Windows 7 News

The other day I was trying to set up a projector for a friend who was running Windows Vista on his laptop. Being so familiar with Windows 7 I thought it would be a simple straightforward procedure, but unfortunately it wasn’t. It’s only when you go back to an older OS like Vista that you realise the small subtle changes Microsoft have made in Windows 7 and your really appreciate them. With Windows 7 connecting to and managing an external display is really quite simple. Firstly you connect your display to your laptop/PC with a HDMI cable or VGA cable etc… Then once it’s powered on you simply use to following keyboard shortcut; Windows key + P You will then see this window pop up on your screen You can cycle through the 4 different options by pressing the “P” key Computer Only – This will disconnect the projector entirely Duplicate – This will display exactly what you can see on your screen on the external display Extend – When you select the extend mode your desktop will expand into the external display giving you acres more space to work with

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

The Context menu is often overlooked by many users. This is a pity as it provides lots of quick ways to get on with the job. I am writing three articles about Context Menus.  In this, the first, I’ll explain what is a Context menu and tell you a little of the  History of the Context Menu and then show where you can access them. All it needs is a right-click and “ Hey presto !” and a context menu appears!  Tip! However if you have problems right-clicking with the Mouse select the object and press the Window Context key.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

If you are like me, you prefer to use one browser over the others. For me, that browser is Google Chrome. I use it for my daily work, but on occasion I will use Internet Explorer, especially if I have to enter a secure Microsoft Site. Other browsers just will not work well. But I have found that when I use other browsers, I start to look at my bookmarks to access different sites, only to find that they are not there. Moreover, the import operations that I’ve used when I’ve installed a new browser have not gone as well as I would like. But now there is a third-party program, Transmute, that will do the importing and exporting for you.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

Microsoft introduced “Play to” with Windows 7, a feature built into Windows Media Player (and we can assume future versions of the Zune software) that allows you to automatically stream music and video from a Windows 7 PC to any network-connected device supporting the standard.  These would include Internet radios as well as other Windows 7 PCs. So far everything has been quiet but now Denon, one of the world’s premier hi-fi equipment manufacturers have announced a range of new products that support it, and that will allow you to play your PC-based music and video collections on both your hi-fi and TV. This is an exciting prospect, merging the ever-growing digital audio and video libraries we’re all collecting, with our existing AV kit.  There will downsides regards your electricity bill, with your PC always needing to be switched on for you to be able to access the files, and this, frankly, is no substitute for AV kit with an in-built hard drive, but I won’t knock it for that simply because Denon are well known for providing fantastic kit, and these will no doubt be no exception. The models with the new functionality are the AVR-4310CI, AVR-3310CI, AVR-990, and the new 9.3 channel AVR-4810CI in addition their ASD-51W and ASD-51N iPod docks are also compatible with play to.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

Problems with the Windows 7 the Start Menu can be irritating. All users have to type and search in Files and Folders to Windows 7. The Start Menu is inconvenient and uncomfortable to open programs or commands. But this program is designed to replace the Windows 7 start Menu with the Start Menu in Windows XP. Here are the installation steps to follow and make the program  available  to all users

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

One of the great new features in Windows 7 is Aero Peak ( click here for more on Aero Features ) which allows you to see a preview of a window by hovering over it in the task bar. However, for users with large high resolution monitors, they may find it difficult to make out these thumbnails and they can be pretty useless. Well now there’s a great little program called Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Customer 1.1 (W7TTC for short), a free utility that lets you make thumbnails just about any size you want. It’s quite simple really, there’s not a lot to it. Simply download the program from here and extract the folder.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

Windows XP was released back in 2001 and now it’s beginning to start showing its age. Apart from the rather outdated user interface,compared to Windows 7 at least, Windows XP is now beginning to suffer from advances in hardware. While you may think that newer hardware makes Windows XP run faster, well it may be the case sometimes, but not now. In this case, new hard drives are coming out starting January 2011 which will see a decrease in performance for machines running Windows XP

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

As security bulletins go, this March so far, Microsoft has only released a one security bulletin for Windows. But, a Security Release ISO Image was made available for download on March 9, 2010. The ISO image patch is made available to IT Admins who need to get the security patch without resorting to use the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or through some other automated solution that will present the patch for delivery and installation. This ISO release image contains multiple language versions of MS10-016. This is a security update that MicroSoft has offered to Windows users through Windows Update on March 9, 2010. It is designed to contain a hole in Windows Movie Maker program.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

I was doing my normal reading through different tech websites when I came across a post on PCWorld by Rick Broida regarding Windows 7’s preview Thumbnails. His article talks about how the thumbnail previews are a good feature to have, but that they are almost useless because they are so small. His solution, Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Customer 1.1. Created by Kishan Bagaria, this little app is not only small, but very helpful for those that want to have the ability to adjust the size of their thumbnail previews

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News

So the rollout has begun and every PC user in Europe running XP, Vista or Windows 7 will shortly see the new browser ballot screen, if they’ve not seen it already.  Last night I got my update and along with it, a few surprises. The first surprise was the apparent optionality of the update.  In Windows update Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows was unticked.  Presumably this would only remain so for a short period of time before it becomes mandatory.   Upon restarting my PC, which wasn’t required, I was faced with both a notice about the ballot screen and a new icon on my desktop. In addition, and as expected, the IE icon in my taskbar had disappeared.

The full story can be found on Windows 7 News