January, 2009 Archive

Windows 7 Beta Checked Builds

January 31, 2009 by Jason

In addition to the plain-vanilla Windows 7 Beta (7000.0.081212.1400) releases, Microsoft has also made available the checked builds for both the client and server flavors of the operating system. However, although meant for testing, the checked builds of Windows 7 client Beta and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (Windows 7 Server Beta) are designed with a specific target group in mind: device driver developers.

At the same time, the Redmond company is not serving the checked builds of Windows 7 client and server through its official Win 7 hotspot of via the Microsoft Download Center. The developer releases are only available through Microsoft Connect. The following Connect ID WIN7-3HQW-RF74 along with a Windows Live ID permits access to the downloads. Microsoft is offering 7000.0.081212-1400_server_unstaged_en-us-GB1SXCHK_EN_DVD.iso; 7000.0.081212-1400_client_unstaged_en-us-GB1CXCHK_EN_DVD.iso; 7000.0.081212-1400_server_unstaged_en-us-GB1SIAiCHK_EN_DVD.iso and 7000.0.081212-1400_client_unstaged_en-us-GB1CCHK_EN_DVD.iso. Read More»

Install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine

January 26, 2009 by Jason

Earlier this month, Microsoft made the Windows 7 beta available for anyone to download and test drive it. Unless you have a spare computer, it can be somewhat inconvenient to test out new operating systems on your main system. Although it is possible to dual boot Windows 7 with Vista or XP, you may still prefer to install it on a separate machine. VirtualBox is just the separate machine you’ve been looking for, and it’s free!

VirtualBox is a free and open source virtualization program. Essentially, it is like having a complete and separate computer within your computer. You can install any operating system on it, including Windows 7. The latest version of VirtualBox (2.1.2) has support for Windows 7, which makes it very easy and convenient to install.

First, you’ll want to download VirtualBox and install it. VirtualBox is available for multiple platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris. During the installation on a Windows system, you may receive a warning that untested software is being installed. Be sure to click continue when those boxes appear, as essential components for VirtualBox to function properly are being installed. Read More»

Supercharge Firefox

January 26, 2009 by Jason

If you are a Firefox user (and if not, why not…?) then here’s possibly one of the most useful add-ons ever well, for web users like me at any rate. It’s called UrlBarExt and it’s available in Windows, Mac and Linux versions. Here’s what it can do. A set of discrete icons appears at the end of the address box and from left to right they copy the current address or URL to the clipboard, shorten the displayed web address to a Tiny URL (or the web shortening service of your choice, Bit.Ly, cli.gs etc). It will search the currently displayed site using a keyword (right-click on the icon to open a search box), go up one level to the website’s root or home page, tag or bookmark the current page from a menu of popular tags, navigate through sequential pages (really handy when web pages are numbered, like those in my Boot Camp archives), and surf anonymously, using a proxy server. It’s highly configurable and like all the best things in life, completely free, so give it a spin, it’s really impressive once you get used to it.
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Tweak for Windows 7

January 25, 2009 by Jason

Windows 7 beta has been released recently, we had already written some articles on Ten Tips for Windows 7 , How to Dual Boot Windows Vista And Windows 7 , Questions and Answers about Windows 7 and Windows 7 Beta Download and Install Guide, Today we are going tell you how can you tweak windows 7.

SetteMaxer is the first windows 7 tweaking tool which lets you tweak windows 7 through various registry tweaks very easily and safely without touching windows 7 registry.

Let’s see what all you can tweak in windows 7 with SetteMaxer

Windows 7 Tweaks you can apply with SetteMaxer

Optimize Menu Show Delay: Check this option to enable faster navigation in windows 7

Optimize Wait to Kill Services Timeout: Check this option to Speed up windows 7 shutdown / restart faster set the value to 1000.

Optimize Wait to Kill Applications Timeout: Check this option to Speed up windows 7 shutdown / restart faster set the value to 1000. Read More»

Windows 7 Beta Elevation PowerToys

January 24, 2009 by Jason

The Elevation PowerToys that have been initially made available for Windows Vista can now also be integrated with the first Beta of Windows 7. Fighting a bug in Win 7 Beta, Michael Murgolo, a senior consultant with Microsoft Services – U.S. East Region, and the maker of the Elevation PowerToys for Windows Vista, has tweaked the tools, permitting users to integrate them with the current development milestone of the next iteration of Windows.

“The Elevate command in the Elevation PowerToys does not work correctly in the Windows 7 Beta. The application is launched elevated, but the arguments are not passed to the application. It turns out that this is caused by a known bug in the Windows 7 Beta. The ShellExecute method of the Shell Scripting Objects does not pass the argument parameter when it is stored in a variable,” Murgolo stated.

The issue was reported in December 2008, and this week Murgolo managed to come up with a solution designed to bypass the Windows 7 bug and allow the Elevation PowerToys to play nice with the operating system. Following the changes delivered by the developer, users should no longer have any issues when it comes down to the integration of the Elevation PowerToys into Windows 7 Beta. Read More»

Mozilla is looking for a project lead

January 22, 2009 by Jason

Mozilla aims to build a new program designed to harvest end-user data for its open source projects, but especially Firefox. Firefox Test Pilot is currently nothing more than an initiative debuted under the Mozilla Labs umbrella, in order to lay out the concept behind the project, and to attract interest and identify a software engineer to lead the program. According to Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, Test Pilot will be used to gather Firefox usage information, feedback that will subsequently be used to evolve the design process of the open source browser.

“Test Pilot is a still-in-concept platform for a new user-testing program for Mozilla that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for interface and product experiments,” Raskin stated.

One important aspect of the new program is that Mozilla actually envisions building an entire feedback platform, which could scale beyond Firefox, to Thunderbird and Seamonkey, and subsequently to every Mozilla Labs project. Raskin indicated that the Test Pilot, served to users as an extension of Firefox, would first of all require them to answer non-personally-identifiable questions, in order to classify them in accordance with the locale, technical level etc. Read More»

Office 2007 Resource Kit

January 21, 2009 by Jason

Microsoft is offering as a free download the Resource Kit content already made available on TechNet for the Office 2007 System. Packaged in Compiled Help format, the 2007 Office Resource Kit Technical Library weighs in at just 3.7 MB, and end-users will need an operating system capable of dealing with compiled help files, namely Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. According to Microsoft, the downloadable Office 2007 Resource Kit CHM offers nothing more than the 2007 Office Resource Kit technical library, which can be accessed on the company’s portal for IT professionals.

Essentially, the 2007 Office Resource Kit is designed as a resource centralizing a range of information, guides, walkthroughs, troubleshooting techniques etc. related to Office 2007. In this sense, the kit is set up to streamline the deployment of the Redmond company’s productivity suite in the context of corporate IT infrastructures.

“The primary administrative tools for deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system are included with the product and are no longer available as a download as in previous Read More»

Turn your PC into a Super Computer

January 21, 2009 by Jason

What, exactly, are supercomputers? The clue is in the name, really: they’re powerful computers capable of calculating many millions of floating operations per second (FLOPS) essentially, they’re very, very fast.

While any array of powerful computers, such as a modern-day web server which consists of several motherboards (the main circuit board of a computer) running in parallel can be considered a supercomputer, generally the term is reserved for machines that dedicate their entire hardware to one complex task at any given time.

Take the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, for example, which was created specifically for modelling weather problems associated with global warming. Or the world’s fastest computer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, which simulates the behaviour of biomolecular structures and protein folding. It’s capable of 600 trillion FLOPS (tera-FLOPS or TFLOPS), whereas, the six-year-old Earth Simulator is only capable of 36TFLOPS. BlueGene/L won’t hold the top spot for long, though. Supercomputers twice as powerful will be online soon. Read More»

Questions and Answers about Windows 7

January 19, 2009 by Jason

1. Windows 7 Beta – why?

Beta is a label synonymous with a critical milestone in the development of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, as it marks the company moving away from dogfooding and testing internally early Alpha Builds towards the point where the product meets the necessary quality standard to be made available as a preview release to the general public. Microsoft is essentially inviting the public to lend a helping hand in building the next iteration of the Windows platform, by testing the operating system and providing feedback, which permits the company to soften all the rough edges of the software before RTM.

“We need a bit of information so we can gather your feedback and in case we need to send information about the Beta. We will also collect automated reporting feedback from PCs running the Beta to help collectively analyze issues and file bug reports where appropriate,” Microsoft informed.
Read More»

Windows 7 User Account Control

January 18, 2009 by Jason

In the next version of the Windows client, end users will be able to customize the level of nagging that the operating system generates via the User Account Control, revealed Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, on behalf of the team building the feature. Sinofsky emphasized that, as early as Windows 7 pre-Beta Milestone 3 Build 6801, users of the operating system would be able to see a reduction in the volume of prompts associated with UAC. At the same time, Microsoft started implementing the new dialog designs into the platform, along with the new UAC Control Panel.

The User Account Control was introduced in Windows Vista with the purpose of making all Windows users run under standard privileges, even those with administrator accounts. In this respect, the mitigation is able to provide an extra layer of defense against malicious code that would attempt to install itself on a machine, as UAC requires the user to grant it the rights. Sinofsky indicated that, in Windows 7, users would have more control over UAC compared to what was made available in Windows Vista. Read More»