Microsoft Blue Track Says Goodbye to Laser

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 More »

USB 3.0 in the Pipeline

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 More »

Space Invader

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.

Increase Your Torrent Speed

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 More »

Is Ctfmon-Exe Spyware?

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 More »

Live Season for FIFA 2009

EA Sports has recently announced that it plans to introduce a new update system, called Adidas Live Season, which should bring the characteristics of the in-game players in line with those of real life players. The service will have a subscription price which is not yet determined and will cover the most important leagues present in FIFA 2009.

It seems that the Live Season service will gather player data as it is provided by the same soccer experts who now determine the initial stats of the players. They will now watch the players perform on the pitch and rate their appearances as being bad, poor, neutral, good or excellent. Based on the centralized ratings, the attributes will be modified by the update service from EA Sports. Read More »

NVIDIA’s Secret Weapon: 40nm GPUs

According to the most recent details regarding NVIDIA’s upcoming graphics products, the Santa Clara-based chip maker is planning to release its very first 40nm GPUs, even before competitor AMD has a chance of delivering its own 40nm-based solutions. Apparently, NVIDIA will step up to the next-generation TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 40G process technology with the introduction of new mobile chips, codenamed N10x.

At this point in time, there are no details regarding availability and official release date but, according to VR-Zone, NVIDIA will try to be the first to offer a 40nm graphics card, thus increasing its chances of gaining the number one spot in the graphics card market. Read More »

Download Zune theme with colour variations

Zune theme always gives that classic windows xp feel but it never offers any customization in terms of colors. Some people might get bored by the orange coloured start menu in the traditional zune theme by Microsoft

Today, we have come with some beautiful colour variations in the zune theme by a developer Usman Akhtar named Zune Usmanistan

The Zune Usmanistan theme is like an extended version of the original zune theme released by Microsoft, you can change the orange colour start menu to many colours under the ‘Colour Scheme‘ menu on the ‘Appearance’ tab, in ‘Display Properties‘. Read More »

How to type faster?

Type a lot! Yup, there is no way you can type faster if you not punching the keyboard everyday.

When I was young, I want to type faster like the person in a movie that I watched. It would be very cool when you can type faster and don’t have to see the keyboard while you typing. Then, I thought I need a typing software to practice but that software does not really help me. I make a lot of errors if I use the typing technique. But in case you want to try the software, here is the link.

Then, after few years, I start blogging. From there, I type a lot because everyday I have new ideas for my blog. I did some researches and type what I have found. Read More »

Keeping Tabs on Windows Explorer

As you know Windows Explorer (aka My Computer, Explorer etc.) lets you see what’s stored on your computer, move files around and so on, and it works reasonably well, but it could be so much better.

Over the years we’ve looked at several Explorer alternatives, but this one, called Explorer ++ is definitely one of the best. It does pretty well everything standard Windows Explorer does but its main claim to fame is a multi-tab display, so you can quickly switch between folders. There’s also a file details and thumbnail preview pane at the bottom (it has all of the usual Explorer type ‘Views’ as well), Permanent file delete, it’s highly customisable and it supports advanced operations, like file merging and splitting. Read More »