20 things you didn't know about Windows XP

You've read the reviews and digested the key feature enhancements and operational changes. Now it's time to delve a bit deeper and uncover some of Windows XP's secrets.

1. It boasts how long it can stay up. Whereas previous versions of Windows were coy about how long they went between boots, XP is positively proud of its stamina. Go to the Command Prompt in the Accessories menu from the All Programs start button option, and then type 'systeminfo'. The computer will produce a lot of useful info, including the uptime. If you want to keep these, type 'systeminfo > info.txt'. This creates a file called info.txt you can look at later with Notepad. (Professional Edition only).

2. You can delete files immediately, without having them move to the Recycle Bin first. Go to the Start menu, select Run... and type 'gpedit.msc'; then select User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer and find the Do not move deleted files to the Recycle Bin setting. Set it. Poking around in gpedit will reveal a great many interface and system options, but take care -- some may stop your computer behaving as you wish. (Professional Edition only).

3. You can lock your XP workstation with two clicks of the mouse. Create a new shortcut on your desktop using a right mouse click, and enter 'rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation' in the location field. Give the shortcut a name you like. That's it -- just double click on it and your computer will be locked. And if that's not easy enough, Windows key + L will do the same.

4. XP hides some system software you might want to remove, such as Windows Messenger, but you can tickle it and make it disgorge everything. Using Notepad or Edit, edit the text file /windows/inf/sysoc.inf, search for the word 'hide' and remove it. You can then go to the Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel, select Add/Remove Windows Components and there will be your prey, exposed and vulnerable.

5. For those skilled in the art of DOS batch files, XP has a number of interesting new commands. These include 'eventcreate' and 'eventtriggers' for creating and watching system events, 'typeperf' for monitoring performance of various subsystems, and 'schtasks' for handling scheduled tasks. As usual, typing the command name followed by /? will give a list of options -- they're all far too baroque to go into here.

6. XP has IP version 6 support -- the next generation of IP. Unfortunately this is more than your ISP has, so you can only experiment with this on your LAN. Type 'ipv6 install' into Run... (it's OK, it won't ruin your existing network setup) and then 'ipv6 /?' at the command line to find out more. If you don't know what IPv6 is, don't worry and don't bother.

7. You can at last get rid of tasks on the computer from the command line by using 'taskkill /pid' and the task number, or just 'tskill' and the process number. Find that out by typing 'tasklist', which will also tell you a lot about what's going on in your system.

8. XP will treat Zip files like folders, which is nice if you've got a fast machine. On slower machines, you can make XP leave zip files well alone by typing 'regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll' at the command line. If you change your mind later, you can put things back as they were by typing 'regsvr32 zipfldr.dll'.

9. XP has ClearType -- Microsoft's anti-aliasing font display technology -- but doesn't have it enabled by default. It's well worth trying, especially if you were there for DOS and all those years of staring at a screen have given you the eyes of an astigmatic bat. To enable ClearType, right click on the desktop, select Properties, Appearance, Effects, select ClearType from the second drop-down menu and enable the selection. Expect best results on laptop displays. If you want to use ClearType on the Welcome login screen as well, set the registry entry HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop/FontSmoothingType to 2.

10. You can use Remote Assistance to help a friend who's using network address translation (NAT) on a home network, but not automatically. Get your pal to email you a Remote Assistance invitation and edit the file. Under the RCTICKET attribute will be a NAT IP address, like 192.168.1.10. Replace this with your chum's real IP address -- they can find this out by going to www.whatismyip.com -- and get them to make sure that they've got port 3389 open on their firewall and forwarded to the errant computer.

11. You can run a program as a different user without logging out and back in again. Right click the icon, select Run As... and enter the user name and password you want to use. This only applies for that run. The trick is particularly useful if you need to have administrative permissions to install a program, which many require. Note that you can have some fun by running programs multiple times on the same system as different users, but this can have unforeseen effects.

12. Windows XP can be very insistent about you checking for auto updates, registering a Passport, using Windows Messenger and so on. After a while, the nagging goes away, but if you feel you might slip the bonds of sanity before that point, run Regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/Advanced and create a DWORD value called EnableBalloonTips with a value of 0.

13. You can start up without needing to enter a user name or password. Select Run... from the start menu and type 'control userpasswords2', which will open the user accounts application. On the Users tab, clear the box for Users Must Enter A User Name And Password To Use This Computer, and click on OK. An Automatically Log On dialog box will appear; enter the user name and password for the account you want to use.

14. Internet Explorer 6 will automatically delete temporary files, but only if you tell it to. Start the browser, select Tools / Internet Options... and Advanced, go down to the Security area and check the box to Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed.

15. XP comes with a free Network Activity Light, just in case you can't see the LEDs twinkle on your network card. Right click on My Network Places on the desktop, then select Properties. Right click on the description for your LAN or dial-up connection, select Properties, then check the Show icon in notification area when connected box. You'll now see a tiny network icon on the right of your task bar that glimmers nicely during network traffic.

16. The Start Menu can be leisurely when it decides to appear, but you can speed things along by changing the registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop/MenuShowDelay from the default 400 to something a little snappier. Like 0.

17. You can rename loads of files at once in Windows Explorer. Highlight a set of files in a window, then right click on one and rename it. All the other files will be renamed to that name, with individual numbers in brackets to distinguish them. Also, in a folder you can arrange icons in alphabetised groups by View, Arrange Icon By... Show In Groups.

18. Windows Media Player will display the cover art for albums as it plays the tracks -- if it found the picture on the Internet when you copied the tracks from the CD. If it didn't, or if you have lots of pre-WMP music files, you can put your own copy of the cover art in the same directory as the tracks. Just call it folder.jpg and Windows Media Player will pick it up and display it.

19. Windows key + Break brings up the System Properties dialogue box; Windows key + D brings up the desktop; Windows key + Tab moves through the taskbar buttons.

20. The next release of Windows XP, codenamed Longhorn, is due out late next year or early 2003 and won't be much to write home about. The next big release is codenamed Blackcomb and will be out in 2003/2004.

Read the Original Article

Google Chrome Beta - At Last......

At last, its here. The browser I have been waiting for ages. The browser from Google. Google Chrome. I had heard a lot about it. Yesterday, I was surprised to see the news of its launch at the official Google Blog. After seeing and using all the other products from Google, I was sure this one would also be one of its kind. I went forward and downloaded it from the Google Chrome site.

Interface & Appearance

The interface looked quite simple. No fancy animations or other such affect. Just a basic skin, with the standard browser buttons. Ofcourse, like all other browser, it too has a tabbed structure. That is one of the best thing I like about the modern browsers. No menubars are available. All the menu items are stacked in to the last 2 buttons to the right of the address bar. Most of the menu items are the standard ones found in any other browser. So, I am not going deep into it.

The tab structure does have a very unique feature not found in any other browser. You can simply drag a tab out of the browser to create a new window containing that page. Infact, dragging tabs between various open windows of Google Chrome is a breeze.

Speed & Memory Usage

At first use itself, I felt it had more speed that all the other browsers I used (Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3, Opera 9, Flock 2,...). All pages seem to load quickly. Ofcourse, my calculations could be wrong, considering the fact that, my Firefox and Flock browser are clogged with dozens of Add-ons installed. Next, I decided to check the memory and CPU usage using Prcoess Explorer. Here, I got a real surprise. I had around 7 chrome.exe running in my system. After a bit of study, I understood the fact that, for each tab you open in the browser, a different EXE is launced. In simple worlds, if you have 10 tabs open in the browser, it is (i assume) equivalent to running 10 instances of the browser. I am not sure about the implication of this on the system resources over time.

Webpage Compatibility

I didnt have much problem loading most websites. But, many Ajax based sites like Hotmail are not likely to work. I was surprised when the Yahoo! Mail's Ajax interface did work in the browser. The explanation is simple, Google Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine used by a few other browsers such as Apple's Saffari. Gmail worked perfectly with the browser. Ofcourse, no surprise there, what else would you expect from a browser created by Google itself.

Security & Stability

From what I have heard, it seems Security is one of the main focus of Google Chrome. Infact, I guess this is the reason why each page is run as a different process. Each process runs like a sandbox with very limited access to the outside world. The browser also maintains two seperate updated blacklist (one for phishing and the other for malware).

Stability is also one important part of the browser. Most users love to have lots of webpages open and running. Here again, the benefit of running each webpage in a seperate process is that, if a webpage gets crashed, it would not affect the other open pages. To make things even better, it also has an integrated taskbar that displays all the open page instance of the browser. It also displays Memory Usage and CPU usage for each seperate page.

Few More

The browser does have a few other unique features integrated into it. Google Gears is one of them. It is a most promising standard from Google to support Off-line storage of data for supported websites. The best use of this is for the various web applications being created that need not have a server to run, but will need to store various data on the local system. Google Chrome also has a "Create Application Shortcuts" used to create shortcut for your commonly used Web-application on the Desktop, Quick Launch, or Start Menu. When run in this mode, the application will not display tabs or address bar. In effect, you get a full-screen display of the web-application.

Read Original Review At: SoftReview.co.cc

Toshiba launches 32GB flash for PMPs and Phones

Cellphones, PMPs and other compact portable devices may soon be slimming down even further, as Toshiba announce their latest 32GB flash module. Consisting of eight 4GB NAND chips, the clever part is all in the sizing: through using 43nm manufacturing processes this new chip takes up just half of the space its predecessor requires.

Not only that, but Toshiba have added a new memory controller - responsible for data traffic management - that makes the chipset backward compatible with previous generation hardware. That means shorter development times, as OEMs aren't required to redesign to take advantage of the memory.

Although Toshiba - like many suppliers - will not confirm which manufacturers use its memory chips, they are known to have a working relationship with Apple. There's a fair chance the new 32GB chip could appear in a larger-capacity iPhone at some point in the future, with it doubling up to permit a 64GB iPod Touch no bigger than the existing 32GB model.

Toshiba will begin releasing the memory to suppliers in September, with bulk production this Fall. Expect commercially-available products in the following quarter.

New Software Review Blog

Considering the large number of Software available for reviewing, I have decided to branch out the software review section as a separate blog. This blog is available at:

http://softreview.co.cc/

So, check it out, and subscribe to it's RSS feeds to get info about various kinds of software.

Software Reviews of major sites would still be available on this blog. So, stay tuned.

Flock Browser - The Social Web Browser

Most users have hardly heard about this browser. But, believe it or not, the community of this browser is quiet big and active. Basically, it is an Open Source browser branched out from the most popular open source browser "Mozilla Firefox". This means that, Flock directly posses all the abilities of Firefox. Most of the extensions of Firefox are compatible with Flock. Any specific page written to support "Only Firefox" will work in Flock. In short, it can do all that Firefox can do.

Why Flock when it is a copy of Firefox?

Flock can be considered to be FireFox on steroids. To a newbie, the interface and options would appear to be a copy of Firefox. But, a few extra buttons are visible. The real power reside behind these buttons.

Social Networking is the hot stuff on the net right now. Blogs, Social Communities, Videos, etc. Flock is a "Social Browser". This means, it has been made from "ground up" to support many popular social networking sites and make social networking much easier.

At the time of writing this Blog, the Version 2 Beta 2 of this browser supports Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, Xanga, Self-Hosted Blog, del.ico.us, Magnolia, AOL Mail, GMail, and Yahoo! Mail. Now that is a huge list.

Making Blogging Easier

Are you into blogging? If yes, Flock is the browser for you. It is the only browser with in-build Blog Editor. The blog editor is pretty much perfect, with option to insert pictures, edit tags and edit HTML. You can post directly to most of the popular Blog services from within the editor. It also comes with a Preview pane to see a Preview of your Blog.

The picture uploader module is integrated into the Blog Editor window. So, if you paste a picture or if you paste a picture file, the file will be uploaded to a Picture Sharing Site (Picasa, Photobucket or Piczo) and the link will be integrated into the blog.

It does not end there. Most big pictures and videos you see on websites will have a flock toolbar attached. This toolbar will have option to "Blog" the pictures. Clicking this brings up the Blog Editor with the picture attached. You can also drag pictures from any site, into the Blog Editor window.

Photo Uploader

The Photo Uploader is a basic, but quiet useful utility, which helps batch upload of pictures to online web albums on Picasa, Photobucket or Piczo. The uploader has inbuilt options for resizing and cropping pictures.

Bookmark Integration

Tagged bookmarking has become quiet popular with the advent of sites such as del.ico.us . For most browsers, there exist extensions and links to Bookmark a given page in these online bookmarking services. Flock too supports bookmarking to del.ico.us and Magnolia (inbuilt). What sets it apart is that, it also integrates your online bookmarks into the Favorites menu of the browser, making it easier for accessing the bookmarks from any place.

People

Are you an extensive user of online social networking sites? Flock integrates with many Social Networking sites, Facebook, Flick, Pownce, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, etc. Integration with other social networking sites such as Orkut are still pending. The sections helps in direct media sharing from within the browser.

Media Bar

Media Bar is a small strip that appears across the top of the tabs. It can show picutres from your online photo albums, or videos from your favorite video sharing site.

RSS and Mail Integration

Like all modern browser, it too has a good RSS Integratoin.

It can also integrate with your online mail provider such as Gmail, Yahoo! or AOL and check for mail regularly. Also, email links in webpages can be redirected to these online mail sites.

Packing Up.....

Overall, Flock is a very innovative browser. I recommend that you give it a try. It should please you (atleast for a while). The memory usage is also quet impressive (considering the heavy loaded features it support).

OpenDNS

For those who don't know what a DNS is, all sites on the internet are actually server systems connected to the internet with an IP address. A DNS is what converts the domain names we enter into the IP address of the server. Usually, when we connect to the internet (Dial-up, DSL, etc.), our service provider returns a DNS server. The usual problems with DNS is that, they can sometimes go down even if the internet connection is fine. Also, when there are typos in the entered domain, the DNS is not intelligent enough to redirect you to the correct site.

OpenDNS is a free DNS provider. They have been around from 2006. They run on a geographically distributed servers. Thus, there are very little chance of the DNS server going down. Also, from my experience, they are really hi-speed owing to the fact that many DNS domains are actually cached well.

It is also quiet intelligent. If there are typos when you enter the domain, they are intelligent enough to forward you to the correct site most times. For example, if you enter google.om instead of google.com, the server will automatically redirect you to google.com .

One question that remains is, what does the company get by providing free DNS service? Well, when you enter a domain that is not accessible, normal DNS actually fires an error. But in the case of OpenDNS, you are forwarded to their search page containing advertisement links. The revenue they gain from these links are used to sustain the server.

To use OpenDNS, simply point your change the DNS settings of your connection to:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

The below button would indicate weather you are currently using OpenDNS or not:

Edit Plus

This is one simple text editor I love the most. The main plus point of this software is that, with all those complex features it support, it is still a very fast and simple text editor.

From a developer's point of view, it supports color coding of: HTML, ASP, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Java, JSP, JavaScript, VBScript, CSS, XML, C# and SQL. To support more languages, you can download or write your own syntax file. The syntax file structure is very simple.

Features

• Syntax Highlighting support for: HTML, ASP, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Java, JSP, JavaScript, VBScript, CSS, XML, C# and SQL.
• Tabbed structure when showing multiple files.
• Ability to capture outputs from external Console Applications (e.g. It can capture outputs from a Java or C++ compiler and show it within the interface.
• Regular Expression - The Regular Expression supported by the Find & Replace of this software is probably the best I have seen in any software.
• FTP - Ability to open and upload directly from an FTP server
• Has many text formatting features like: Trim Trailing Spaces, Convert Tabs to Spaces and Vice Verse, Join and Split lines, Increase and Decrease Indent, Line Comment and Uncomment, etc.
• Column Selection - This is probably the only Windows Application I have seen that supports column selection. A cool feature if you want to delete the starting few character(s) of all lines in a file.
• Integrated Browser - Many software support Integration of Internet Explorer. So, nothing new here.

Overall, this is a great utility for developers. Of course, it cant replace other major development environments. But still, this can be a handy utility in your toolbox.

Software Reviews

I love downloading and trying out softwares. It is one of my major pass times. Download and install softwares, use it for the trial period, and the uninstall the software. Here I will be posting my reviews about the various softwares I have tested. Hope you guys will like it.

Free Domain Names...........

Want to create your own presence on the internet? But cant afford heavy charges domain? Get a cool CO.CC domain:

Welcome (സ്വാഗതം)........

Hi,

I am Sujith Sreedhar, from India. My greatest passion is Web Programming.