300 Words into replying to some comments made by Rarst on my post yesterday about Microsoft I decided I may as well publish it like so as a new post… that’s what happens when you have the power of authorship =P
No I don’t want to make this too serious and I hope I don’t seem like I’m ranting, I just felt that since Rarst’s views are probably shared by a few of you we could open up the discussion even more.
Microsoft released a new version of Windows Search on Windows Update and made it a recommended update for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 users. Windows Search 4.0 introduces a wealth of new features and improvements over the previous version including the automatic indexing of shared folders, improvements in indexing online e-mail as well as in the performance and stability of the indexer.
Read more »KatMouse is a simple software that can change the way Windows NT handles scrolling with the mouse wheel. It basically provides a way to customize the way the scroll wheel is utilized in Windows and adds scrolling support even in applications that seem to be somewhat resistant.
Read more »The email client Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 has been released just a few hours ago and is now available for download on the official Get Thunderbird website but also through automatic updates in the mail client. I had to manually selected Help > Check for Updates to install the new version this way but most users will probably be notified about the update in Thunderbird.
Read more »The well respected German website Heise Online has fueled speculations about a backdoor that is implemented in the Voice over IP software Skype. According to Heise the Austrian interior minister revealed at a conference with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services that they were able to listen to Skype conversations which was confirmed to Heise by several attendees of the conference.
Read more »Some of you will remember my post a little while back about favorite music players. For most people on Linux, Amarok rules hands down. In fact, Amarok has gained a reputation as ‘the player’ and made a lot of Windows users sit up and take notice, myself included.
The developers at Amarok have been working hard over the months to put forth a new version of the software. The result is Amarok 2.0. The new version is radically different from the previous version and includes a whole new bunch of features.
The file hoster Rapidshare seems to have seen a huge increase in premium users, those users that pay for the service to receive a faster transfer rate and other comfort functions, since they introduced the new system that saw a removal of the captchas but a introduction of a speed limit for guest users.
Read more »I’ve previously written about Librarything, a book cataloging service, and now here I am again with another similar service, Goodreads. This service is very similar, but there are a few features which I like more here, making this a better solution for me.
Read more »Amazon Watcher is a handy application to monitor availability and changes of items at the six Amazon stores. Users can feed Amazon Watcher with full urls to Amazon items, their ASIN or ISBN-10. The product will then be loaded into the application with a preview image if available and the user can configure Amazon Watcher to react if the item is in stock or if the price of it falls below a selected level.
Read more »Snippy is a portable application for Windows XP and previous versions of Windows if they have the redistributable version of GDI+ installed that brings an interesting feature to the table of screenshot applications. My favorite screenshot application MWSnap supports only screenshots that are rectangular and I encountered several situations in the past where I had to include lots of whitespace in the screenshot to include all the relevant areas in the image.
Read more »Google released a new service today called Google Knol, a service aimed to take on Wikipedia and in my case will definitely beat it after a while, although there are some differences which I think will make both services live on.
Read more »UnDLL is a specific application for Windows 2000 and Windows XP that can completely remove Dynamic Link Libraries (Dlls) that are currently in use in Windows. This comes in very handy if the computer has been infected by an aggressive virus, trojan or other malicious software but also any other situation where a malicious dll has to be removed from the system.
Read more »What a week. This week has seen so many updates, it took almost twice as long to compile the list than last week. Several popular applications have been updated this week including such heavyweight ones like Autoruns, Opera, uTorrent and Flock.
It definitely was an exciting week and I had to update lots of the installed applications on my Windows XP system.
The update of this week award goes to my favorite desktop search application Locate32. I just like it that much and think that it is definitely one of the most efficient ways to search for files and contents in Windows.
Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Outlook 2007 users can use Microsoft Office Outlook Connector to access and manage their Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail accounts directly in Microsoft Outlook including emails, calendar and the address book,
Read more »Well I don’t think I’ve ever had so many responses as I have to these Posts on Windows Vista =) But obviously it’s a controversial subject.
Now I realise that many of the things I said where good about Vista can be backported or substituted into XP. There are freeware alternatives to everything really, and Microsoft has allowed many things intended for Vista alone to be installed into Vista.
While this is true, I don’t think it makes for a killer argument on why we should stick with XP. As Thinker said:
Okay the Solid State Drive that I ordered on Sunday arrived today and I thought it would be nice to give everyone the chance to ask questions about it and point to tests that they would like me to run to see how the SSD performs in a normal computer environment in comparison to those lab tests that you see the results of all the time.
Read more »It was the big talk two month ago when British ISP Virgin Media send out it’s first warning letters to users they suspected to be sharing files online that they did not have the rights of. Yesterday the news hit the Internet websites that six major Internet Service Providers from the United Kingdom have agreed to implement a set of measures against file sharing in the United Kingdom.
Read more »The default way to install new fonts in Windows (except for Windows Vista) is to click on the Font entry in the Windows Control Panel and to select Install New Font from the File menu. That’s not very handy especially if you install fonts regularly on the system.
Click Font is a small Open Source application that provides users with a better way to install fonts in Windows. The software adds an Install Font entry to the right-click menu when specific font related file extensions are selected.
