Although Microsoft is not breathing a single word in relation to an event it has cooking for September 9, 2008, under the slogan “Say Goodbye to Laser,” leaks from its partners are managing to paint a more complete picture. As it has been speculated, the new technology, which will be unveiled in the second week of the coming month, has been incorporated in a mouse. The Microsoft Blue Track mouse, featured in the adjacent images, reportedly sports a LED in combination with wide angle lenses, instead of a laser diode. In this context, despite the attempt to build anticipation with consumers, the Blue Track mouse is by no means reinventing the wheel. Read the rest of this entry »
Now contain yourself! News that Intel has released the final draft specification for USB 3.0 has been sending ripples of excitement throughout the PC industry. You too will have to come to terms with a whole load of new jargon if you want to stay ahead of the game. Provisionally dubbed ‘SuperSpeed USB’ the big selling point is that data transfer speeds are up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0, which means a whopping 5 Gigabits per second. That’s really fast, quick enough to whizz a DVD from one place to another in just a few seconds and it’s going to make things like data transfer from things like MP3 players, cameras and storage devices virtually instantaneous. Plugs and sockets look superficially similar, and it should be backwards compatible but USB 3.0 sockets have an extra 5 contacts, set behind the front five contacts and these are the ones that carry the SuperSpeed data. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the years we’ve looked at several hard disc file viewers, that show in an easy to visualise way, what’s on your drive and how much space it is using, and I still use SpaceMonger, one of the first and still one of the best, but there’s a new kid on the block. It’s called FosiX, it’s also free and it displays the contents of your drive as a bar or pie char, in 2D or 3D. Like its rivals, you can click on the bars or segments to drill down through folders and see what’s inside and using up all the space but here’s the good bit. It comes with a number of extra tools, basically shortcuts to existing Windows functions, for clearing the browser cache and history, remove temporary files and run Windows defrag. SpaceMonger still gets my vote for simplicity but this one is well worth trying and if nothing else, those cleanup tools should come in handy.
This PDF explains how to get up and running with bit torrent technology efficiently. It shows how to battle ISPs throttling bit torrent speed and other ways to get the best optimization of your bandwidth.
This is a step by step tutorial guide on setting up uTorrent. It details all the steps from downloading to optimizing your settings. Many people have used Bit Torrent and think they are running with optimized settings, even then, it is advised to read through this guide and see what you may have missed to better optimize your settings. Read the rest of this entry »
In the early days of Windows PCs text inputting was a reasonably simple affair, with a keyboard used to enter text, in American English, which is then displayed on the monitor. With the arrival of new technologies, such as speech-to-text, and handwriting-to-text, conversion, and with the new opportunities of the globalized technology market requiring the more advanced support of Asian languages by existing technology, Microsoft beefed up its advanced text processing functionality with the Ctfmon.exe software component.
The process Ctfmon.exe is not spyware and is actually used by the Microsoft Office suite of applications to launch both the Microsoft Office XP Language bar and the Alternative User Input Text Processor. The Language bar is an important part of Microsoft’s Text Services Framework [TSF] and operates as the user interface for the TSF. Although it comes preinstalled, with Windows XP and Vista, it is also available to be downloaded for the older versions of windows. Read the rest of this entry »
Although Microsoft is not breathing a single word in relation to an event it has cooking for September 9, 2008, under the slogan “Say Goodbye to Laser,” leaks from its partners are managing to paint a more complete picture. As it has been speculated, the new technology, which will be unveiled in the second week of the coming month, has been incorporated in a mouse. The Microsoft Blue Track mouse, featured in the adjacent images, reportedly sports a LED in combination with wide angle lenses, instead of a laser diode. In this context, despite the attempt to build anticipation with consumers, the Blue Track mouse is by no means reinventing the wheel. Read the rest of this entry »
