Free Tools for Fine-Tuning Your Windows 7 Setup

Last week I told you how to migrate to Windows 7 at your own pace--there's no need to jump into the deep end right away. Now that you've got Windows 7 up and running on your newly partitioned, dual-boot PC, it's time for the next big step in any OS migration: reinstalling your software.

I've always hated this part, as it involves digging out CDs, downloading apps from lots of different sites, and then manually installing everything. Takes forever.

Thankfully, I've found salvation in the form of Ninite, a new service that automatically downloads and installs popular software.

All you do is scroll through Ninite's list of 70-odd apps, check-marking the ones you want. The service offers the most current versions of nearly every popular mainstream program, including Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice, iTunes, Picasa, Steam, and Revo Uninstaller.

Once you've made your picks, click Get Installer to download a small executable file. When you're ready, run that file and sit back while Ninite goes to work.

How long does it take? That depends on how many programs you've selected. I chose a baker's dozen (including the trial version of Office 2007 Standard, which I already own--now I just have to type in the security key), and I'd swear Ninite was done in all of 10 minutes.

I'll bet the service saved me a couple hours of manual labor. It worked flawlessly, and it installed 90 percent of the programs I use regularly. Awesome. Just awesome. And did I mention Ninite is free?

Migrating Your Bookmarks

I'd argue that the first thing a user wants upon migrating to a new PC--or, in this case, a new operating system on the same PC--is his or her bookmarks.

Fortunately, that's perhaps the single easiest chunk of data to move as part of our "slow" migration to Windows 7. All you need is Xmarks.

Available for both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, Xmarks automatically and effortlessly synchronizes your bookmarks between PCs and the Web.

If you were already using it, just install the program in your new Windows 7 partition, sign into your account, and presto: All your bookmarks will magically appear in your browser. (All your Web-site passwords, too, assuming you configured the tool to sync passwords.)

If you weren't using Xmarks before, start by booting back into your previous version of Windows, installing Xmarks, and setting up an account. (Don't worry, it's free.) Then you can jump back into Windows 7 and install Xmarks there.

There are other ways to copy bookmarks, but this is by far the fastest and easiest--and you get the added benefit of having a password-protected copy of your bookmarks on the Web, accessible from any PC.

Bonus Tip: Make Windows 7's Taskbar More Like Vista's

I like most of what Windows 7 brings to the table, but there's one thing I definitely don't like: the new taskbar. Specifically, I miss the text labels that accompany each running program. Without them, it takes me an extra second or two to figure out what's what. Fortunately, there's an easy way to make the Windows 7 toolbar look a lot more like the one in Vista (and, for that matter, XP). Here's how.

1. Right-click on any open area of the toolbar and choose Properties.
2. Click the "Taskbar buttons" pull-down and choose Never combine.
3. If you really want a more Vista/XP-like taskbar, check the "Use small icons" check box. Me, I like the bigger icons.
   
4. Click OK.

Now, this won't give you exactly the same taskbar you remember (Windows 7's pinned icons tend to interrupt the "flow" a bit), but at least you'll have the text labels and bigger buttons back.

pcworld

The Best of Today's E-Book Readers

If you think the universe of e-book readers begins with the Kindle 2 and ends with the Kindle DX, think again. That universe is expanding rapidly. We recently completed thorough hands-on testing of seven of the top e-readers available today and came to a surprising conclusion: Our number one choice isn't from Amazon at all; it's the Sony Reader Touch Edition.

Sony's $300 reader matches the Kindle 2's screen size and quality but adds a touchscreen and support for free e-books and Adobe ePub, an e-book file format that book publishers and resellers have widely embraced. Whereas Adobe's PDF reproduces a fixed image of a page, ePub permits text to reflow in order to accommodate different fonts and font sizes.Certainly the wireless connectivity in Amazon's Kindle models makes buying new books a breeze, but to this point Amazon's readers support only Amazon's format, locking you into buying exclusively from the online giant.

Of course, no company's lead in the rapidly evolving e-reader market is safe. Barnes & Noble looks to be one of Amazon's chief competitors. The giant bookseller announced its Nook e-reader last month, and most people who got a peek at the device seemed to love it. The Nook isn't yet available for thorough testing, however.

E-books have numerous benefits. Eliminating paper saves resources. E-book readers take up little room in travelers' backpacks and purses, and yet can store the equivalent of a whole bookshelf. You don't have to go anywhere to buy or borrow an e-book title. For the vision-impaired, the ability to adjust font size can mean the difference between being able to read a book and having to hope that the publisher will eventually release an audio version. Some e-book readers double as music players, and some even have a speech capability for reading books aloud.

Unfortunately, the world of e-books is Balkanized, with multiple incompatible file formats and digital rights management (DRM) technologies, and devices with varying support for both. Books in the public domain are widely available in PDF and other standard formats. But copyrighted material is another story. Amazon's current Kindles can obtain commercial e-books in Amazon's AZW file format via wireless download only in the United States (in early October, however, the company announced a Kindle capable of downloading content in most countries).

Adobe offers a DRM technology called Adobe Content Server 4. Sony and a number of other online bookstores--most notably Borders--sell commercial titles in ePub/ACS4 format, and some libraries let patrons check out ePub books. As of early October, 17 e-book readers supported ePub and ACS4, making that combination the closest thing the industry has to a standard for DRM-protected books. Aside from the Amazon Kindles and Foxit's eSlick, all of the e-book readers in this collection of reviews support ePub/ACS4.

We compiled a comparison chart of the five highest-ranking e-readers at the conclusion of our evaluations. For the details, see our Top 5 E-Book Readers chart. And for individual reviews of the seven e-readers we put through their paces, click the links in the list of products in the floating contents bar on this page (above right).

pcworld

Gedit: Don't Get Tricked by Its Simple Looks

Every Linux user that has used the GNOME desktop environment must have had at least an encounter with its default text editor, Gedit. You start it up, and it looks like a simple notepad type application with a toolbar added on top. However, don't let yourself fooled by that simple appearance. If you know how to customize this application, it can be modified to serve almost any text exiting purpose, and you can even create an IDE-like environment.

With Gedit, it's not the general appearance that counts, it's all the little details that make a great application. As a programmer, I know that simple things like auto indentation and syntax highlighting can make your job much more easier. Gedit's can do syntax highlighting for quite a large number of programming languages or file formats, over 70 in fact. Also, the customizable tab width makes it easy to structure your texts, and the option to fill tabs with spaces makes it so much friendly to many environments in which your files could end up. The line numbers make it easy to collaboratively edit text files like source code, and along with the jump to line function it provides a way to refer and return to a certain section of the document without scrolling

through to it.

Many text editors have trouble opening files that were created on other platforms, or with specific encodings, and this can go as far as replacing a specific set of characters with jibberish, which can be very annoying. Gedit tries to detect the appropriate encoding for the file that is opened, and the in-built UTF-8 support means that you can use any type of characters that aren't in the default ANSI set without worrying about compatibility.

Modifying a file means that there is a risk of accidentally overwriting a section or, even worse, saving those unwanted modifications. Gedit has provisions for that too, with multiple Undo/Redo levels, automatic backup and even an autosave function which has customizable time intervals. The backup files are saved in the same directory like the originals and they only have a tilde ("~") appended to the file name. Unfortunately, most file browsers hide these files by default, so they are often left behind and they clobber up the filesystem.

If you feel that the default color scheme, black text on white background, isn't comfortable for your eyes, there are others that you can pick from. Unfortunately, defining a new color scheme isn't as simple, because it has to contain all the rules by which the syntax highlighting is done, so custom setting files have to be created.

By default, Gedit is a pretty useful text editor, but its real power lies in its plug-ins. They range from spell checking support and document statistics to integrating a terminal or a file browser right into the text editor. With the functions that this plug-ins can provide, you can turn Gedit into a programming-friendly IDE, automate certain tasks or keep tabs on the character, line, word or even byte count of your document.

If you feel stuck at any point, the application ships with minimal documentation, but on Gedit's website you will find a wiki with more comprehensive guides and even a keyboard shortcut list for handy reference. Moreover, if you need to continue your work on another platform, you will be happy to find out that you can take this great text editor with you, because Gedit can also work on Windows and MacOS X, saving you the hassle of getting used to a different application.

softpedia

Windows 8, and So It Begins

Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, and hit the shelves on October 22, generating obvious questions about what’s next for Microsoft’s proprietary operating system. And the answer is rather simple: Windows 8. This time around, the Redmond-based company made little efforts to hide the moniker associated with the next generation of the Windows client. Not that it could, given that the codename aspect of Windows development efforts is the only transparent aspect of the otherwise translucent communication strategy set in place by Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division.

Back in early 2007, after Windows Vista shipped to customers worldwide, Microsoft shifted its focus on what was at the time referred to as Windows codename Vienna, and which ended up as Windows 7. The company delivered a taste of early plans, noting that it was aiming for a release ahead of 2009, but nothing more after that. In fact, it wasn’t until August 2008 that Sinofsky started sharing crumbs from the development process of Windows 7, at a time when the operating system was between the Milestone 2 and Milestone 3 development stages.

In this regard, it is interesting to understand just how early Microsoft actually started building the successor of Windows Vista. According to Larry Osterman, Microsoft Principal SDE, the Windows team was hard at work coding for Windows 7 within 4-5 months after the general availability of Vista. “In June of 2007, we started working on actual feature planning – the planning team had come up with a set of tentative features for Win7 and we started the actual design for the features – figuring out the user experience for the features, the internal implementation details, etc.,” Osterman noted.

With Windows 7 wrapped up, Sinofsky was upgraded to the President position from senior vice president of the Windows and Windows Live engineering group, but just as it was the case for Windows 7, Windows 8 will be developed in accordance with his vision. With Sinofsky at the helm of the Windows 8 project, Osterman could even expect the same development experience as for Windows 7.

“The remarkable thing about Win7 development was that it was almost friction free. During the Vista development process (and in every other product I’ve worked on) development was marked by a constant stream of new issues which were a constant drain on time an energy. It felt like we moved from one crisis to another crisis,” Osterman recalled. “For Win7 it was different. I think it was some time during the second milestone that I realized that Win7 was ‘special’. The newer development process that was deployed for Win7 was clearly paying off and my life was far less stressed. In fact I don’t think I worked late or came in on weekends once during the entire 3 years that Win7 was under development – this was a HUGE change. Every other product I’ve ever worked on has required late nights and weekends (sometime it required all-nighters). But for Win7 it just didn’t happen. Instead we set a set of goals that were reasonable with achievable schedules and we executed on those goals and delivered the features we promised.”

Revolutionary vs. evolutionary

When it moved forward from Windows Vista (version 6.0) and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) to Windows 7 (v6.1) and Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft chose the path of evolution rather than build a revolutionary OS. Another legitimate question about Windows 8 is whether the platform will continue to evolve, or whether Microsoft is ready for a revolution in Windows, even though the memory of what revolutionary meant for Vista is still fresh for customers. While only time will tell whichever way Microsoft will take Windows 8, one thing is clear, the Redmond-based company started planning for the next generation of Windows long before Windows 7 was finalized.

In addition, the software giant is also hiring people to start coding for Windows 8. If the development process described by Osterman still applies, Microsoft will begin building Windows 8 early in 2010, if not even earlier. However, just as is the case with all Windows platforms, the successor of Windows 7 will too have to go through a planning phase, where coding is left in the background, and the priority is putting together the actual feature set for the operating system. Still, don’t expect Microsoft to start talking Windows 8 until well into 2010, if not even 2011. After all, it took over a year since the Windows 7 coding had started for Sinofsky to share the first details on the engineering process of the project.

Just in October, Microsoft mentioned Windows 8 in a number of job posts:

- “IIS team is looking for an experienced PM to join our core platform team. Your role will span across driving key features into Windows 8 as well as owning several out-of-band modules, including web analytics that will bring business intelligence for the customers that host applications and contents on IIS. Your work will help differentiate IIS and Smooth Streaming from Apache and Flash. You should also be ready to work in a fast-paced environment and have a strong desire for quality, security, and performance. Your feature will be used by millions of customers,” for the position of Senior Program Manager.

- “The Windows Live Mail team is looking for a seasoned Lead Program Manager to drive our next generation Mail client, and manage five stellar PMs. Our client has over 40M users world-wide, and serves as a key component of our Windows Live “light up Windows” strategy. Our current release is centered on hot new consumer features & better synergies with Hotmail & Windows 7, and our future releases will likely be tightly designed to work best with new Windows 8 platform technologies. We will also work closely with the Outlook team on ways to bring Windows Live to Outlook,” for the position of Principal Lead Program Manager.

- “The TAG team provides the foundation services and infrastructure to support a unified test and dev workflow. This team’s charter includes - developing and running a unified test submission and execution system for Windows 8, Automating Test pass scheduling & execution, results analysis & automated triage, Windows code coverage services, Developing and running the eBVT quality gate, supporting WinSE’s Windows 7 sustained engineering test needs,” for the position of Test Lead 2.

- “The Application Experience Bug Investigation Team, AEBit, is looking for passionate SDETs that want to make an impact on Windows 8. On the AEBit team you will get the unique opportunity to challenge and grow your debugging skills on issues that span the entire OS. You will have the opportunity to engage with software vendors, OEMs, as well as internal component teams. You will also be applying and enhancing your knowledge of system internals. As part of the AEBit team you will be responsible for driving and ensuring compatibility in Windows by engaging with component teams, root causing application bugs, and authoring mitigations,” for the position of Software Development Engineer in Test.

softpedia

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Vertical version:

Code:
[IMG]http://ngask.us/kaskusv.php?u=3[/IMG]

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Code:
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The image above can also be placed on your site/blog with slightly different HTML code.
Thanks to chmdznr

TrueCrypt

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux
Main Features:

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

• Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.

• Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).

• Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

• Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.

• Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:

• Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

• Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: XTS.

• Further information regarding features of the software may be found in the documentation.

download : http://www.truecrypt.org/

Android 2.0: Your Complete Primer

Feeling hungry? Try a taste of Eclair, Google's brand new Android operating system.

Google took the wraps off its tasty-sounding OS, also known as Android 2.0, on Tuesday. The software is expected to officially debut on Verizon's Motorola Droid smartphone -- you know, the one that does all those things Apple's phone doesn't -- early next month.

Android Eclair adds a host of features into the open source OS (and, despite its mouth-watering name, appears to be fairly low-calorie if eaten). Here's a look at what's new.

Quick Contact for Android

Android 2.0 includes a new "Quick Contact" feature that simplifies communication throughout your phone. The feature creates a menu bar with easy icons showing your contacts' communication modes -- e-mail, instant messaging, and whatever other venues you have listed for each person. The new bar pops up every time you tap on a contact's image anywhere on the device, whether you're in your actual contacts list, your e-mail, or even your calendar. Developers will also be able to incorporate the Quick Contact feature into third-party applications.

Multiple Account Support

Android 2.0 lets you manage multiple accounts throughout your device. That means you can sync up several e-mail addresses, Exchange-based or otherwise, and keep track of your messages and contacts together.

With the multiple account support, the 2.0 OS will allow you to create a combined inbox that displays messages from all of your accounts on a single page.

Camera Improvements

Android 2.0's camera controls support flash and digital zoom. The software also includes options for scene mode, white balance, color effect, and macro focus.

Better Keyboard

While the Verizon Droid will include a physical keyboard, other upcoming Android devices won't (and other existing Android devices don't). The Android 2.0 edition makes typing on the virtual on-screen keyboard easier, with a tweaked layout built to improve key-pressing accuracy and allow for faster typing. It also relies on a retooled dictionary that "learns" from your typing habits and includes names of your contacts as suggested words.

Better Browser

The default browser in Android 2.0 features a "refreshed" user interface. A new address bar offers support for instant tap-driven searching and navigation, and double-tap zoom is supported throughout the browsing experience. The browser also supports HTML5 standards, including the usage of the geolocation API and video tag.

Better Bluetooth

Bluetooth gets a boost in Android 2.0: First, Bluetooth 2.1 is fully supported. Second, developers will be able to better integrate Bluetooth functionality into their apps. With the Android 2.0 update, applications will be able to activate Bluetooth on your phone, search for other Bluetooth-enabled devices, and send and receive Bluetooth data. That addition, according to Google, should allow for stronger peer-to-peer communication and "proximity-based social interaction."

Other Additions

Android 2.0 introduces a new graphics architecture with better performance and improved hardware acceleration. It also brings SMS/MMS search and a handful of calendar improvements into the OS.

You can take a video tour of some of the new features in Google's Android 2.0 developer's video. Just be sure to wipe your hands when you're done -- all that Eclair is bound to leave some grease behind.

pcworld