeal, eBay is your savior. Your Razr V3? On the right carrier, or unlocked, it could be worth an easy $75, while fetishized first-gen iMacs can rake in well over $100. Shipping as selling on the site can be a hassle and it's one of the most obvious options, but don't ignore the possibility—you never be sure what junk people are willing to pay for, and eBay is the easiest way to find out.

You're not bound to make as much money on Craigslist as on eBay, but it's easier and at least you'll know that whoever adopts your stuff will appreciate it. It's local, so you can usually convince your chumps to come pick you stuff up. Lifehacker as a great guide for getting the most out of Craigslist, but as long as you don't list your Zen Xtra in the Casual Encounters section it should be able to sell itself, or at least give itself away.

Selling gear to a faceless conglomerate might not yield the returns of an eBay success or have the dignity of a loving local transaction, but it'll get your gadgets off your hands and put a bit of money in your pocket. Last year, we investigated Costco's cash-for-gadget program, and it worked, though not always to our liking. Lifehacker wrote up Gazelle, who appraises and buys electronics, even covering the shipping. HP has a similar buyback program. Your gadget might end up as scrap and you won't be getting the best price, but these guys will take an awfully wide range of stuff and the process is pretty convenient.

Recycle It
Despite suffering from a recent bad rep on account of widespread, cost-cutting dumping in China, the recycling option is still a good one, as long as you do it through the right channels. Why not take care of your e-waste and middle-class enviroguilt all at once? The small cost is offset by the fact that your doing a good thing by not dumping some of the more toxic electronic component in landfills or, you know, poor countries, assuming your chosen company is legit.

Apple will waive the fee at recycling firm Metech for anyone who buys a new Mac. If you don't feel like spending $1999 to save $30, you can still use the company.

Your best option is to track down a local recycling company. Many towns have good e-waste facilities—some free, though most are not—and private companies often picks up the slack when the local government can't make it happen. E-Cycling Central has a fantastic utility for finding your local e-waste facilities, municipal and private, but the onus will be on you in either case to ensure that they're not just throwing your stuff into a landfill. Just be sure to ask where the stuff goes and if it gets recycled. If they won't or can't answer, move on.

For residents of D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego areas, as well as a few others, the USPS will help you recycle small gadgetry for free. They basically serve as a middleman between individual citizens and a corporate bulk recycling/repurposing outfit, and offer free shipping for inkjet cartridges, cellphones, PDAs, digital cameras, and MP3 players to be recycled, torn down or sold. Call you local P/O to see if you've got this option. If you do, prepaid packages are available at your branch for easy sending. The best part about this service is that it isn't vetted, so even the dumpiest old Motorola gets a free ride.

Donate It
There are plenty of charitable organizations trade hardware for karma by placing your old hardware in needy hands, but they can be somewhat picky about what they take. The National Cristina Foundation will put your computers in the hands of those who need them, but they won't take garbage. If you have a Pentium 3 equivalent computer with a software license, you're good to go. They'll also take peripherals, which would be a great way to pass on old printers, monitors, mice, keyboards, speakers and so on. The charity has been around for years, and is very good at what it does.

CollectiveGood normally deals with corporate bulk donations, but also runs a buyback program not unlike Gazelle's. The difference is that CollectiveGood will donate your payment directly to the charity of your choice. Face it—it's far more satisfying to feel like you've done something good than to just walk away with a disappointing $31.43 for your once-beloved Optiplex.

Recycling for Charities is a lot like the National Cristina Foundation, but with a focus on reselling cellphones for charity. As with CollectiveGood, you can choose your cause.

Due to shipping constraints, many donation opportunities won't be national—no worries though, as local options abound. Our brilliant intern Erica found plenty of options for New Yorkers in just a few minutes, so a little localized Google-fu will likely turn up something in your area too.

Hat tip to Lifehacker, and thanks to Erico Ho for additional research.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Work rules, lame carriers, prohibitive contracts—whatever the reason you're shacked up with a WinMo phone, you've been through the same experience. You toil with the layers of menus, hidden device settings, poor browsing and crashy, inconsistent performance. Surrounded by fancy, shiny phones with even fancier, shinier OSes, you're even getting a bit jealous, and feel like you have a genuinely last-gen device. Well, as Windows Mobile enthusiasts (who are out there in droves) will tell you, it's not that terrible. With the right apps you can get quite a lot of utility and—yes—enjoyment out of your aging phone.

For God's sake, get a new browser
Internet Explorer Mobile, even in its latest incarnation, has rarely been described as "good." In fact, it's pretty much the complete opposite. No worries though—Windows Mobile, through third parties, has the broadest and most versatile collection of browsers of any of its competitors.

Opera Mini/Mobile: A Java-based browser, Opera Mini is a free download that will immediately give your phone a new lease on life. Fancy this: Now, with your phone, you can visit actual websites, rendered to a reasonable degree of accuracy! OH MY GOD!

There's also Opera Mobile, a native app with a few more advanced features, which has recently shifted its emphasis to a relatively narrow set of touchscreen devices (mostly from HTC and Samsung), on which it performs as a reasonable counterpart to Safari Mobile or Chrome Mobile. It's free when it's in beta, but will cost you for long term use.

Both browsers Opera Mini routes content through Opera's servers for optimization and compression, which can occasionally break formatting. Update: Opera Mobile runs independently of Opera's servers, though there is noticeable compression performed—presumably locally—on some images.

Skyfire: This upstart company has produced a phenomenal browser, dedicated to bringing a full desktop browsing experience to Windows Mobile phones. This powerhouse app is now available to the public, and lives up to most of its claims.

Skyfire routes web content through its servers like Opera Mini does, but with a greater emphasis on exact page reproduction. For the end user, that means fully optimized streaming Flash video, which will allow you to watch everything from Hulu to Megaporn—all automatically transcoded into a lower, EDGE or 3G-appropriate bitrate. Skyfire works wonderfully on most WinMo phones, touchscreen or not, but its version for VGA-resolution phones needs better visuals.

TorchMobile Iris: This is another browser that claims to bring the "desktop experience" to your phone, and for the most part it does, assuming your phone has a touchscreen. It got its start on the LG Dare, where it performed relatively well. In short, this WebKit-based browser render quite well, but it's not terribly fast and the navigation paradigm isn't the most intuitive of the lot. But! It's free and it's not Mobile IE, and for this I am grateful.

Give your old phone a new look
This is where Windows Mobile feels the most out of date; its interface is a classic example of design by committee, only this time the committee was made up primarily of the visionaries responsible for Windows Bob, Windows ME, Windows Vista and possibly the Pontiac Aztec. The solution? Skin it.

PointUI: About a year ago, our own Jason Chen raved about PointUI, and not much has changed—it's still fantastic. This layer, not unlike those designed by HTC, Samsung and Sony to mask WinMo, will provide pretty, finger-friendly navigation to a touchscreen Windows Mobile phone. It looks like the project is on temporary hiatus, but the app is still available here.

SPB Mobile Shell: This one isn't free ($30, actually) but does provide a fairly complete conversion. It reaches deeper into layers of the interface than PointUI does, is a bit more friendly for QWERTY-based phones and offers a load of user skins.

ThrottleLauncher: HTC's TouchFlo 3D is a wonderful Windows Mobile shell, but unfortunately can be difficult to port due to its 3D acceleration requirement. ThrottleLauncher is a TF3D replacement, which works on most Windows Mobile touchscreen phones. It looks like TF3D, and offers skins to look like Android, iPhone OS and others. There are a fair number of bugs present, but they're tolerable.

Fill out your app list:
Most of those things that modern smartphones have—the swank maps, the messaging services, the productivity apps—you can have too. They may not be as polished, but they work very, very well.

Google Apps: Aside from plethora of mobile web apps offered by Google, there are a few native ones as well. Google Maps is a must-download, and provides almost all of the functionality of its iPhone/G1 brother, including GPS integration. Google Mail provides a nice, speedy interface for your Gmail account, offering relief from Windows Mobile's occasionally frustrating mail app, and allowing for relatively easy switching between accounts.

Skype: Here's an area where Windows Mobile generally trumps all others OSes—voice over IP. The native Skype app is lovely, functioning well over Wi-Fi and cellular data connections, provided your carrier allows the latter.

Palringo: Palringo is a multiprotocol IM app, which enables messaging on many networks at once in a single program. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ—they're all there. Like any decent IM app it works with the WinMo notification system and runs in the background, so you can be constantly apprised of your new messages, just like those smug BlackBerry users. In fact, I think it's fair to say that in the area of messaging, Windows Mobile shines. Similar, also good: Fring.

TCPMP Media Player: Its development has been discontinued, but the app is perfectly usable as is. What is it? It's a barebones media player that'll handle almost any codec, audio or video, that you throw at it. In other words, you can encode video for mobile consumption however you like, something that can't be said of most other OSes (cough*Apple*cough).

Pocket Scrobbler: An unofficial client for the fantastic Last.fm internet radio/social network service, this app will handily stream endless, personally catered internet radio over a cellular data connection or Wi-Fi. Windows Mobile actually has a distinct advantage with this type of programs: the ability to run apps in the background!

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

For decades, photographers have engineered little tricks to get the most out of their cameras, and most of them have carried just fine over the digital divide. Here are a few, with some newer additions collected by our friends at Lifehacker.

Build your own stabilizer out of string
Shooting long exposures without something to prop your camera on is a pain in the ass, not to mention a blurry mess. So is carrying a tripod. This video shows how to build a pretty effective foot-looping camera stabilizer out of some string, a bolt and a washer. The results are surprisingly good.

Build your own L-bracket, for serious stability, vertical mounting
If you're doing portrait photography, or have a dumpy old tripod that can't accommodate vertically oriented cameras, you can build a sturdy L-bracket for about $30. It's a bit more involved than the piece-o-string stabilizer, but it's also a lot better, and much cheaper than something you'd pick up at Wolf.

The "David Pogue Special": Use a lamp as a tripod
To round out the camera-steadying tools, here's what I call the David Pogue Special, and it's great: Many lampshade mounts share a diameter and thread size with the tripod mount screw on the bottom of your camcorder, point-and-shoot or DSLR, providing quick and dirty stabilization in a bind.

Scrounge up household flash diffusers
Shooting with flash indoors is often necessary, but can wash out your subjects, making them look sheet-white, greasy and demon-eyed. With a diffuser, the light is softened and the photos are dramatically improved. Commercial flash hoods and diffusers cost money, but aren't much more effective than what you can make yourself. A coffee filter held in front of a flash, a translucent film canister with a notch cut into it, a simple piece of A4 paper or even a piece of matte Scotch tape over the flash lens will measurably improve your drunk party photography.

Calibrate color temperature with free flooring samples
Shooting a piece of paper, gray notecard or painted wall can give you OK white balance calibration, but this guy has a better idea: snag some free floor laminate samples and built a proper calibration board.

Make flash deflection umbrellas from actual umbrellas
If you really want to go pro-hobo, you can repurpose old umbrellas into flash-directing photography umbrellas. After all, there are always plenty lying around. Here's how you do it. If you're feeling lazy, you can even get away with just an old sheet and some tape.

Build still-life photography studio for free(ish)
Ever wonder how that creepy old photographer got such a soft, vivid, dreamy picture of you and your prom date all those years ago? This is how. The project doesn't call for much more than large pieces of paper and tape—relying on indirect sunlight for the adequate lighting—but the results are impressive. It is just a small-scale testbed though, so you'll be limited to shooting Lego models, action figures and the like, but what else were you going to shoot anyway?

Snap magazine-style portraits, beautiful macros with a homemade ringlight
Flickr user jedrek has written out a detailed how-to guide for converting your external flash into a ringlighting rig, mostly using kitchen wares. If you've never heard of ringlighting, have a look at this. The technique is usually reserved for professional photographers, because real ringflashes are comically expensive. This one costs a few bucks.

Foam-fit an old bag to hold your gear
If you're packing a DSLR with lenses and accessories, carrying a full-fledged camera bag is usually ideal, but they're expensive and tend to draw attention to your cargo. With some foam, cardboard and a ratty old military-surplus bag, you can put together a stylish, stealthy and highly-functional camera bag that won't make you feel like a snap-happy father of four.

Top image of proto-pro-photo-hobo Miroslav Tichy.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Before you drop the dough on a whole new system, here's a list of upgrades for squeezing a few more months, years even, out of ol' faithful, during these trying economic times.

If your Windows PC is seriously Dark Ages material, you might want to try converting it into something altogether different, like an NAS or media center. But stick around here if you're riding that thin line between acceptable day-to-day use and the scrap heap and try these quick and cheap upgrades first.

1. Reinstall Your OS
Over the years, operating systems inevitably pick up random pieces of clutter that start hogging your limited resources and bring your system to its knees. Forget spyware and malware cleaners—they're often just as guilty of mucking up your machine.

No, the best way to start fresh is of course to reinstall Windows. It's a pain, but thankfully there are a number of tools that will make the process easier.

• nLite and vLite for XP and Vista respectively are great tools for not only automating a large chunk of the reinstall process, but also for slimming down and customizing the installation to make sure you have a version of Windows that's optimized for your old hardware

• Kevin from Lifehacker also has a great guide for slipstreaming XP Service Pack 3 onto a custom install disc so you can avoid hundreds of Windows Update downloads after you reinstall using the older XP disc you probably have lying around.

• There are a ton of tools to help back up your data before a reinstall, but an easy no-brainer (especially if things have gotten so bad that you can't boot) is to boot with a Linux live CD like Ubuntu and move your files from your Windows volume to an external drive before wiping it.

2. Buy a New Graphics Card
A huuuuge part of what we humans perceive as slowness while using a computer are delays and hang-ups in the graphical UI—something that doubling or quadrupling your available video memory and beefing up your GPU rendering muscle will go a long way in alleviating. Graphics cards are super cheap these days, so think about dropping $100 or less on a new video card for your system and see where that gets you before going full monty on the replacement. As you probably well know, Newegg is the place for cheap hardware—for $150 or less you can do very well with a variation on the solid Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT or ATI Radeon HD 4850.

3. Max Our Your RAM
Many of you may be saying "duhhh" here but this can't be more of an important point—if you haven't maxed out your RAM yet, do it. Now. Just like graphics cards, RAM is super cheap, especially if you're running a common motherboard configuration. So head to Crucial or OWC, have it scan your system, and price out some new RAM sticks for you. Remember—matched pairs (in terms of size) are always faster than unmatched, and to taste every last bit of a 4GB upgrade, you'll need a 64-bit OS.

4. Get a Bigger Display
This one is more of head game than an actual upgrade, but I swear, every time I hook my laptop up to the big 22" widescreen monitor here in the office, my machine feels about a year or two faster. Something about having more screen real estate just helps. Plus, once you do finally get a brand new screamer, you can just swap it right over. Cheap LCDs are our daily Dealzmodo Roundups bread and butter, so keep an eye out there for a good bargain on a decent brand.

5. Get a Bigger, Faster Hard Drive
You can never have too much storage. So abiding by this rule, a few bucks spent on a new HD will at the very least free up more space for virtual memory on your boot volume. You could also look at a 10,000RPM drive for a desktop or a 7,200RPM drive for your laptop, which will undoubtedly be faster than your stock drive. Don't worry so much about your new HDD's cache size so long as its at least 8MB (which is common), as anything higher tends to offer diminishing returns. For everything else you'd want to know and more about getting a new hard drive, check out yesterday's Giz Explains on HDDs.

6. Optimize Your Boot Time
Another psychological downer is waiting 5 minutes for your machine to boot. Again, Lifehacker to the rescue: Less than a month ago, Gina published a complete guide to streamlining your Windows startup speed—make that your first stop.

7. Clean Out Your Browser
Your web browser is where you spend most of your time—and just like Windows, Firefox can get bogged down in bloat. If you have a ton of extensions installed that you never use, disable or remove them. You can also dive into the world of about:config and follow the numerous guides to tweaking FF's guts for more speed. Opinions on whether these are real or placebo is mixed, but even so, there are a lot of cool things you can do.

You can also make the leap to Firefox 3.1 (still in beta) with its drastically sped-up TraceMonkey rendering engine. Here is a guide for safely playing with the Firefox 3.1 beta without touching your Firefox 3 profile.

And if you're using Internet Explorer, um, stop it.

8. Ditch Windows Entirely
If things are really dire (on the money or performance front, or both) you might want to think about making a switch to Linux—especially if your main PC usage entails not much more than your typical web browsing, emailing, IMing and media playing/managing. There are a million and half tutorials out there for switching to Linux (Ubuntu's own is pretty good), which will almost certainly run considerably faster on your hardware than Windows does.

Special thanks to the Lifehacker folks for just doing what you're doing.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Your regular Dealzmodo hacker John Herrman will be back next week.

There are nearly endless ways to bring a USB stick out of retirement, and they're not just gimmicks: virtually all USB sticks, 32MB USB 1.1 dinosaurs included, can be repurposed into anything from a lifesaving troubleshooting tool to an entire portable OS. Here are your best options:

Turn it into a physical "key" for your computer
For security freaks or the extraordinarily literal-minded, Vista has built-in software to convert your USB key into an actual key, such that your PC won't boot without having it inserted. It might not be ideal if your key may be old enough that it is likely to fail on you, if you have a propensity to lose tiny things, or if your laptop only has one or two USB ports to begin with, but it definitely offers a special kind of peace of mind. For Macs, Rohos essentially does the same thing, but at $30, it's not particularly recession-friendly.

Install a portable OS
This is actually simpler and less esoteric than it sounds—installing a wide array of Linux systems is pretty easy nowadays, and will more importantly net you a fully functional desktop that you can take with you wherever you go. Lifehacker recently assembled a useful comparison of popular USB-able Linux distributions, in which they recommend the fantastic UNetbootin or creating the bootable keys in the first place. It's worth noting that two of these distros will work on keys at less than 128MB capacity (DSL is just 50MB, total) and all carry a legitimately useful range of apps.

Use portable apps to create a pocketable user profile
Most free software now comes in a portable variety, meaning that at least under Windows, programs that normally extend their tentacles into your user profile and registry can be installed completely—user data included—onto a USB stick. All you do is insert the stick and find the desired .exe, and you're good to go.

The most obvious advantage to this is profile portability—in other words, your portable Firefox (or Opera or Chrome) isn't just the app, it's your favorites, history, user preferences and cookies too. The portable version of Pidgin, a multiprotocol IM program, can hold your account data, transcripts and settings. Most of these installations are quite small—Firefox is just 8MB, for example—so you can build an extensive user profile on all but the oldest keys.

The very best one-stop shop for portable apps is the, well, aptly named PortableApps.com.

Create a powerful troubleshooting toolbelt
Portable antivirus and file recovery apps are convenient, but a USB key can be loaded up with much more powerful software. Ultimate Boot CD for Windows is a sort of software panacea which, in addition to including a selection of Windows maintenance apps, carries a veritable treasure trove of low-level troubleshooting programs, made accessible by booting into a sort of temporary "Windows Lite" desktop. It can manage disk deletion and partitioning, software and hardware diagnostics and a huge variety of lifesaving recovery functions. Despite the "CD" part of its name, Ultimate Boot CD for Windows can be loaded onto a USB key, though it requires a Windows installation disc from which to build the aforementioned "Windows Lite" environment. If you don't run Windows but still want a basic DOS-based suite of hardware diagnostics and disk tools, the vanilla Ultimate Boot CD has you covered.

Convert it into a tiny SNES, Genesis, MAME, etc.
Emulators are tiny, and most ROMs are even tinier; a USB key, no matter the size or speed, can probably hold more vintage console games than you can find the time to play. Many popular emulators come in a portable flavor, so your display settings, saved games and cheats will follow you everywhere. Without the need to install anything, this potentially opens up work, school or other public PCs to most pre-PlayStation gaming. Popular portable NES, SNES, Game Boy, Genesis, and arcade emulators. As for ROMs, that's on you. (Pro tip: GOOGLE).

Carry a portal to your home computer
Virtual Network Computing (VNC) sounds more complicated than it is—it simply lets you see and control your computer screen remotely. Whatever OS you run (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), VNC servers are simple to set up and, if configured correctly, plenty secure. While many provide web interfaces to be accessed through a browser, they're almost always clunky, Java-based monstrosities. A simple VNC client (download the binary archive version) will carry your settings, run responsively and offer more quality, speed and transfer options than its bastard HTTP brother, transporting a home computer's desktop to wherever you happen to be.

Donate it to charity
If you're some kind of ingrate who doesn't see the potential in any of the above options (or you're just a good, charitable person), InVineo, a non-profit tech outreach organization will find someone who does. They'll gladly take your 64MB Cruzers and send them to developing countries to be used in schools or local governments.

Hat tip to Lifehacker and Portable Apps.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Cases
A case will usually be the first thing people buy for their pods, and the first thing they'll lose. Luckily, they're just about the easiest thing to replace yourself. The most obvious solution is a custom-tailored sock, chosen to suit your taste in color and aroma and fitted to suit your choice in iPod. For a more refined look, sewing together some inner tube and suede will make for a stylish pouch, while utilitarians can opt for the quick, versatile rubber-only approach. If you're just too quirky for a regular case, the venerable Altoid Nano case might get the attention you crave, while the legitimately natty cut-up record sleeve case will do the job just as well, if not better.

Speakers
If you're handy with a soldering iron and have some old audio equipment lying around, there's no reason to dump dollars on a full-fledged iPod speaker dock when you can just build one yourself. Construction homemade unamplified speakers — which sound surprisingly good — is much less of an ordeal. Disposable cups and sheets of printer paper make great little megaphones for your earbuds, and lend themselves well to mounting as a part of a kid-friendly makeshift home stereo.

Docks and Stands
Apple gives iPod/iPhone buyers just about everything they need to throw together a huge variety of charging and sync docks — even the commercial ones are pretty much just the sync wire with some plastic trim. This hack starts small: fantastic iPhone and iPod Touch docks can be made with nothing but a binder clip. The possibilities for LEGO docks are limitless, but generally end up looking like an iThrone. This paperclip box dock provides a good template for chopping an iPod cable into just about anything of a similar shape. The paper clips themselves can be twisted into a 20-second stand, just as a business card can be origamically (?) reshaped into the same.

Other
In the commercial world, this space is inhabited by the shrouded likes of Brando. But who doesn't love that stuff? If you're looking for a jury-rigged AA iPod charging solutions, there's no reason to surrender your credit card number to an iffy Chinese e-commerce site. The same goes for the iPhone 3D image viewing apparatus, though I'm not even sure there's buyable analog for that, Chinese or not. iPhone macro lenses are cool, but almost certainly not worth paying for. Last, and probably least, even though you can't put a price on security, you can reduce the cost of paranoia.

Hat tip to Lifehacker, MAKE and Instructables.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

It turns out that crappy old PCs are kind of a hot commodity nowadays; numerous software projects have succeeded in dressing up retired computers for purposes that often didn't even exist when they were first wheeled out of Circuit City. Here are a few suggestion for your dumpy old rigs:

Make a browsing machine for your grandmother and/or kitchen

The most straightforward, obvious use for an old PC is to wipe it clean and install a lightweight, browsing-oriented OS. With a modest PC, you can run the web-app-inclined gOS, which is essentially a modern, stripped down Linux distribution with a modern web browser and lots of links to cutting edge online services.

For older hardware, there's always Damn Small Linux. This superlight distribution will boot straight from a CD in about a minute on just about any box you can find — and it's fast. It'll make your Pentium feel like a Centrino 2. Until you try to play YouTube.

What it can salvage
gOS has room to breathe on just about anything from about 700mhz and 256mb of RAM. It's based on Ubuntu, so it's not the lightest distro, but it get good mileage out of your hard. DSL will run on anything, seriously.

How you do it
Download, burn to a CD and pop in in your computer. Both will ask you if you'd like to install or just run from a CD. Give them a try first, but you'll get your best results running from a hard drive.

gOS download page
Lifehacker's gOS Post
DSL download page

Make a professional grade home router

For people who want to rule their home networks with an iron fist, Monowall a FreeBSD-based operating system that flips any PC with two network cards into a superrouter. If that sounds boring to you, I completely understand — but if full bandwidth monitoring and control, easy setup VPNs and a complementary web server with a remote interface perk your ears up, then you should give Monowall a shot. And step outside for a few minutes a day.

What it can salvage
Got a 486? It'll work, with 64MB of RAM. If your hardware is less than five years old, though, you should probably aim a little bit higher than making a Linksys out of it.

How you do it
Again, this is a wipe>install situation. m0n0wall is based on FreeBSD, which is based on Unix. None of that matters much, though — the m0n0wall team has designed a pretty straightforward installation routine.

m0n0wall download
m0n0wall HowTo page

Create a media center PC

There's no reason to spend money on a Windows Media Center PC if you've got an Athlon XP or Pentium 4 machine with an s-video port at hand, because you can do better with the free XBMC Live. Without modern hardware you won't have much luck playing back HD video, but virtually everything else — music, standard def video, streaming content — will play beautifully. The interface is very intuitive and gives a solid set-top box feel.

What it can salvage
Recently obsolete PCs. Don't expect to get a good experience on a 1GHz Athlon or Duron system, but anything newer can handle the load.

How you do it
Like most of the other hacks here, this one is a start-from-scratch project. If you want to run it within Windows or Linux there is also an option for that. The full, OS-replacement XBMC Live is ideal, however.

XBMC Live download
XBMC HowTo
Note: Boxee is a much more polished and feature-rich fork of XBMC that runs on Linux and OS X currently, but it's in a semi-public alpha. Use this link for Gizmodo readers to skip the line a bit and get invited into the alpha.

Run a server

An obvious use for old PCs for years, running a web server has now gotten easy enough for anyone. Apache is the de facto free web server, but it's a pain to set up. Enter XAMPP, a super-simplified click-and-run version of Apache. Forward a few ports on your router and get yourself a static DNS and you've got your very own website, with as much space as you've got on your hard drive and as much transfer as your ISP will let you get away with. If you have no need for a website, you can host your music, video and files for easy access from anywhere.

What it can salvage
Anything that can run Windows or Linux, gOS and Damn Small Linux included. You can reach waaaayy back into your closet with this one.

How you do it
It's a matter of running the installation routine on your chosen operating system — there's no drive wiping or OS installing involved.

XAMPP Download
Port Forwarding Guides
Free Static DNS

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Now, it bears mentioning that HTC is pretty diligent about updating their phones, releasing driver and software updates to improve performance when necessary. Problem is, these updates don't usually trickle down through the cellular providers, leaving most users stuck with the first (and only) generation of the phone's branded—and sometimes crippled— software. Thanks to XDA, most users can switch to an up-to-date OS, with a variety of extra tweaks added at the discretion of the community.

What do you stand to gain from upgrading your ROM?

• Better battery life
• Faster performance, especially in TouchFLO 3D
• Stronger reception
• Quicker, less laggy GPS locking and tracking
• Bundles of useful software, included updated, faster Opera browser
• Reenabling carrier-chopped features such as tethering, HDSPA

Popular phones best suited for upgrade:

• Touch
• Touch Dual
• Touch Diamond
• Touch Pro
• Other variants

The prospect of upgrading your phone's entire OS might sound intimidating, but the XDA community has provided GUI tools for each step. The procedure is not risk-free, but the success rate polls highly among people who follow the directions closely. I flashed T-Mobile's branded Diamond, the MDA Compact IV, without incident.

Ready to give this a shot? XDA's detailed guides are available here:

• Touch/Touch Dual
• Touch Diamond/Touch Pro
• 
  Others can be found in the device subforums here.

If ROMs and bootloaders and radios all sound too scary (and I wouldn't blame you), XDA also has a hefty collection of simpler tweaks and mods for your HTC phones, including themes, games and apps that you might not find elsewhere.

Expect to hear a lot more about these guys in the coming months—they'll probably be the first ones to port Android to older HTC handsets. As of the 4th, they've got a severely gimped version of Android 0.8 (the G1 launched with 1.0) running on the Diamond, so an "Install Android on Your HTC Phone" Dealzmodo Hack is inevitable, if still pretty far off. [XDA Developers and ModMyDiamond]

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

CHDK isn't hacked firmware, and it doesn't require any risky flashing or OS replacement. It's non-destructive software that runs directly from a memory card, so it won't affect your warranty. But you'll still get an experience akin to an entirely new operating system. What new features will your tired old Canon gain with CHDK?

• Save images in RAW format
• Ability to run "Scripts" to automate the camera
• Live histogram
• Zebra mode (blinking highlights and shadows to show over/under exposed areas)
• An "always on" full range Battery indicator
• Ability to turn off automatic dark-frame subtraction
• A higher compression movie mode, and double the maximum video file size
• Motion Detection
• Exposure times as long as 65 seconds
• Exposure times as little as 1/10,000 of a second
• Ability to use the USB port for a remote trigger input
• A depth-of-field calculator
• File browser
• Text reader
• Calendar
• Games
• and others

The installation process is fairly straightforward, and about as risk-free as these kinds of things can get. You'll need:

• A Canon digital camera from this list, with compatible firmware
• A card reader for whatever format you use (probably SD)
• A build of CHDK for your camera from this page

Once you've got all your stuff together, you're ready to load CHDK up:

1. Copy the PS.fir and Diskboot.bin from your downloaded ZIP file to the root of your SD card (not in a folder)

2. Turn on your camera in "Play" Mode

3. Press "Menu", and select the menu item "Firm Update" and confirm

For instructions for automatically booting into CHDK, check here.

Again, since this is not an actual firmware upgrade, you can just pop out the SD card and batteries should anything go awry. When you put the batteries back in and restart your camera, you'll revert to where you started.

Installing CHDK isn't quite like getting a new camera, but it's a sure value-add to your trusty old one. For more information, hit up CHDK. [CHDK Wiki Home Page]

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Monday and Thursday for free, DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.