Boot Windows in Under Ten Seconds
How long does your Windows PC take to boot? Two to three minutes is about average, under two minutes and you are doing really well, one minute or less and it’s either only a couple of days old or you’ve been doing some serious tweaking. So how about a Windows PC that boots in less than ten seconds? Well, Bios makers Phoenix Technologies reckon they can do just that. It’s called Instant Boot Bios and is based on a set of standards called UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and some fancy pre-boot footwork in Windows 7, which apparently involves carrying out around 2 million instructions. Apparently with a bit more work it may be possible to boot a PC in a second or less, which sounds great but the question that has to be asked, is when it all goes wrong – as it inevitably will — how on earth will you be able to get to the BIOS menu?
Display Your Disks
For most Windows PC users the only insight into what they have on what’s stored on their hard drive is clunky old Windows Explorer. True, it tells you how much space a file or folder occupies, but what you really need is the big picture, a way of telling, at a glance, which files are taking up the space, and how much you have left. I’ve recommended a number of graphical disc usage utilities over the years but this one, called OverDIsk is arguably the best looking. Key features include a good assortment of disc and file statistics as you hover your mouse, you can drill down into any folder and sub-folder by clicking on it and the window is magically resizable It’s still in beta form and the author admits there’s a couple of bugs that needs sorting but they appear to be a very low level and it performed flawlessly on my test PCs but as usual, you download and this program entirely at your own risk
Windows Live Essentials for Windows 7
On the path to Wave 3, the Windows Live collection of services and applications debuted into Beta earlier this year, and has been crawling toward RTW ever since. As of December 15, 2008, Windows Live made yet another step forward, but still managed not to lose the Beta tag. At the start of this week, Microsoft introduced the Windows Live Essentials Beta Refresh. A number of Windows Live applications, including the company’s instant messaging, email, and photo viewer clients are now available for download as Beta Refresh builds.
“About three months ago, we released public betas of the Windows Live Essentials – our suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety,” a member of the Windows Live team revealed. “Since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback and we’ve been using that information to update these programs. We’re getting very close to the final release. But before we get there, we’re refreshing the beta versions one more time, to make sure we’ve ironed out all the kinks.” 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
Mac Owners Told ‘Don’t Panic’
Security specialists Sophos are doing a fine impression of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones with its latest advice to Apple Mac users, which is ‘Don’t Panic’. This follows the discovery of a Trojan horse web popup that targets OS X users, called Troj/MacSwp-B or ‘Imunizator’. Windows PC owners will be familiar with the trick it plays, it purports to be a security program checking for problems, which needless to say it finds, it then tries to frighten Mac users into paying out for bogus software. Read more
DivX Goes Mobile
DivX, the super-efficient compression technology and codec that brings high quality video to your PC and DVD player is about to make an appearance on your mobile phone. For phones that are not DivX certified (there’s a list of certified phones on the website) simply download the DivX Mobile Player onto your Windows mobile device, Windows PC or Symbian phone and use it to convert videos to DivX format and transfer and play movies on your phone. There’s a simple to follow installation guide covering a range of devices and systems. It’s still in beta form but by all accounts it is stable and works well. While you are at it you can browse a beta version of a video content website on your phone at mm.divx.com.
