Category: XP

Windows 7 there will be two primary editions: Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Professional. We think those two SKUs will meet most customers’ needs.

Windows 7 Home Premium is the recommended choice for consumers. It gives them a full-function PC experience and a visually rich environment in everything from the way they experience entertainment to the way they connect their devices.

Windows 7 Professional is the recommended choice for small businesses and for people who work at home but have to operate in an IT-managed or business environment where security and productivity are critical. For those running Windows Vista Business, it will be a very logical move to Windows 7 Professional.

to see the full article

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 makes great strides in both features and performance improvements that provide faster day-to-day browsing, and is designed for the way people really use the web. We are excited about this new release and its cool features, functionality, and partner opportunities:

•	Add Value with Web Slices Enable users to subscribe to content directly within a page, and monitor information as they browse the Web. IE8 Web Slices make it possible to integrate rich, real-time online services and content.
•	Add Functionality with Accelerators Accelerators allow you to enhance selected text on your Web pages, enabling you to map addresses, define words, add blog functionality, and share website data across the Web and e-mail.
•	Enable Quicker Results with Instant Search Help customers find the information they need, faster. Users can leverage suggested search terms to help find the data they need—without typing the entire word or phrase. Visual search functionality adds images and graphics to search results.
•	Protect Customers’ Critical Data with Built-In Functionality Inspire customers’ confidence by helping to reduce risk and protect their IT environments—on premises or hosted—from security and privacy threats. Identify malicious sites and blocks malware downloads.

We encourage you to download IE8 RC1 and if you haven’t already, install the compatibility patch on your own website today. The patch will help ensure that IE8’s advanced technology works with your site.

In my coming and goings a friend show me a new application for creating high quality panoramic images, Trevor uses a Mac and did a demo of this software ( it took about 4 Minutes to build the picture made up of over 350 megs of pictures) i decided to download the software and install it into my Windows 7 beta build. Not sure if it would work, IT did !

I then ran the application and  and under 1 Minute had the same Picture.Trevor was impressed.

The software is PTGui is panoramic stitching software for Windows and Mac OSX. Originally developed as a Graphical User Interface for Panorama Tools (hence the name), PTGui now is a full featured photo stitching application.

PTGui can stitch multiple rows of images

Create 360 degree cylindrical panoramas, ‘flat’ partial panoramas and even spherical 360×180 degree panoramas

No need to keep the camera level: PTGui can stitch rotated and tilted images

Virtually unlimited output size: create Gigapixel panoramas from hundreds of images!

Layered output allows full control over the final stitched result

PTGui stitches most panoramas fully automatically, but at the same time provides full manual control over every single parameter. This enables stitching of ‘difficult’ scenes, where other programs fail.

Full 16 bit workflow for best image quality

To see some great pictures go here http://www.trevorcurtis.com/

Aero Snap is a new feature which was added to Windows 7, where in you can drag any window to the top of your screen to maximize it or take it to the left or right to snap it to the side and re-size by 50 per cent and when you drag it back to the last position, the window size will be restored. This feature is now available for XP and Vista. AeroSnap is a simple but powerful application that allows you to resize, arrange or maximize your desktop windows with just drag and drop. Aero Snap supports both Windows XP as well as Vista.

Aero Shake allows user to quickly and instantly minimize all other non-active windows that sit in the background by just shaking the application window, and at the same time experiencing a seizure in your hand. To bring back the desktop to previous state with windows open back, shake the sole window again. To use Aero Shake to minimize all inactive windows to Taskbar (or Superbar), user can click and hold on to a window’s title bar that he or she wants to continue work on, and then move the window to left and to right (shake) a few times (two times or move). The feature is probably one of the feature to support mouse gesture by Microsoft.

Aero Peek improves on Windows 7 Superbar thumbnail previews, and allows user to quickly preview the desktop by making all other opened active and inactive windows transparent by just using mouse to hover over the far right end of Taskbar. Aero Peek also support full screen view preview of any open windows on desktop while temporarily hiding all other open windows by mouse over the taskbar button for an open application or window. A new graphical thumbnail appears, previewing the window in a small glass frame. It also allows users to pin program to Taskbar permanently, with a mini-Start Menus for all pinned items or most common destination and most common tasks, dubbed as Jump Lists

With the increase in popularity of laptops, it is very common for users to frequently reconnect to a previously visited network. In order to improve user experience in roaming scenarios, where the user connects back to a previously visited network where the user had a valid DHCP lease, DHCP network hint has been implemented in Windows 7 OS. DHCP network hint helps in identifying the correct DHCP configuration for a previously visited network and then using the configuration opportunistically. Network hint used in order to uniquely identify different network is SSID (Service Set Identifier) of a network

I spend a lot of time traveling between my office and hotels and i hat that my computer takes time to find a DHCP address, with Windows 7 connecting to the network is fast and quick, to learn more go to this location

Microsoft Windows DHCP Team Blog

 

Do you use SharePoint and need to look at site from your phone. Well you can use the browser and wait and download all the graphics or you can do the following go to you went SharePoint and at end or url add /m

 

example SharePoint/mycompanyxxx.com/default.aspx change to

SharePoint/mycompanyxxx.com/default.aspx/m (the /M is the secret)

(This is not a real site)

There are 2 ways to stop applications that auto-start when you login to Windows Vista. You can either use the System Configuration Utility or the new Software Explorer in Windows Defender:

Method 1: System Configuration Utility
1. Click on the Start Button, enter msconfig and hit Enter.
2. Click on the Startup tab.
3. Uncheck items that you do want to auto-start and click OK.

 

Method 2: Windows Defender
1. Click on the Start Button, enter Windows Defender and hit Enter.
2. Click on the Tools from the top menu bar.
3. Click on Software Explorer and select Show for All Users.
4. Select an application to either Remove or Disable.

If you are interested in High performance Computing (HPC) and have the need for massive power Microsoft is have a Super Duo Super sweepstakes.

Windows HPC Server 2008 provides a productive, cost-effective, and high-performance computing (HPC) solution that runs on x64-bit
hardware. Windows HPC Server 2008 can be deployed, managed, and extended using familiar tools and technologies.

Windows HPC Server 2008 enables broader adoption of HPC by providing a rich and integrated end-user experience scaling from the desktop application to the clusters. A wide range of software vendors, in various verticals, have designed their applications to work seamlessly with Windows HPC Server 2008 so that users can submit and monitor jobs from within familiar applications without having to learn new or complex user interfaces.

Developing parallel programs requires integrated development environments along with support for distributed computing standards. Visual Studio 2008 provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment for Windows HPC Server 2008. In addition to supporting OpenMP, MPI, and Web Services, Windows HPC Server 2008 also supports third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers, and a native parallel debugger for developing and troubleshooting parallel programs.

Enter our Super Duo Super Sweeps by January 31, 2009 and you could win:

• A Cray CX1 desk-side supercomputer
• One of 10 Premium MSDN Visual Studio Professional subscriptions
• One of 10 Xbox 360 consoles

This dynamic duo is bringing high productivity supercomputing into the mainstream. Cray CX1 supercomputers with Microsoft Windows® HPC Server 2008 and Intel Xeon Processors provide “Ease-of-Everything” for new users of HPC for as little as $25,000. 3 easy steps to enter:

• Register now!
• Download the Cray CX1 and Windows HPC Server 2008 datasheet.
• Download the free 180-day Windows HPC Server 2008 evaluation copy.

*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to authorized representatives of US companies who do not manufacture, sell, or resell server hardware for use at high performance computing workloads. Game ends January 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on February 12, 2009.

For Official Rules, please click here

 

The beta of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization V 1.0 an enterprise virtualization solution that helps your users run legacy applications on their Windows Vista desktops. The final version of MED-V 1.0 is slated for release in the second quarter of this year as a part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack

There is a good podcast that you can download to learn about this product.

MED-V 1.0 provides deployment, management and user experience capabilities for Virtual PC images in a corporate environment,

To get the beta the beta A short survey will need to be answered before downloading the software to take the survey click here.

Do you have 2 or more operating systems on your computer ?

Do you want to easy change your boot priorities. Well you can use

BCDEdit Command-Line Options

Boot Configuration Data (BCD) files provide a store that is used to describe boot applications and boot application settings. The objects and elements in the store effectively replace Boot.ini.

BCDEdit is a command-line tool for managing BCD stores. It can be used for a variety of purposes, including creating new stores, modifying existing stores, adding boot menu options, and so on. BCDEdit serves essentially the same purpose as Bootcfg.exe on earlier versions of Windows, but with two major improvements:

• BCDEdit exposes a wider range of boot options than Bootcfg.exe.
• BCDEdit has improved scripting support.

However I am lazy and when I can use a graphical tool I will  do that all the time.

EasyBCD is NeoSmart Technologies’ multiple award-winning answer to tweaking the new Windows Vista bootloader. With EasyBCD, almost anything is possible. Setting up and configuring Windows boot entries is simple, and there is no easier way to quickly boot right into Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD straight from the Windows Vista bootloader – on the fly, no expert knowledge needed!

EasyBCD is geared for users of all kinds. Whether you just want to add an entry to your old XP partition or want to create a duplicate for testing purposes.

 

They also have

iReboot  a simple yet effective reboot helper tool. This app sits in your taskbar at startup (only taking up 400KB of memory!) and lets you choose which operating system you want to reboot into. Instead of pressing restart, waiting for Windows to shut down, waiting for your BIOS to post, then selecting the operating system you want to boot into (within the bootloader time-limit!); you just select that entry and you done !