The World of Windows

10+ tweaks, tricks, and hacks to make Windows Vista fly, Chapter 1

2012-01-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

1: Add the Run command to the Start Menu

Beginning way back with the release of Windows 1.0, Microsoft has been all about the GUI interface (more or less effectively).

But sometimes you just want to run a program without having to navigate the GUI maze of menus and folders. Windows Vista, by default,

does not include the Run command on the Start Menu. This was a common and favorite feature of Windows XP.

To add the Run command back to the Vista Start Menu, follow these steps:

Right click the Taskbar in an open area
Click on Properties
Click on the Start Menu tab (See Figure A)

Figure A

Taskbar and Start Menu Properties

Click the Customize button to get to the Customize Start Menu
Scroll down the list until you find the Run command checkbox and check it (See Figure B).
Click OK and the Run command will now appear on the Start Menu.

Figure B

Customize Start Menu

2. Disable the Welcome Center and Sidebar

The Windows Vista default setting is to show the Welcome Center on startup. While the Welcome Center is mildly interesting the first time you see it, you will quickly tire of it appearing every time you boot your Vista PC. This behavior is easily changed by unchecking the Run a Startup button located at the bottom of the Welcome Center as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

Welcome Center

Similarly, the Vista Sidebar is also on by default. While some users will find the Sidebar and its widgets useful, many will desire the desktop real estate and underlying resources for other more productive uses. You can turn the Sidebar off by:

Right clicking the Windows Sidebar icon in the system tray
Click Properties
Uncheck the Start Sidebar when Windows starts checkbox (See Figure D)
Click OK

Figure D

Windows Sidebar Properties

3: Change the Product Key

A Windows Vista installation disk essentially has all of the various editions of Vista included on that one disk. Which version gets installed is dependent on what product key you enter during the installation process. At some point you may want to upgrade your current version to a version with more bells and whistles, which would require a new Product Key.

Or you may want to Activate your Windows Vista under a different Product Key for some reason. The easiest way to change your Product Key is through the System applet in the Control Panel. (See Figure E)

Figure E

System applet

Figure F

Windows Activation

Under the Windows Activation section there is a link: Change Product Key. Clicking that link brings up the screen shown in Figure F where you can enter in a different Product Key.

4: Start Windows Explorer at somewhere other than documents

Figure G

Windows Explorer Properties

While Windows Vista has desktop search that will theoretically allow you the option of merely typing in a location on your hard disk to get an Explorer view, some users will undoubtedly prefer to use Windows Explorer. By default, Windows Explorer in Vista shows you the files located in the user Documents folder. Follow these steps to have Windows Explorer start in a different folder:

Copy the Windows Explorer shortcut, usually found in the Start Menu under Accessories, to the Desktop.

Right click the shortcut and click properties.
Click on the Shortcut tab to get the window shown in Figure G.
Change the Target filed to the desired location.

For example, to have Windows Explorer start at C:\ type in"

C:\Windows\explorer.exe /n, /e, c:\

5: Privacy tweak

As a convenience, Windows Vista by default saves and displays a list of recently opened files and programs on the Start Menu.

Ostensibly, this is supposed to make it easier to find a file or program. However, many users would prefer that information to remain hidden. Here is how to turn it off:

Right click the Taskbar and click Properties on the resulting menu
Click the Start Menu tab
Uncheck the checkboxes under Privacy (See Figure H)
Click OK

Figure H

Privacy settings

6: Smaller icons on Start Menu

The icons located on the Windows Vista Start Menu default to large (Figure I).

Figure I

Large icons

For many users, the personal preference will be for those icons to be much smaller. Here is how:

Right click the Taskbar and click on Properties
Click the Start Menu tab
Click the Customize button
Scroll down to the bottom of the list (See Figure J)
Uncheck the Use large icons checkbox
Click OK twice

Figure J

No more large icons

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Help protect your PC with Microsoft Security Essentials.

2012-01-28T00:45:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. It helps protect against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

It's available as a no-cost download for Windows XP SP2 and higher, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials now.

Why should I download Microsoft Security Essentials?

Comprehensive protection—Microsoft Security Essentials helps defend your computer against spyware, viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malicious software.
Easy to get, easy to use—Because Microsoft Security Essentials is available at no cost, there's no registration process that requires billing or personal information collection. It installs after a quick download and Genuine Windows validation and then stays automatically up-to-date with the latest protection technology and signature updates.
Quiet Protection—Microsoft Security Essentials doesn't get in your way. It runs quietly in the background and schedules a scan when your computer is most likely idle. You only see alerts when you need to take action.

Microsoft Security Essentials security status.
Microsoft Security Essentials has a clean, simple home page that shows the security state of your computer.

The 8.5MB download installs in about a minute, but its mandatory update of anti-malware signatures can take 10 minutes or more. After updates, the full installation occupied over 170MB of disk space—more than I expected. The installer necessarily turns on automatic updates, which may pose a problem for advanced users who want to control exactly when Windows installs those updates.

Microsoft pulled the plug on its Windows Live OneCare security suite before it reached version 3. The company promised to replace it (sort of) with a slim, free tool specifically aimed at malware protection. The just-released Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0 offers consumers protection against malware, but in real-world testing it didn't impress.

The 8.5MB download installs in about a minute, but its mandatory update of anti-malware signatures can take 10 minutes or more. After updates, the full installation occupied over 170MB of disk space—more than I expected. The installer necessarily turns on automatic updates, which may pose a problem for advanced users who want to control exactly when Windows installs those updates.

Average Malware Removal
Getting the product installed on all my test systems took hours and hours, but the fault was mine, not Microsoft's: I've been doing back-to-back suite reviews for months, and I let my test systems get behind on their Windows updates, so I had to bring them all up to speed before installing Security Essentials.

Malware acting as a proxy server blocked the update on one system. Downloading a self-installing update package on another computer solved that one. Many products will remove this proxy without correcting the system's proxy settings, leaving it with no connectivity. Security Essentials removed the threat and fixed the proxy settings; I was impressed. Overall, the installations went smoothly.

The product's beta version warned that a scan might take a few hours; the release version says a few minutes. It still took over an hour on many infested test systems. A full scan of my standard clean system took over 45 minutes, well over the 30-minute average. A repeated scan was no faster.

Security Essentials scored 7.0 of 10 possible points for malware removal. That's just average, although it's only one full point below the top-scoring Norton Internet Security 2010. It detected 92 percent of the threats but left behind many executable files. A couple of threats were still running after it supposedly cleaned them up. In a separate test using commercial keyloggers, it scored a dismal 1.6 points. Only Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware 1.36 with 0.5 point and FortiClient Endpoint Security Standard Edition 4.1 with 0.7 have scored lower.

I analyzed the product's ability to detect and remove rootkits, drawing from both the malware and keylogger categories. Security Essentials boasts live kernel behavior monitoring and other features that should help against rootkits—they didn't. It only detected two-thirds of my rootkit samples. Two were still running and one still functioning as a rootkit after attempted removal. Its antirootkit score of 3.7 is way below average.

Microsoft has publicly warned about the growing problem of rogue security software, called "scareware." I broke out a separate score specifically for scareware samples and found that Security Essentials scored just 4.5 points, another below-average result

Screenshots.

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New Windows 8 wallpapers.

2012-01-24T00:38:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is keeping a tight lid on any information about "Windows 8." But back in June, leaked slides on the Web indicate that, with its next client OS, Microsoft will push for near-instant start-up times, integrated facial recognition technologies, support for USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0, compatibility across different devices through the cloud, and simpler streaming of movies and TV shows to any screen.

It's clear that Microsoft intends to cover the increasingly diverse hardware landscape with Windows 8.

Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm, has some ideas of its own for the next version of Windows.

In an as-yet-unpublished report, Directions on Microsoft Research Vice President Michael Cherry compiles a Windows 8 wish list consisting of faster start-up times, a timely release, coherent error messages and more.

This fourth batch of Windows 8 wallpapers were sent in by a fifteen year old.

Sunshine In The Trees

Sun Rays Through Red Trees

Spring Wallpaper

Mountains And Valley

Flowers Field Wallpaper

Lake And Valley

Blue Beach Wallpaper

Windows8 Fire Wallpaper

Windows 8 Colourful Wallpaper 1

Windows 8 Elements Wallpaper

Windows 8 Infinity Wallpaper

Windows 8 The New Begining

Windows 8 Colourful Eggs Wallpaper

Windows 8 Beta Black Wallpaper Hd

Freaky Windows 8 Wallpaper Black

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Windows System Information Tool.

2012-01-15T00:20:00.000-08:00

SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS.

The first step in optimizing your PC is to find out precisely what hardware components you have, and what their various capabilities are.

This is known as your System Specifications, and to find out the specific details of your hardware you require an appropriate set of tools. Information about your system specifications is vital both for using this guide, and for general PC usage and maintenance.

For example you must know the model and chipset type of your motherboard before you ca n upgrade your BIOS, or install the correct motherboard drivers; you must know the full capabilities of your graphics card if you want to know if it can run Vista Aero or again to update its drivers; or you may have a complex problem which you wish to resolve yourself or provide details of to a Technical Support person.

This chapter covers the tools you need and the methods you can use to obtain all the relevant system information.

There are several good free system information utilities to choose from, including some comprehensive ones built into Windows Vista.

A combination of these programs will tell you everything you need to know about your system specifications and ca pa bilities, and I recommend you download and install as many of these programs as possible:

WINDOWS SYSTEM INFORMATION TOOL.

You can access the Windows System Information Tool by going to Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Information, or go to Start>Search Box and type "msinfo32" (without quotes) and hit Enter.

The Windows System Information Tool presents a range of basic information about your system.

Unfortunately much of it can be a little difficult to comprehend or may not be quite what you're looking for. Some of the more useful pieces of information include the IRQ allocations under Hardware Resources>IRQs; the listing of your hardware components by type under the Components section; a listing of all the system drivers loaded up and their status under Software Environment, System Drivers; or recent Windows errors under Software Environment, Windows Error Reporting.

In general the System Information Tool is best used by medium to advanced users who can comprehend the interface and the information much easier than a beginning user. Its major advantage is that it is a free and built-in utility that anyone can easily access.

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Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

2012-01-12T00:11:00.000-08:00

Do you want to submit the RSS feed of your website to tons of RSS directories? Do you need greater exposure and visibility for your content but don't know where to go? Stop wandering. In this guide you will find the best and reliable blog directories and RSS submission sites to make your website known.

Until a few years ago the web was populated by web sites and other HTML-based content pages, thus the main vehicle for reaching content was the large use of major search engines and directories. But as a rapidly increasing number of content sources started to leverage RSS as a key distribution channel, the ability to maintain high exposure and visibility has found an ally in RSS feed submission sites and directories.

The problem with RSS directories and submission sites is that there are so many of them that it is almost impossible to have the time to track and try each one. Especially if you run more than one website, finding and testing all the RSS directories out there makes up for a positively extended nightmare: trust me.

I have been inspired and prompted to collect all these RSS feed directories and submission sites by my own need to support skilled change agents and communicators like the ones I personally support (Sepp Hasslberger, Chris Gupta, Ivan Ingrilli) and also by the nice initiative of Ari Paparo to collect a set of online resources where anyone could easily submit her new blog / RSS feed.
Over the years, this list of RSS directories has been updated many times and it has recently crossed 250 RSS directories, which make up for a truly unique collection of venues that you can use to achieve greater visibility for your website content.

One of the key benefits of this list of RSS directories and blog submission sites, is that this resource provides all of the submission links directly, so that you don't have to waste any time at all to find any RSS directory at each destination site. This by itself is a significant effort, especially as a number of sites make it consciously hard to find this info, in order to discourage spam and superficial or automated submissions. In some cases, I have been able to dig out valuable emails and contact forms after a lot of searching.

For this resource to be useful to as much people as possible, I have decided to focus only on English-based global directories and not to include any regional or geographically limited directories. I have also dropped any service that did not look completely reliable or trustable.

Other lists of RSS submission sites available online are either too superficial, not updated (including many web sites that either do not work or are not reliable) or are just listing many search services and tools which do not rely on manual submission to become aware of new blogs sites and RSS feeds.

The directories to which to submit your RSS feed are listed in reverse chronological order (first up the most recent and newly added ones; down bottom what I have collected first) and NOT according to any importance order.

Do you want all blog directories and RSS submission sites in one place?

Xmeta.net is a free RSS feed submission directory to share the URL of your own website or blog that helps you spread your content to a larger audience. The submission process is very easy as it only requires the URL of your blog. There are six categories to add your feed: Art & Entertainment, Business, News, Politics, Sports and Technology.

To add your website or blog to the directory, you only have to add your URL and input the security validation code.

Click here to submit your feed to Xmeta.net.

Hot vs Not is a free website submission directory where you can share the URL of your own website to achieve higher visibility and exposure. The submission process allows you to target very precisely your website niche and all of the tags, title and description are automatically inserted by retrieving the information from your website metadata.

To add your website or blog to the directory you only have to add your URL, select a specific category and then provide a valid e-mail address.

Click here to submit your feed to Hot vs Not.

SolarWarp is a free RSS feed directory where you can share the RSS feed of your website or blog to gain greater exposure and visibility. RSS feeds inside SolarWarp are divided in categories and you also have a list of the latest items on the homepage.

To add your RSS feed to the directory, just add the URL of your RSS feed, a description, the category of where to add your RSS feed and then also your name and email.

Click here to submit your feed to SolarWarp.
LeighRSS is a free RSS feed directory where you can share the RSS feed of your website or blog. Feeds on LeighRSS are categorized in niches of interest and can also be searched using specific keywords using the internal search engine.

To add your RSS feed to the directory, just click the button on the upper right corner on the homepage of the service, add the URL of your RSS feed and then select a proper category to have your feed reviewed by LeighRSS editors. If you want to achieve greater visibility for your RSS feed, you must also enter a valid e-mail address.

Click here to submit your feed to LeighRSS.

Blog Directory 001 is a free RSS feed directory where you can share the RSS feed of your blog or website to achieve greater visibility on the web. Each feed on Blog Directory 001 is added to a sub-category that will help others find more easily your own RSS feed or other feeds of interest.

After registering, just type the title of your RSS feed, a valid URL, add a brief description and then select a sub-category to have Blog Directory 001 index your feed in the proper niche of interest.

Click here to submit your feed to Blog Directory 001.

Dr. 5z5 is an open feed directory where you can add the URL of your RSS / Atom feed. Free of charge and without registration, the directory allows you to browse tons of feeds divided in specific categories.

You can also grab free widgets and feed counters to add to your site to help viewers subscribe to your RSS feeds.

Just open the submission page and add the URL of your RSS / Atom feed to add it to the directory. Provide your web site URL if you need to find the URL of your feed before adding.

Click here to submit your feed to Dr. 5z5.
FeedPlex is a XML / RSS feeds search engine and RSS feed archive to submit the URL of your blog or web site to achieve greater exposure and visibility.

Without registering, submit the URL of your website or blog and provide a valid e-mail address. When your site is added to the archive, you will get a confirmation e-mail.

Click here to submit your feed to FeedPlex.

OnToplist.com is a free human-edited blog directory where you submit the RSS feed of your blog. You can also set up your own micro-directory (blog ranking) and compile a list of your favorite blogs in one place. OnToplist is also a social network that allows you and other bloggers to get in touch and promote your blog by attracting more readers.

After registering, access your dashboard and go to the tab "Add New Blog". Here provide detailed info about your website such as: title, URL of your site, URL of your RSS feed, tags, etc.

Click here to submit your feed to OnToplist.
BLOGbal is a human edited web directory that helps your website content gain more visibility. All links submitted are listed in categories, free of charge. Having your links featured on the homepage of BLOGbal costs $4.99/year.

On the submission page type the title of your website, the URL and a brief description. Then add your name, email address and specify a category where your website link will be listed. Wait for your link to be approved.

Click here to submit your feed to BLOGbal.

ooBdoo provides webmasters and content providers with an avenue to promote content through RSS. Free of charge, your RSS feeds are placed into the category that best suits your website topic to gain maximum exposure. All pages are regularly updated by polling RSS feeds for fresh content.

Without registration, just type your name, email address, website URL and a brief description to have OoBdoo index your feed. You must also specify if you want your website URL to be a follow / nofollow link and how often your content is updated. Then wait for your RSS feed to be approved.

Click here to submit your feed to Oobdoo.

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What are the Benefits of Windows Live ID Integration in Windows 8?

2011-12-16T09:01:00.000-08:00

We all know that Windows 8 will come with lots of new features and enhancements and one of them is the built-in integration of Windows Live ID.

You can check this new feature in the recently released Windows 8 Developer Preview build as well. Actually you can use your Windows Live email ID as your login account for Windows which provides many benefits to you.

Microsoft has outlined these benefits in an official post at Building Windows 8 blog. According to Microsoft:

Windows 8 will come with Windows Live ID integration which will provide the ability to log in to Windows (optionally) with a Windows Live ID that works across devices, apps, and services, allowing you a uniquely personal experience with Windows.

Signing in with Windows Live ID allows you to:

Associate the most commonly used Windows settings with your user account. Saved settings are available when you sign in to your account on any Windows 8 PC. Your PC will be set up just the way you are used to!
Easily reacquire your Metro style apps on multiple Windows 8 PCs. The app's settings and last-used state persist across all your Windows 8 PCs.
Save sign-in credentials for the different apps and websites you use and easily get back into them without having to enter credentials every time.
Automatically sign in to apps and services that use Windows Live ID for authentication.

How is it Done?

When you buy a Windows 8 PC and set up your user account for the first time, you can optionally choose to create an account that is associated to a Windows Live ID.

You can either use an existing ID or create a new one. If you choose to create a new one, you can use any email address you want as your new ID, and then create your unique password. You just need to identify an email address that you want to have associated with the Windows Live ID service, and provide a unique password. Of course, you can also continue to use local Windows accounts as you always have just like in Windows 7. You can also change a local account to link it with a Windows Live ID at a later date.

So, although many people assume they will need to sign up for a new email account to get a Windows Live ID, it's actually not necessary.

What Happens in Background?

With Windows 8, you will be able to have your personal Windows experience on any Windows 8 PC you sign in to with your Windows Live ID. Settings such as your lock screen picture, desktop background, user tile, browser favorites and history, spell check dictionaries, Explorer settings, mouse settings, and accessibility settings, among many others are now associated with your Windows 8 account and stored in the cloud. They are kept in sync and come down to each machine you use as they are changed or updated.

No Need to Sign In Multiple Times!

Once you've signed in to Windows with your ID, you do not need to enter it again to sign in to any app or website that also uses Windows Live ID. For example, once you sign in to Windows with your ID, you can launch the Windows Chat app and start talking with your friends without the need to sign in again.

Similarly, you can browse to your Hotmail inbox page without needing to enter your email address and password again. You can always sign out of a webpage and sign in as a different user, but by default you will be automatically signed in. To be clear, however, those applications and websites do not have special access to your Windows PC or your personal data.

If you choose to, Windows can store separate Metro style app and web site credentials. Those credentials can then sync to each Windows 8 PC that you’ve trusted and verified yourself with. You won’t have to type in your user name or password; just confirm your sign-in as needed. Similar to the Chat application example, when launching a Metro style application that uses this feature, you will be signed in automatically and the application will resume right where you left off.

How to Control?

In Control Panel, there is a section called "Sync PC Settings" where you can manually turn settings sync on or off.

You can choose to turn off all syncing or you can turn off syncing per the type of setting. The settings groups include:

Personalize
Themes
Ease of access
Language preferences
Apps
Web browser
Other stuff
Some passwords

Check out following demo video showing benefits of signing in to Window 8 with Windows Live ID:

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Themes, Skins, Icons and Wallpapers for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

2011-12-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

If you are following this blog since long time, you might be aware of our exclusive themes, skins and wallpapers which we have released for Windows, Yahoo! Messenger, mobile phones and other software.

We have released many themes for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and many of them have been featured at various popular websites including Microsoft.com.

We have also released skins for mobile phones and Yahoo! Messenger. Long time back we also released 2 wallpapers to spice up your Desktop.

Today in this topic, we are going to list all these themes, skins, wallpapers, icon packs, etc for your convenience so that you can check them in a single place and don't waste your time in searching for them in different sections.

So without wasting time, lets take a look at all the free eye candy stuff:

VistaVG Theme for Windows XP

"VistaVG" theme is the first ever theme released by us. This theme was created for Windows XP users who wanted to make Windows XP look-like Windows Vista. VistaVG is the first Vista look-like theme for Windows XP and all other similar themes available on Internet are based on it.

You can download it using following link:

Download VistaVG Theme for Windows XP

VistaVG Blue Theme for Windows XP

VistaVG Blue theme is a blue version of VistaVG theme. This theme was released after getting lots of demand for a blue version of VistaVG theme.

You can download it using following link:

Download VistaVG Blue Theme for Windows XP

VistaVG Black Theme for Windows XP

VistaVG Black theme is a dark version of VistaVG theme. This theme was also created after getting several requests for a dark version of VistaVG theme.

You can download it using following link:

Download VistaVG Black Theme for Windows XP

SevenVG Theme for Windows XP

We continued our tradition to make themes for Windows XP to transform it in newer versions of Windows. SevenVG theme was created for Windows XP users who wanted to make Windows XP look-like Windows 7. SevenVG theme is also the first Windows 7 look-like theme for Windows XP and all other similar themes available on Internet are based on it.

You can download it using following link:

Download SevenVG Theme for Windows XP

SevenVG theme comes with Windows 7 like superbar which is an enhanced version of traditional Taskbar. It's a bit large in height. If you want a normal Taskbar version, check out following special version of SevenVG theme:

Download SevenVG Theme with Normal Thin Taskbar

SevenVG Black Theme for Windows XP

Similar to VistaVG theme's dark version, we created a special dark version of SevenVG theme as well. If you are a dark theme lover, you can download SevenVG Black theme for Windows XP:

You can download it using following link:

Download SevenVG Black Theme for Windows XP

Download SevenVG Black Theme with Normal Thin Taskbar

AeroVG Theme for Windows Vista

When Windows Vista was released, it introduced Aero UI for Windows which provides transparency with glass effect. But customization lovers wanted to have as much transparency as they could. That's why we created "AeroVG" theme for those people who wanted to enhance Aero theme and make it perfect.

AeroVG theme became very popular among Windows Vista users.

You can download it using following link:

Download AeroVG Theme for Windows Vista

Vista Blue Theme for Windows Vista

When AeroVG theme for Windows Vista became popular, people started requesting to make a special version of the theme for Windows Basic theme users who didn't have dedicated graphics card in their system and can't enjoy Aero theme.

To make those people happy, we created "Vista Blue" theme.

You can download it using following link:

Download Vista Blue Theme for Windows Vista

Vista Black Theme for Windows Vista

When we released Vista Blue theme for Windows Vista users, lots of people asked to create a dark version of this theme. So we released Vista Black theme for Windows Vista Basic theme users:

You can download it using following link:

Download Vista Black Theme for Windows Vista

AeroVG Se7en Theme for Windows 7

When Windows 7 was released, AeroVG theme users started requesting to create a port of the theme for Windows 7. "AeroVG Se7en" theme was created for Windows 7 users who wanted to enjoy AeroVG like interface in Windows 7.

You can download it using following link:

Download AeroVG Se7en Theme for Windows 7

Y! Vista Skin for Yahoo! Messenger

When we released VistaVG theme for Windows XP, lots of people requested to create a similar skin for Yahoo! Messenger. We created "Y! Vista" skin for Yahoo! Messenger to match its UI with VistaVG theme. Almost all Yahoo! Messenger users agree on the fact that the default messenger skins are not that good.

You can download it using following link:

Download Y! Vista Skin for Yahoo! Messenger

Y! Vista Blue Skin for Yahoo! Messenger

Y! Vista Blue skin was created on request for a blue version of Y! Vista skin for Yahoo! Messenger. This skin perfectly matches with VistaVG Blue theme:

You can download it using following link:

Download Y! Vista Blue Skin for Yahoo! Messenger

VistaVG SE Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

This theme was created for Sony Ericsson mobile phone users who wanted to have a Windows Vista like UI in their mobile phone. This theme transforms your cell phone menus into Windows Desktop like interface:

You can download it using following link:

Download VistaVG SE Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

SevenVG SE Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

This theme was an update for VistaVG Se theme. We released this theme when Windows 7 was released to public. This theme provides Windows 7 like UI in Sony Ericsson mobile phones:

You can download it using following link:

Download SevenVG SE Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

Google Android Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

This theme was created by AskVG reader "Hackerpunk1". This theme transforms your Sony Ericsson mobile phone UI into Google Android OS.

You can download it using following link:

Download Google Android Theme for Sony Ericsson Mobile Phones

Windows 8 Skin for RocketDock Utility

We here at AskVG love RocketDock utility. Its one of the best dock available for Windows. AskVG reader "Rtyh-12" created a cool skin for RocketDock after getting inspired from Windows 8 Metro UI.

The skin comes in 2 variations:

You can download it using following link:

Download Windows 8 Skin for RocketDock

Icon Packs and Wallpapers for Windows

We have also released 2 icon packs and 2 wallpapers for Windows users. VistaVG icon pack and SevenVG icon pack were created to provide Windows Vista and Windows 7 icons in Windows XP respectively.

Download VistaVG Icon Pack for Windows XP

Download SevenVG Icon Pack for Windows XP

And following are download links of 2 exclusive wallpapers which were released by us long time back:

Download Exclusive AskVG.com Wallpaper

Download VistaVG Starts Now Wallpaper

source: Askvg

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Microsoft reveals its online upgrade experience for Windows 8.

2011-12-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

Microsoft detailed a number of changes in its Windows 8 setup experience on Monday.

Microsoft’s planning of Windows 8 involved looking closely at the setup experience on its next-generation operating system. “We wanted to hear from customers who chose not to upgrade to Windows 7 even though their PCs would run it,” explained Microsoft’s Christa St. Pierre in a blog post on Monday.

The software giant commissioned a study of how people purchase their PCs to better understand why users chose not to upgrade their operating system and opted for new hardware instead.

Microsoft found that many users wanted to upgrade but that the current experience was difficult.

“Hearing that some customers think it is too difficult really highlights the fact that we have many different customer needs we need to fulfill with setup,” explained St. Pierre.

Microsoft is addressing the setup process with Windows 8 in several ways. The biggest change is the user experience of upgrading Windows, however Microsoft is also shifting towards web delivery methods. Microsoft plans to make Windows 8 installable from a web page. “With our web setup experience, we actually “pre-key” the setup image that is downloaded to a unique user, which means that you don’t have to type in the 25-digit product key when you install,” says St. Pierre.

Microsoft has also combined its Upgrade Advisor, Setup and Windows Easy Transfer applications into one experience for Windows 8.

Windows 8 upgrade report.

The first step in the upgrade experience involves Microsoft scanning a machine to determine what it can and cannot run. “It provides information on the apps and devices that will work in Windows 8, those that won’t work, and any other system information that is useful to know when determining whether or not to purchase and install Windows 8,” says St. Pierre.

The compatibility data then compiles a report to check whether certain applications will work automatically or require an upgrade. The next step involves an integrated download manager that checks which version of Windows 8 is compatible with a system and the required language version.

“Once the download is complete, you are presented a choice to continue the installation, or install on another partition,” explains St. Pierre. Microsoft will allow users to simply save the install as an ISO or create a bootable USB drive for installing the operating system later. The next step will then ask a user whether they want to keep their personal data, Windows settings and apps or just personal files.

Windows 8 upgrades can also opt to wipe everything and upgrade. The new “just personal files” option allows users to clean install Windows 8 but keep their personal data without a separate tool such as the Windows Easy Transfer application.

Overall the upgrade experience is vastly improved from Windows 7 upgrades. Users will only need to navigate through one end-to-end experience in 11 clicks.

Microsoft claims this is an improvement of 82% fewer clicks in Windows 8 and a lot less screens and wizards to work out. “We accomplished all of this with no loss of functionality or customization,” explained St. Pierre. “We simply streamlined the existing experience.”

Windows 8 online download.

Microsoft has also done a lot of work on improving the speed of a Windows 8 upgrade. The underlying Windows 8 upgrade engine has been upgraded to reduce the impact on upgrade times. Microsoft has achieved this by moving entire folders instead of moving things file-by-file. In Windows 7 upgrades, Microsoft preserved files by using the upgrade process to move each file during install and then moving them back.

The upgrade process uses a transport folder during the transition and Microsoft has reduced this to one folder instead of two and used hard link operations to link the actual data on disk in the transport location without having to physically move it. The result is a “significant performance gain” according to Microsoft.

“With Windows 8 setup we have greatly improved both speed and ease of use, while still retaining all of the advanced setup functionality that many customers will demand.” explained St. Pierre. “We hope that you will find these improvements to be a great way to start your experience using Windows 8.”

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Designing search for the Start screen, Chapter 3.

2011-11-29T11:04:00.000-08:00

Designing Start search for dexterity.

Designing for efficiency and dexterity is a core goal of the Start search feature team. As such, using the keyboard to launch apps, settings, and files from search is a very important part of the Start search experience. We also put a lot of thought into preserving existing keyboard patterns, which both average and advanced users have come to rely on, and have built muscle memory around.

Our telemetry data shows that many users leverage the Start menu as a means of commanding Windows. They use specific key-combinations to efficiently launch apps. For example, pressing the WIN key, typing “calc”, and pressing ENTER launches Calculator. Many advanced users know that typing “cmd” and then CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER opens an elevated command, and that typing “notepad c:\mynotes” creates or opens a .txt file. If you watch the keyboard demonstration from the //build/ keynote, you will see many of these used.

These keyboard patterns continue to work in Windows 8 just as well as in previous versions. Pressing the WIN key takes you to the Start screen. Simply start typing in the Start screen and the Search pane automatically opens with the search term in the search box, and the view filtered to show apps that match the term.

The fastest way to search settings and files from anywhere in the system is to use a set of keyboard shortcuts introduced to increase efficiency. These Windows 8 shortcuts reduce the number of keystrokes needed to launch a setting or file to a number equal to (or less than in many cases) what was required in Windows 7. Alternatively, you can also use the Search pane, which indicates the number of results matching the search in each view, to switch between apps, settings, and file searches.

and type	Apps search
+W	Settings search
+F	Files search

Figure 11: Windows 8 Start search keyboard shortcuts

Based in part on the feedback here, we are working on a change that we hope to have available in our beta release, which will take you directly to app search results when you select the Search charm in the desktop.

The efficiency of using the keyboard doesn’t stop at just typing to start a search. Sometimes the app, setting, or file that you want to launch is not the first result shown. You can use the arrow keys to quickly move down to the desired app in the results list, and then press ENTER to launch it. The white box that shows keyboard focus tells you which app will be launched on ENTER. This enables you to efficiently launch any app, setting, or file matching a search. In Windows 7, you could only launch one of the top 3-4 results with this kind of efficiency.

When we looked at some of the common Control Panel items people were searching for (for example, searching for power options using the term “power”), it quickly became clear that because we favored app results first in our Windows 7 design, “Power options” was the fourth result, below all the power shell app results. If you installed Office and frequently used PowerPoint, you saw PowerPoint along with Power shell (32 bit, 64 bit, and the Help file) ahead of ”Power options.” Extending a similar design in Windows 8 would have meant that the position of the “Power options” result would continue to fluctuate as you installed more apps on your system. This forces you to scan through increasingly large result-sets every time you search for a particular app or setting or file.

In Windows 8, we also provide the count of results per system view, so you immediately know how many apps or settings or files match the search term. Switching search views is also designed so you can easily switch views without taking your hands off of the keyboard. In the example shown below, to switch to settings search, press the Down Arrow key and the focus shifts to settings in the search list. Press ENTER and you will see settings search results. As mentioned before, you can continue to use the arrow keys to choose the desired item and press ENTER to launch it. Pressing TAB allows you to quickly switch between the search results list and the Search pane.

Figure 12: No results for apps – but use the arrow keys to switch to settings view, which shows 17 results

Figure 13: Use the arrow keys to choose a settings search result

To add to our earlier point on preserving search efficiency, here are some comparisons of the number of keystrokes for launching frequently used apps via search. In Windows 7, you would press the WIN key, start typing in your search term, and then press ENTER to launch the program. We count all the keystrokes end to end. In Windows 8, you can apply the same pattern for searching for apps (WIN key, type in the search term, press ENTER to launch). Launching Word, Calculator, Paint, or Media Player by pressing the WIN key and typing "word", "calc", "calculator", "paint", "player", or "media" in the search box takes precisely the same number of keystrokes in Windows 8 as it does in Windows 7.

To launch settings in Windows 7, you would press the WIN key, type in the query, arrow down to the result you wanted, and press ENTER to launch it. In Windows 8, you can use WIN key + W to launch settings search, type in a query, and press ENTER to launch. Typing WIN key + W and typing "uninstall", "device manager", or "defender" gives you the same results with precisely the same number of keystrokes in Windows 8 as in Windows 7. In some cases, it takes even fewer keystrokes than in Windows 7 (for example, pressing WIN key + W, typing “power” and then pressing ENTER to launch power options).
This dexterity-focused design isn’t all we have done to make search more efficient. We have also made key performance investments across the system. In current testing of Windows 8, our search performance improvements have cut app search time in half for desktops and laptops. The improvements are even larger on netbooks.

Figure 14: Performance comparison showing % decrease in execution time of app search

Designed for touch, too.

We discussed the details of designing search for dexterity while using the keyboard, but this design works equally well for touch. To begin searching in Start, simply swipe the edge and tap on the Search charm. This opens the full list of installed apps. You can use the touch keyboard to search for a program to launch, but you can also use semantic zoom to zoom out, and then tap on the section that contains your app. Start search is lightweight, fast, fluid, and quickly gets out of the way as you pan through your list of apps, settings, or files.

The Search pane makes it easy to continue searching for the same term in other system views or Metro style apps with just one tap. Touch-friendly search suggestions minimize typing on a touch screen, and the search contract provides a framework for search suggestions that developers can use for their own Metro style apps as well. In addition, we designed touch-friendly filters with result counts in the file search view to help users quickly refine the search results set.

The new Start search experience makes it easier than ever to search for content in your PC or in apps from anywhere in the system. It’s been designed to work seamlessly and efficiently across the range of devices that Windows will run on, and across different input mechanisms such as the mouse, keyboard, and touch. Start search brings apps, settings, and files together with other Metro style apps that implement the Search contract, creating a unified and consistent search experience. We will talk more about the search experience and the search contract in a future post. In the meantime, you can get more information from our talk at //build/ on the Search contract.

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Designing search for the Start screen, Chapter 2.

2011-11-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

Searching settings.

The settings search experience brings together all settings and Control Panel items across the system in one view. Settings search results are matched not only to the name of the Control Panel applet or task, but also to the various keywords that may describe it.

We have also heard your frustration that shutdown is not available as a search result, and we will address this along with improvements to the Start user interface for shutdown (as a reminder, you can also just use the power button or close the lid).

Figure 6: Full-screen settings search results

Searching files.

The number of files on PCs keeps increasing over time as users continue to acquire and create more documents, music, photos, and videos. Our goal, while redesigning the file search experience, was to make it seamless and complete so you can achieve your task of quickly finding a file without having to transition to Windows Explorer.

In File search, you’ll also see search suggestions as you type to help you quickly and efficiently complete the search. The indexer provides these search suggestions based on the content and properties of files it knows about. Search suggestions are a very powerful concept made popular and used extensively on the web—they help you to pinpoint relevant search terms with just a few keystrokes. In Windows 8 we built search suggestions into the file search experience and also made this feature available in the platform for all Metro style apps to use. Note, this feature also accounts for typos or spelling errors, and suggests the auto-corrected search term as you type. Using the arrow keys to choose suggestions autocompletes the term in the box. This makes it easy to add more terms to the query and quickly narrow down the set of results to find the one you want.

You can also still search using AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) from Windows 7. AQS allows for greater precision and control when constructing the query to get targeted results. Here are some sample searches and their advanced query syntax:

Query	AQS Syntax
Find all files authored by Brian or David	author: (Brian OR David)
Find all photos with an F-stop of 2.8 where no flash was fired	f-stop:2.8 flashmode:no flash
Find all files where the file name contains a word starting with Metro and the file size is greater than 1MB	filename:$1mb

Figure 7: Search suggestions based on the content and properties of files

Figure 8: Full-screen file search showing results

Separating searches for apps, settings, and files into their own views allows room for each of them to evolve and breathe— this way they can each provide their own ideal display format—unlike the single list of results in previous versions, which required conformity to achieve aggregation in the limited space. For example, the file search view also provides filters to easily refine the results based on the type of file you’re searching for. Filtering by type is a powerful way to efficiently reduce the results set, irrespective of where the file is saved.

More relevant and contextual information for each file is also now displayed to make the search experience complete. This helps differentiate between similar results and also makes it clear to you why a given result was returned, by highlighting the property that matched the search term—something not possible in the Start menu before. For example, when searching for the term “performance,” the results now highlight where “performance” matched. In one result, it matched on the Title property, and is clearly indicated that way in the result. The results also show file type and size to help further disambiguate between results.

Figure 9 File search results highlight the property that matches the search term

Using a mouse, hovering over a result reveals a rich tooltip with some additional details. For example, for the video result shown below, the rich tooltip shows the duration of the video, frame height, frame width, date modified, and the full path to the file. Using touch, pressing and holding on an item reveals the tooltip.

Figure 10: Rich tooltip reveals additional details in file search

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Designing search for the Start screen, Chapter 1.

2011-11-18T09:03:00.000-08:00

When planning Windows 8, we wanted to make sure the efficiency and dexterity of the Windows 7 Start menu search was carried forward into the new Start screen. Before we dive into the details of the new experience, let’s take a quick look at the evolution of search from the Start menu, and how people are using it today.

Given the ton of interest in the design of the new Start screen we wanted to dive deeper into the topic of search. There's a clear focus on efficiency and overall professional productivity in the comments. For professional scenarios, every keystroke matters. One new aspect of the Windows 8 platform is the ability for Metro style apps to deliver a customized search "contract." For this post we'll focus on the built-in search capabilities for files, settings, and apps, which update the Windows 7 search features. You can learn more from our //build/ session on search, which provides a detailed look at the topic of this post. With that lens, Brian Uphoff, a program manager on our Search, View, and Command user experience team, authored this post.
--Steven

Evolution of searching from Start.

The search box in the Start menu as we know it today first made its appearance in Windows Vista. It became easy for users to search for programs or apps, settings, and files on the desktop and in personal folders like Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos. The search experience aggregated different types of results in one view with programs and settings combined in a single group. The results of a query displayed a small set of items in heuristically sized groups. You needed to click “See all results” to see the rest in Windows Explorer, which aggregated everything into one ungrouped and unsorted view.

Figure 1: Start menu search in Windows Vista

In Windows 7, we expanded results to include detailed Control Panel tasks in addition to the main Control Panel pages. We also separated out Control Panel items from programs into a unique group that allowed you to more easily focus on the type of result you were looking for.

The overall experience aggregated different types of items and had a fixed limit on the number of results that could appear. This was because the result set was limited to the size of the Start menu. Clicking a group header took you to Windows Explorer for programs and files or to Control Panel for settings. Each experience had a type-specific view, though the search results order diverged from what was shown in the Start menu. Showing an aggregated view in the Start menu required compromising on performance in addition to space because we would search all programs, Control Panel items, and files, even if you were looking for only one of these data types.

Figure 2: Start menu search in Windows 7

When we look at the usage data of how people are using the Start menu to search in Windows 7, it’s clear that searching to launch programs is the most frequent and important activity users engage in with Start search.

Our telemetry data shows that 67% of all searches in Windows 7 are used to find and launch programs. Searching for files accounts for 22% of all Windows 7 Start menu searches, and searching for Control Panel items about 9%. Searching for email messages via Start Menu is very rare (less than 0.05%). The remaining 2% are searches executing the “Run” functionality.

Figure 3: Windows 7 Start menu search usage data

Searching from Start in Windows 8.

Searching via the Start menu has continued to evolve with each release. The Windows 8 Start search experience builds on top of search features available in Windows 7 and provides a unique view for each of the three system groups - Apps, Settings and Files. These search result views are a natural progression from the Windows 7 groups and are easily accessible from anywhere in the operating system via the Search charm or keyboard shortcuts. Separating the search results into views means we can tailor the experience for each data type. For example, the File search view provides you with filters and search suggestions while typing to quickly complete your query.

In Windows 8, we expect people will be acquiring and installing more apps than ever before. Had we continued using the Windows 7 Start menu search interface to search for a Control Panel item, you would always see app or program results before Control Panel results, displacing many Control Panel items from being the first match. This and other constraints on the existing design required us to develop a new approach—this is especially true as we consider the increasing use of larger monitors or higher DPI screens where longer menus become even more difficult to use and navigate. In Windows 7, the total number of results that could be shown in the Start menu was limited. Depending on the number of groups with matching results, an average of 3-4 results were shown per group. Very rarely did all results for a group show up, and the organization of the results was pretty unpredictable.

With Windows 8, on the other hand, we’re following an app-first model, where each app developer understands their data and users best, and knows the best way to present the information to them. Using the same model for search, we believe that always having a quick and consistent way to get directly to settings or file search results gives you precision and control over the type of results you’re looking for. In Windows 8, each view is tailored for the type of content you’re searching for, and shows all the results, instead of limiting them due to screen real-estate.

One change a few of you will notice is that file search results no longer include email messages and contacts. The inclusion of email search never got the generalized support from mail clients that we had hoped for, though at least one mail client did support it (one reason why email searches are rare in the Start menu <0.05% of total searches). With the app-first approach in Windows 8, Metro style email apps will use the search contract to provide a rich set of filtered search results in a view customized for email. In comparison, email clients and other apps in Windows 7 have no control over how their search results are presented.

We paid special attention to ensuring the number of keystrokes required to find and launch apps, settings, or files is at parity with or better than in Windows 7. We’ve introduce a set of keyboard shortcuts to help users quickly and efficiently get to settings search results (WIN key + W) or file search results (WIN key + F), thus reducing the total number of keystrokes needed to find and launch settings or files. We’ll cover how we maintained and increased keyboard efficiency across these views in more detail later in the post.

Searching apps.

App search results show the full set of apps (both their “friendly” names and executable names) for which the search term matches the name. As the number of installed apps increases, it becomes difficult to browse through a large list to find an infrequently used app. Search helps quickly filter and reduce a large list of apps down in just a few key strokes. We wanted to make sure we preserved the same keyboard usage patterns as Windows 7. You don’t have to first click on the Search charm to begin searching – simply start typing in the Start screen and you’ll see your list of apps filter down to the one you are looking for.

Figure 4: Full-screen app search results

Also note that the Most Frequently Used (MFU)-based ranking of app search results from Windows 7 is preserved in Windows 8. For example, if you type “paint” in the developer preview you get 2 apps back as search results – PaintPlay and Paint. If you predominantly just use Paint, it will be ranked higher than PaintPlay as you use it more often. So, launching Paint (or other apps you frequently use) becomes more efficient the more you use app search.

Some of you have pointed out that many users won’t discover that they can simply type to start searching in the Start screen. Search is closely associated with typing— the most common pattern to search in the Start menu is to bring up the Start menu by using the Windows key or by clicking the Start button and typing. That exact and efficient behavior is preserved in Windows 8 as we have observed and found that pattern is what users care about most. Our experience in user tests, and even when people at //build/ tried the Develop Preview for the first time, shows that people tend to serendipitously discover this feature early in using Windows 8, and so we're confident it will not be a hindrance to usability. Nevertheless the Search charm is highly visible, and selecting it shows the Search box.

The Windows 7 Start menu also included “Run” functionality for commanding and navigating Windows. This has been carried over to Windows 8 as well—tasks like running scripts and .exes in the user’s PATH are still possible and supported in App search. Search continues to support launching folders in Windows Explorer by typing in full paths. For example, typing “C:\” in Start search results in the set of folders in the C: drive appearing below the search box. Pressing the Down Arrow key moves selection through the list and autocompletes the folder name in the search box, allowing users to continue typing to further refine the path. You can do the same with UNC (\\foo\example) paths as well. And of course WIN key + R will switch to the desktop and bring up the classic Run dialog, just as you would expect.

Figure 5: Typing a path into Start search

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The Windows 8 Task Manager, Chapter 2.

2011-11-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

Scenario #1: Ending processes quickly and efficiently.

We know from many third-party tools (or tools like sysinternals Process Explorer) there are many things we could add to Task Manager for power users, but we knew we had to first address the mainstream users because we didn’t want to create something that would overwhelm the majority of our customers.

We will of course continue to value third-party tools as they allow for specialization and unique innovation around this and many tasks. For the default view, we designed a minimalist experience that appeals to the needs of the broadest customer base and most common scenario. When you launch Task Manager for the first time in Windows 8, you see a very clean view of your running apps. We made the default view great at one thing: killing misbehaving apps. And we removed everything that did not directly support that core scenario.

Figure 10: Default view of Task Manager in “Windows 8”

The value of the default view is all about what we took out. We removed everything not focused on the core task of killing apps, which makes the design focused and efficient. Specifically:

We took out the tabs from this view, since they distract from the core scenario.
We removed the menu bar from the default view.
This view shows just the apps, and removes individual windows that can’t be killed anyway.
We took out things that clutter the experience, such as resource usage stats and technical concepts that most users don’t understand.
No double prompts. If you click ”End task” we don’t ask you, “Are you sure?”, we just kill the app, and quickly! (But be careful, because we also won’t prompt you to save!)

Check out how much cleaner and more focused the new Task Manager is compared to the Windows 7 Task Manager with the same applications and windows opened:

Figure 11: Windows 7 and Windows 8 Task Managers, compared

After taking out all of the extras, you are left with a tool that is great at one thing: killing a misbehaving app. And this is perfect for many users who are experiencing the pain of a “not responding” app that won’t go away using the app’s Close button.

Scenario #2: Diagnosing performance issues.

A lot of what is new with Task Manager is shown only when you go to the “More details” view. This is the realm of the power user, so keep in mind that mainstream users may never want to get into this level of detail, and all of their needs should be met by the ”Fewer details” view above.
Here is what you will see in this new view:

Figure 12: The new processes tab and the heat map

The heat map.

The most noticeable difference in the new processes tab is the new heat map, which represents different values with color. Our telemetry data told us that it was very common for users to go to the process tab, sort by CPU or memory utilization, and then look for applications consuming more resources than expected. The nice thing about a heat map is that it allows you to monitor anomalies across multiple resources (network, disk, memory, and CPU utilization) all at the same time, without having to sort the data. It also allows you to find the hot spot instantly without needing to read numbers or understand concepts or specific units. In usability studies we used an eye-tracking system to test what users looked at when presented with various ways of visualizing this information. This helped us narrow our choices to a design that efficiently draws user’s eyes to the most significant resource problems. Below you can see the eye movement of a participant in one of our eye-tracking studies overlaid on top of a screen shot of what he was looking at. The red dot indicates a place where his eye paused, and the lines show where his eye had quickly moved from previously.

Network and disk counters.
Many power users supplement their usage of Task Manager with other tools such as Resource Monitor simply because in the past Task Manager did not show per-process network and disk attribution. This was a gap, when you consider that a spinning disk or multiple applications competing for network bandwidth are the root cause of many perceptible PC performance issues. The new Task Manager now shows these resources at the same level of detail as memory and CPU.

Lighting up the resource usage.
One of the biggest causes of PC performance issues is resource contention. When a particular resource is being used at a rate above a threshold number, the column header will light up to draw your attention to it. Think of this as a warning indicator, letting you know a good place to start looking if you are experiencing performance issues. Below, you can see that the CPU column header is highlighted to draw your attention to the fact that you may have multiple applications competing for CPU time.

Figure 13: Resource usage indicators

Grouping by applications, background processes, and Windows processes.

A big challenge with today’s Task Manager is that it is hard to know which processes correspond to an application (apps are generally safe to kill), which are Windows OS processes (killing some of these can cause a blue screen), and which are miscellaneous background processes that may need to be explored more deeply. The new Task Manager shows processes grouped by type, so it is easy to keep these separated while still providing an ungrouped view for situations where you need it.

Figure 14: Grouping by process type

Friendly names for background processes (and services, and everything else).

Looking at the screen shot above, do you see the line item for "Print driver host for applications"? In the old Task Manager, this showed up as “splwow64.exe”.
But if you still want to see the executable name, of course you can add it back as an optional column.

Grouping top-level windows by app.

One of the most distracting parts of the old Task Manager is that the Applications tab was a flat list that included all of the top-level windows from all processes in the system. While the list of top-level windows is interesting information to have, it is often overwhelming to look at and sometimes a single window cannot be killed without closing all the other windows for that process. To address this, the new Task Manager now groups top-level windows under their parent process. It allows for a much cleaner view for typical usage, helps you focus on killable processes, process resource usage, and allows you to see which windows are owned by each process so you know what will be closed if you kill it.

Figure 15: Grouping top-level windows by process

What’s a fussvc.exe?.

Have you ever looked through the process list, seen something like “fussvc.exe” and wondered what it was? Adding friendly names was a good first step to resolving this problem (fusssvc.exe is actually the Fast User Switching Utility Service), but of course, to really find out what this process is, you need to search the web. The new Task Manager integrates a search context menu on right-click, so you can go directly to your default search engine (which you can customize) to see more details and relevant information. This can make a huge difference when deciding whether a background process is doing something useful or just wasting cycles.

Figure 16: Search the web for details on obscure processes

Figure 17: Search results for “fussvc.exe Fast User Switching Utility Service”

Service host details and friendly names.

If you open up Windows 7 Task Manager to the Processes tab and select “Show process from all users,” you will probably see eight seemingly identical instances of “svchost.exe”. This is one of the most commonly noted "not very informative" sources of information we provided. Of course, some of you know that this is really just a service host process and you can add the PID column, go to the services tab, sort by PID, see which services correlate to that PID, and then reverse-look-up friendly names for each of the services… but that is a lot of work (and not everybody knows this)! With the new Task Manager, we show all of the services grouped by process with friendly names for each of them, so you instantly can see what is going on when an instance of svchost is consuming a lot of resources:

Figure 18: Service host grouping and details

As you can see, we added quite a lot to the new Task Manager (and we only showed you the first tab!). Task Manager was a unique opportunity for user experience designers and researchers working together with technical program managers and engineers to create a clean, organized, and efficient design. We made it more streamlined for mainstream users, and more detailed for power users.

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The Windows 8 Task Manager, Chapter 1.

2011-11-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

We are really excited to share some of the improvements we are making to the Task Manager in Windows 8.

Task Manager is one of the most widely used apps, and it has a long history. It showed up in early versions of Windows as a simple utility to close and switch between programs, and has had functionality added to it through several releases to make it what it is today.

As we mentioned during the Windows 8 keynote at //build/, every 15 years or so we choose to update Task Manager. Of course that was said in jest as we have incrementally improved the utility in just about every release of Windows. For Windows 8, we took a new look at the tool and thought through some new scenarios and a new way of tuning the tool for "both ends of the spectrum" in terms of end-users and those that need very fine-grained control over what is going on with their PC. Ryan Haveson, the group program manager of our In Control of Your PC team, authored this post. Note: This post is about Task Manager, not about closing Metro style applications :-)
--Steven

Figure 1: Windows 3.0 Task List

Figure 2: Windows NT 4.0 Task Manager (now with “new task”)

Figure 3: Windows XP Task Manager (with new Networking and Users tabs)

Figure 4: Windows 7 Task Manager

Because Task Manager is so widely used, we knew that any changes we made would be noticed, so of course we were both excited and cautious about the effort. At the beginning, there were a few key problems that we knew we wanted to address:

Build a tool that was well designed, thoughtful, and modern. After all, even a technical tool can benefit from a focus on design.
Fill some of the functionality gaps that drove some of our most technical customers to use other tools such as Resource Monitor and Process Explorer.
Organize and highlight the richness of data available to make it more elegant and clear for those who want access to a new level of data.

How do people use Task Manager?

To really make Task Manager great at what it currently does, we wanted to first understand how people were using it. Over the years, it had grown to support many different scenarios. As of Windows 7, you could use Task Manager to close applications, to find out detailed data about your processes, to start or stop services, to monitor your network adaptor, or even to perform basic system administrator tasks for currently logged on users. That is a lot of functionality.

Because of the investments we made in telemetry, we had some pretty good data to start with. We combined this with individual customer interviews and observation in the research lab to understand what people were doing with Task Manager and why they were doing it.

Figure 5: Which tabs are people using?

This data is pretty interesting. What it shows is that people are spending most of their time using the first two tabs, which are pivoted around views of applications and processes. Although it is not surprising, it was interesting to see that the usage was roughly evenly split between the Applications tab and the Process tab. This indicates that there must be some significant detail lacking in the Applications tab, which is causing people to go to the Process tab. So, next we looked at how people were using the Process tab to understand what they were doing there.

Figure 6: Many users sort the process view on resource usage

When we looked at this data, and then correlated it with interviews and observations of users in our research labs, we found that people were using the process tab either to look for something that was not on the applications list (e.g. a background or system process), or to see which processes were using the most resources.
So next we looked at what actions people take in Task Manager.

Figure 7: The goal is often to close or “kill” an app or process
Click to view a larger version of this chart

Looking at the data and talking with customers, we determined that the most common usage of the tool was to simply end or “kill” an application or a process.

Goals of the new Task Manager.

Based on all of the data and our background research, we decided to focus energy on three key goals:

Optimize Task Manager for the most common scenarios. Focus on the scenarios that the data points to: (1) use the applications tab to find and close a specific application, or (2) go to the processes tab, sort on resource usage, and kill some processes to reclaim resources.
Use modern information design to achieve functional goals. Build a tool that is thoughtful and modern by focusing on information design and data visualization to help achieve the functional scenario goals.
Don’t remove functionality. While there are some notable core scenarios, there is a really long list of other, less frequent usage scenarios for Task Manager. We explicitly set a goal to not remove functionality, but rather to augment, enhance, and improve.

A key issue we intended to address was how we could add all of the interesting new functionality without overwhelming users. To solve this, we pivoted around a "More/Fewer details" button similar to the new copy file dialog model.

Figure 8: Fewer details view

Figure 9: More details view

This model allowed us to optimize the default view (“Fewer details”) around the core scenario of finding an application and closing it. It also allowed us to add much more detail in the other view because it would only show up when someone asked for it. In the “More details” view we decided to stay with the existing tabbing model of Task Manager and focus on improving the content of each of the tabs. This would help us to augment, enhance, and improve what we already had, without removing functionality.

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Reducing runtime memory in Windows 8.

2011-11-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

The runtime memory usage of Windows 8 is an important factor in determining the Windows 8 system requirements, as well as the broadened spectrum of devices that will host Windows 8. As you know, we’re delivering the complete Windows 8 experience on SoC-based devices characterized by low power consumption. This makes it even more important to leave lots of memory available for multiple concurrent apps and to sustain the overall responsiveness of devices.

Something that might not be obvious is that minimizing memory usage on low-power platforms can prolong battery life. Huh? In any PC, RAM is constantly consuming power. If an OS uses a lot of memory, it can force device manufacturers to include more physical RAM. The more RAM you have on board, the more power it uses, the less battery life you get. Having additional RAM on a tablet device can, in some instances, shave days off the amount of time the tablet can sit on your coffee table looking off but staying fresh and up to date.

Memory usage goals.

Our goal with Windows 8 from the beginning was to ship with the same system requirements as Windows 7. We know if we do even better that there are more resources for apps, even if we keep the published requirements the same. It is fun to think about what the "low end" hardware looked like in 2009 and how you can't even find things like 256MB memory modules anymore. We wanted to ensure that people running on Windows 7-era hardware would have the option to easily upgrade their existing machines to Windows 8 and take advantage of the functionality it has to offer. We also expect that many machines that predate the Windows 7 release will run Windows 8 based on the experiences we’ve had with older machines we intentionally keep in our performance test infrastructure.
An important task for Windows 8 was to make room for new functionality while looking for opportunities to reduce the memory consumed by existing functionality and consumed across the board. Windows 8 is tracking well towards meeting the goal we set ourselves.

Task Manager memory use comparison.

The easiest way to make a ballpark comparison of Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 memory use is to install both operating systems on a 1GB RAM machine (minimum OS RAM requirement) and compare them when they’ve been rebooted multiple times, and then idled for a while.

The Windows Task Manager contains the main view of system memory through its “In Use” statistic (described in detail in this doc). The below graphics compare memory consumption on Steven’s 3+ year old netbook that he was using at the //build/ keynote recently, running Windows 7 at idle, and then with the same machine running Windows 8.

Figure 1 – Memory usage in Windows 7 SP1

Figure 2 – Memory usage in Windows 8

The specific hardware making up a machine, memory use of drivers, and even uptime can cause variability, so memory results will be different on different machines (or even the same machine at different times). As you can see though, Windows 8 is doing well relative to Windows 7.

For a bit of extra fun on a test machine, go to device manager and disable your display adapter (unload the graphics driver). You’d never run your machine this way but this does give you an even closer approximation of the memory use of Windows itself. With a disabled graphics driver, the machine above gets under 200MB after idling for a while.

NOTE: For Windows 8, a clean install also contains the extended Windows Defender technology, which, for the first time incorporates complete antimalware functionality – also optimized for memory and resource use per Jason’s blog about protecting you from malware. (This functionality does not exist on a clean install of Windows 7 where we would recommend that you add security software).

Making room in Windows 8.

We made hundreds of specific changes to minimize OS memory use in Windows 8. I’m going to call out a few specific areas that resulted in substantial memory savings.

Memory combining.
When assessing the contents of RAM in a typical running PC, many parts of memory have the same content. The redundant copies of data across system RAM present an opportunity to reduce the memory footprint even for services and OS components.

How can this happen? Applications will sometimes allocate memory for future use and will initialize it all to the same value. The application may never actually use the memory as it may be there in anticipation of functionality that is the user never invokes. If multiple running applications are doing this at the same time, redundant copies of memory are in the system.

Memory combining is a technique in which Windows efficiently assesses the content of system RAM during normal activity and locates duplicate content across all system memory. Windows will then free up duplicates and keep a single copy. If the application tries to write to the memory in future, Windows will give it a private copy. All of this happens under the covers in the memory manager, with no impact on applications. This approach can liberate 10s to 100s of MBs of memory (depending on how many applications are running concurrently).

Service changes and reductions.

OS services configured to run all the time are a significant source of ambient memory use. When assessing the set of OS services during Windows 8 planning, we decided to remove a number of them (13), move a different set of services to “manual” start, and also made some of the “always running” services move to a “start on demand” model. This is where a “trigger” in the OS (like device arrival or the availability of a network address) causes the following to occur:

The service starts.
The service does its thing (whatever that happens to be).
It hangs around for a while to make sure there isn’t anything else to do, and
The service goes away.

You’ll notice that Plug and Play, Windows Update, and the the user mode driver framework service are all trigger-started in Windows 8, in contrast to Windows 7, where these services were always running.
Of course we have added a ton of new functionality (and new code) to Windows 8. Some of this new functionality is packaged in the form of new services. Of these new services, two are auto-started; all others are manual or trigger-started.

Doing the same job with less memory.

As Windows executes applications and performs its own system housekeeping, program files and data are loaded off the disk into main memory. During Windows 7 and Windows 8 development to date, we’ve analyzed the pieces (pages) of memory during normal execution and how often they were referenced. The idea here is that if you’re going to pay the price for allocating a piece of memory, you’d better be using it (referencing it) often. If you’re not referencing that memory often but need it, consolidate it with something else.

Shortly after we shipped Windows 7, we applied a similar technique to several of the low level components of Windows dating back to the early days of NT (early 1990s). The work included re-architecture of code and changing data structures to completely separate “hot” parts of memory (frequently referenced) from “cold” parts. By densely consolidating the hot items, we brought down the overall runtime memory cost.

Given the nature of the changes (low-level OS), we wanted to get the work done as early as possible in the schedule to get ample runtime on the changes. To date, these changes have been in place on Windows 8 for almost 2 years with thousands of Microsoft employees using the product to get their daily jobs done. And we’ve seen consistent results showing memory usage reduced by tens of MB on an average machine.

Lazy initialization of the “desktop”.

Back in June, you saw Steven and Julie introduce the Metro style UI for the first time. We expect many people using tablets to spend a lot of time in that environment, typically using Metro style apps. As part of that demonstration, we also showed that for Windows 8, you can also bring forward your existing applications and use them in the very familiar desktop environment.

From a memory perspective, we’ve taken advantage of the fact that there will be some set of devices on which users will stay in the immersive, Metro style UI almost all the time. In this instance, Windows 8 will only initialize OS components unique to the desktop environment when necessary. This is another source of memory savings, approximately 23MB right now. (Note that Task Manager runs in the desktop, so the memory numbers shown above include its cost).

More granular prioritization of memory.

Windows 8 has a better scheme for the prioritization of memory allocations made by applications and system components. This means that Windows can make better decisions about what memory to keep around and what memory to remove sooner.

For example, antivirus programs (AV) do various checks on files when they are being opened by other programs. The memory that the AV program allocates to check virus signatures is usually a one-time allocation (it is unlikely that specific memory will be needed again). On Windows 7, the memory is treated as if it had the same priority in the system as other memory (say, memory allocated by a running instance of Microsoft Excel). If memory became scarce, Windows 7 could end up removing the memory that helps another running application (like Excel) stay responsive for the user, which wouldn’t be the best choice for system responsiveness in this case.

In Windows 8, any program has the ability to allocate memory as “low priority.” This is an important signal to Windows that if there is memory pressure, Windows can remove this low priority memory to make space, and it doesn’t affect other memory required to sustain the responsiveness of the system.
To wrap up, I’ve called out our philosophy and approach to reducing memory usage in Windows 8. You’ve seen some sample results and I’ve just scratched the surface on some of the engineering work done to date in this area. One thing I haven’t discussed at all is the Windows 8 application model, and process lifecycle changes made to make new Windows 8 apps more “memory friendly.” Look out for this in the //build/ content and in future blog posts, as it’s also a really important part of the story of reimagining Windows.

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Blogger Template Designer is a new way for you to easily customize the look of your blog.

2011-10-03T01:14:00.000-07:00

Blogger Template Designer is a new way for you to easily customize the look of your blog. You can select a variety of templates, images, colors, and column layouts to make your blog an expression of you. To get to the Template Designer, go to Design | Template Designer.

To access the Template Designer in the upgraded interface, just click on the drop-down menu of the gray Post List icon, and select Template. From there, you'll be able to choose and customize your template.

As you play around with the Template Designer, you’ll see a preview of how the blog will appear based on the choices you’ve made, which you can expand to by pressing the toggle to Expand Preview between the Blogger Template Designer dashboard and the preview. When you’re satisfied with the look of your blog, you can make them go live by pressing Apply to Blog in the top right hand corner of the Template Designer.

To get started with Blogger Template Designer, select a template for your blog from one of the professionally designed templates that are available. Each template appears as a large thumbnail that when clicked will show different variations on the template below that you can select by clicking on them. Note that clicking a new template will erase any customizations you’ve made on a previous template. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can continue customizing the look of your blog.

No matter what template you are previewing in Template Designer, you can always see what is currently live on your blog by looking at the Live on Blog thumbnail in the Template Designer control panel. You can also click on it to reset the template in the Template Designer to the live version of your blog.

Background.

Even though you’ve chosen a template, you can still change the way that it looks. Using Blogger Template Designer, you can choose the background color or image for your blog and then play with the color scheme. To start customizing your background, click on the thumbnail under Background Image.

One of the best new features of Template Designer is the ability to change the color of your background image. This is possible when a background image has transparency. You can tell that a background image is transparent because it has a checkerboard in the top right hand corner of the image.

Once you’ve selected your image, you can change the color of the background by clicking on Main Color Theme and then selecting the color of your choice.

You can only change the color of your background if the background is transparent. Also, if the template that you chose has a grey background, you cannot change its color.

In addition to selecting and personalizing your blog’s background image, you can also choose a color theme to apply to aspects of your blog, including text and links. You can do this by playing with the Main Color Theme or by choosing one of our Suggested Themes. Changing the color theme of your blog will change the colors for all aspects of the blog template that can be changed.

Note: If background image is not transparent, themes will alter the text color scheme of the blog
Note: For information on uploading your own custom background image, please see our article on Adding custom CSS to your blog.

Layout. You can choose a variety of layout options for your blog, from one to three columns. These layouts feature drag and drop functionality for gadgets. You will also have a variety of layout options for the blog footer as well.

If you want to add or remove gadgets or edit gadget settings, you cannot do this through Blogger Template Designer. Rather, you have to do this on the general Layout tab.

Adjust Width.

You can change the width of the blog, and the right and left columns by dragging the slider for the different parts of blog layout. Note that the options you see here correspond to the type of layout that you chose. If, for example, you chose a blog with left and right columns, you will see both left and right column sliders. If, however, you chose a blog with only a left column, you will only see that option here.

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How to Get Windows Media Player (WMP) 12 Taskbar Toolbar (Taskband) Back in Windows 7 by Downgrading to Version 11.

2011-09-26T05:05:00.000-07:00

As we all know "Windows 7" comes with Windows Media Player 12 version which contains lots of new features and also the interface is a bit different from previous versions.

But tbh I don't like WMP12. Its a bit buggy and the most annoying thing is it doesn't provide the taskbar toolbar aka mini toolbar which was one of the best thing in Windows Media Player.

If you also don't like WMP12 and want to get the good ol' mini toolbar back in Windows 7, then this tutorial will help you.

In this tutorial, we'll downgrade the WMP version in Windows 7. We'll install WMP11 and it'll bring the taskbar toolbar back as shown in following screenshots:

WMP11 Running in Windows 7:

WMP Taskbar Toolbar in Windows 7:

So here are the required steps:

1. Right-click on Computer icon on desktop and select Manage, it'll open a new window. Now go to Services & Applications -> Services. You can also open the same from Administrative Tools -> Computer Management. Or you can directly open "Services" list by providing services.msc command in RUN or Startmenu search box.

Now right-click on "Windows Media Player Network Sharing" service and select "Stop". It'll stop the service.

2. Now you'll need to take ownership of following files/folders:

"Windows Media Player" folder in "Program Files" folder
All files starting with wmp in "Windows\System32" folder
wmploc.dll.mui file in "Windows\System32\en-US" folder

How will you take the ownership?

NOTE: This article has been featured by Microsoft. AskVG.com was the first website posting this unique trick.

Many times you need to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows. For example, when you want to customize Windows UI and need to replace existing system files with a new one.

You have to follow no. of steps to take ownership and grant yourself full permission to access the file or folder. But now you can do it in a single step.

You just need to download following zip file and extract it. You'll get a .REG file. Run the file and accept the confirmation:

Download Link

It'll add an extra option "Take ownership" in file and folder context menu:

Now you can right-click on any file or folder and select "Take ownership" option. It'll make you the owner of the file or folder and you can perform your desired operation on that file or folder.

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Action Center lists important messages about security and maintenance settings that need your attention.

2011-08-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Action Center in Windows 7 is a place to view alerts and take actions that can help keep Windows running smoothly. Action Center lists important messages about security and maintenance settings that need your attention.

A red item in Action Center indicates an important issue that should be addressed soon, such as an outdated antivirus program that needs updating. Yellow items are suggested tasks that you should consider addressing, like recommended maintenance tasks.

As soon as Windows 7 is installed you can see the Action Center notifications in the System Tray. One of the first notifications should be about the missing Antivirus in your Windows 7 computer.

Quote:

Find an antivirus program onliline
Windows did not find an antivirus program on this computer. Click to find a program online.

Clicking on such popup messages gives the following screen.

You may click on this message to open te Action Center in Windows 7 or follow the conventional way.

1. Click the Start button to view the Start Menu. Then choose the Control Panel option.

2. The Control Panel window opens up now.

Click the System and Security link from the Control Panel window.

3. The System and Security section of Control Panel opens up. Here you can see the Action Center link.

Click on the Action Center link to open the Action Center Window.

You may finish the first time malware scan from this screen.

Click the Scan Now button to open the Windows Defender scan window.

Turn On / Turn Off Notifications

Now in order to change the behavior of notification and enable or disable of the messages the Change Action Center Settings link can be used from the left pane of the Action Center window.

From this window modify the check boxes for the Action Center notification messages like Windows Update, Windows firewall, Virus Protection etc. Click OK to save the settings.

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Add Google Plus One Button on Blogger with Blogger Plugins.

2011-07-09T06:45:00.001-07:00

Google has released an alternative to the Facebook and Twitter Sharing buttons named +1.

If you like something that you find on the web, you can hit the +1 button, and your +1's will help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

This tutorial will guide you on adding the same to your Blogger Blog.

Checkout this video to know more about the +1 button:

Why Should I add the Google +1 Button?

1. The Plus one button will have a major impact on your Search results. When a friend of yours does a search in Google, your +1s will count.
2. You can get a detailed report about the +1 metric and how it affects your search traffic over at Webmaster Tools. You can read more about it at the Official Google Webmaster Blog -

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html

Adding Google Plus one (+1) button to Blogger.

1. If you are already using the official Blogger Sharing buttons, you should already be seeing the +1 buttons on your blog. If it is not, then go to that tutorial, and you will get the answer to how you can fix it.
2. No I don’t want to add those Blogger Sharing buttons, but would love to add the +1 button somehow. If that’s the case, then read on.

3.Generate the Google +1 button code using the following generator.(The codes and the tutorial will be updated with the options that you make using the generator).

Configure the Button

Demo

4. Go to Blogger Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML and click on the button which says “Expand widget Templates”. Look for and immediately above that paste:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
{lang: 'en-US'}
</script>

5. Now look for and immediately below that paste:

<div>
<g:plusone size="standard" expr:href="data:post.url"/>
</div>

6.Save the template, and you should see the Google +1 buttons on your blogger blog.

source: Blogger Plugins

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Microsoft abusing DMCA to eradicate competing Xbox 360 accessories.

2011-06-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

If you were able to score on gaming console accessories from a third party at a significantly lower price, wouldn't you be inclined to purchase the products that give you the most bang for your buck?

What if after you installed the third party accessory, like a memory card to save your games, the console-maker were to remotely disable it and claim that copyright law gave the company every right to do so?

According to Microsoft, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) gives it the power and the legal authority to remotely disable Xbox 360 compatible memory cards, controllers and headsets that were not made exclusively by Microsoft or one of its affiliates.

As you might imagine, it hit the fan in 2009 after Microsoft issued an Xbox 360 firmware update that blocked a less-expensive and non-Microsoft-made memory card from working on Xbox consoles. Third-party accessory maker Datel Holdings then sued, calling the disabling of memory cards a deliberate anti-competitive move "to perpetuate Microsoft's market power."

But Microsoft countered on the grounds of a DMCA argument, saying Datel's memory cards circumvent an Xbox memory card authentication sequence. Microsoft claimed that Xbox users of such third-party cards manufactured by an "unauthorized" competitor are violating federal copyright law. But those copyright infringement claims are why the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge stepped into the legal game.

The EFF urged a federal court to block Microsoft's "misuse of copyright law" in the console-makers attempt to "quash innovation" and to police users' behavior. "The DMCA is supposed to be a shield against piracy, not a weapon to smash competition and consumer choice," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Microsoft is misusing the law in order to sell more accessories and control customers' use of the Xbox."

EFF argued [PDF] that "Microsoft effectively asks the Court to grant it exclusive rights to sell any and all Xbox-360-compatible memory cards, controllers, and headsets," but DMCA was not created to block competitors.

Yet Microsoft alleged that gaming users are "cheaters" when using the Datel-made memory cards. The EFF points out that thousands of legitimate "consumers paid Microsoft and its affiliates for the devices and the games," and Microsoft should not abuse copyright law to "maintain exclusive control of the Xbox 360 aftermarket."

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Abigail Phillips stated, "Congress did not intend to grant manufacturers the power to eliminate competition for replacement parts, accessories, or repair services. That's bad for consumers and bad for innovation."

A court date has not yet been set, but it will be interesting to see if this plays out differently than when Sony cried DMCA foul against Playstation modder George GeoHot Hotz . . . the same Geohot who Microsoft later welcomed to hack Windows Phone.

Microsoft also recently became the first member to join a litigation avoidance program by Article One Partners. The service "uses crowdsourcing to find information that could deem patents invalid" in order to help Microsoft fight patent trolls, Seattlepi reported. Does this strike anyone else as a wee bit inconsistent? Microsoft has been accused of being no stranger to abusing the patent system and patent trolling for its own purposes.

TechDirt said, "Microsoft is a steaming pile of hypocrisy" since it has claimed Android violates Microsoft patents and has used those patents to attack other companies that use the Android operating system. It's been estimated that Microsoft has made five times the income from Android fees than from its own products, Windows Mobile and WP7 combined, during the first quarter of 2011.

Yet after Google placed a $900 million "stalking horse bid" on the thousands of patents which belong to bankrupt Nortel Networks, MS officially objected to Google's tactics. Reuters reported the patents in question cover "wireless, data and optical networking, voice, Internet, semiconductors and other technologies." The patent auction takes place later this month.

Computerworld's Glyn Moody wrote about Microsoft suddenly wanting the government to intervene and protect it from patent troll attacks. "Let's be consistent here: if you want to abuse the patent system, expect to be on the receiving end of similar abuse.

On the other hand, rather more laudably, why not stop abusing, in which case you can take the moral high ground when others start abusing the system to attack you?"

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 "Mango".

2011-06-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

The next version of Windows Phone 7, called "Mango," although that won't be its final name, is great-looking and fun to use. It's full of people-centric features that make it easier to stay in touch with friends and family, to communicate, and to share ideas. It's easier to use than Android, and in many ways slicker than Apple's iOS.

Microsoft lent me a Samsung Focus loaded with a developer build of Windows Phone 7 Mango, which isn't yet complete. Still, the developer build let me get a feel for which features will really pop, and which still need work.

For a rundown of the basic features of the OS, check out our Windows Phone 7 review. You might also want to read our review of the Samsung Focus, the best Windows Phone so far.

Mango will appear this fall, both as an upgrade for current Windows Phones and on new devices, Microsoft says.

The Best Tastes of Mango.

Windows Phone 7 has always been activity-centered rather than app-centered. Its hubs let you focus on ideas like "people," "pictures" or "music" rather than about which particular app or service you need at the moment.

My favorite new Mango feature is the new Groups option in the People hub. With Facebook and Twitter added to your phone book, you're probably going to have a lot of contacts. Groups help you make sense of them.

I don't use Facebook because I find it overwhelming. With my account stuffed full of acquaintances, everyone I went to school with, and people from work, my news feed is a massive flow of data from people I hardly know.

Windows Phone Mango makes me want to use Facebook again. I set up a Family group and saw only the updates and photo albums from my family; a Work group showed only updates and photo albums from colleagues.

We move in multiple circles, and Mango lets your phone reflect that.

Facebook pops up everywhere. You can take a picture by pressing the camera button straight from the lock screen, auto-tag it with names, and share it on Facebook. The Calendar absorbs Facebook events, complete with their walls and commentary. The photo gallery lets you immediately dip into your friends' Facebook galleries. It's safe to say Mango is the most Facebook-oriented OS available in the U.S.

Email and office tasks have all received a bit of a bump. There's a useful conversation view in email, and you can more easily start new calendar entries by typing directly into a calendar line. The Microsoft Office apps now automatically connect to Skydrive, which gives you a decent way to get files onto your phone—you still can't drag and drop files from a local PC, though, which is frustrating.

Multitasking is just fast app switching, for now. Hold down the Back button, and you can flip between your most recent apps, each paused where you left them. That's a start, but it will take new apps written with new APIs to actually start doing things in the background, including using background data to update home-screen tiles.

Bing Vision is a Google Goggles clone, letting you search for objects by scanning barcodes to return Web and shopping results, or translating text between languages. It feels a bit like a gimmick, and I had trouble testing it because of a bug that kept throwing the camera out of focus in macro mode, making it unable to scan anything. Ah, beta software.

The new voice-to-text features are flashy, though I'd prefer if they went further. You can dictate text messages and search for items on the Web using voice commands, and it takes that voice input from a Bluetooth headset - great! I'd like it even more if you didn't have to periodically press on-screen buttons as part of the process.

More screens also now work in landscape mode, which is critical on sliding-keyboard phones like the LG Quantum and HTC Arrive. Parts of the People hub rotate, for instance. The Maps app and many main menus stayed stubbornly in portrait, though.

There are many more features, far too many to list here. It's easier to shuffle all of your music, to download podcasts, and to watch videos in full screen. It's easier to jump to specific apps in a long list. There's more Xbox Live integration. Pretty much everything has been improved, at least a little.

What's Not There Yet.

Some of Mango's core features weren't on my developer phone, Twitter and LinkedIn integration, most notably. When the software is fully baked, Mango should integrate your friends' Twitter profiles into the People Hub and What's New.

The new Local Scout local search feature is a great idea, but it has some accuracy problems. In my neighborhood in Queens, it gave me a great list of restaurants and shops near me. But the local "events and attractions" included odd things miles away, and not similar events that were closer. And the "highlights" are just baffling. No matter what New York neighborhood I tried the phone in, it insisted an Upper East Side "casino theme night party rental" was one of the top things to do in that neighborhood.

Microsoft has promised terrific browser performance, but IE9 is dependent on Windows Phone's lackluster hardware spec. As Android phones move to dual-core, IE9's performance advantages are more than compensated for by the better hardware on phones like the HTC Sensation 4G and Motorola Droid X2. On the Sunspider and GUIMark browser tests, the Focus fell far short of the latest dual-core Android phones. I expect that the next iPhone will have a fast processor as well, so if Microsoft doesn't bump up that spec, Windows Phones will feel slow no matter how good the browser code is.

IE9 rendered pages well, including complex Javascript objects, but Flash was another key missing element.

Some key Mango features are also dependent on third-party apps. I'm looking forward to apps which put rich, up-to-the-minute data on their home screen tiles, apps which let you use a tile to jump right into a specific screen deep within the program, and apps which weave themselves into the Hubs and search results.
But Will It Matter?

Mango is coming out this fall, along with iOS 5, BlackBerry OS 7, and the usual flood of Android 2.3 phones. It's a fine competitor; it's better at group messaging and social networks than iOS or (stock) Android, better at gaming than Android or BlackBerry, and customizable in visually delightful ways.
Windows Phone 7 takes a genuinely different approach to communication than its main rivals. The iPhone is a box of siloed apps, although Game Center and iOS 5's Twitter integration blur things a bit. Android tries to be everything to everyone and ends up without a coherent story. BlackBerry still starts from email and SMS and works outward from there. Windows Phone's "hubs" require some re-learning from iPhone users especially, but they're worth the effort.

But Windows Phone 7 has been a strong OS since it was released last year, and our Readers' Choice awards show that the people who buy it, love it. Windows Phone's problems include no steady flow of hardware, a mediocre hardware spec that is neither budget-friendly nor cutting-edge, carrier salespeople who seem to hate it, and a marketing team who seem perhaps too relaxed about the slow sales.
Mango keeps Windows Phone competitive. It's a necessary upgrade, and it's great to hear that it's coming to all the existing Windows Phones. Now Microsoft needs to focus on the other aspects of the phone experience—hardware, marketing and sales—to make sure that this Mango doesn't rot on the shelf.

How to Change Default Programs in Windows 7

2011-06-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

Default Programs is used to choose which programs you want Windows to use by default to open a particular type of file, such as a music file, an image, or a web page. For example, if you have more than one media player installed on your computer, you can choose one of them to be the default player.

Using Default Programs, you can:

Set your default programs
Associate a file type with a program
Change AutoPlay settings
Set default programs for this computer

Let's see how you can change settings using Default Programs.

1. Click the Start button to view the Start Menu and then choose the Control Panel option.

2. The Control Panel window opens up. Click on the All Control Panel Items.

3. From all the options choose Default Programs.

4. The windows shows various options. Click on the Set your default program.

A window opens up with the list of all programs available on your computer.

Choose the program from the list by clicking on it eg. Windows Media Player and then click on the Set this program as default link and click Ok.

5. To make a file to be open with a particular program, click on Associate a file type or protocol with a program in the Default Programs window. All the file types with their extension names are listed.

As in above screen shot you can see the default program for .bmp files is Paint. You can change it to Windows Photo Viewer. Click on .bmp file extension, click on Change Program button. A popup opens up as below:

You can also Browse to select other programs. Select the Windows Photo Viewer from the Recommended Programs list and click ok.

6. To change AutoPlay Settings for CDs and other media click on the Change AutoPlay SettingsDefault Programs window. The window opens up with the default settings. in the

For Audio CD choose Play Audio CD using Windows Media Player option from the combo box and for Pictures choose View pictures using Windows and so on. Click Save to update the changes.

7. Click the last option in the Default Programs that is Set program access and compuer defaults. Window opens up with three configuration options as below:

Using this you can control access to some programs and also set default programs for the computer. Clicking on the Microsoft Windows configuration option shows the default setting for Microsoft windows.

8. Click on Non-Microsoft option to see the defaults for Non-Microsoft programs.

9. You can also customize the configuration settings by clicking on Custom option. Window opens up.

Change default media player as Windows Media Player as shown in the below screen shot.

Enable / Disable Automatic Updates in Windows 7.

2011-06-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

Updates helps to keep your Windows 7 computer up to date with all the security fixes and improvements. It is highly recommended to Turn this On in automatic mode for a smooth Windows use.

How ever if you wish to play with varous options of Windows Update in Windows 7 here is a guide to explain it briefly.

1. First of all click the Start button to view the Start Menu. Then choose the Control Panel option.

2. The Control Panel window opens up now.

Click the System and Security link from the Control Panel window.

3. The System and Security section of Control Panel opens up. Here you can see the Windows Update link.

As you can see in the above screenshot there is direct links to the important Windows Update option here it self in slightly small fonts, such as Turn automatic updating on or off, Check for updates, View install updates . You may choose the required option directly from here. But we are going ahead to the dedicated Windows Updates section of the Windows 7 control panel by clicking the main Windows update link.

4. So now we are at the Windows Update section of our Window 7 Control panel. You can manually look up for any new updates by clicking the Check for updates button under the heading Check for updates for your computer fromthis window. In order to modify the Windows update option click the Change settings in the left pane.

5. Here you may change the way Windows 7 download and install updates. Configurable option include Important Updates , Recommended updates , Who can install updates and Featured update notifications .

Important updates provide significant benefits, such as improved security and reliability. Recommended updates can address non-critical problems and help enhance your computing experience. Optional updates are not downloaded or installed automatically.

6. Important Updates can be configured in four ways:

Install updates automatically (recommended)
Download updates but let me choose whether to install them
Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them
Never check for updates (not recommended)

If you choose Install updates automatically , there are additional options to schedule the update at a convenient time.

or if Never check for updates is selected:

In order to have the same behavor for Recommended updates also tick the Receive recommended updates the same way you receive important updates check box.

You can also choose if you want to allow anyone to install updates by selecting the Allow standard users to install updates check box.

Choose the other options appropriately and click OK to save the settings. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

A configured Windows Update window will look like this:

Incredible Start Page extension jazzes up new tabs in Google Chrome.

2011-05-27T22:38:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome's default new tab page is already good -- and honestly, I seldom find myself clicking anywhere other than my bookmark toolbar when I add a tab. So while I might not need to change the new tab page, the Incredible Start Page extension certainly has me hooked regardless.

Install it, and your new tab page displays a sleek, three-paneled view which includes recently closed tabs, your bookmark toolbar folders, and random slides pulled from Flickr -- with any non-folder items from your bookmarks overlayed on the images.

There's also a sticky note where you can enter text and fire it off to a new GMail compose window. Text you jot down is saved, so it's also a handy place to leave yourself a reminder...Now if they would just tap in to Chrome's bookmark sync to make it reappear when I got to work...

Options allow you to choose from four Flickr keywords (clouds, sunset, nature, and star) and five color schemes.

It's a nice way to add some visual pop to Chrome's new tab page

6 Awesome Google Chrome Extensions For Playing Cool Games.

1. Avalanche

Install this fun game to kill time while waiting for slow sites to load, talking on the phone, or any other time you’d like a distraction! To start the game, hit any key. Use the arrow keys to move your character, and dodge the falling icicles.

2. Classic Games

Bored? Well lets play some your favorite classic games! The most addictive games to hit the web can be on your browser whenever you want to play it. Get ready for some crazy fun!!

3. JoyRack Games

JoyRack Games – Play hundreds of free online games. This Chrome extension lets you browse through the games under categories such as Action, Sports, Racing, Strategy, Puzzles etc and lets you play games right from the extension

4. Game Button

The Game Button lets you play many free online games directly from your browser with easy access to an endless stream of flash games and other popular online web games. Automatically updated daily so you can discover tons of new web browser games for playing directly from your browser as well as play your favorite classic games for free. Installing the Game Button gives you direct access to all your favorite online games and helps you find many new ones so you can waste all your free time.

5. Online Multiplayer Games

MGPOP is a casual online multiplayer gaming website built entirely in Flash. States on its homepage that it is a place to hang out, play free online multiplayer games, chat and make friends.

6. Ping Pong 3D

This game is a 3D dimension! You have the option to play as easy or advanced in Ping-Pong

Top 40 best free Vista apps software programs for your Windows Vista PC.

2011-05-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

We’ve picked out the best free software programs for Windows Vista, so there’s no need to spend big dollars to get top quality applications and utility software.

Whether you’re looking for free anti-virus software, or free Office software, you’ll find it here.

The first group of programs listed are the stand out programs; we use them on a regular basis and find them indispensible.

The stand outs

Audacity – This offers a simple sound recording and editing tool. It lets you record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files, cut/copy/splice/mix sounds together, and change the speed or pitch of a recording.

AVG Free Edition – One of the most popular anti-virus protection tool, AVG Free is easy to use and will not noticeably slow your system down. Its features include automatic updates, the AVG Resident Shield (which provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run), free Virus Database Updates for the lifetime of the product, and an AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files.

FileZilla FTP Client – This fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client offers tons of useful features and an intuitive interface.

GIMP – Your best free alternative to Photoshop and other paid graphics manipulation software, GIMP performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and is not a vector editor. It’s helpful for photographers who want to edit photographs and are more familiar with Adobe Photoshop as most of the menus and capabilities of Photoshop can be found in GIMP.

Mozilla Firefox – Of course this has to be on the list. What better way to browse the Internet? IE8 is good and will probably work well with Vista considering that they are both Microsoft product. But Firefox is definitely much faster than IE8.

OpenOffice – Who doesn’t know about OpenOffice? It’s your best alternative to the highly-priced MS Office, offering a suite of software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages – including MS Office.

And the rest are also good.

7-Zip – This free archiving tool features a high compression ratio supporting most compression formats such as, 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR (for packing/unpacking) and RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS (for unpacking only).

Adobe Flash Player 10.0.12.36 – What can we say? It’s a lightweight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices. To state it simply, it lets you play interactive online content.

Basecamp – This program offers a fresh and novel approach to project collaboration by providing tools tailored to improve communication between people working on a project.

Cabos – This file-sharing program was based on LimeWire and Acquisition and provides a simple sidebar interface, Mojito DHT support, firewall to firewall transfers, UPnP support, IP2Country support, iTunes integration, searches and more.

ClipMagic – This is a clipboard program that allows you to capture, store and categorize text and images and even record URLs. It also provides extended clipboard capabilities for saving clips in a convenient categorized format.

CuteWriter – This easy-to-use PDF writer supports 64-bit Windows Vista. It integrates well with CutePDF Professional and the latest version of Ghostscript. It also supports foreign language well.

deVault2009 – This program lets you store, classify, organize, compress, encrypt, backup, and share all your files in sophisticated digital vaults.

DVD Flick – With this simple yet powerful DVD authoring tool, you can take a number of videos on your computer and turn them into a DVD that is playable on a standard DVD player. It also lets you add additional custom audio tracks, subtitles and menus for easier navigation.

Feeds Plus – This allows you to read all your RSS feeds from a single location. It’s very useful if you subscribe to dozens of feeds.

Foxit Reader – This PDF document viewer is quick to load, utilizes few resources and offers more than enough features to answer your need for a PDF reader. It supports PDF Standard 1.7.

Free Studio – This program offers 20 tools for video editing, processing and capturing in a single package. It lets you convert, split, join, burn and download videos and audio files, and it allows you to burn, copy and backup DVDs. It also lets you convert video files from one format to another, save video and DVD files to your iPod ,iPhone, PSP, and cellphones.

Fullscreen Photo Viewer – This is an image viewer designed for high-quality viewing of high-resolution pictures and photographs. It uses advanced scaling algorithms to fit image rendering on your PC’s monitor.

GanttProject – This easy to use Gantt chart-based project scheduling and management tool includes features such as task hierarchy and dependencies, a Gantt chart, a Resource load chart, Generation of PERT chart, PDF and HTML reports, MS Project import/export, and WebDAV based groupwork.

GOM Player – This is an easy-to-use and light multimedia player that eliminates the need to download additional codecs to support popular media formats such AVI, DAT, MPEG, DivX and more. It also lets you watch video while you download them.

iBrowser 1.4 – A powerful image and thumbnail viewer and browser, this program lets you preview folders with a large number of images. It also lets you change the look and feel of the program and save your interface layout. It features 14 language localizations and power features such as customizable interface layouts, advanced memory management, a slideshow setting, format defining by signature, full screen view, animated images, autoplay, intelligent large-file support, and more.

ImgBurn – This lightweight CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray burning application supports a wide range of image file formats such as BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI. It lets you burn Audio CD’s from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM – including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.

Jing Project – This is a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. Sitting nicely on your desktop, the application is always ready to capture and share your stuff. All you need to do is simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently attaches a URL to your content, which you can paste into any of your conversations or share on screencast.com, a local folder, a network drive, clipboard, ftp server and Flickr.

King Kong Capture – This screen capture tool that lets you capture any image on your screen from the smallest icon to the whole desktop. It allows you to do simple edits, save your screenshots in any format , and print and share your screen capture.

Limewire – This is the world’s fastest P2P file-sharing application for all types of computer files including, music, video, pictures, games and text documents. It could be a valuable addition to your Vista installation. It features dynamic querying, file previews during download, advanced techniques for locating rare files, and an easy, clean user interface.

M2V Player – While it’s another good multimedia player, it lacks the various media codecs. Still, you can play any movie format as long as you have its video codec. Its features include customizable keyboard shortcuts, aspect ratio adjustment, easy subtitle configuring and resizable windows.

Miro – This is an internet TV and video player that allows you to download video from RSS channels. It supports Torrent and offers a search/download feature from YouTube and other video sites.

Mozilla Lightning – This is the email calendaring task from Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird. It’s a good alternative to Outlook Express.

Net TV and Radio Player – 2.1 – This lets you watch thousands of worldwide online TV and radio stations including movies, sports, news and many other stations. This software is also able to update channel lists.

Paint.NET – Another image editing and photo manipulation tool similar to GIMP, this supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects and other useful tools.

PDFCreator – You can use this PDF creation software as a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows applications. It encrypt PDFs and protects them from being altered or printed by third parties. It sends generated files via email.

PhotoFiltre – Another image editing tool, this time PhotoFiltre allows you to perform simple or advanced adjustments to an image including various filtering options. It features an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. It also features a robust toolbar that gives you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks.

PictureShark – This program lets you add a watermark to any image and lets you adjust its transparency.

PopMan – This POP3 and IMAP4 manager can be used to list all emails received on your incoming mail server without having to completely load the messages. You can deleted unwanted emails directly from the server as well as use it to check your email accounts in the background.

Sociagami – This program lets you manage your Myspace, Facebook and Twitter accounts from one Vista application. Sociagami brings together the latest messages, comments, wall posts and status updates in one place.

Trillian – Possibly one of the best and most robust IM clients that you can use with your Windows Vista installation. This supports AOL IM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, voice chats and file transfers.

VLC – This highly portable multimedia player works with various audio and video formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, and more. It also supports DVDs, VCDs, and various streamingprotocols. You can also use it as server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Web Album Maker 2.20 – This program makes the task of creating a Web gallery easier and faster. It produces HTML and flash templates for your photo gallery, creates thumbnails of your photos and displays them in HTML format. It also lets you produce slideshows.

Window Clippings – Available in both free and paid versions, this is a simple-to-use screen capturing software that lets you save in various formats. It also lets you capture Windows Vista shadows.

Zipeg – This program allows you to open and explore content of zip, rar and other archived files. It also allows you to preview files and images before you extract/unzip them. It extracts only the files you want, zip thru photo archives, and see image thumbnails.

Have we missed a program that you think should be on our list? Feel free to add it in the comments.

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Install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your PC.

2011-04-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to test your website in various versions of Internet Explorer?

It is possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions thanks to Joe Maddalone who came up with a way of achieving that in November 2003. Basically, Internet Explorer is run by exploiting a known workaround to DLL hell - which was introduced in Windows 2000 and later versions - called DLL redirection.

Manfred Staudinger perfected the standalone versions by adding IE version numbers to the title bar of the standalone browser window. Moreover, by removing the "IE" key in the registry subkey [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector] Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.

It is not difficult to follow the instructions and get any version of IE running in standalone along side other versions. Most of you probably know of evolt's archive of Internet Explorer which has them readily packaged in ZIP files. Now suppose you want to download them all. An installer that would conveniently automate the whole process would be great. Thanks to this comment for the idea.
So I made an installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6.

which, in the end , will conveniently create shortcuts based on your preferences

Important Notes:

The installer was made to work with Windows XP. With a little bit of hacking it could run on Windows 2000 but this was not tested. See some of the comments below for ways to run Multiple IE on Windows 2000 (page 4).

The Developer tool bar from Microsoft WILL NOT work in IE6

Sometimes IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 crash unexpectedly.

Multiple IE doesn't work on Windows Vista. Follow the progress of running Internet Explorer 6 natively on Windows Vista here!
Read the comments before asking questions. Most of the issues have been discussed below.

Microsoft supplemental EULA says : IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR ANY "OS PRODUCT", YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY, OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.

Update December 2007: A recent windows update broke the Multiple IE installation and unfortunately this means you'll have to reinstall Multiple IE to get it to work again. I haven't yet identified which update broke the installation.

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