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Apr 11

Make XP Look Like Vista with WindowBlinds 6

Posted in: Features, performance, Pre-Release, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on August 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Stardock just released WindowBlinds 6 Beta, which is a huge milestone when it comes to skinning. This version adds a host of great new features for both Vista and XP users, with the most notable thing being the blur effect. Why is that so great? Well, it’s available for XP users as well as Vista users, so you don’t have to spend a fortune on a new operating system if you just want it to look good! Here is an example of the blur effect on Windows XP:

Aside from that there are also a host of options available in WindowBlinds 6 so that almost all aspects of your operating system look exactly the way you want it to. Here are a bunch of screenshots I took of the configuration screens (click on the thumbnails for a fullsize version):

All of those screenshots were done while running WindowBlinds 6 Beta on a computer that is several years old and has an integrated graphics card. I don’t get all of the pretty effects that some of you can have (one example is that I only see an outline of a window when I move it around the screen), but as you can tell the blur effect still works. And as far as performance goes…I noticed no difference running WindowBlinds when compared to not running it. I really don’t know how Stardock does it.

Here’s a list of features currently available in WindowBlinds 6 Beta:

Animation overlays
Blur glass effects on both Windows Vista and Windows XP
User created sub-styles
Full font control
Explorer backgrounds
Complete Windows Vista skinning (including a sidebar skinner)
New Leo skin (that’s what I was using for all of the screenshots)
Faster performance
And much more!

When the final version of WindowBlinds 6 makes it out the door there will be 6 brand-new skins created by the Stardock Design team. There will also be a SkinStudio 6 Beta released soon so that skin developers can start taking advantage of the new features.

If you want to try out WindowBlinds 6 Beta you’ll need to have an ObjectDesktop subscription. Any users that purchased the standalone version of WindowBlinds 5 after February 1, 2007 will get a free upgrade to version 6 when it is released, so you can buy that now and rest easy knowing you’ll get the next major upgrade when it is available.

I have a strong feeling that we are going to see some great skins being developed for WindowBlinds 6, and this application will take XP’s skinning abilities to a whole new level with the added effects. Now I can’t wait to give this a shot on Vista to see how well it purs!

Source: Stardock News

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WindowBlinds 6 Released – Next-Generation Skinning is Here

Mar 30

Omnimo: desktop Windows given fashion makeover with Phone 7 Series flair

Posted in: free, Gmail, interface, itunes, Today's Chili, twitter, ui, Windows, windows phone, windows phone 7, windows phone 7 series, Windows XP, WindowsPhone, WindowsPhone7, WindowsPhone7Series, Wp7

Can’t wait for Windows Phone 7 Series, but can’t hack the emulator, either? Don’t lose hope, Windows junkies — you can still bring some semblance of WP7S order into your life with this Metro UI-inspired desktop HUD. Based on the open-source desktop customization platform Rainmeter, the “Omnimo UI” will overlay your desktop with a minimalist, tiled interface not unlike the one you’ve been drooling over for weeks, with live hooks into many useful services (including Gmail, iTunes, Steam, Twitter and SpeedFan) as well as the usual widgets and a host of program shortcuts. The best news of all? It’s available now for all versions of Windows since XP, completely free of charge; simply follow the source links or flit over to Lifehacker, where good folks will teach you how it’s done.

Omnimo: desktop Windows given fashion makeover with Phone 7 Series flair originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Rainmeter, Omnimo UI | Email this | Comments

Mar 12

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives

Posted in: Today's Chili, Windows, Windows XP

Solid state drives may be the fast-moving wave of the future in PC storage, but the technology for bigger and better magnetic media keeps on trucking. Only recently, that truck hit something of a pothole: the 4096-byte sector size that will allow advanced format drives to have more usable space (and surpass the current 2TB capacity limit) doesn’t play nice with the world’s most popular OS — Windows XP. While manufacturers like Western Digital have already introduced software that successfully combats the problem, the new drives perform poorly in Win XP without it, and rival manufacturer Seagate told the BBC that even with software tricks, XP users should expect the occasional 5ms delay, or 10% speed reduction, during write times. Is this the end of Windows XP? Hardly. Should you make sure to install the software that comes with your next hard drive? Absolutely.

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | BBC | Email this | Comments

Mar 06

CyberNotes: Rotate Your Screen Orientation

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on February 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Whenever I’m at home I hookup my laptop to a secondary 24″ monitor to drastically increase the amount of screen space available to me. When I’m working on programming projects I will rotate my monitor so that it is oriented vertically (a.k.a. portrait mode), which I think is something most programmers do when they have widescreen monitors.

Physically rotating my monitor doesn’t change the screen’s orientation though, and for that you’ll need some software. Most graphics cards are bundled with a control center that will let you change such properties, but I often find them a bit bulky. Below we’ve got three different methods that you can use to change the orientation of your monitor without using the software that came with your graphics card.

Note: All of these alternatives depend on your graphics card supporting screen rotation. This might require installing the drivers for your graphics card, which are typically offered separately from the software control center that they offer.

–Windows Hotkeys–

Believe it or not there is a standard Windows hotkey (in both XP and Vista) that will let you change the orientation of your primary monitor only. The shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+[Arrow Key], where you use the standard arrow pad on your keyboard to change the orientation. Ctrl+Alt+Up will always set your monitor back to the usual landscape orientation.

–Vista Settings–

All editions of Vista except for Home Basic now come with Tablet PC support regardless of whether your machine is actually a Tablet PC. If you only want to rotate the primary monitor you can use the Tablet PC settings in Vista to rotate the screen orientation.

The easiest way to find the Tablet PC settings is to open the Start Menu or Control Panel and start typing “Tablet PC” in the search box. You want to click on the “Tablet PC Settings” option when it is displayed. Then look for the orientation option that you can adjust:

tablet pc rotation

Unfortunately this only works for the primary monitor on the system, but I’m guessing that there are more people out there looking to do this with a single monitor rather than multiple monitors.

–iRotate (Homepage)–

iRotate This is a free program that creates a System Tray icon for each of the monitors connected to your machine. You can click on each icon to see the various orientation options that are available to that monitor. That means in a few clicks you can quickly switch between orientations.

iRotate will also set itself to start with Windows to ensure that all of the monitors remain in the correct orientation. Hotkey junkies will appreciate the keyboard shortcuts that are provided for each of the four orientations, which can be seen in the screenshot above.

–Overview–

I’m sure there are dozens of other ways that you can change your monitor’s orientation, and that’s where we turn it over to our readers. What tools, if any, do you use to adjust the orientation of your screen?

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Mar 02

Microsoft tells IE faithful on Windows XP to avoid F1 key

Posted in: hack, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, operating system, OperatingSystem, os, problem, security, Software, Today's Chili, Windows XP

Still hanging around on Windows XP? Perfectly acceptable. Still using Internet Explorer to browse the world wide web? Just a wee bit less forgivable, but we understand that some of you simply can’t get around it. If we just rung your bell, you might want to rip the F1 key right off of your keyboard (at least temporarily), as a recently discovered vulnerability in VBScript — which can only bother Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — could allow malicious code to weasel its way right into your life with a single keystroke. As the story goes, some ill-willed web sites are encouraging users to smash the F1 key in order to access a Microsoft Help file, and when said key is depressed, “arbitrary code could be executed in the security context of the currently logged-on user.” Microsoft has promised to fully investigate and resolve the issue in due time, but ’til then, we’d highly suggest ~~avoiding your F1 key like the plague~~ switching to Firefox.

Microsoft tells IE faithful on Windows XP to avoid F1 key originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Switched | Microsoft | Email this | Comments

Mar 02

XP downgrade lawsuit thrown out, MS lawyers celebrate rare victory

Posted in: lawsuit, lenovo, Microsoft, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

It’s hard to imagine a more busy team of lawyers than those on-staff at Microsoft, and while the news isn’t always good for them, today they can hold their heads high as a lawsuit filed last year alleging that MS was profiting from so-called “downgrade fees” has finally been dismissed. US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman found that the plaintiff, Emma Alvarado, didn’t prove Microsoft was in any way gaining value from these charges. In fact the downgrade fee to move to XP was, in this case, being charged by Lenovo, not Microsoft, and was to cover the additional time it took to physically install that OS over the standard (at the time) Vista. In other words Alvarado missed the mark and in the process surely cost taxpayers and Microsoft thousands and thousands of dollars. Hooray!

XP downgrade lawsuit thrown out, MS lawyers celebrate rare victory originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink ars technica | ComputerWorld | Email this | Comments

Feb 19

Microsoft confirms rootkit caused Windows XP blue screens

Posted in: Microsoft, Today's Chili, update, Windows, Windows XP

When malware writers fail to generate clean, reliable code, just who can you trust? On the heels of many Windows XP 32-bit users facing blue screen of death errors and unwanted reboots, Microsoft is now confirming that there’s a little bit of malicious code sitting at the root of it all. A rootkit, to be specific, one called Alureon that compromises the atapi.sys file and others. This rootkit makes a system call via an address that, after the update, no longer corresponds to the particular call Alureon is trying to make. This is apparently the cause of the BSODs, not the update itself, and so those suffering from similar issues can resolve them by simply replacing corrupted system files via the recovery console. It won’t be as much fun as using Microsoft’s more popular console, but should at least cure what ails you.

Microsoft confirms rootkit caused Windows XP blue screens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Slashdot | Microsoft Malware Protection Center | Email this | Comments

Feb 13

Vista Aero Effect (with Blur) for Windows XP

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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

You might receive mixed results with the program below, but I thought this new application was definitely worth a mention if only for the idea that it presents. It is called Vystal (Download Mirror) and its goal is to add an Aero-like glass effect that you would experience in Vista…except now you can have it in Windows XP.

The reason I wanted to point this program out was because it is really the first of its kind, and is free. Other programs that have tried to make Windows XP look like Vista merely make the surrounding border transparent, while this actually adds a blurring effect to whatever is located behind the window:

Unfortunately there is a downside to this program…compatibility. I took the screenshot from the developer’s site because I had a hard time getting it to work properly on my own XP system. The blur effect should work on nearly all video cards but it didn’t want to work correctly for me. The good news is that there is nothing you have to install to try it out yourself! All you have to do is download Vystal, extract the files, run it, and then enable the glass-like effects. You’ll quickly be able to see if it is something you like or whether you should ditch it.

Hopefully the performance is good for you as well, because the anonymous tipster who sent this in said that it worked on their system but ran pretty slow. Again, this is something I am unable to confirm because I only have one Windows XP machine, and it didn’t want to cooperate with the software.

It is also important to note that this isn’t a full-fledged Vista theme for Windows XP, instead it just styles the borders of your windows to be what you would expect in Vista. Full Vista skinning solutions are available and maybe after this is fine tuned a bit more (for both speed and compatibility) it may be included in some of the packages as an optional add-on.

I was skeptical about doing this article because I couldn’t get it to work, and the person who sent me the tip said it worked but ran slow. The main reason that I did want to post about this was to show that people are indeed working on ways to add the blurring effect to Windows XP, and maybe after a little bit of time there will be a more efficient way of getting it done.

For right now feel free to try out the software which I have linked to below, and remember that it doesn’t require any installation which is pretty nice. Make sure to leave a comment letting us know whether you got it to work and what the performance was like!

Vystal Homepage (Download Mirror)
More Vystal Screenshots

Easily Compare The Different Windows Vista Themes

Aero Glass in Windows XP… Done Right

Quickly Turn Aero Transparency on and off in Vista

Make XP Look Like Vista with WindowBlinds 6

Feb 12

Windows XP patch fiasco gets even crazier, Microsoft now scrambling for solutions

Posted in: firmware, Microsoft, Software, Today's Chili, update, Windows, Windows XP

If you ever needed a reason to go Linux, here you go. The noise surrounding this patently obscure Windows XP bug / patch fiasco has just reached a fever pitch, and now we’ve got engineers within Redmond scratching their heads, too. As the story goes, Microsoft recently patched a security hole that took care of an antediluvian DOS vulnerability, and in doing so, some users began to see BSODs and endless reboots. Today, we’ve learned that the patch has been yanked, and Microsoft is suggesting that malware is to blame. But here’s the skinny — the patch simply disturbed the malware, which called a specific kernel code that directs your PC to keel over; in other words, any application that calls that same code could theoretically leave your machine in dire straits. And that, friends, probably explains the software giant’s following quote:

“In our continuing investigation in to the restart issues related to MS10-015 that a limited number of customers are experiencing, we have determined that malware on the system can cause the behavior. We are not yet ruling out other potential causes at this time and are still investigating.“

Rock, meet hard place.

Windows XP patch fiasco gets even crazier, Microsoft now scrambling for solutions originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feb 12

Session Manager for Windows Explorer

Posted in: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on September 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

I’m going in and out of Windows Explorer all day since I have a bunch of files I’m always trying to manage. One of the nice things in Windows Vista is that you can add favorite folders and locations to the sidebar for fast access, but I don’t think anything is as fast as Side-by-Side Explorer.

The power of Side-by-Side Explorer lies within its System Tray icon. You can create sessions for Windows Explorer so that when they are executed they are immediately opened to a particular location. Not only that but it can be configured to open two Explorer windows simultaneously and place them side-by-side. Here’s everything it can do with the System Tray icon:

Click to open one centered Explorer.
Double-click to open a pair of side-by-side Explorers.
Use the Menu Builder to create custom Explorer configurations in the context menu.
Each session (single or side-by-side) has its own tray icon.
Click icon to hide or show session, independent of other windows on screen.
Make a side-by-side session out of two singles.

If you hardly use Windows Explorer I don’t think this will be very handy, but it should definitely appeal to some people. It does require a quick installation process before being able to use it, but it’s completely free and registration is optional.

Side-by-Side Explorer Homepage (for Windows 2000/Server/XP/Vista)
Kudos to the anonymous tipster for sending this one in!

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Hasta La Gadget!

Make XP Look Like Vista with WindowBlinds 6

Omnimo: desktop Windows given fashion makeover with Phone 7 Series flair

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives