Now these operating systems have begun to propagate with iPhone OS and Android appearing on tablets, the kind of thing everybody would use in the home instead of a laptop. One of the biggest changes this will mean for users is that it will no longer matter what operating system we use and most people won’t even notice anyway.

If you look at the average things a casual user will do with a computer or computing device then, email, browsing and shopping, photo editing, playing music and watching video would all top the list. In fact these are the activities people would do 90+% of the time.

All of these OSes are either capable of doing all of these activities out of the box, or with the very simple and quick addition of a bolt-on bit of software. More’s the point it can easily be argued that the App stores for Apple devices and Google make it even easier on those devices than a Mac or Windows.

Despite the major differences between these operating systems, required to give each one its own identity and prevent litigation cases in court, they’re all fundamentally the same. Only things like the top-of-the-screen menu system on the Mac and the ribbon in Windows pose anything different to the norm.

Now at this point Ballmer and Jobs would disagree with me immensely and point out the huge and fundamental differences that make their operating system the best and easiest. Take Windows 7 for instance, it’s certainly the most flexible and for a power-user such as myself, more attractive because of that.

But this is nothing more than corporate greed playing on the pack-animal nature of humanity. When it boils down to it we’re all human and all in the same boat wanting to do the same things. Psychology plays a large part here though and major companies attract fans and loyal supporters the same way your local football or baseball teams might. For example, only this morning I received an email from someone who didn’t like the things I’ve been writing here about Apple recently, accusing me of all sorts of things and being a bit rude in the process. This was even though I’ve been quite complimentary about the company in recent days.

This is really quite clever on their part and I’m certain they all have psychologists on staff. What they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades is grooming us into becoming ambassadors for their companies.

None of this really has anything to do with how good the actual product is because if you take a step back and think about the things you want to do on your device for 90% of the time, any-old device will probably do and most of your stuff’s now in the clouds, USB hard drives or pen drives anyway.

Even the old familiarity argument is fading fast with people picking up and mastering iPhone OS and Android as quickly as they can get a new microwave to cook a lasagne.

It will be interesting to see what each company do with their operating systems in the future, especially Windows 8 which has a monumental battle to fight now to prevent Microsoft from losing market share. Looks like they’ll need those psychologists to rally the troops again.

Source: Windows7 News

ITIL course – Web Design Harrogate

The problem was traced back to Internet Explorer 6, most internet-based problems are traced back to IE6 to be honest. This browser has now been around for almost ten years. It’s been superseded twice and it’s widely acknowledged that this is possibly the worst and most insecure browser you can have on your computer.

IE6 came out at a time when Microsoft had won the browser wars and Netscape had largely disappeared. Firefox had yet to appear and the Redmond giant had 99% of the browser market. They had nobody to compete with and internet commerce was in its infancy. Thus Microsoft just let the browser stagnate for many years until finally forced to innovate by the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, who realised that adequate security was the minimum specification their new browser should have.

But IE6 was buggy in all sorts of other ways too, mostly in the notoriously bad way it rendered HTML code. Microsoft seemed to have their own ideas about how HTML worked and so most web pages had to be ‘fixed’ to work on it. But this had to happen because of Microsoft’s 99% market share. I was working in web design at the time and I can remember the constant complaints which still continue today.

Eventually with Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft released far superior and better protected versions of the browser but by this time big business had already developed their web-apps and portals to work with IE and made it clear that they didn’t want to spend the tens of thousands needed each to reformat them so they worked in IE7 or IE8.

Now Google is taking the bull by the horns and dropping support for IE6 from some of its products, starting with Google Docs. They’re doing what Microsoft should be doing. Not pandering to big business and causing the world a headache, but forcing people to stop using this buggy, insecure piece of antiquated rubbish.

Google are only giving you a month to prepare too. From the 1st March some services, there’s no definitive list yet, will no longer operate properly in IE6. Hopefully this will spur Microsoft to withdraw support for IE6 soon too, but somehow I doubt it.

This speaks volumes about Microsoft’s business model, and of how important to the company its volume licensing customers are. In some ways Microsoft execs will warmly welcome the move by Google. They’re doing what Microsoft can’t and it can only be a good thing.

It may even encourage more businesses to roll out Windows 7 before the first service pack is released later this year, traditionally the time when businesses begin deploying a new version of Windows.

We can only hope that IE6 is very soon dead, forgotten and that the world can concentrate on the security issues of today, not fixing the security nightmare of the 20th century.

Source: Windows7 News

Most users did not only save their documents, images and other files into this folder but also to other places on the hard disk. This could mean chaos as files were spread all over the hard drive without a way of accessing them in one place comfortably.

Windows 7 Libraries address that problem by allowing the user to add folders to his libraries so that all locations where the files are stored can be included in a library so that they all can be accessed from one central location.

The Windows Blog has published an extensive article about Windows 7 Libraries that is worth the read if you are new to the concept of libraries in Windows 7 or want to get a deeper understanding of the concept.

Sources: Windows 7

]]> http://www.les-actualites.net/windows-7-libraries/feed/ 0 http://www.les-actualites.net/even-more-features-can-be-turned-off-in-windows-7/ http://www.les-actualites.net/even-more-features-can-be-turned-off-in-windows-7/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:15:09 +0000 Irfan http://www.les-actualites.net/?p=53 We have reported about the groundbreaking change in the Windows 7 release candidate that allowed users to uninstall Internet Explorer. While uninstallation was probably the wrong choice of words as it merely meant that the executable of Internet Explorer would be removed from the operating system it did prepare users for things to come. In an article published today at the Windows Engineering blog it became known that additional features of Windows 7 can be turned off by the user.

The release candidate for Windows 7 offers an extended Windows Features control panel which can be accessed from the Programs and Features menu. New features have been added to that control panel that can be removed from the computer system including media features like Windows Media Center, Windows Media Player or Windows DVD Maker, the indexing service, Windows Search or the Microsoft .net Framework 3.51.

Deselecting a feature has the following consequences:

If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer. These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD.

This is a very interesting move by Microsoft that should please advanced users who usually rely on third party software instead of Microsoft programs.

Source: Windows 7 News

Our partner site Ask VG is at the forefront of Windows 7 theme creation. A few new themes or variations have been posted recently and we would like to introduce them to you. The themes can be applied to Windows XP if the file responsible for the theme management in Windows XP has been patched. You can read up on the uxtheme.dll at the link posted.

The themes will not only change the colors and background images of the Windows XP operating system but also the taskbar, start menu and other core interface elements to make it resemble that of Windows 7. Installation however has been streamlined for ease of use. All that needs to be done is to execute the theme.exe file located in the theme folder after unpacking the themes to the local computer system.

Windows 7 Theme Black:

Link

Windows 7 Theme Blue:

link

Both themes add the following elements beside the basic interface changes to the operating system:

• Extra Common Tasks (This folder contains 2 extra shell styles: Bottom and Left dark blue)
• Fonts (This folder contains Segoe UI fonts required for the theme. Run Fonts.exe file to install them.)
• Iconized Taskbar Hack (This folder contains registry script to enable Iconized taskbar in Windows XP.)
• Styler Toolbar

If you are looking for more themes for both Windows XP and Windows Vista visit our Windows 7 Theme directory.

Source: Windows7

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