Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
Google’s newly launched web browser Chrome is all set to shake the web browser industry. On the first look and it looks like the later the better quote fits up for Google Chrome. Chrome has borrowed and acquired most of the features from Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer to emerge as a hybrid and fast browser.
You can clearly see in the screen shot below that Google Chrome has the dials feature which has been taken up from Opera. Another thing by launching its own web browser by Google means a complete dominance over the Internet. Google has it own search engine, its own social network etc. and at last its own browser Chrome to integrate all its services at one place. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever lost a file or forgotten where you’ve put it on your hard drive? Of course you have, we’ve all done it, and if you’re lucky you may even have found it by searching through folders, or using the Windows Search facility. The one in Vista is actually quite good, but even that won’t be able help you if you can’t remember what the file was called.
Here’s something else to try, it’s called Seeker and in addition to searching for files by all or part of the name, it also looks inside files, for keywords or phrases. Again it’s something Windows can do, but this search tool is fast, very fast in fact, thanks to a powerful algorithm and an unusually flexible range of search criteria. 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.
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 »
Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
