Microsoft is increasing the capacity offered by its storage service in the Cloud fivefold. This means that users of Windows Live SkyDrive will be able to enjoy no less than 25GB of free online storage. The move comes as a natural evolution of the Windows Live suite of services and applications towards the full implementation of Wave 3. Microsoft indicates that it is currently hammering away at the finishing touches for Windows Live SkyDrive Wave 3, and offers users a taste of what it is in store for them.
“You asked us to make it easier to organize and download your files, so we’re answering you with four key new features to address your needs: download photos directed to your to Windows Live Photo Gallery; download as a .zip file. Read the rest of this entry »
Users of AVG 7.5 and 8.0 should be on the alert for a false positive Trojan virus warning after downloading an update on November 11th. It concerns the legitimate Windows system file user32.dll, which AVG wrongly identifies as infected and advises that it should be deleted. Don’t do it!
If you do Windows will not load after a reboot. Apparently it only affects the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP and AVG has published a rescue plan. It involves running the XP Recovery console, which means you need an installation disc. Of course not all PCs come with one, in which case AVG has come up with a downloadable utility that should fix the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft already proved that on the same system configuration Windows 7 would boot a few seconds faster than Windows Vista. But fact is that the evolution from Vista to Windows 7 is not limited to the boosted startup times. In this context, at the Windows hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Mike Angiulo, General Manager, Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem Team for Microsoft, and Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of the Core Operating System Division, revealed Windows 7’s superiority compared to Vista also in terms of memory usage and graphics performance.
“Once we’re even booted we’ve done a lot to improve the memory usage, and the graphics performance. This graph that you see on the screen here shows how in Vista we scale linearly with the number of open windows, so that’s the amount of memory that’s consumed by the system as you open more Windows. Read the rest of this entry »
Windows has a number of diagnostic and system monitoring tools built in but this one, called System Explorer puts everything you need to know about your computer, and what’s it doing now, and in the past, into one very convenient and easy to use package. Here’s just a taster of what it can do. You can view information about running processes, startups, Explorer, IE Add-ons, uninstallers, drivers, services, connections and open files. You can check which programs and files were opened, and when, take snapshots of your Registry and later compare them if something has gone wrong to see what’s changed. It uses fewer resources than the Windows utilities and there’s even a portable version that you can run from a pen drive. Try it, get to know it and one day it could save you a lot of time and trouble if your PC throws a wobbly…
Microsoft has been busy showing journalists some interesting bits of Windows 7, which you can expect to see on a new PC near you sometime in 2010 or 11, probably… Anyway, the OS still very much in its early stages of development is now being made available to developers to tinker with. Most of the new features have been heavily trailed so there’s no big surprises but the Touch screen stuff does look very impressive. It’s all very Minority Report, with lots of finger wiggling and hand movements, making things whizz around the screen, and pictures twist, tumble, enlarge and reduce, the only thing it doesn’t do is clean off the sticky finger marks afterwards… Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft is increasing the capacity offered by its storage service in the Cloud fivefold. This means that users of Windows Live SkyDrive will be able to enjoy no less than 25GB of free online storage. The move comes as a natural evolution of the Windows Live suite of services and applications towards the full implementation of Wave 3. Microsoft indicates that it is currently hammering away at the finishing touches for Windows Live SkyDrive Wave 3, and offers users a taste of what it is in store for them.
