Thursday, December 31, 2009

MICROSOFT UNLEASHES OFFICE WEB APPS

MIXED START TO LIFE FOR THE BROWSER-BASED EDITION OF MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010

Microsoft has released an early technical preview of its Office Web Apps — although half the applications are still completely unusable. The browser-based versions of Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint are due for release with the desktop software in the first half of next year, although only the latter two are working in the technical preview currently open to invitees only. Of those, Excel is by far the most impressive. The online app coped well with the intricate formulae and conditional formatting used in our Labs feature tables — something that rival Google Spreadsheet certainly couldn't boast. Changes made to the data were reflected in dependent fields with a delay of only a half-second or so. Although the online apps use the same Ribbon interface as the desktop software, they currently contain a fraction of the features. Only the Home and Insert tabs are present in Excel, for example, and a number of the features from even those two tabs are omitted.

Microsoft has long stated that there won't be feature parity between the desktop and online apps, but claims we can expect to see more features added as the service progresses towards a full public beta before the end of the year. The company has confirmed that Web Apps will be free of charge to consumers and small business, with 25GB of storage provided via Microsoft's SkyDrive. However, business customers who wish to run Web Apps via their SharePoint Server or as a hosted Microsoft service could face charges. "There may be some licences where it's included in the price, and others where there's an incremental rharge," Microsoft's Office Live product manager, Tim Kimber, told PC Pro.

Source of Information : PC Pro December 2009

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Make the Most of Win 7 Libraries

Before your new operating system can be useful, you need to understand how it organizes your data. By Neil Randall

Windows 7 has its share of highly visible user interface tweaks. After getting past the oohs and aahs of the spiffedup taskbar, you’ll likely find the new look of good old Explorer the most dramatic difference. Click the Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar, or open Computer from the Start menu, and you’ll get a window that displays not only the standard expandable hard drive labels but also a new feature called Libraries.

Win 7 Libraries are, in effect, metafolders. The idea behind them is simple: We have massive hard drives with files scattered all over the place, and organizing our resources by hard drive and folders (which are always tied to a hard drive) is inefficient. Like Vista, Win 7 provides a Favorites system to help with organization—you drag a folder to the Navigation pane, creating a link to that folder—but Libraries carries organization an important level further.

Win 7 ships with four libraries already in place: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Of course, Vista and XP included folders called Documents or My Documents, Music or My Music, and so forth, inside each user profile (and easily accessible from Computer or My Computer), so you might very well ask how Win 7 improves anything here. The answer is that the folder “My Music” (to use just one example) contains files and subdirectories that reside inside one big directory called My Music—and that folder exists in one specific location on your hard drive. By contrast, the library “Music” in Win 7 contains links to files, and other directories, and other subdirectories anywhere on your system. Think of the security desk in a large building: From one monitor bank you can view camera feeds from any number of locations within the building. This isn’t like metatagging files, which enables Windows to search for them more efficiently and accurately; it’s telling Windows that it should consider certain, disparate folders as a group. With Win 7 Libraries, you can add as many locations as you want to each library, and when you open that library all locations will be accessible from within it. And to top that all off, if you join multiple PCs in a Win 7 HomeGroup, you can share entire libraries as easily as you can share individual directories or files.

To show how libraries work, I’ll create a brand new one and call it “Archived E-mail.” Inside it, I want links to all folders on my various hard drives and partitions that contain Outlook data (PST) files I’ve stored over the years. Every time I install a new instance of Windows (beginning way back in the year 2000 or so), I reinstall Office as well, creating a new Outlook data file. I then import my calendar, contacts, and certain folders from the most recent Outlook PST file, but I often leave much of the data in that older file as an archive. In addition, I have numerous smaller archives and backups scattered around. This new library will let me collect them all in one place, so that if I need to find that specific e-mail from six years ago, I don’t have to do nearly as much digging. To create a library, open Explorer, rightclick the Libraries item, and choose New | Library. Name the library what you want— for me it’s Archived Email. Right-click the new folder and choose Properties. Now, click Include a Folder and navigate to a folder you want to make part of this library. Highlight that folder and click Include Folder; repeat the process for all folders you want to add. The Optimize this Library drop-down menu of the dialog lets you tell Win 7 whether you want to track this library for General Items, Documents, Music, Pictures, or Videos; it would be more useful if you could also specify file types, but this is a good start.

From this point on, Win 7 will track your selected folders and update them automatically in Libraries whenever you change their contents. In and of itself this feature is useful, but Win 7 expands on it by providing a detailed default view of the library. It expands the included folders to show the files and subdirectories within the monitored directories, letting you easily browse for the file or folder you want to open. You can add locations to the library in several ways. First, you can reopen the library`s Properties dialog and click Include a Folder again. Second, you can use Explorer to browse to a file or folder and right-drag the item to the library’s heading on the Navigation bar, pausing until it bears the caption Create Link in Folder. Third, you can rightclick on any folder and choose Include in Library, selecting the library you want from the resulting submenu. You can also create a new library by dragging a folder (not a file) to the Libraries heading itself, where Win 7 will prompt you to create the new library.

Finally, the various locations can be modified by clicking the link beside the Includes label, which appears at the top right of the Explorer window when you have selected a library. The result is the Library Locations dialog, from which you can Add or Remove additional items. In my case, by the time I added all of my old Outlook folders to the Archived Email library, I had a list of nine directories containing several subdirectories, all containing one or more PST files. Suddenly, all my old e-mail was accessible to me, should I want to search it or revisit old discussions. Of course, using libraries to track music files, document files, or all your various Photoshop files might be more helpful for most users, but for me the Libraries feature worked superbly to give me control over a very specific data type.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Printers READERS’ CHOICE

Canon. Ever consistent, Canon once again comes out on top of printers overall and in several printer subcategories.

Brother. The come-from-behind vendor of the year jumped ahead in the lineup enough to garner the second Readers’ Choice in printers for 2009.

HP. HP is the 400-pound gorilla of printers, considering the sheer number of responses it received, but users also give the company high scores.

Canon’s middle name is consistent, at least when it comes to how PC Mag readers feel about its printers. The vendor’s overall score has gone up a little, from an SBA of 8.2 in 2008 to an SBA of 8.3 this year. In fact, it hadmodest gains across the board for printers overall, with a nice jump in its tech support number from a BA of 7.3 last year to a BA of 7.7 this year. That’s more than sufficient to keep the company’s status as Readers’ Choice. Our second Readers’ Choice is a slight surprise. For the previous two surveys,
Brother managed a score of BA 8.0—better than average, but the competition is very tough. That score was usually on par with HP, but HP’s overwhelming response rate in previous years helped it get SBA scores. This year, Brother surged ahead with an SBA overall score of 8.2 (compared with HP’s SBA 8.0 overall for 3 years running). Brother remains a clear second place to Canon in business printers, home printers, and printers under a year old, as well. Finally, HP is back in our Readers’ Choice spotlight. Its SBA overall score of 8.0 was nice enough (and in keeping with the company’s high marks last year and the year before), but we felt HP deserved recognition this year for great scores almost across the board, especially a very good showing in printers for the home market, with SBA scores overall (8.0), for reliability (8.3), and in the category of likelihood of being recommended (8.4). The company takes a drubbing most of the time for its tech support, where it is frequently the only vendor that even earns a score (such as with business printers and printers less than a year old). The big surprise of last year’s survey was Kodak, which burst onto the printer scene and our results for the first time after running advertisements promoting its inexpensive consumables. The company garnered a Readers’ Choice with last year’s response. Not so this year. Kodak’s overall score went from a BA 8.3 to an average 8.0 this year, though it did well with home printers, getting a BA 8.0. Perhaps worse for Kodak, it’s the first company to show a percentage of products needing repairs higher than Xerox does. We’ve never exactly been able to figure out why for years running Xerox has had double-digit numbers in this category. Last year it was at 18 percent (and Kodak was at 14 percent). However, this year Xerox’s percentage needing repair went up to only 22; Kodak more than doubled its score to 31 percent. That’s almost one in three Kodak printers needing a fix; a big problem for a company that hasn’t been in the printer business very long.

On the other end of the repair spectrum, if you want printers that don’t need many repairs, go with Samsung or Epson. All that said about Kodak, guess what? Our readers still gave the company the highest score for satisfaction with the cost of consumables, an SBA 8.9 out of 10. No one else comes close; the next highest is an average 5.9 for Brother. Obviously, Kodak’s campaign on cost of ownership continues to resonate. Readers scored Epson, HP, and Lexmark low when it comes to cost of ink and toner, giving each a significantly worse than average 4.9.

In the individual printer types, Canon dominates wherever it plays: ink jets, ink jet all in ones (AIOs), and photo printers. Brother and HP run neck and neck in monochrome laser printers. HP leads only in one category, color lasers, where the competition (Dell and Samsung) are not exactly household names. Well, HP also rules color laser AIO printers and photo AIOs, but that’s by virtue of having such a huge market share that it was the only vendor to make the cut in those categories. Its scores there were quite good.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Monday, December 28, 2009

Notebooks READERS’ CHOICE

Apple MacBooks of all shapes garner high marks from our readers.

Asus Netbooks or notebooks, it doesn’t matter. Asus is far and away the top-rated Windows-centric notebook maker with PC Mag readers.

Are you sick of seeing Apple as the PC Mag Readers’ Choice vendor for notebooks year after year? Tough. Jobs & Co. are back on top again, with the same significantly better than average (SBA) score of 9.2 out of 10 that the company received last year (albeit based on 29 percent fewer responses than last year). Apple’s scores in the All Notebooks category were almost identical to those of 2008, though the percentage of equipment needing repair went up slightly from 15 percent to 16 percent. In fact, almost all vendors had fewer responses, with one notable exception: Asus debuts on our list this year with an SBA score of 8.8, more than enough to become our second Readers’ Choice. You might think that this has to do with the company’s successful netbook products, but we drilled deeper into the data to see that netbooks accounted for fewer than 50 percent of the responses we received (other popular types of Asus notebooks are the multimedia, mainstream, and value market segments). Asus also kills the competition in the likelihood of being recommended, with an SBA of 9.0—a number worthy to stand with Apple’s. The next best brand is Toshiba at an average 8.1. Last year’s second Readers’ Choice, Lenovo, didn’t make the cut this year. Its score was down only slightly, but Lenovo also fell two confidence levels, going from an SBA of 8.1 in 2008 to a 7.9 this year, a score strictly within the average range. Lenovo did score better than average in tech support and repairs, both among all laptops and with business laptops, where it was second only to Apple. There was little dramatic movement in scores for any of the other major players. Sony did increase its overall score to 8.1, but that’s within the average range compared with all notebooks, whereas last year it earned a BA 8.0. As we’ve seen before, Dell and Toshiba continue to get good scores in the likelihood of being recommended category, higher than each company’s overall scores, in fact; we attribute this to the strength of these brand names.

At the bottom of the pack this year is HP, with scores that run in tandem with Acer and Gateway. But HP’s 7.7 out of 10 is considered significantly worse than average (SWA), whereas last year it was within in the average. For more information on how we measure these scores, see below. Taking a closer look at the percentage needing repairs reveals changes for almost every vendor; only Acer held steady at 12 percent. Apple worsened slightly in this category, along with HP, but the biggest jumps were for Lenovo, which dropped from 18 percent to 22 percent, and Dell, which fell from 20 percent to 23 percent (earning it the dubious distinction of highest failure rate of notebooks). Sony, Gateway, and Toshiba all had major improvements here, however, Sony from 18 percent last year and Gateway with 20 percent last year, both down to 12 percent; Toshiba’s failure rates were reported as 13 percent, down from 19 last year. Such significant drops are all well and good, but none of these companies could even touch new entry Asus: Just 6 percent of its products needed repair.

Notebooks less than a year old, just like desktops of that vintage, always get higher marks. This year is no different, and, in fact, brings us to the highest number among computers: Apple’s SBA 9.5 overall rating for one-year-old MacBooks. Its youthful laptops received a 9.6 in reliability and likelihood to recommend, too. Asus made another fine showing—after barely making the cut in this part of the survey with only 55 responses—with an SBA of 8.9 overall, and a tremendously low percentage of products needing repair: 2 percent. Apple itself was at 5 percent needing repair. And what’s with Lenovo and Dell? Some 16 percent of their new notebooks needed fixing, according to our readers.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Desktops READERS’ CHOICE

Apple John Hodgman’s campaign against the Mac continues to be a losing battle, at least among the readers of PC Mag, who for the umpteenth year in a row gave Apple high marks.

Sony Sony’s media-centric line of desktops are the favorites among the Windowsbased computers in our survey, despite a small market share.

When it comes to the overall satisfaction users have with their computers, Apple once again reigns supreme. The company’s Macintosh PCs—which we can all state unequivocally are actually Windows PCs too, if you want them to be—have consistently proven to be favorites among PC Mag readers. Apple’s significantly better than average (SBA) overall score (9.1 out of 10) marks it as a clear Readers’ Choice.
The company moved up significantly in scores for tech support since last year, too (8.6 SBA, up from 8.1). It suffered a little in that more of its desktop computers needed repairs this year (12 percent, instead of the 9 percent needing repair in 2008), and the likelihood of someone recommending a Mac to a friend dropped slightly to a score of 9.2 SBA. Still, these are very high marks. Even though we can call Apple computers “Windows machines” since they’re powered by the same Intel chips (and can run the same operating system), we still average the Windows-only system vendors separately, since consumers view the two Oss in such different light. And in the world of Windows vendors, not much has changed since 2008, when the average overall score was 7.6. The same goes for this year. That number held steady in part because of a nice showing this year by Sony. In fact, Sony almost didn’t make the final results in 2009, as a lower number of responses overall led to one-third as many Sony desktop owners participating in our survey. However, Sony owners who did respond are pretty happy with their VAIOs. Sony is the second Readers’ Choice vendor, with a better than average (BA) overall score of 8.2 this year— that’s half a point higher than the nearest Windows PC manufacturer, indicating satisfaction indeed. The company dropped the percentage of its desktops needing repairs by half (from 14 percent to 7 percent) from last year as well. Sony’s likelihood of receiving a recommendation to others also went up significantly, from a 7.6 in the average range last year to a BA score of 8.4 this year. Other companies saw very high percentages of products needing repairs— big names like Lenovo, Dell, and Gateway.

These numbers are very consistent with reader reports from last year (the only change was for the worse—Gateway’s fall from 18 percent to 21 percent. Needless to say, a high score on this metric doesn’t indicate pleased customers. Another interesting increase in overall satisfaction is with non-vendor PCs—those desktops readers either built themselves (which get an SBA 8.5 overall score) or bought locally from a no-name vendor (8.3 SBA overall). Yes, both types of systems received significantly better than average overall scores, giving them an edge over any Windows PC vendor, even Sony.

The other vendors in the final list either scored the same overall as last year (HP, Dell, Gateway, and Acer), or fell somewhat. Emachines went from a 7.3 to 7.2; Lenovo had the worst showing this year for an overall score in all desktops, dropping from 7.4 to a worse-than-average (WA) 7.1. HP did better this year, going from last year’s merely average 7.6 to a BA score of 7.7. Extrapolating the market share of a company based on the responses we received yields some intriguing information. Acer is the only vendor in the desktop survey to net more users than last year. It might not seem like much going from 81 responses in 2008 to 89 in 2009, but consider that every other vendor is down by double-digit percentages (17 percent in Apple’s case; 66 percent for Sony); this probably says something about how much PC Mag readers like Acer. When it comes to business-oriented PCs, Apple is still the top rated, but Windows vendors are led by Dell with an SBA 7.4. Dell also scores high for tech support, both overall and for business, and gets SBA scores for the likelihood of recommending in overall, business, and home systems. HP also scores SBAs in those three areas for likelihood of being recommended. We call that the power of the brand name.

When it comes to desktop systems that are less than one year old, the scores are always higher—after all, newer computers (hopefully) require less tech support or repair than a system with a few years and a few relocations under its skin. Apple (still the only vendor to get an SBA score) and Dell both had slight drops in their overall scores; Gateway and HP went up slightly, but are all just in the average range. Gateway and HP remain in the average range for overall scores.

Dell’s newer systems had some other issues. Last year for reliability the company scored better than the average (8.2); this year’s 8.1 doesn’t seem like much of a drop, but that score is suddenly worse than the average. It also had an SBA score of 8.2 last year for likelihood to be recommended, which fell to 8.1—merely in the average range this year.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Saturday, December 26, 2009

3M Pocket Projector MPro120

A Stylish Pico Projector

Pico projectors—defined as small enough to fit comfortably in a shirt pocket—don’t qualify as new anymore, but they’re still rare. Just try using one in a public space—connecting it to a camera to show a friend some photos, say—and see what happens. You’ll quickly find that it’s high on the list of gadgets that encourage total strangers to come over and start conversations. That’s particularly true of the MPro120, which offers a sleek design, a screw-on tripod with flexible legs, and reasonable image quality that works for both video and data.

The MPro120 is about the size and heft of an electric razor, measuring 1 by 2.4 by 4.7 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.6 ounces. The solid matte black finish and rounded edges give it a decidedly sleek look and feel. Setup is easy, and in addition to the standard VGA/RCA cable, you can buy an optional component video cable (with a cable for iPods and iPhones coming soon).

The MPro120 has a VGA native resolution of 640 by 480 and an LED that’s rated for 20,000 hours. However, 3M has made a fundamental change in the engine. The first-generation engine used a white LED as a light source, while this new engine uses red, green, and blue LEDs in sequence. The sequential approach is intended to display richer colors, but it also results in a slight rainbow effect, which means the light areas of a moving image can break up into little red-green-blue rainbows. Also, the audio quality and volume limit was lackluster. But you do get good battery life, lasting
4 hours in Normal mode. All told, the Mpro 120 is an attractive choice as both a hardtoresist gadget and a potentially useful tool.



3M Pocket Projector MPro120
$350 street

Pro s : Fits in a shirt pocket. Connects to computers and video sources. Rechargeable battery.

Con s : Although brighter than the first-generation version, it’s still not very bright. Audio is barely loud enough to be usable.













Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Friday, December 25, 2009

Microsoft Zune HD

Zune Aims for Apple

Afte r years of trying , has Microsoft finally beat Apple at its own game? Well, not quite. But the fantastic Zune HD certainly gives the iPod touch some worthy competition. The lack of a robust App Store is the only drawback for the Zune HD, which otherwise flaunts a beautiful touch-screen, an excellent user interface, HD radio, and the best browser we’ve seen since the Apple’s mobile Safari. While the touch is a better touch-screen player, the Zune HD is a close second. A very good-looking gadget, the 16GB Zune HD is Onyx Black and the 32GB version is Platinum Silver. This Zune has a smaller, lighter frame than the iPod touch, measuring 4.0 by 2.1 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighing just 2.6 ounces. However, the Zune’s 3.3-inch OLED screen is noticeably smaller than the touch’s 3.5-inch LCD, but video still looks great on it. The touch and Zune HD seem nearly identical in touchscreen sensitivity.

Microsoft’s software updates, however, are still clunkier than Apple’s. But once you’re up and running, the software and interface are impressive. Also, the Zune HD supports only MP3, WMA, and unprotected AAC files. The best new music feature on the Zune HD is the ability to purchase music wirelessly, thanks to integrated 802.11g. The Zune Marketplace makes it easy to browse for music on the player or your PC, but the Apps section currently has a very limited selection. Overall, Microsoft has shown Apple that it, too, can make an attractive, easy-to-use player. If Microsoft is able to give birth to an
App Store that can rival Apple’s, then the race could get interesting.—Tim Gideon


Microsoft Zune HD
16GB, $219.99 direct; 32GB, $289.99

Pro s : Gorgeous multi-touch OLED screen. Intuitive user interface with sharp, goodlooking graphics. Strong Web browser. Wireless music purchasing, downloading, and syncing. HD radio.

Con s : Limited HD video support. Very slim pickings in the App section of the Zune Marketplace.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Apple iPod nano (5th generation)

New Nano is Better Than Ever

Remarkably, the latest iPod nano looks almost identical to its predecessor, but this player packs so much more into its small frame: A video camera, an FM tuner (a first for iPods!), a pedometer for joggers, and a larger screen. Priced at $149 for 8GB and at $179 for 16GB ($20 less than last year’s 16GB player), this nano is more affordable and capable than any similarly priced player out there—a hands down Editors’ Choice. Aside from seven bright new colors, the new nano’s body is otherwise identical to the 4th-generation device. The screen, however, is significantly larger—2.2 inches as opposed to 2 (it may not sound like a lot, but on such a tiny player, that 0.2 inch makes a big difference), with a slightly higher resolution. The included earbuds act as an antenna for the new FM radio—finally.

The big news here is the inclusion of a video camera, a mic, and a built-in speaker on the back panel. Nonetheless, video capture was crisp and vibrant (despite the low 640-by- 480 resolution), rivaling footage from mini camcorders. You can even choose from 15 effects, such as Sepia, Film Grain, and even Thermal and X-Ray. Unfortunately, the camera can’t capture still images and the mic isn’t great. Even so, no other media player has built-in video. While the iPod touch has seen many challengers, the nano doesn’t have a serious enemy. Nothing else in this price range comes close to its ease-of-use and graceful design.


Apple iPod nano (5th generation)
16GB, $179 direct; 8GB, $149


Pro s : Built-in video camera, mic, and speaker. Larger display, but same-size frame as previous- gen nano. Excellent user interface. New Genius Mix feature. Adds an FM tuner and a pedometer.

Con s : So-so file support. Video camera can’t capture still images. Ships with Apple’s signature subpar earbuds.


Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Apple iPod touch (3rd generation)

Touch: The Song Remains the Same

The third generation of the iPod touch looks identical to the 2nd generation, but the capacities and prices are improved: 8GB ($199), 32GB ($299), and 64GB ($399). There’s no built-in video camera, as had been rumored, which is a bit of a surprise, considering the less-expensive and muchtinier nano got one. With the touch, Apple’s focus remains firmly on music, and, more so than ever, portable gaming. Along with a nice speed bump come some app organization improvements and new Genius features, all of which are welcome additions. Even if there’s no exciting surprise with this touch iteration, after three long years, there’s still not a better portable media player out there.

The new iPod touch doesn’t just look like the old touch—it’s identical. The device is, as always, dominated by its luscious 3.5-inch glass touch-screen. With a 480-by-320 resolution, the display is the best in the business— only the LCD on the Zune HD, which is smaller, rivals the touch’s bright and responsive screen. The player’s top panel houses the Power button, the back of the player looks like a warped funhouse mirror, and the proprietary connection for the USB syncing cable lives on the bottom panel alongside the earphone jack. The Home button remains centered below the display. Though the new iTunes LP feature is very cool (including video, song lyrics, and liner notes with album purchases), you can only experience those extras in iTunes, not on the touch itself. Also, there’s no 802.11n support yet. Apple claims a 50 percent speed bump with this model, and I did notice the device reacted more quickly to button pushes and finger swipes, as well as a more fluid Web experience. One remaining Web gripe: There’s still no support for Flash, which is a feature I’d gladly trade for the slight speed boost. On the software front, the new Genius for apps suggests apps you may like based on what you’ve already downloaded. And Genius Mix can organize your music into “mixes” based on genre. In a nutshell, when you improve the best player on the market, even if in tiny increments, it remains the best—and our Editors’ Choice. If you’re not an Apple fan.



Apple iPod touch
(3rd generation)
8GB, $199 direct; 32GB, $299; 64GB, $399

Pro s : Best touch-screen portable media player, period. Increased capacities at lower prices. Faster processing ideal for gaming. Top-notch Web browser. iTunes improvements include Genius Mixes, Genius-based app recommendations, and app organization.

Con s : Bundled earbuds still stink. Audio file support doesn’t include FLAC or OGG. Browser still lacks Flash support.


Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Add Photos to Your Facebook Profile Via E-Mail

IF YOU’RE A Facebook addict and you’re eager to tell your pals about your adventures, you don’t have to wait until you get back to your PC—Facebook off ers a number of features that cater to mobile users. For starters, you can update your status via text message. And if your phone has a camera, you can do even more: Facebook lets you add photos and videos to your profi le via e-mail. You don’t have to use a phone to perform this procedure. You can just as well e-mail your content to Facebook from a PC if you find that easier than using Facebook proper (or if you happen to be using a work PC that blocks social networks). Here’s how to get going with Facebook via e-mail.

1. Head to www.facebook.com/mobile. (You’ll need to sign in to your account if you haven’t done so already.)

2. Look under ‘Upload Photos via Email’ for your person al e-mail address. (Mine is a bizarre string of random words and numbers.)

3. Add that upload address to your contact list, or click Send my upload email to me now to have Facebook shoot it to wherever you routinely check your mail. (It’s not much of a time-saver, but it might be easier than your typing the address into your phone.)

4. Compose a new e-mail message with the photo or video attached. Direct the missive to your Facebook upload address, and use the subject line for the caption you want to show. Click Send, and presto! The photo or video goes straight to your Facebook profile. By default, the site makes such uploads public, so be sure to go to Facebook’s settings if you want to change that.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Monday, December 21, 2009

A Laptop With Rugged Good Looks

Getac has deep roots in the ruggedized space, a company originally geared toward military- and governmentoriented computing products. But the Getac 9213 purges the notion that a ruggedized ultraportable should have a rough-and-tumble appearance; its stylish metallic frame looks more like a mainstream product with business-rugged features. With the help of Intel’s low-powered parts, this featherweight delivered more than 5 hours of battery life, but the 9213’s toughness and energy efficiency may not be enough to warrant its bloated price tag. In design, the 9213 is reminiscent of the Acer Aspire 3935, measuring just 12.5 by 9 by 1 inches, and weighing 3.6 pounds. Its 13.3-inch widescreen clings to the old-school aspect ratio (16:10), whereas most consumer laptops are moving to 16:9. And the 9213’s classification as “business rugged” means it can survive 1.5-foot drops, water spills, and shock to its hard drive, but it’s not nearly as tough as a fully ruggedized laptop. The 9213 Ultralow Voltage (ULV) processor eliminates clunky fans and has huge benefits in power savings, but it trails many of its consumer counterparts in performance. Luckily, the 9213’s 3GB of memory can help offset some of its performance woes. If you work with resource-intensive apps, this laptop is probably not for you. Overall, the sleek metallic frame and more than 5 hours of battery life can compete with the best of them, but until the price comes down, I would carefully consider the Lenovo ThinkPad X301 or the Acer Aspire 3935.


Getac 9213

Pros : Feathery light. Can sustain drops, spills, and shakes. Efficient battery. Excellent navigating experience. Very stylish.

Cons : Expensive. Mislaid forward-slash key. No HDMI or DisplayPort technologies.

Specs 1.4-GHz Intel Pentium SU9400 processor; 3GB DDR3 SDRAM; 160GB hard drive ; 13.3-inch display; Intel Wi-Fi Link 5300 AGN; 3.6 pounds (4.4 travel); 3 USB ports; 58-Wh battery; Windows Vista Business (32 bit).



Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Fujitsu’s Multitouch Tablet

Convertible tablets are and will remain specialized products that cater to a certain group of people. Nevertheless, the multitouch LifeBook T5010 is the hallmark of what a tablet user experience should be. Though the design lacks style and the battery life could use some pick-me-up, it now has dual active displays, which works like this: The pen triggers Wacom’s digitized panel, and when you apply a finger (or two), the capacitive touch panel similar to the Apple iPhone’s, is activated. The T5010 retains an older chassis that’s just begging for a makeover. While other tablet makers are using 12-inch widescreens, the T5010 opted to use a 13.3-inch screen, one of the biggest for a tablet. The T5010 also has a responsive capacitive touch technology, instead of resistive, so you don’t have to apply pressure against the screen. The multi-touch display recognizes up to two fingers, and that means you can pinch and rotate photos, Word documents, Web pages, PDF files, and so on. You also get a free upgrade to Windows 7. Though pricey and a bit outdated in terms of design, the T5010 is a convertible tablet that gives you three vital tools for data input: a keyboard, a digital pen, and now, multitouch.


Fujitsu LifeBook T5010 (Multitouch)
Pros : Capacitive touch panel. Support Windows 7 Multi-touch. Digitized pen is an excellent tool. Powerful and energy-efficient processor. Mobile Broadband available. Tons of security features.

Cons : Clunky design. Tablets are still pricey instruments. Battery life is below average on a single battery. 80GB hard drive is more meager than those found in netbooks.

Specs : 2.53-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 processor; 2GB SDRAM; 80GB hard drive; Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics; 13.3-inch display; 4.8 pounds; 3 USB ports; 63-Wh battery; Windows Vista Business (32-bit).





Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Is it possible to put apps such as Word and Excel onto a flash drive?

YOU CAN PUT apps on a fl ash drive, but only those designed for that use. And Microsoft Office was not made for such portability. Think about how you put most Windows programs onto your PC: You don’t just copy the files, you run an installer. The installer integrates the application into Windows, changing the Registry and altering the operating system. (By the way, this is a major reason why Windows becomes less reliable over time and sometimes requires reinstallation from scratch—too many OS-altering installations.)

Clearly, if you simply copied the program folder to a fl ash drive and tried running it on another PC, you’d be disappointed. A portable application is specifically designed not to require an installation, and is thus able to work from a flash drive. A well designed portable program will not alter the Registry or leave behind any other trace of itself on a computer. Lots of portable programs, many of them free, are available. You can find portable browsers, graphics editors, media players, and programming tools. Utilities, too: I keep a flash drive loaded with sorted portable diagnostic tools that come in handy when someone asks me to help them with their computer. PortableApps.com creates and gives away portable versions of existing free, open-source software. One such offering is an Office alternative, a portable version of OpenOffice.org. It doesn’t do everything that Microsoft Office can do, but it does enough things to satisfy most people. Grab it at fi nd.pcworld.com/63596. For additional fl ash-drive-friendly applications, check out Make use of .com’s list of portable software at find.pcworld.com/63593.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Friday, December 18, 2009

Add a Desktop Dictionary to Ubuntu for Quick Word Lookups

IF YOU WRITE a lot, a desktop dictionary can be a powerful asset. With it, you can highlight a word inside any program and then click the dictionary icon in your menu bar to open a Web browser window containing the word’s definition. To add a desktop dictionary to your Ubuntu installation, use the Googlizer applet, which you can install via Synaptic Package Manager. If you don’t find it in Synaptic’s graphical interface, open a terminal window and type sudo apt-get install googlizer to automatically locate it and install it. This applet was made to perform instant Google searches, but you can make it do dictionary searches instead. Once you’ve installed Googlizer in Synaptic, drag its icon from THE PPLICATIONS¨ NTERNET MENU TO A SPARE SPOT ON THE PANEL BAR_ Then right-click it and select Properties. In the Command field, change the line to read googlizer --url http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ (make sure that you put two hyphens before url). How does this trick work? The search term you highlight enters the selection buffer automatically, and then it simply joins the end of the URL you quote when you click on the Googlizer button. In the case of the Merriam-Webster Web site, this trick works perfectly, since the site uses that URL format for each word. For example, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/orange leads you to a definition of the word orange. You might also want to change the icon for Googlizer, as I have, to that of a dictionary. The icon that I use lives at /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/apps/accessoriesdictionary.svg.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Take Your Work Into the Cloud With a Web OS

With the help of a Web-based virtual machine, you can work on projects from any device without having to carry files with you.

IF YOUR JOB involves frequent travel, if you use more than one computer for your work, or if you depend on a smartphone for conducting business, you might find it difficult to keep your files in sync and up-to-date. But with the assistance of a Web based virtual computer, you can ensure that your data remains synced and organized across all of your devices while using a single, consistent interface on every computer you work from. In this article I’ll explain what a Web OS is, what its primary benefits are, and how you can put one to work.


What’s a Web OS?
A Web OS, sometimes called a Webtop or a cloud computer, is a virtual machine that lives online—but when you’re logged in to one, it can be nearly indistinguishable from a regular desktop operating system. In most cases the menus and icons of a Web OS look similar to those of Windows, complete with a taskbar, a file browser, a desktop with customizable wallpaper, and productivity and communications apps. But because a Web OS doesn’t reside on your local PC, you can access the same desktop—along with all your apps, files, and settings—on almost any device that provides a Web browser. Prominent examples of Web Oss include G.ho.st (g.ho.st), Glide OS (glideos.com), and Icloud (icloud.com). For a comparison of these and other Web OS services, see Ian Paul’s “9 Web-Based Office Productivity Suites” at fi nd.pcworld.com/63606. Because G.ho.st is my personal favorite, I’ll use it for most of this tutorial. The truth is, however, that no clear leader has arisen in the Webtop sarena, and personal taste will be an even greater factor in selecting the best Web OS for you than it is in choosing your favorite desktop OS.


Why Go With the Web?
For users who have only one computer, or who seldom need to share their files between a work PC and a home system, adding a Web OS into the mix will likely prove needlessly complicated. But if you move between multiple machines oft en and you don’t want to fret about syncing files all over the place, a Web OS can be even better than a thumb drive for storing everything and providing a consistent experience across platforms. In the course of writing this article, for instance, I sat in front of at least three different computers running two different operating systems. (And not just to prove a point about Web OSs, either.) But at any time—because I used G.ho.st—I could easily move to a different PC, boot it up, log in to my desktop, and pick up where I had left off . All of my icons were in the same place, and all of the applications and menus were the same, too. And because everything sits on a remote Web server, I didn’t have to worry about forgetting my thumb drive when I moved from my home office to my office. In addition to its persistent browser-based interface, G.ho.st comes in a mobile version that lets you download your files from a smartphone in a pinch. One big advantage of a Web OS is that its performance doesn’t depend much on the speed of your computer. This makes such a setup great for use on an aging laptop or an underpowered netbook. Web OS performance will, however, depend a great deal on the speed of your Internet connection, especially if you’re regularly transferring files back and forth; so be sure that you have a reliable broadband service, or you will experience sluggish re - sponse times from your cloud-based applications.


Get Started
You don’t need much to start using a Web OS right now. Once you’ve chosen a service, just visit its Web site from any Internet-connected desktop or laptop computer, and then sign up for a free account. After completing a quick registration, you’ll be staring at your new virtual desktop for the first time. While the interfaces for different Web OS services vary slightly, they tend to follow the basic desktop layout that Windows popularized.
In G.ho.st, the taskbar runs across the bottom of the screen just as it does in Windows, and a Go button is located where the Start button would be. You’ll also find a Quick Launch bar just to the right of the Go button, and a system tray to the far right of the taskbar. The G.ho.st desktop gives you rapid access to a few of the most important features of your virtual machine, including a link to all of your applications, the control panel, your e-mail program, and an instant messenger application that supports AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. Want to get started with a text document or spreadsheet right away? Launch Zoho Writer or Zoho Sheets directly from the desktop and start typing. You might also take a look at the ‘Take the Tour’ link on the desktop, which will get you oriented quickly.


File Management
Assuming that you don’t plan on using your new Web OS as your primary computing environment all the time, you’ll want to start managing your files intelligently from the moment you log on. While you certainly can just upload files from your local computer to the Web OS one by one, or even in batches, the better ap - proach is to take advantage of the Web OS’s built-in synchronization features to manage files on all of your systems automatically. In G.ho.st, you’ll find the appropriately named Sync utility, available in both Windows and Mac versions on the Ghost Services menu. Select the version for the computer you happen to be using, and then download and run the installer. Afterward, enter your log-in info and set the utility’s options as you see fit. The best choice is to sync in both directions and set conflict resolution to keep the newest version of each file. You can also choose simply to append ‘~deleted’ to the file names of old versions, which will help you avoid losing important data if something goes wrong.


Mobile Access
Though not all Webtops provide a mobile version of their services, G.ho.st does. However, not all of the service’s features will work in all mobile browsers. Be sure that your phone supports JavaScript and that the feature is enabled; otherwise you won’t be able to download your files to the device. To work with the documents once you have downloaded them, you will need an editing program and/or a viewing application installed on your mobile device.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Lenovo ThinkPad T400s (Multitouch)

A Well-Executed Multitouch Laptop

TheT400s (Multitouch) incites lust among business users. It has the ThinkPad X301’s exquisitely thin dimensions, with a 14-inch LED widescreen to boot. It’s the lightest business laptop in its class—and that’s with the internal optical drive. The latest edition (and bear in mind that this is not a convertible tablet) takes advantage of Microsoft’s Touch Pack and other touch-friendly applications made for Windows 7 and is, bar none, the best implementation of a multitouch panel yet on a laptop. The T400s is considerably thinner than the ThinkPad T400, measuring 13.3 by 9.4 by 1.1 inches (HWD), but weighs a bit more than the original T400s—4.4 pounds versus 3.9. Unfortunately, the T400s had to unload certain features to achieve this thinness; it has only one memory card reader slot and no FireWire port. It does, however, have every wireless technology built-in—3G, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a GPS chip. And hard drive options include a 128GB SSD.

But the big story is obviously the new multitouch gestures. By tapping two fingers on the screen, you invoke a series of icons called Simple Tap. You can also customize screen icons for commonly used apps and tasks. Though Simple Tap could be a bit temperamental, otherwise the touch features worked like a charm. In our testing, high scores were split between the T400s and the T400s multitouch version. Video encoding scores improved by a margin of 6 seconds with the T400s (Multitouch) and outperformed the original T400 by 2 seconds. On MobileMark 2007, the multitouch T400s scored 4 hours 20 minutes, which trails the T400s by 11 minutes (4 hours 31 minute). There is no support here for an extended battery. And the multitouch T400s met our criteria for a Green Tech Approved product, with Energy Star 5.0, EPEAT Gold, and RoHS certification, among other factors. Though finding the right business implementation for the multitouch screen could prove a challenge, this new T400s is nonetheless an exciting look ahead for Windows 7 systems.


Lenovo ThinkPad T400s (Multitouch)

Pros : Multitouch panel works well. Exquisitely thin. Modular optical drive included. Fast, energy-efficient processor. Nice resolution. Tough as nails. Phenomenal typing experience. Excellent green credentials.

Cons : No FireWire or extra card slot. No extended batteries available.


Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Truth About Broadband

According to a new study, “high-speed” Internet may be an overstatement.

The United States may be tops in a lot of areas, but it turns out that broadbandaccess speed is probably not one of them. This finding came to light as a result of an Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ) t a s k f o r c e probe into the actual speed of broadband connections across the nation. This report will help the FCC bring a plan before Congress to spend allocated stimulus dollars.

The study found that broadband speeds advertised by ISPs are generally slower than they claim to be. Furthermore, the report says that the increasing number of users is putting stress on networks: About 1 percent of all users drive 20 percent of traffic and 20 percent of all users drive 80 percent of traffic. The task force also found that most Internet applications are currently focused on communication and entertainment, but that is evolving into education, job training, business and other productive purposes. Currently, almost two-thirds of Americans have broadband at home. About 33 percent have access but have not adopted it, and 4 percent said they have no access where they live. The FCC says that getting broadband to everyone should be a priority. “The cost of digital exclusion is large and growing fornonadopters, as resources for employment, education, news, healthcare, and shopping for goods and services increasingly move online,” according to the FCC.

However, the commission goes on to say that if Americans want more than one provider, guaranteed access to fixed and mobile service, or access in rural areas, they should be prepared to see the cost of broadband improvement increase by a few billion dollars. Depending on the type of speeds you want, investment will range from $20 billion for universal 768-Kbps to 3-Mbps service all the way up to $350 billion for 100-Mbps service. For a more in-depth look at the FCC’s findings, the commission has posted all 168 slides from the report on its Web site.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Monday, December 14, 2009

WiMAX: Why You Want It Right Now

As the subway train I’m on races through the white, almost gleaming tunnels of Seoul, I can hardly believe what I’m seeing on the lightweight Samsung netbook that sits on my lap: high-definition YouTube video files streaming with nary a hiccup or pixilation. Is it a dream? No, it’s a reality—in South Korea. This demonstration came courtesy of Samsung and South Korea’s remarkable WiMAX-based WiBro network. I’ll be honest: Until now, I hadn’t paid much attention to WiMAX. I knew it was supposed to be faster than current 3G broadband speeds, but I also understood that it was rolling out very, very slowly (and “rolling” would be a generous term). To date, our mobile expert, Sascha Segan, has been able to test WiMAX only in Baltimore. There’s also a competing 4G option, LTE, which isn’t in any U.S. markets currently, but 4G may ultimately have better traction than WiMAX, because of greater carrier support. My response to all this confusion and lack of deployment has been to ignore it until such technologies become a real option in the U.S. That was before my trip to South Korea.


Raising Expectations
I currently use two 3G options: AT&T’s HSDPA and Verizon’s EV-DO Rev A. They’re both okay, but I’m comfortable using them only for browsing simple Web sites, tweeting, checking e-mail, and downloading small files. These days, the networks feel like they’re choking from overuse. I figured this was probably as good as can be expected in the world of mobile broadband. I wrongly assumed that 4G would be like 3G albeit a bit faster, an incremental change that I really wouldn’t notice. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a hilly, densely populated metropolis with over 22 million people. It already has a reputation for broadband innovation. Roughly 90 percent of its population has broadband access, most of it thanks to fiber to the home. According to Hung Song, Samsung’s VP of global marketing for telecommunication systems, some pay roughly $35 per month for 100-Mbps download speeds. This is an unbelievable deal. South Koreans understand fast online access, and it’s only natural that they expect quite a bit from their mobile broadband experience.


Superior Signal, Even on the Subway
Back in Seoul’s subway system, I immediately began tweeting my experience and noted how quickly Twitter responded. “This seems fast,” I told my hosts. Before I got on the train, I surfed over to some lengthy You- Tube videos. One streamed smoothly as I stepped from the platform onto an arriving train. Next, I found a couple of HD videos on YouTube. All played almost perfectly (I noticed just the occasional throttling down on frame rate). As we whizzed by each stop, I kept expecting the WiBro connection to stutter as it hopped from base station to base station. That never happened. Eventually, I imagined myself riding the rails all day, enjoying speeds—4.3 Mbps down and 1.6 Mbps up—that rivaled entry-level home broadband in the U.S. I realized I also felt somewhat angry. The U.S. faces an uncertain future in the 4G space. Verizon and AT&T are pushing LTE 4G, while Clear is the leading proponent of WiMAX. Both should be fast, but it’s unlikely you’ll be able to hop from one network to another. Samsung execs told me they expect to support both fully, but that’ll most likely mean devices that are built for one network or the other.


Demanding More from Our Carriers
I doubt U.S. consumers even understand the mess they’re facing. Unlike South Korea, which seems to have settled on one type of mobile broadband for its most populous city, the U.S. will have two options— both claiming to be the fastest. That’s a shame. Now would be a good time for consumers to simply say no: “We don’t want competing platforms. Instead, give us one flavor of 4G and competing devices and service offerings. Most of us will be using 4G with our laptops, and we won’t switch them as readily as we do our phones. But we might switch carriers if we get a better deal or any perks. ” To be fair, the U.S. is nothing like Seoul. Our sprawling nation’s network of existing cell towers all have to be upgraded to support 4G networks. That takes time and manpower, an almost comical proposition, because companies like AT&T haven’t even finished upgrading all of their networks to 3G. Looks like it’s going to be a long time before anyone in the U.S. can share my experience. I’ll miss South Korea, but I think I’ll miss WiBro more.

Source of Information : PC Magazine 2009 11

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Seven Ways to Upgrade Your Netbook

Netbook hacks range from the absurdly simple to the electronically complex. Here’s how to turn your netbook into a powerful portable PC.

MANY PEOPLE admire netbooks for their portability, but no two models are exactly alike, and each reflects different trade-offs. A system with a great battery may have a horrible keyboard arrangement; a model with a solid state drive might be out of your price range; or a unit with killer specs might be missing 802.11n connectivity. All of these are common problems, but they don’t have common solutions. Due to their diversity, netbooks don’t share a standard upgrade path as typical desktop PCs do. Each model is unique in what you can do to it, and the procedures are as varied as the netbooks themselves. If you plan to upgrade your machine, you’ll need to hunt down the instruction manual or—in the case of trickier upgrades—a community of users to walk you through the process. That said, possible netbook hacks range from 5-minute routines to soldering-gunbased surgeries. Following are seven hacks for a Dell Mini 9—one of the more tweakable netbooks we’ve come across. The first three hacks are easy, and the other four are intermediate. While your mileage (and procedures) will depend on your own netbook model, this guide should give you a good idea of the kinds of upgrades that are available (and suitable) for your machine and your skill level.


1. Insert a Better Battery
In our testing (find.pcworld.com/63590) the Dell Mini 9’s battery survived for about 3 hours, 34 minutes. That’s not too shabby for a fourcell battery, but you can do better. Though you may find a few guides online that describe how to create a laptop battery by using a number of aftermarket batteries wired together, that method is a recipe for disaster. Instead, try eBay: There you can find a 77-watt-hour, eight-cell battery that’s entirely compatible with the existing connections (and size) of your Dell Mini 9. You’ll double the longevity of your netbook—provided that you aren’t bothered by the inelegant mass sticking out from underneath it. To replace the battery, just flip your netbook upside-down, move the two switches from the locked icon to the unlocked icon, and then push up on the battery tray.


2. Upgrade the OS
If you want to install a new operating system onto your netbook, you certainly can: You simply pop the CD into any external USB optical drive and install away. Want to dual-boot your netbook? Grab the GParted utility, by downloading the .iso file for its LiveCD at find. pcworld.com/63584 and then burning the file onto a disc. Insert that disc into the external optical drive, restart the netbook, and enter the BIOS to change the boot settings for your machine. Boot off of the optical drive first, and GParted will load. Right-click on the primary partition and select Resize/Move. Microsoft recommends that you have at least 16GB of space for Windows 7; if you were hoping to use that OS but your netbook has too little room, your experiment ends here. For any OS, if your netbook does have space for it, enter a new partition size of your choosing. Click Resize, and you’ll see the newly unallocated space sitting to the right of your primary partition in GParted’s graphic. Right-click on this area and select New. Enter zeros for ‘Free Space Proceeding’ and
‘Following’, select Primary Partition under ‘Create as’, and click the add button. If you prefer not to use an external optical drive, you can follow the same steps for using GParted and installing the new OS with a simple USB thumb drive.


3. Rearrange the Keyboard
Does your netbook keyboard’s default layout conflict with the muscle memory you’ve built for desktop keyboard layouts? You can pop an off ending key off of your netbook by wedging a tiny screwdriver under the key and gently applying upward pressure. As long as the keys you are swapping are the same size, you can interchange them as you please. Once you’ve made the physical transformations, use the Sharp Keys utility (find.pcworld.com/63585) to reassign your OS’s interpretations of the keystrokes to the appropriate keys. Alternatively, if you don’t mind a bit of visual confusion, you can leave the physical keys exactly where they are and use this helpful application to redefine their purpose.


4. Replace the Hard Drive
What’s worse: the underwhelming capacity of a typical solid-state drive inside a brand new netbook, or the price difference you’d have to pay to get a larger drive in your preconfigured netbook build? Here’s a way around both of those nightmares. First, when you’re building your netbook on the maker’s Web site, select the lowest capacity drive available (or if you have no configuration options, buy the netbook as is). Next, consult user to get a clearer sense of which after market solid-state or magnetic hard drives are compatible with your unit. Finally, grab a screwdriver. For the Dell Mini 9, flip the netbook over and remove the two screws that secure the large back panel into place (since it’s in the center, it’s hard to miss). Pry off the panel with your finger or with the tip of a screwdriver. With the Dell Mini 9’s battery facing north, you’ll notice a set of four electronic pieces inside the machine; those are the hard drive, the memory, the network card, and a blank space for a nonexistent 3G card. You should see a pair of screws securing the tiny flash-memory circuit board into place in the upper-left quadrant. Unscrew them, and the SSD should lift up. Pull it out, insert its replacement, and tighten the screws.


5. Upgrade the RAM
Memory is one of the main areas of a netbook where system manufacturers can increase their profit margin. Don’t let a netbook maker empty your wallet by selling you RAM that you can find elsewhere for a lot less. In the case of the Dell Mini 9, we bought the bare minimum of RAM that we needed to complete the configuration: 512MB. To upgrade RAM, first open the netbook’s back and look for the existing memory. On the Mini 9, it’s in the upper-right (with the battery facing north). On the RAM module you should see its specifications. You can either purchase the same type of RAM in a larger size (in our case, a 2GB stick of DDR-2 SODIMM running at 533MHz) or check the manufacturer specs for your netbook to discover its maximum supported speed. The difference between DDR2-4200 and DDR2-5300 memory is almost unnoticeable, but there’s no sense in maxing out with DDR2-6400 memory if your netbook can’t support its full speed. To replace the memory, push outward on the two clips holding the RAM in place near the notched groove on each side. The RAM will pop up toward you for removal. Insert the new memory and push it into place. When you start up the machine, quickly press the appropriate key to access the system BIOS (for the Dell Mini 9, it’s the 2 key). Head to the main tab and confirm that the system recognizes the new memory.


6. Upgrade the Wi-Fi
Upgrading the internal Wi-Fi capabilities of a netbook from 802.11g to 802.11n sounds as though it should be easy. In theory, you’d simply buy a miniature wireless card, pop off the back of the netbook, shuffle its components, and start enjoying the increased functionality and speed of the new card. Alas, in reality it isn’t that simple. Just because a Wi-Fi card looks as if it will fit in your netbook, that doesn’t mean the card is compatible with the netbook’s OS/motherboard combination. But even before that, you have to deal with the issue of size. When purchasing a new Wi-Fi card, you need to know whether your netbook can support a full-height or half-height card. Remove the back of the netbook and look for the existing Wi-Fi card. A full-height card is long and rectangular, similar in shape to an SD Card for a camera. A half height card is stubbier and resembles the shape of a CompactFlash card. As for the particular brand of card, there is no hard-and-fast rule for determining what will be compatible with your netbook model. A card that looks perfect on paper may not work with your unit’s configuration. Instead of using trial and error, search the Internet for stories of other people’s successful Wi-Fi upgrades of the same netbook model. It’s the best way of improving the odds that the card you pick will actually work. Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, installing the card is easy. On the Dell Mini 9, for example, remove the netbook’s rear cover. The Wi-Fi card is in the center-right of the system; it’s the card with white and black wires (the antenna) running into it. Gently disconnect those wires, undo the screws, and remove the card from the slot. Insert the new card, reinsert the screws to tighten the card into position, and reconnect the two antenna wires—note, however, that the specific card you buy will dictate whether you should reverse the wires as compared with their positions on the original card. Depending on the size of the card and the configuration of the motherboard, you might have to remove a motherboard standoff to permit a solid fit. If the operating system can’t find the new card on the next boot, install the drivers for the particular Wi-Fi card you bought. You should be able to find the drivers on the company’s Web site; if not, you might have to install drivers from a third-party netbook manufacturer whose product uses the same network card.


7. Overclock the CPU
Overclocking represents the pinnacle of system upgrades that an average user can perform without physically deconstructing the netbook. It’s also among the more dangerous upgrades for netbooks, given that these miniature systems don’t come with the best cooling systems. In the case of the Dell Mini 9, the passive cooler protecting the processor from thermal overload is no match for frequency tweaking, and it’s probably for the best that we couldn’t find a way to overclock this tiny PC. Other netbooks are a bit more flexible in this regard. Owners of Dell Mini 10 netbooks can rev up their CPU through the SetFSB utility. Users of earlier Asus Eee PC models can pick up the Eeectl utility, which permits them to alter the front side bus within Windows and, consequently, up the speed of the processor. If you have an MSI Wind and you want to update its BIOS, you’ll discover that MSI officially supports your over clocking habit. Still, these waters demand careful navigation (or strict avoidance) lest you wreck your netbook and condemn it to an inglorious end.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Saturday, December 12, 2009

The XP-to-Windows 7 Upgrade Challenge

You had good reason to stick with XP and skip the Vista experience entirely. But now that the folks at Microsoft have created a new OS that’s worth moving to, they haven’t made the upgrade easy.

HARDWARE: Your hardware may not be up to the task of running Windows 7—and even if it is, your drivers won’t work. Unfortunately, a simple upgrade install is out of the question, too; Microsoft requires that you XP users do a clean install. It’s a good idea for anyone contemplating the upgrade to run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor first (see page 82); for XP users, this step is absolutely vital. Upgrading your motherboard’s firmware also becomes more important; check your system manufacturer’s Web site to see if an upgrade is available.

WINDOWS 7 CAN’T USE XP DRIVERS: Check the Windows 7 Compatibility Center, which was still in its “coming soon” phase at the time of this writing. The Vista version of the Compatibility Center can help, since Vista drivers work in XP, but the fit isn’t perfect. Some Vista drivers download as .exe files that run exclusively in Vista. Not all XP applications work in Vista, or in Windows 7, either. Again, the Compatibility Centers can tell you what works, what doesn’t, and where you can download the necessary patches.

WINDOWS XP MODE: Windows 7’s XP Mode could be the solution to your application compatibility problems. This mode runs XP in a virtual machine inside 7, although the user interface is more integrated than in most virtual machines. For instance, XP and 7 applications appear together on the same desktop. But XP Mode may not work on your PC. It requires a CPU with virtualization capabilities. Browse to the Microsoft page at find.pcworld.com/63675 for instructions on how to find out whether your CPU has this feature and, if it does, how to turn it on. XP Mode doesn’t ship with Windows 7, but it’s available as a free download (at find.pcworld.com/63676). It also comes with a full version of XP.

ONE XP-TO-7 ISSUE IS JUST SOMETHING TO BE AWARE OF: These two versions of Windows store your data files in different locations. The XP folder C:\ Documents and Settings is now C:\Users. Application Data is now the abbreviated AppData. Local Settings\Application Data is now AppData\Local. And your Music, Pictures, and Videos folders now sit beside My Documents rather than inside it. The Windows 7 installation program moves all of your old folders to a folder called C:\Windows.old. You may need to remember, as you try to get your new program installations together with your old data, that the Outlook.pst file that is now in C:\Windows.old\Documents and Settings\yourlogon\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook belongs in the new location C:\Users\yourlogon\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Friday, December 11, 2009

Windows 7 on Netbooks

Thinking of upgrading your tiny portable to Windows 7? Microsoft promises that the new OS will run smoothly on netbooks. But is it really worth taking the plunge?

MOST NETBOOKS available as of this writing ship with Windows XP. The few models that offer Windows Vista have performed sluggishly in our tests. Microsoft, however, stresses that Windows 7 will run perfectly fi ne on netbooks. In fact, Microsoft now gears Windows 7 Starter Edition toward netbooks (Windows Vista Starter was available in only “emerging” markets). Though Windows 7 Starter Edition isn’t quite as crippled as its Vista counterpart was—hooray, no more pesky threeapplication limit!—it still arbitrarily disables certain features. (No ability to change the desktop background? Lame!) If you own a netbook, you might want to consider purchasing a lesshamstrung (translation: more expensive) edition of Windows 7 instead.

On the other hand, you may want to stand pat with Windows XP. For this article, we tested Windows XP Home Edition and three editions of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium) on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, and we discovered that Windows 7 ran slightly slower than XP did. Windows 7 Starter, intended for use on netbooks (or as Microsoft puts it, “low-cost small notebook PCs”), managed to reach a score of 31 in our WorldBench 6 test suite, while the other two Windows 7 editions topped out at a mark of 30. By comparison, Windows XP on the Lenovo earned a score of 33. A three-point decline in WorldBench 6 score on a normal laptop isn’t much of a drop, but on a netbook it represents a difference of roughly 10 percent. So while it looks as though Windows 7 will run on a netbook, you may want to take the OS for a spin on a demo netbook at a store before you decide to upgrade.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Testing Windows performance

Testing Windows performance isn’t rocket science. Here’s how the PC World Test Center compared Windows 7 and Vista.

WORLDBENCH TESTING: For this article, we ran our WorldBench 6 test suite on a set of five different PCs: two desktop systems (the high-end E&C Black Mamba PC and the mainstream HP Pavilion a6710t), two laptop systems (the budget Gateway T-6815 and the mainstream Lenovo IdeaPad Y530), and one netbook (the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2). On the two desktops and two laptops, we compared Windows 7 against Windows Vista. Unlike many benchmark tools, our WorldBench 6 test suite is a real-world benchmark. We test systems by running actual, commonly used applications, not synthetic, arbitrary benchmarks, to give you a better idea of how well a machine will perform in daily, regular use. For more details about WorldBench 6, point your browser to find.pcworld.com/63704.

BATTERY LIFE: To test laptop battery life, we alternate between 15 minutes of typing and 15 minutes of full-screen video playback. We repeat the process until the battery dies. We run the test twice and then average the scores. If the scores differ by more than 10 percent, we run the test a third time and take the closest two scores for the average.

SPEED: For boot-up and shutdown times, a member of the PC World Test Center hand-times our speed tests. To ensure consistent results in these tests, we repeat each test ten times and then calculate the average for each. We measure startup times from when we press the computer’s power button until the Windows desktop loads (defined for these purposes as when the mouse pointer and the desktop background appear). We measure shutdown times from when we click the Start menu’s Shut Down button until the PC completely powers down and the power lights (if present) go dark.

APPLICATION LAUNCH TIMES: To test application launch times for this article, we used Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007, plus Adobe Photoshop CS4. Photoshop CS4 opened in 32-bit mode on 32-bit systems, and in 64-bit mode on 64-bit PCs. For Word, we launched the program and then opened a two-page document. We used a similar process for Excel and Photoshop, except that we opened a 10-page document in Excel and we opened both a PDF file and a JPEG image in Photoshop CS4. We ran these tests three times per application to ensure consistent results. When measuring app launch times, we began timing from when we clicked the app or document’s icon to when the program was fully loaded and usable.

NETBOOK: On the Lenovo netbook, we compared Windows 7 with Windows XP, since XP is the operating system that most netbook models ship with today. For more on the performance results we achieved with those two Oss.


Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Windows 7: Getting in Touch With Touch

The new OS’s support for touchscreens should encourage a fl urry of third-party applications.

BEFORE WINDOWS 7, touchscreen support wasn’t part of the Windows operating system itself. Instead, all-in-one PC vendors used stopgaps ranging from HP’s elegant TouchSmart suite of software to kludgy touchscreen apps from MSI and Asus. But Microsoft’s new OS supports touch gestures, and PC manufacturers are likely to take advantage of the growing popularity of touchscreen interfaces. By the time Microsoft releases Windows 7, we should see quite a few announcements for multitouch all-inone
PCs and laptops, with more due in 2010. The evolution of touch on Windows 7 owes a lot to Microsoft’s collaboration with touchpad maker Synaptics to standardize on common gestures between touchpad and screen. “The experience on the screen should be the same on the touchpad,” explains Ted Theocheung, a general manager at Synaptics. “We talked with Microsoft to eliminate this Wild West of gestures.” Since 2008 his company’s Synaptics Gesture Suite software has supported gestures on touchpads. Apple introduced gesturebased navigation on its notebooks in 2008. According to Theocheung, the basic gestures used for navigation will be a limited, shared set. “It’s all about helping with basic navigation—pinch for zoom in and out, a gesture to rotate objects and images, and scrolling gestures with two fi ngers to move the screen up and down, or left and right.” Due out this fall, Synaptics‘ Gesture Suite 9.4 will introduce gestures that you can use on both the touchpad and the touchscreen.

The final features of Synaptics’ latest multitouch-capable Gesture Suite software were not available at press time, but you can expect Gesture Suite 9.4 to support a series of three- and four-finger gestures (Apple’s newer laptops support four-fi nger gestures that
relate to system commands). Windows 7 will support scrolling and reverse-scrolling by touch, so you can move two fi ngers down the screen to scroll downward, or move them up the screen to scroll upward. Software developers can map gesture commands from the touchscreen to the touchpad. (Today, the rotation maps to a keystroke command.)

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Windows 7 Much Slimmer, Slightly Faster

Windows 7 is efficient enough to run even on netbooks with puny processors, but it’s only marginally faster than Vista, according to PC World Test Center tests.

WINDOWS VISTA NEVER was particularly speedy in most people’s eyes. Whether it deserved the reputation or not, the word on the street was that Vista was both slow and bloated.

Given that, it’s no wonder that improving performance was one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7. Many reviewers have said that the new operating system feels faster than Vista. In our extensive PC World Test Center evaluations comparing the two, we found an increase in speed, though the overall improvement wasn’t dramatic.

We installed Windows 7 on five computers (two desktop systems, two laptop PCs, and a netbook), and put the systems through our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, which consists of a number of tests that assess a machine’s performance in popular, real-world applications. We also ran timed tests to measure how the two OSs affected boot-up and shutdown times, laptop battery life, and launch times for several common apps. The verdict? Windows 7 makes some performance strides over Vista, though in some cases we saw no clear-cut winner, and in one area Windows 7 lagged considerably behind its predecessor.



WorldBench 6 Test Results
Overall, Windows 7’s performance improvement over Windows Vista is slight—but the important thing is that there is an improvement at all. For a breakdown of some of the performance scores, see the chart below. On our E&C Black Mamba desktop (with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 processor, overclocked to 3.8GHz), Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit earned a WorldBench 6 mark of 144, edging out Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, which scored 139. Here Windows 7 was roughly 3.6 percent faster than Windows Vista. When comparing the two versions of Windows on the HP Pavilion a6710t desktop (with a 2.6GHz Pentium Dual Core E5300 CPU), we tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows 7 Ultimate. Running the 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7, the a6710t saw its WorldBench 6 score increase only a little, from 104 on the former to 106 on the latter. But on our WorldBench 6 tests comparing the 64-bit versions, it enjoyed a somewhat larger boost with Windows 7, going from a score of 96
on Vista to a mark of 103. We saw similar incremental performance improvements on our portable test PCs as well. With the 32-bit versions of Vista Home Premium and Windows 7 Home Premium, our Gateway T-6815 notebook went from a World- Bench 6 score of 58 on the older OS to a result of 64 on the newer one. Our Lenovo IdeaPad Y530 laptop’s World-Bench 6 score improved by only one point with Windows 7 in our comparison of 32-bit Ultimate editions (going from 83 to 84); when we tested the 64-bit editions of the two OSs, we again saw a modest boost, with the Y530’s score increasing from 79 to 83. Windows 7 makes big gains in disk performance, however. For example, in our hard-disk-intensive WorldBench 6 Nero test—in which we create a series of images of an optical disc and then save them—every PC we tested showed an improvement. In our comparison of the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7, the IdeaPad Y530 performed the test twice as quickly with the newer OS. Meanwhile, our Gateway T-6815 was almost two and a half times faster, go ing from a time of 1648 seconds to complete the test on Windows Vista to a time of 667 seconds on Windows 7.
We had noticed a similar speedup on disk-intensive tests in our earlier evaluation of the Windows 7 release candidate; such gains may be due to updated hard-disk drivers under Windows 7. One particular result worth noting: In our testing, the 64-bit versions of
Vista produced poorer disk performance than the 32-bit Vista editions did. With Windows 7, however, Microsoft brought the 64-bit versions’ disk performance more in line with that of the 32-bit versions. That explains the larger World- Bench 6 score advantages over Vista that we saw from 64-bit Windows 7 compared with 32-bit Windows 7.



Boot-Up, Shutdown
Microsoft says that in Windows 7 it changed the way the operating system handles starting up processes when you boot your computer. For some processes and services, Microsoft employs a scheme called trigger-start services. These are system services and processes that under Vista would have started up when you booted your PC, but now kick in only as needed. One example Microsoft gives is Windows 7’s handling of Bluetooth: Instead of launching at system boot, Bluetooth now starts up when you use a Bluetooth
device with your PC. Reducing the number of services that start at boot is supposed to reduce boot-up time. In our boot-up tests using one desktop and one laptop, though, we saw mixed results. On our Gateway T-6815 laptop, Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit) had the advantage, booting up in 39.6 seconds on average. Windows 7 Home Premium (also the 32-bit edition) took slightly longer, averaging 43.6 seconds. On our HP Pavilion a6710t test desktop, the outcome was reversed. The 64-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition booted in 55.2 seconds, whereas Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-bit came out slightly ahead, booting in 48.3 seconds. At first, we couldn’t explain why the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 im - proved the boot-up time over Vista
(on the HP desktop) while the 32-bit edition of the new OS lagged behind its predecessor (on the Gateway laptop). In subsequent testing, however, we discovered that the 32-bit version of Windows 7 exhibited a similar speedup on our HP desktop, going from an average of 54.5 seconds on Vista 32-bit to 47.7 seconds on Windows 7 32-bit. The up shot: Whether Windows 7 will start faster than Vista for you will likely depend on your particular computer’s setup. As for shutdown times, in our tests we observed no significant difference be - tween Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
On our Gateway T-6815 laptop, the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium shut down in 11.72 seconds on average. The 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium took 11.57 seconds to shutdown—an improvement of a mere 0.15 second. The results were just as tight on our HP a6710t desktop. The 64-bit Vista Ultimate shut down in 9.1 seconds on average, while the 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate took 9.0 seconds—a negligible difference of just 0.1 second. To say that such results are too close to call would be an understatement: The difference between the two is so minor that you likely wouldn’t notice it even if you had the OSs running sideby- side on identical hardware. Granted, boot-up and shutdown times aren’t as important today as they once were, now that many people use their computer’s sleep or hibernate mode instead (find.pcworld.com/63670), but in either case you’ll probably find only slight differences, if any.



Battery Life
Another key aspect of performance for Windows 7 is energy efficiency. With the new OS, Microsoft is introducing technology aimed at reducing energy consumption and boosting battery life. For instance, in a procedure that the company calls timer coalescing, Windows 7 will simultaneously perform certain routine tasks that require the processor, which in turn allows the computer to spend more time in lower-power mode. In our tests, the Gateway T-6815 laptop gained an additional 15 minutes of battery life on average with Windows 7. Running under Windows Vista, the Gateway lasted 2 hours, 58 minutes on a single battery charge; under Windows 7 the notebook ran for 3 hours, 12 minutes. Our Lenovo Y530, in contrast, eked out an insignificant 1-minute improvement with Windows 7. Of course, your individual systemperformance gain will depend to a large extent on your setup, but our results were still encouraging. At best, your laptop will gain a few extra minutes of run time; at worst, the battery life will be about the same as it was under Windows Vista. As our tests demonstrate, Windows 7 makes many modest performance strides beyond its predecessor. Our evaluations of the two OSs also uncovered one notable exception, however: Windows 7 is consistently slower than
Vista at launching applications. In every timed application-launch test we performed, Windows 7 took anywhere from a trivial 0.7 second to nearly 7 seconds longer than Vista to open a program. The biggest difference involved the launching of Adobe Photoshop CS4 on our HP Pavilion a6710t desktop running the 64-bit versions of Vista and of Windows 7. Under Windows Vista Ultimate, Photoshop CS4 took 2.7 seconds to open, on average. Under Windows 7 Ultimate, Photoshop launched in 9.6 seconds. In the other application-launching tests, the difference was no greater than 3.7 seconds on average—all in Windows Vista’s favor. Keep in mind, though, that while the percentage difference is sizable, the actual diff erence is only a few seconds. You may notice the slowdown, but it isn’t as big a deal as the numbers might suggest.



A Faster OS
Th ough Windows 7’s performance improvements may not blow anyone away, Microsoft ’s new operating system proved speedier overall with every computer we tested it on. Of course, our tests were limited to fi ve machines out of thousands of possible confi gurations available on the market, so your day-to-day results may vary. Even so, the most important part of our conclusion stands: Windows 7 is faster than Windows Vista. In a world where upgrades are oft en performance downgrades, this may be the biggest Windows 7 feature of all.


Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Monday, December 7, 2009

Is Windows 7 Worth It?

Reading about a new operating system can tell you only so much about it: Aft er all, Windows Vista had far more features than XP, yet fell far short of it in the eyes of many users. To judge an OS accurately, you have to live with it. Over the past ten months, I’ve spent a substantial percentage of my computing life in Windows 7, starting with a preliminary version and culminating in recent weeks with the fi nal Release to Manufacturing edition. I’ve run it on systems ranging from an underpowered Asus EeePC 1000HE netbook to a po tent HP TouchSmart all-in-one. And I’ve used it to do real work, not lab routines. Usually, I’ve run the OS in multiboot confi gurations with Windows Vista and/ or XP, so I’ve had a choice each time I turned the computer on: Should I opt for Windows 7 or an older version of the OS? Th e call has been easy to make, because Win 7 is so pleasant to use. So why wouldn’t you want to run this operating system? Concern over its performance is one logical reason, especially since early versions of Windows Vista managed to turn PCs that ran XP with ease into lethargic underperformers Th e PC World Test Center’s speed benchmarks on fi ve test PCs showed Windows 7 to be faster than Vista, but only by a little; I’ve found it to be reasonably quick on every computer I’ve used it on—even the Asus netbook, once I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a rule of thumb that errs on the side of caution: If your PC’s specs qualify it to run Vista, get Windows 7; if they aren’t, avoid it. Microsoft’s offi cial hardware configuration requirements for Windows 7 are nearly identical to those it recommends
for Windows Vista: a 1-GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of free disk space, and a DirectX 9–compatible graphics device with a WDDM 1.0 or higher driver. Th at’s for the 32-bit version of Windows 7; the 64-bit version of the OS requires a 64-bit CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk space. Fear of incompatible hardware and soft ware is another
understandable reason to be wary of Windows 7. One unfortunate law of operatingsystem
upgrades—which applies equally to Macs and to Windows PCs—is that they will break some systems and applications, especially at first. Under the hood, Windows 7 isn’t radically different from Vista. Th at’s a plus, since it should greatly reduce the volume of difficulties relating to drivers and apps compared to Vista’s bumpy rollout. I have performed a half-dozen Windows 7 upgrades, and most of them went off without a hitch. The gnarliest problem arose when I had to track down a graphics driver for Dell’s XPS
M1330 laptop on my own—Windows 7 installed a generic VGA driver that couldn’t run the Aero user interface, and as a result failed to support new Windows 7 features such as thumbnail views in the Taskbar.

The best way to reduce your odds of running into a showstopping problem with Windows 7 is to bide your time. When the new operating system arrives on October 22, sit back and let the earliest adopters discover the worst snafus. Within a few weeks, Microsoft and
other soft ware and hardware companies will have fi xed most of them, and your chances of a happy migration to Win 7 will be much higher. If you want to be really conservative, hold off on moving to Win 7 until you’re ready to buy a PC that’s designed to run it well. Waiting a bit before making the leap makes sense; waiting forever does not. Microsoft took far too long to come up with a satisfactory replacement for Windows XP. But whether you choose to install Windows 7 on your current systems or get it on the next new PC you buy, you’ll fi nd that it’s the unassuming, thoroughly practical upgrade you’ve been waiting for—fldaws and all.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Feature Face-Off: Windows 7 Meets Snow Leopard

Neither Windows 7 nor Snow Leopard is a game changer in the eternal struggle of Apple vs. Microsoft, but here’s a quick run-down of how the two latest combat units in the OS wars match up.


FILE MANAGEMENT: Both Snow Leopard’s Finder and Windows 7’s Explorer have
quick-search fields in the upper-right corner, path bars, and sidebars for easy access to common locations on your computer.


SMART FOLDERS VS. LIBRARIES: Nothing in Snow Leopard corresponds to Windows’ libraries. OS X offers saved searches (as does Windows 7); but a saved search gathers files based on search criteria, not location, so you can’t create a smart folder containing all the photos from two other folders. On the other hand, you can’t combine Windows 7 libraries with saved search results.


QUICK ACCESS VIA DOCK OR TASKBAR: Mac OS X’s Dock has had features similar to Windows 7’s jump lists for years. Some OS X apps use the Dock’s pop-up menus to display app-specific information and to offer easy access to frequently used commands.


THE DOCK AND STACKS: Snow Leopard has no feature exactly like the jump list’s pinning feature. Instead, Mac owners can use stacks in the Dock to provide quick access to folders and files (drag any folder to the Dock to create a stack).


BOLSTERED OS X INLINE PREVIEWS: To augment Leopard’s preview features, Apple added an enhanced inline preview to the Finder’s icon view in Snow Leopard. When you view a folder that uses icons of 64 by 64 pixels or larger, mousing over your files will display preview/playback controls. Windows 7 has an optional preview pane in Explorer, but its previews are basic.


EXPOSÉ VS. AERO PEEK: Part of Mac OS X since 2003, Exposé lets you view thumbnails of all open windows, or of open windows for one app, with a keystroke or mouse click. Windows 7 will show you thumbnails of open windows for individual apps when you click an app’s taskbar icon; when you mouse over a window’s thumbnail, the Aero Peek feature will hide all other windows. But in Win 7 you can’t see thumbnails of all open windows side-by-side, as in Exposé.


Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Input: Reach Out and Touch Windows 7

The biggest user interface trend since Windows Vista shipped in January 2007 is touchscreen input; Windows 7 is the first version of the OS to offer built-in multitouch support. Windows 7’s new touch features are subtle on a touch-capable PC and invisible
otherwise. Swipe your finger up or down to scroll through document files and Web pages; sweep two fingers back and forth to zoom in and out. Dragging up on icons in the Taskbar reveals Win 7’s new Jump Lists. The Taskbar button that reveals the Windows desktop is a bit bigger on touch PCs for easier use. I installed the final version of Windows 7 and beta touchscreen drivers on an HP TouchSmart all-in-one PC. The touch features worked as advertised. But applications written with touch as the primary interface will determine whether touch becomes useful and ubiquitous. Until they arrive, Windows will continue to feel like an OS built chiefly for use with a keyboard and mouse—which it is. You might have expected Microsoft to reinvent familiar tools such as Paint and Media Player for touch input. But the closest it comes to that is with the Windows 7 Touch Pack, a set of six touchbased programs, including a version of Virtual Earth that you can explore with your finger, and an app that lets you assemble photo collages. The Touch Pack isn’t part of Windows 7, but it will ship with some Win 7 PCs, and it’s a blast to play with. Still, ultimately, the Pack is just a sexy demo of the interface’s potential, not an argument for buying a touch computer today. Third-party soft ware developers won’t start writing touch-centric apps in force until a critical mass of PCs can run them. That should happen in the months following Windows 7’s release, as fi nger-ready machines from Asus, Lenovo, Sony, and other manufacturers join those from HP and Dell. And even then, touch input may not become commonplace on Windows 7 PCs. But if a killer touch app is out there waiting to be written, we may know soon enough.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009

Friday, December 4, 2009

Windows 7 Device Management: Setting the Stage

Windows 7 offers you numerous ways to connect your PC to everything from tiny flash drives to hulking networked laser printers—USB, Wi-Fi, ethernet, slots, and more. Devices and Printers, a new section of the Control Panel, represents connected gadgets with the largest icons I’ve ever seen in an operating system. (When possible, they’re 3D renderings of the device; the one for Sansa’s Clip MP3 player is almost life-size.) More important, the OS introduces Device Stages—hardware-wrangling dashboards tailored to specific items of hardware, and designed by their manufacturers in collaboration with Microsoft. A Device Stage for a digital camera, for instance, may include a battery gauge, a shortcut to Windows’ image downloading tools, and links to online resources such as manuals, support sites, and the manufacturer’s accessory store. You don’t need to rummage through the Control Panel or through Devices and Printers to use a Device Stage— that feature’s functionality is integrated into Windows 7’s new Taskbar. Plug in a device, and it will show up as a Taskbar icon; right-click that icon, and the
Device Stage’s content will at once appear as a Jump List–like menu.

Unfortunately, Device Stages were the one major part of Windows 7 that didn’t work during my hands-on time with the final version of the OS. Earlier prerelease versions of Win 7 contained a handful of Device Stages, but Microsoft disabled them so that hardware manufacturers could finish up final ones before the OS hit store shelves in October. The feature will be a welcome improvement if device manufacturers hop on the bandwagon—and a major disappointment if they don’t. Even if Device Stages take off, most of their benefit may come as you invest in new gizmos—Microsoft says that it’s encouraging manufacturers to create

Device Stages for upcoming products, not existing ones. At least some older products should get Device Stages, though: Canon, for instance, told me that it’s planning to build them for most of its printers. And Microsoft says that when no full-fledged Device Stage is available for a particular item, Windows 7 will still try to give you a more generic and basic one.

Source of Information : PC World November 2009