Get the Vista Start Menu in XP (Public Beta)

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

One of the biggest advances in Windows Vista has got to be the visual appearance. We have seen several attempts at trying to mimic the Vista user interface on XP, and some have been pretty successful. One of the most popular applications for doing this has got to be the Vista Transformation Pack. This bundle changes almost everything on your XP computer to make it look as close to Vista as possible.

Now another step is being taken by the creator of the Vista Transformation Pack in preparation for version 7 that is to be released later on. This new step involves a new and improved Start Menu that has many similarities to that of Vista:

Vista Start Menu for XP
Click to Enlarge

 

As you can see there is no pop-out menu like Windows XP normally has, and instead it is all contained within the one window. Not only that, but it also has the same icons at the top-right corner that you normally see when hovering over the items on the right-side of the Start Menu. Heck, I even liked it because I could use it with any normal XP theme which you can see in the picture!

Just like in Vista, the power button expands when you click on the arrow in the bottom-right corner to reveal all of your shutdown/restart/standby choices. The only thing that still remains not functional is the search bar, but the developer says that he does have plans to make that work. Hopefully he decides to integrate that with a search indexing service like Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search.

So what do you have to do to try this out? It is in public beta right now and is available as a stand-alone program. The developer will probably be including this in the Vista Transformation Pack 7 (VTP 7) which will hopefully be available soon.

The great thing is that you can play with this Vista-like Start Menu by simply downloading the files, extracting them, and running the program! There is no installation required, so you don’t have to worry about messing anything up. One thing that you should note is that after running the program you won’t be indicated in any way that the program is running. I actually tried running it three or four times before clicking on the Start Menu and noticing that it was already running. :)

Visit the VistaStart Public Beta site (Download the file immediately from our Mirror)

Here is an important note from the developer:
Known issues that can’t be fixed: You need to turn off “show shadows under menus” visual effects because that will cause flashing shadow when you open start menu.

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Picnik Photo Editing Firefox Extension

This article was written on November 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Despite the fact that the list of online image editing services continues to get longer and longer, there is still one that has been sitting at the top of my list for quite a while – Picnik. We first wrote about Picnik back in April, and since then, it has managed to get better and better. If you’re a fan of Picnik and you’re a Firefox user, you’re going to love an extension that I recently came across which makes importing images into Picnik even easier.

picnik extension To start, you’ll want to install the Picnik Firefox extension (download found here), and of course restart your browser. Once you’ve done this, right click on any image and notice the option that’s been added which says “Edit Image in Picnik.” There’s also an option to “Send Page to Picnik.” The “Send Page” option is great because you can essentially take a screenshot of any website and send it to Picnik for editing- either the visible page, or the full page. That means all it takes is two clicks before you’re editing a photo or web page from anywhere on the web. This extension is extremely handy and makes editing photos on your browser easy.

Now remember, Picnik offers all kinds of options for photo-editing like the capability to crop, rotate, resize, sharpen, or even remove red-eyes, so I think you’ll find it useful. And because it’s an online service, there’s nothing that has to be downloaded. To boot, it can be used on a Mac, a PC with Windows, or even Linux. Picnik has always been awesome, but this Firefox extension makes it even better!

Download Firefox Extension for Picnik here

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System Information, Benchmarks, and More

This article was written on June 02, 2010 by CyberNet.

pc wizard 2010.png

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
Getting both the hardware and software details of your system typically requires using multiple apps. You’d have to peruse through the device manager, jump on over to the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel, and then if you want to run some diagnostics or benchmarks you’d have to go hunt down some apps to do that as well.

PC Wizard 2010 is the all-in-one Swiss Army knife when it comes to that kind of stuff. It can provide a detailed breakdown of both the hardware and software on your computer, and can even be used to run some benchmarks. The included benchmark tools will let you test out the performance of your CPU, cache, RAM, hard drives, DVD drives, video, and more.

To top it all off most of the data can be saved off to a text file so that it can be referenced again later on. If you look at all the information PC Wizard provides (which I’ve put at the end of this article) you’ll likely see the value in being able to export some of the data to a simple archivable format. And did I mention that it’s not only free but also portable? Yeah, it’s an all-around worthwhile app to have in your collection.

PC Wizard 2010 Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit; Freeware/Portable)

Hardware Information

  • Mainboard / Bios (Connectors, ID String, MP Support …)
  • Chipset (FSB Frequency, Norhtbridge, Hub, Direct Media Interface, XMB, NSI, …)
  • Main Memory (FPM, EDO, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR-2 SDRAM, DDR-3 SDRAM, RDRAM, FB_DIMM, Timings …)
  • Memory Profiles : EPP (SLi Ready), Intel XMP.
  • Cache Memory (L1, L2, L3, Size, Frequency …)
  • Processors (Type, Speed, Multiplier coeff., Features, Model Number, Vanderpool Technology …)
  • Coprocessor
  • APM & ACPI
  • Busses : ISA, PCI, AGP (2x, 4x,8x), SMBus/ i2c, CardBus, Firewire, Hyper-Transport … )
  • DMI / SMBIOS
  • Mainboard Sensors, Processor, Hard Disk & Battery (Voltage, Temperature, Fans)
  • Video (Monitor, Card, Bios, Capabilities, Memory, Integrated Memory, Frequencies …)
  • OpenGL & 3Dfx
  • DirectX (DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound (3D), DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectInput, DirectX Media)
  • Keyboard, Mouse & Joystick
  • Drives (Hard Disk, Removable, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVD …)
  • SCSI (Card, Controller, Adapter, Devices …)
  • ATA/ATAPI & S-ATA (Devices, Type, Capabilities, S.M.A.R.T. Features, RAID)
  • Ports (Serial, Parallel, USB, IEEE-1394)
  • IDE & SCSI Devices
  • Twain & WIA Devices
  • PCMCIA (PC Card) Devices
  • Bluetooth Devices
  • Biometric Sensor Devices
  • Sound Card (wave, midi, aux, mix, AC’97 codec, High Definition Audio)
  • Printers (Local & Network)
  • Modem (Features, Speed …)
  • Network (Server, Connexion, Firewall …)
  • Security (Scan Ports …)
  • PocketPC & SmartPhone Devices
  • Virtual Machines

System Information

  • MCI Devices (mpeg, avi, seq, vcr, video-disc, wave) & ACM
  • SAPI
  • Passwords (Outlook, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Dialup …)
  • DOS Memory (base, HMA, UMB, XMS, EMS, DPMI, VCPI)
  • Windows Memory
  • Windows (Version, Product Key, Environment, Desktop, XP Themes …)
  • Windows UpTime (Boot, Shutdown, BlueScreen, System Restore Points …)
  • TrueType & OpenType Fonts
  • WinSock (Internet), Telephony et Remote Access
  • OLE (Objects, Servers …)
  • Microsoft® Applications
  • Activity (Process, Tasks, Threads)
  • Modules (DLL, DRV, 32 & 16-bits) & NT Services
  • Internet Navigator (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox)
  • .NET Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
  • ODBC
  • CMOS/RTC
  • Resources (IRQ, DMA, E/S, Memory)
  • System files (.ini, .log, .bat, .nt, .dos …)

System Benchmarks

  • Processor (Dhrystone (MIPS), Whetstone (MFLOPS), Mandelbrot fractal …)
  • L1, L2, L3 Cache, RAM (Bandwidth, Latency …)
  • Main Memory (Bandwidth, Latency …)
  • Hard Drives
  • CD/DVD Rom
  • DirectX
  • Video
  • Removable/Flash Support
  • MP3 Compression
  • VISTA Experience Index

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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CyberNotes: Getting the most out of Firefox Sidebars

This article was written on March 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Web Browser Wednesday

Firefox is an extremely customizable browser, and combining that with the growing popularity of widescreen monitors results in more sidebars. I used to never use sidebars before I got a widescreen computer because it just took up extra screen space that was otherwise pretty useful. Now you’ll hardly ever find me with a sidebar not open on my computer!

There are so many things that you can do and so many Firefox extensions available to utilize your sidebar space. Most commonly it is used for bookmarks, but there are a lot of other things that you can do with it as well. For example, Digital Inspiration recently noticed that you can place Google Talk in your sidebar:

Firefox Sidebar

It may sound like you need an extension to do something like this, but surprisingly, you don’t. Firefox is designed so that you can have any website open in a sidebar and since Google made the Google Talk client available on the Web, it is possible to chat with your friends in the Firefox sidebar. We’ll use the Google Talk as an example of embedding a website into a sidebar:

  1. Right-click on this URL: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client and bookmark it.
    Firefox Bookmark
  2. After you have saved the bookmark, go back to the Bookmarks menu and right-click on the bookmark. Choose the Properties option.
    Firefox Bookmark
  3. Now check the box that says Load this bookmark in the sidebar:
    Firefox Sidebar
  4. Now the next time you click on that bookmark to open it will popup in the sidebar!

You can use that trick with any website, but it is really only useful if the website is designed for smaller screens so that it fits the width of the sidebar well. I would also say that it doesn’t work too bad with Meebo, but if you have a lot of chat windows open it can quickly become cluttered.

If you wanted to put your Google Personalized Homepage in the sidebar it wouldn’t look quite right since there is a huge header area that you probably don’t need, and all of the modules are spread out over three columns. There is an actual extension called iGoogle that will bypass this problem by putting all of your modules into a single column, and you’ll still have access to your tabs:

Firefox Sidebar

But how do you manage all of your sidebars in a quick and easy way? For that you’ll probably want to use All-in-One Sidebar which makes it easy to switch between all of your different sidebars. Not only that but it also lets you configure which side of the screen, left or right, the sidebar actually appears.

Now if you are fortunate enough to have a lot of extra screen space, you might want to use multiple sidebars. There is an extension for that as well called MultiSidebar that lets you pick the position of the sidebar in the browser as well as open multiple sidebars:

Firefox Sidebar

There is so much that you can do with the sidebars that it may seem a little overwhelming at first. Once you start getting used to them, you begin to wonder how much more productive they let you become. Let us know in the comments below how you use your sidebar to help you be more productive or useful.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Stretch Dual Monitor Wallpapers

This article was written on September 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Desktop Wallpaper Multiple monitor setups are becoming increasingly abundant these days, and I for one couldn’t imagine not having two monitors. I have a 24" Dell (1920×1200 resolution) and a 15" laptop screen (1680×1050 resolution) that I place side-by-side as seen here. The thing is that getting the wallpapers to effortlessly flow across from one monitor to another could be better in Windows, or maybe you would like to set a different background for each screen?

Give a warm welcome to a free app called DisplayFusion. It has a host of features not only for managing the backgrounds on multiple monitors, but also for moving windows from one screen to another using hotkeys:

  • Use a different wallpaper on each monitor (either a picture or solid color)
  • Stretch a wallpaper across all monitors (either a picture or color)
  • Integrated Flickr image search & download
  • Drag maximized windows by their title bars to other screens
  • Easily manage application windows with customizable hotkeys:
    • Move windows to the next monitor
    • Move windows to the next monitor and maximize them
    • Move windows to center of the screen
    • Move windows to center of the screen and size it to 75% of the work area
    • Tile windows along the top, bottom, left or right side
    • Maximize windows so that they span all monitors

For being less than a month old I would have to say that this free app already feels pretty mature. The download is pretty small (just 326KB), but it does require a quick setup.

Tip: DualMonitorBackgrounds.com is a good source for the wide wallpapers.

DisplayFusion (for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista)
Source: How To Geek

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Advent Vega nabs Android Market access courtesy of MoDaCo custom ROM

The Advent Vega seems to be gaining some serious traction overseas, but despite the low price, not having access to Google’s bona fide Android Market is a huge Debbie Downer. Well, it was. The fine folks over at MoDaCo have cooked up a custom ROM for the 10-inch tablet, and if you’ve nothing better to do on a Black Friday than tinker with software, the v1.04 build hosted in the source link promises a “full Google experience” including Gmail, Maps with Street View, Talk, Voice Search and even Android Market access. All the steps you’ll need to follow are just a click away, so allow us to ask you this: what’s the holdup?

Advent Vega nabs Android Market access courtesy of MoDaCo custom ROM originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Explorer 8 First Impressions

This article was written on March 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

ie8 overview
(Click to Enlarge)

We’ve been receiving quite a few requests from our readers wanting to know what we think about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, and whether it is worth the upgrade. I downloaded and installed it shortly after it was released yesterday, and the total installation time on my Vista machine took around 4 or 5 minutes. There were absolutely no problems for me upgrading to IE 8 from IE 7.

–Performance–

Everything in Internet Explorer 8 seems a lot more responsive than in Internet Explorer 7: tabs open faster, pages render more quickly, and the “Quick Tabs” works almost instantaneously. Really, I’m not exaggerating the difference at all. Ashley and I have the exact same laptops, and we wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of how long it took to load our site. The difference was like night and day… Internet Explorer 8 loaded our site at least twice as fast.

I’ve gotten a handful of emails already that have been wanting me to run the SunSpider JavaScript test on Internet Explorer 8. Previously it failed miserably coming in a very distant last place. Here’s how it stacked up against the latest Firefox 3 nightly build (the lower amount of time is better):

  1. Firefox 3 Nightly (03/05/2008 build): 6624.2ms
  2. Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 1): 14302.0ms

That’s more than five times better than Internet Explorer 7 in our previous tests! So it looks as though there has been substantial changes under-the-hood in Internet Explorer 8 to make it perform better. The best thing is that the speediness doesn’t show just in the numbers. I can almost guarantee that as soon as you start using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 you’ll see a noticeable difference.

–Features–

I’m not going to just list out the features here because I did that yesterday. Instead there are two things that I really wanted to comment on. The first is the new Activities that was introduced into Internet Explorer 8. I didn’t think that these were really anything special, but I’ve actually come to love them after just a few minutes of using the browser.

When you highlight some text a little green arrow will appear above your selection. If you click on that arrow you’ll see a list of all your installed Activities that you can choose from. This is a quick way for you to translate text, map an address, define a word, and much more:

ie8 activities button

Microsoft has a site setup where users can add more Activities, but given that the browser is so new there are only a handful of them available.

The one other thing that I really like is something Firefox 3 was (or maybe still is) supposed to have when it is released. It’s a domain highlighting feature that makes users more aware of the domain that they are viewing by graying out portions of the URL. Here’s what it looks like for one of our articles:

ie8 domain highlight

This will help users avoid phishing scams that are located at obscure domains disguised to look like a legitimate one, such as paypal.com.example.com.

–The Price of Standards–

Many of us applauded Microsoft for making the browser more standards compliant out-of-the-box, but I’m already starting to see the effects of the change. At first glance I have found that nearly every site I visit has some sort of rendering glitch in Internet Explorer 8. Our site, for example, had problems properly positioning the footer. We had to insert this code into the head section of the HTML on our site:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

This forces Internet Explorer 8 to render the site the same way that Internet Explorer 7 does, and is a great temporary fix until you get the time to make the necessary changes. Our site is far from the only one that has problems. Here are some of the others that we’ve noticed:

  • CNN.com has some video thumbnails that float off to the right side.
  • Yahoo.com has a toolbar underneath the search box that is not aligned properly.
  • News.com has a few issues in the upper part of their site around their search box.
  • Yahoo Mail just pops up with error messages and is non responsive when you try to do just about anything.

You can quickly correct these issues by forcing IE 8 to emulate IE 7 using the “Emulate IE7″ button on the toolbar. You’ll need to restart the browser for the changes to become active, but it should solve most of the problems.

–Overview–

Overall I would have to say that this is a great update for Internet Explorer, but I don’t think Microsoft has done enough to pull users away from Firefox and Opera. There’s nothing that really leaves me in awe, but I do have to say that the performance improvements definitely deserve to be applauded.

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Browser & OS Stats for October 2008: Firefox Almost at 20%

This article was written on November 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

It’s been a few months since we last wrote about the browser and operating system stats, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been on our minds. In fact the market has changed a little bit since our last report in July 2008. Google released their own browser, Apple released new MacBook computers, and beta versions of the next generation browsers have had a few updates. So how has all of this affected the stats?

According to Net Applications the stats haven’t changed all that much over the last few months, but these things don’t happen overnight. Firefox continues to move on up inching closer to 20% of the browser market share while Google Chrome is struggling to capture a mere 1% of the market. Here’s a quick overview before we break it down further:

october browser os stats.png

–Web Browsers–

Google Chrome sparked a lot of excitement when it was first released, and with over 500 votes already in our poll it looks like only 10% of you have chosen to make it your primary browser. That’s actually not a bad percentage, but when taking into account the less tech-savvy crowd Chrome isn’t even trumping Opera in terms of market share:

September 2008October 2008Change
Internet Explorer71.52%71.27%-0.25%
Firefox19.46%19.97%+0.51%
Safari6.65%6.57%-0.08%
Opera0.69%0.75%+0.06%
Chrome0.78%0.74%-0.04%
Netscape0.63%0.45%-0.18%
Mozilla0.09%0.09%0.00%
Opera Mini0.05%0.06%+0.01%
Playstation0.03%0.03%0.00%

–Operating Systems–

There might be a lot of people refusing to upgrade to Vista, but that’s not stopping some of you. Vista’s market share continues to steadily grow as it becomes one of the few operating systems to squeak out a positive change from September to October.

September 2008October 2008Change
Windows XP68.67%68.11%-0.56%
Windows Vista18.33%19.29%+0.96%
Mac – Intel5.80%5.94%+0.14%
Mac OS2.43%2.27%-0.16%
Windows 20001.89%1.72%-0.17%
Windows NT0.80%0.78%-0.02%
Linux0.91%0.71%-0.20%
iPhone0.32%0.33%+0.01%
Windows 980.34%0.31%-0.03%
Windows ME0.19%0.18%-0.01%

Did you also notice how the iPhone is now beating Windows 98? That means more people are using the iPhone to surf the Internet than PC’s running Windows 98. Crazy!

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And the Tweak Vista Winners are…

This article was written on November 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

TweakVista A BIG Thanks goes out to everybody who entered the Tweak Vista giveaway! With two licenses to giveaway, we used a random number generator to pick our two winners. The Tweak Vista Winners are:

  • Entry #2 – “apex 2000″
  • Entry #18 – “Nimicitor”

To the winners: You should have received an email message already informing you that you have won. As mentioned in the giveaway, you’ll need to create an account over at Stardock and then provide us with the email address that you used to create the account so that we can pass it on to Stardock. They’ll then add Tweak Vista to your account.

Congratulations!

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How would you change Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta?

It’s not often that a web browser makes into our HWYC lineup, but it’s also a rare occurrence for Microsoft to issue an entirely new web browser. Internet Explorer 9 Beta has been in the wild (and thus, on your PC) for a few months now, and seeing that the browser wars are raging harder than ever these days, we felt it prudent to ask how you’d change things in the world of IE. After all, being that this is a beta, there’s still plenty of time for Microsoft to actually heed your wisdom and implement changes prior to the full, final, non-beta release. So, have you been pleased with performance? Tab layout? Any tweaks you’d make to the user interface? Compatibility? Go on and get sophisticated down in comments below, won’tcha?

How would you change Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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