Tag: experience
November 01, 2009 by
Jason
Windows 7 is an evolutionary Windows client release, according to Microsoft, and it was also fit that support for the OS would also be an evolution compared to what was available for Windows Vista. And Windows 7 comes in a world where Microsoft Support is much different from what it was when the company made its debut.
According to the software giant, “Microsoft Corp. was founded in 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. Customer support in 1975 consisted of Bill Gates and Paul Allen.” The focus on customer support has grown tremendously for Microsoft, as the Windows operating system became ubiquitous, and as the company started offering additional products.
Official statistics from the Redmond company reveal that this year alone traffic to Microsoft online support exploded to approximately 1.2 billion. “Microsoft Customer Service and Support now manages 30 million support requests online, through e-mail and phone each year in 29 languages across a range of products around the world. There are more than 7,000 agents in over 60 locations available to help Microsoft customers,” the company explained. Read More»
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September 19, 2009 by
Jason Windows 7’s evolution compared to Windows Vista is undeniable, and the lucky few that so far have had access to the RTM bits of the latest Windows client can confirm this. But fact of the matter is that even in Beta Build 7000 development stage, Windows 7 bested Vista, and the boot time performance drag race is an illustrative example in this regard. However, Windows 7 startup speeds manage to leave its precursor in the dust. Some of you might remember reading about the 11-second boot Windows 7 delivered in a demonstration courtesy of Ruston Panabaker, Microsoft’s principal program manager of strategic silicon partnering. (via PCMag and Beyond Binary)
Yes, Windows 7 booting in just 11 seconds. My first question was, what kind of computer was Panabaker running, for obvious, and geeky, reasons. So I went ahead, and shot an email to Microsoft asking for details about the hardware configuration of the 11-second Windows 7 boot machine. Here is the answer a company spokesperson provided me: “This was ran on a Quad-core 1.7 GHz Nehalem [Core i7] processor on a Calpella chipset, 2GB of memory, 80 GB Intel X25-M SSD (1st gen). In the set up, the log-in screen was turned off in the user control panel.”
However, the Microsoft representative noted that the 11-second boot represented just the startup time for Windows 7. “Note: BIOS post is in addition to this,” the company spokesperson added. Read More»
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September 04, 2009 by
Jason Windows 7 is “outrunning” Windows Vista in more ways than one. Microsoft has labored to ensure that the latest Windows client outpaces its precursor in a variety of scenarios, from startup time, to common usage tasks, and to shutdown, to name just a few. Another aspect in which Windows 7 has Vista beat is upgrade performance. According to Chris Hernandez, from the Windows Deployment team, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to Windows 7 upgrades are at least 5% faster than Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 upgrades.
In fact, when it set out to do the operating system upgrade measuring contest, Microsoft was looking for at least a 5% threshold for upgrade scenarios involving Vista SP1 to Windows 7 was in comparison to jumps from Vista SP1 to Vista SP1. The Redmond-based company explained that the Windows Upgrade team monitored the Windows 7 upgrade performance during the development process, and that it compared it against its Vista baseline.
“The reason we choose to use a Vista SP1 -> Vista SP1 upgrade instead of Windows XP -> Vista as our baseline was for the following: Windows XP is a vastly different operating system compared to Vista and an upgrade from Windows XP -> Vista would not be a good comparison with Vista -> Windows 7. Read More»
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Whether you are talking about your car, phone, dog, your favorite football player or even about trying to make the best out of your work day, speed is one of the things – if not the most important – that always come up. The same theory applies to your Mac and the way you want it to respond to your commands.
There are countless pieces of advice you can find on the Internet telling you what you can do to make sure that your Mac is as responsive as you want it to be. However, although some of those tips will show you the right path to achieve that, others have nothing to do with improving the speed of your Mac’s OS X system.
What you can do to make sure you are not doing daily maintenance work on your Mac with no effect just because someone told you that, let’s say, is to repair the disk permissions. Actually, when repairing the disk permissions, OS X will just examine files and folders on your hard drive to check if their current permissions are set the way they were supposed to be.
If the permissions are different from the expected ones, they will be changed to their correct settings. That is only one of the many suggested practices users will wrongfully perform on a daily basis when noticing that their Mac is getting a little sluggish and unresponsive. Read More»
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The latest release of the Compatibility View list update for Internet Explorer 8 went live earlier this week and is now available for download. In an effort to maintain compatibility between IE8 and website developers for IE6 and IE7, Microsoft introduced the Compatibility View feature in the browser.
The Redmond-based company also maintains a list of websites that fail to play nice with the gold version of Internet Explorer 8. For this specific content, IE8 doesn’t use the latest version of its rendering engine, tailored to modern web standards, but rather behaves like older releases of the browser.
“An update for the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View list that is dated June 23, 2009, is available. This Compatibility View list update makes Web sites that are designed for older browsers look better in Internet Explorer 8. When you install Internet Explorer 8, you can decide whether the sites that you browse should be displayed in Compatibility View. After you install this update, you may have to restart Internet Explorer,” Microsoft informed.
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Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »
Mozilla introduced Jetpack, an application programming interface designed to permit developers to apply web development technologies and skills to building Firefox add-ons, in May 2009. Since the initial, 0.1 version release of the API, no less than four updates were introduced, focused mainly on resolving bugs with the initial build, but also on introducing new API features. On June 11, Mozilla labs brought to the table Jetpack 0.2, defined as a major refresh compared to the minor updates delivered since the solution was first launched. The evolution of Jetpack from 0,1 to 0.2 offers developers a new Firefox experimental UI element and fresh APIs.
“Besides numerous bug fixes (including a particularly nasty one that would hide prevent extensions from being in the status bar), there are three main additions: slidebars, jetpack.future, and persistent storage,” revealed Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs. “Slidebars are a reinvention of the old sidebar feature of browsers. They allow quick access to a wide range of both temporary and permanent information at the side of your browser window.”
Raskin stressed the fact that Jetpack was put together to serve a double purpose. First and foremost, the solution is designed as a platform for experimentation. However, this aspect needs not to lead to the exclusion of developers using Jetpack as a solid and comprehensive set of APIs capable of extending Firefox. In this context, Mozilla Labs now allows Jetpack developers to import features from the future, as long as they are experimental in nature, which is the case of Slidebars, for example.
“One of the most requested features in the Jetpack development mailing list was for the ability to persistently store data across restarts. We’ve added simple storage to the future module,” Raskin added. “Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Jetpack experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started.”
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Change the Scenery.
Windows 7 allows you to personalize your desktop background to suit your many moods with a new shuffle feature for your desktop. You can program your desktop background to shuffle through your favorite images and get a change of scenery as often as you like. To enable the shuffle feature, rightclick on your Desktop and select “Personalize,” then “Desktop Background.” Choose the folder where your favorite images or photos are stored and select as many as you like. Make sure you check the “Shuffle” box, and choose how often you’d like your images to shuffle. It’s a simple way to keep your desktop looking fresh and fun.
Crunch The Numbers.
The new Windows 7 calculator is a number cruncher’s dream. New functionality allows the user to not only calculate in the Standard and Scientific modes, but also in Programmer and Statistics modes. And that’s not all! Ever need conversion formulas for temperature, weight, area, or time? Finding the unit conversion option makes it a snap and takes all the work out of the user’s hands. There are even templates for gas mileage, lease estimations, and mortgage estimations. Read More»
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The Firefox Superbar is about to be kicked to the next level with the integration of Ubiquity. Right now all that is available from Mozilla is the Taskfox Prototype, an illustration of what Ubiquity blended into Firefox’s fabric would look like to the end user. Of course, you can watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article in order to get a perspective over Taskfox for Mozilla’s open-source browser. Taskfox is essentially a feature Mozilla plans for Firefox, and which was inspired by the ubiquity experiment.
“The main thing we haven’t prototyped is the interaction of the awesome bar results and the Taskfox commands. We know that this is a major remaining question so we’ll be prototyping that soon. We’ve more or less ignored that interaction for this prototype,” revealed Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “Being able to navigate results with the keyboard is lacking in Ubiquity proper. We’ve tried to solve that in TaskFox.”
But fact is that the video doesn’t actually do Taskfox justice. In this context, Mozilla has made available a demo of the feature, put together with HTML, Javascript, and jQuery. The Firefox Taskfox demo can be accessed via this link, and obviously users will need Firefox in order for it to work. Typing slowly is advised in order to get the best experience possible. Raskin applauded the success of Ubiquity (over one million downloads), an experiment from Mozilla Labs which inspired Taskfox (see the second video embedded below). Read More»
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Interested in moving your Exchange Server messaging environment into the “cloud”? Want to maintain an experience that’s seamless to your end users, allowing them to continue to use Outlook, while providing a completely maintained Exchange environment in our datacenters.
Microsoft Online Services is very likely your easiest, most secure, & cost-effective answer. Here’s a document that goes through the process of migrating existing Exchange mailboxes to Microsoft’s Exchange Online Services.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Understand Migration
1. Simple Microsoft Online Services
2. Microsoft Online Services Using Your E-Mail Domain
3. E-Mail Coexistence
4. Directory Synchronization
5. Mailbox Migration
6. Migration Tools Read More»
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With the next iteration of the Windows client, Microsoft is hard at work from day one to ensure that the development of every element of Windows 7 has Application Compatibility at its core, even though this was synonymous with changed features and designs that needed retouching. Grant George, the corporate vice president for testing in the Windows Experience team, has revealed that as far as Application Compatibility goes, Microsoft has just one purpose with Windows 7, namely ensuring that all the programs that currently work with Windows Vista will also work with its successor.
“Our engineering process includes automated quality checks to assure public APIs don’t change, and our test engineers have the right tools, engineering time and information that is used to find application issues as early as possible in our development cycle. Telemetry information is collected to assess and prioritize the breadth of applications our users depend on, paired with market data and install base information, across a wide variety of software categories to make sure they work as expected in our new OS version,” Grant said. Read More»
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