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Nokia HERE Maps for Windows 8.1 will soon be available for all Windows 8.1 devices, the Finnish firm has confirmed, having previously been an exclusive for Nokia’s own Lumia 2520 … Continue reading

This article was written on March 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the things that I’ve come to realize with using a computer is that you can never have too many ways to launch an application. The Quick Launch bar is probably one of the most famous ways of doing so, and I’ve seen people who have a Quick Launch bar that takes up more than 50% of the Taskbar. Crazy, I know.

Did you know that you can add toolbars, such as Quick Launch, to your desktop? You can, and it’s actually rather nice because you can have it dock to one side of the screen or even float around on your desktop. And why stop at just using it for Quick Launch? We’ll show you how you can add any folder to a floating or docked toolbar on your desktop!

–Add a Toolbar–

Create a new folder on your desktop (or using an existing one) and drag it to one of the sides of your screen. Windows will automatically turn it into a toolbar which we will further customize in a minute:

–Moving the Toolbar–

If you don’t like the fact that the toolbar eats up so much room you have two options available. The first is to right-click on the toolbar and set it to automatically hide. This will force the toolbar to only appear when your mouse hits the edge of the screen where it is located.

The alternate method, and the one that I prefer, is to drag the toolbar off the side of the screen so that it is no longer docked. I actually didn’t realize that this was possible until just a few days ago when one of my friends told me about it. To do it you need to click on the edge/border of the toolbar with your mouse (not on the portion where you resize it), and then drag it into the middle of the desktop. This diagram shows exactly where you need to click:

Even though the toolbar looks like a window it doesn’t actually show up in the Taskbar, and so you don’t have to worry about there being additional clutter.

–Customize the Toolbar–

Now that you have the toolbar positioned where you want it lets make it useful. If you right-click anywhere in the toolbar you can go to the Toolbars menu to select any pre-made toolbars, such as the Quick Launch one. That’s right, you can have all of your Quick Launch icons show up on your desktop instead of or in addition to the Taskbar!You can also use the New Toolbar option to browse for a folder on your computer to be added.

In the end here’s what my toolbar looked like after removing the “New Folder” that we temporarily added, I put the Quick Launch on there, and I browsed for the “My Computer” folder on my machine:

I normally remove the Show Title and Show Text features (located in the right-click menu) since both of those will consume quite a bit of room on your toolbar. You can also change the size of the icons (I’m using large ones in the screenshot above).

By adding the “My Computer” folder I have quick access to all of the drives on my computer, including USB drives that I might add and remove quite frequently. If there is too much to show in any of the toolbars there will be a small arrow along the bottom to display a flyout menu for the rest of the contents.

Pretty cool, huh?

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the things that people complain about the most in Vista is that transferring large files is painfully slow compared to previous versions of Windows. Thanks to a post over at Neowin, both users of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are able to install a performance and compatibility pack that will address this issue as well as several others.

Some sites appear to be thinking that these patches will be released on Patch Tuesday (a week from tomorrow) via the standard Windows Update system. I’m not so sure about that, and if you look at the bottom of this post I outline all of the things that these patches fix. It’s quite a lengthy list, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft held them back for the release of Vista SP1. So I would say that this is kind of like the Beta version of Vista SP1 that we never got.

As soon as I saw this I couldn’t wait to download the fixes, but the problem is that they haven’t been officially posted by Microsoft yet. Have no fear, these updates have been leaked (download links posted below), and I’ve already installed the 32-bit versions on my Vista Ultimate installation. There are just two installation files included that you need to install, and then you’ll reboot your computer. If something does go wrong your System Restore should have automatically made a restore point before proceeding with the installation of the updates (I checked and mine had made the restore point automatically).

What’s the result? The file transfer times are dramatically reduced, and it no longer takes forever for Vista to calculate the remaining time! AeroXP has even gone as far as to say that the transfer times are half of what they were.

If you decide to try these out you should remember that they have not been officially released by Microsoft. In fact, they could be some sort of beta version that isn’t even complete. I’ve had no troubles with either of the updates on my 32-bit version of Vista, but your experience may vary.

IMPORTANT: One thing that a Neowin user pointed out was that the 64-bit version will require that you disable driver signing each time your computer starts, which can be done by pressing F8 during the boot process. This includes everyone that’s using Rivatuner, atitool and/or Peerguardian on Vista 64-bit.

Download from MediaFire: 64-bit and 32-bit
Download from MediaFire (requires 7-Zip to extract): 64-bit and 32-bit

Here are all of the details regarding the two updates:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 12, 2012 by CyberNet.

Starting in Windows 7 Microsoft introduced a new feature they called libraries. The libraries are designed to give multiple folders a single unified view that can be used to manage your media and documents. This is especially useful for anyone with files spread out across multiple hard drives and network locations because it will all appear as a single folder on your machine.

The downside to this awesome feature is that Microsoft never provided a great way for managing the libraries, but third-party developers stepped in to fill the gap. The same goes for Windows 8. An app called Librarian supports creating, updating, and removing libraries on both Windows 7 and also on Windows 8.

As you can see in the screenshot above this particular app gives you full control over how the libraries behave. One thing I really like is that it lets you choose the default location to save files, which I know is something I’ve had many people ask me about before. If you don’t use an app like this to change the default save location Windows will decide where it should put files when you do things like save files to the library. Now you’ll be able to choose where you want the files to go.

If you’re looking for a way to simplify folder management on your computer this app may be the key to doing that.

Librarian Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft published an interesting patent on July 12th that details what could very well be a Windows Taskbar replacement. The images associated with the application can be viewed in this PDF that I put together, otherwise you need to have a TIFF image viewer (or QuickTime) installed to view the images in your browser.

The patent details what Microsoft calls Clipping Lists, and the details at this point are pretty slim. The Microsoft Research group working Clipping Lists say that it will offer:

• Significantly faster task completion times
• Significantly fewer task switches
• Adding change detection is even better!
• Faster task resumption after switch

As with all patent applications the mockups are in black & white with poor quality, so it’s hard to make out what Microsoft is really trying to get across here. For comparison sake this is what the patent demonstrates as the current state of the Taskbar:

The new Clipping List will let users group and order applications in a sidebar in whatever fashion they would like. Here’s a mockup of what that might look like:

To make it easy to monitor the progress of running applications you could expand them to contain a thumbnail. For example, at a glance you would be able to see when your presentation software is done loading a video:

Looking around I came across a presentation that was given on the Clipping Lists, and it had screenshots that were a little more colorful but still lacked any elegance:

There you can see what two "categorized" items look like with some live previews of the running application.

It’s still not clear whether Microsoft has intentions of replacing the Taskbar in the next version of Windows (due out in 2009), but I definitely welcome something that is more productive. I think that Microsoft is on to something with their ideas here, and with the increasing popularity of widescreen monitors it is inevitable that the Taskbar will move into the sidebar.

So what do you think of the idea? Do you think that this is more productive than the current Taskbar and Mac OS X’s Dock?

Source: I Started Something

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com