Archive for the ‘windows’ Category

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Am I The Only One…

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

…who thinks there is something not quite right about awarding prizes for best customer testimonials?  Isn’t this tantamount to bribery?  It’s like – “hey, write a really good piece about our product, and we’ll reward you with a nice prize of some value“.  I’m referring to Microsoft Malaysia’s decision to award an HTC HD2 Windows Mobile smartphone, worth a recommended retail price (RRP) of RM 2899 to a lucky “winner” every week, for testing out Microsoft’s upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 product, and writing an excellent testimonial on their experience.

So, I guess the gist of it is that become a fanboy and stand to win a prize.  Submit an idea for improvement by saying a feature sucks, and stand to win nothing.  Nice.

And if these people are gushing about a product currently in beta, and downloadable for free, why not award them a free copy of Microsoft Office 2010 when it becomes commercially available?  Would that not be a better way of rewarding people – by giving them something that they have thoroughly enjoyed using?  Unless that wasn’t the point in the first place.  You decide.

Source, and the Star’s picked up on it as well.

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Posted in competition, software, windows | 16 Comments »

Watching High Definition Videos On Your Netbook

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

If it’s one thing that Intel Atom based netbooks cannot do properly, it’s playing back high definition (HD) video.  The PCPro website of the UK may just have the solution for you, though – it involves a combination of an open source media player, called the “Media Player Classic Home Cinema”, and a codec -CoreAVC – to decode the high compression used HD videos, typically the AVC and H264 codecs.  Sadly, CoreAVC is not free, so you have to expect to shell out some money to make this combination work.

Click here for the instructions.  Surprisingly, HD playback using this combination does not kill the battery life at all – in fact, with wireless (WiFi) turned off and screen brightness turned down a notch or two, a netbook with a high capacity 6 cell battery can still survive for 4-5 hours.

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Posted in hardware, netbook, software, windows | No Comments »

The Fastest Browser On Earth

Friday, February 12th, 2010

So claims Opera for its Opera desktop browser, version 10.5, currently in Beta.  I must say that it is fast, in some instances, depending on the website you visit, even faster than Google’s own Chrome developmental version, currently in version 5.0.317.2.  Opera 10.5 sports a new Javascript engine, a web programming language used by many websites.  It also has a new graphics rendering engine, all of which add up to a faster browsing speed.

On my netbooks and notebooks, I use two browsers primarily – Google’s Chrome and Opera.  Also, 10.5 Beta supports plugin-less video playback in the form of HTML5 support, which makes Opera the third major browser to support this, after Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox.  Unfortunately, it only supports videos encoded using the Ogg Theora codec rather than the more popular (?) H.264 codec being pushed by Apple (and one of the reasons why they’re ignoring Adobe’s Flash).  Google’s Chrome supports both – now you know why I use Chrome as my primary browser?  ;-)

Try it out here.  As usual, do let us know whether you like it, or not.

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Posted in software, windows | 2 Comments »

The Ultimate “God Mode List” In Windows 7

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Basically, “God mode” is where you’re allowed to do anything you want to your system including setting it on fire and making it explode.  Here’s a compilation of the ultimate 39 secret shortcuts for Windows 7 (some of these shortcuts also work on Windows Vista).  They’re secret because they were never published, most likely only used by Microsoft internally for testing purposes, but now they’ve been out-ed for our enjoyment.  These shortcuts make configuring Windows easier, for those of us who like to tweak the operating system to our heart’s content.

Click here to attain (Windows) God-like knowledge.

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Posted in guides, software, windows | 2 Comments »

And We Have A Netbook AppStore

Monday, January 11th, 2010

More specifically, I should say an appstore for Intel Atom powered devices aka  netbooks or whatever you want to call these tiny screened devices which use the Intel Atom processor as the operating system.  As part of its activities at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel introduced a new application to help owners of netbooks to shop for applications to run on their devices.  These applications have presumably been written specifically, or tested to work with, the lower powered netbooks (I actually wanted to call these “lame” devices, but I shall try to keep a check on my emotions!).

The application, which needs to be installed on your netbook, is called AppUp.  The store categorises the application for easier navigation, and you apparently need a username/password combo to sign up, as well as provide your credit card details – hey, you didn’t expect all the apps to be free, did you?  Click here for engadget’s brief hands-on impressions.  AppUp is available for Windows and Linux (yes, there are Atom netbooks out there which run Linux).  The software is still in beta, and you can download it here.

If you do try it, do come back and tell us about it, OK?  In the meantime, I shall continue to try to figure out why we need AppUp.

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Posted in linux, netbook, software, windows | No Comments »

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