Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

Recently Stardock launched TweakVista version 1.01. We’ve written about it before (here and here), but just as a refresher, it’s described as “an enhancement application that helps users configure Windows Vista to meet their personal needs. The program has been designed to allow both casual, non-technical users to safely use it as well as contain a host of advanced features for power users to dig into the internals of Windows Vista.”

Here’s the thing about TweakVista — it doesn’t allow you to do anything that you can’t already do with Vista out of the box. What’s nice though is that everything is in one central location so that it’s easier to access  the settings you’d ever want to change. It also makes it easier to manage certain things versus doing it on your own, and does a great job of explaining them for those who aren’t familiar.

Today we’re going to give you a visual guide of what it’s all about. Take a look at the screenshots (click to enlarge them) to see what all TweakVista has to offer… it’s a lot! Please note that we used the full-featured version which costs $19.95. There is an awesome free version available that just lacks a few of the features for those of you who’d like to try before you buy, or who don’t need a full-featured version. At the end of this article, look for the instructions on entering our giveaway to receive one of two TweakVista licenses.

Start Up

From the Start Up menu you’ll be able to control just about everything to do with the start up process. You’ll be able to see which programs are set to run upon startup, and you’ll also  be able to disable some of those programs. TweakVista will monitor your computer’s startup, shutdown, and sleep performance which could help you identify if there are any problems.

Resources

Under this section you can identify the programs that are using the most amount of memory. No one likes a program that’s a memory-hog, so this will be helpful. It’ll also show you your process list. Certainly you can easily get this information without TweakVista, but it’s nice to have it all in one centralized location.

Services

This part of TweakVista will help you manage all of the services that come with Vista that you may or may not use. From here you can turn off the services that you don’t use like web folders, diagnostics, error reporting, and more.

Security

Security is an important part of any operating system. From here you can customize your security settings like enable UAC, or switch to the secure desktop to display elevation requests.

Display

Stardock describes this portion of TweakVista as: “Unleash the power of the Desktop Windows Manager, underlying Vista’s user interface.” From here you can do things like enable or disable the Flip 3D window switching.

Power

One of the best options here is the power cost analysis which estimates how much your annual cost is per year to run the computer as well as your carbon footprint.

Assessment

If you’re currently running Vista, you’re probably aware of the assessment feature which rates your computer. You get an overview of how your computer performs, but TweakVista breaks it down further and provides you with detailed information on what the assessments are based on.

Internet

Allows you to easily enable certain network features that aren’t enabled by default.

SMARTGuard

Information presented in the SMARTGuard section was provided by your hard drive.

Misc. Tweaks

Includes context menu handlers, environment variables, and the system restore feature to create a restore point.

–Giveaway–

We have two licenses of TweakVista to giveaway thanks to Stardock! If you are using Windows Vista or have plans of getting it in the future, go ahead and enter. All you have to do is leave a comment below, and we’ll choose two winners.  One winner will be randomly chosen from the first ten comments, and a second winner will be chosen from all entries(it can be someone from the first 10 as well). The sooner you enter, the better!

As always, only one entry per person and this giveaway is void where prohibited. Each winner will receive a license for TweakVista which is valued at $19.95. Please note that if you are selected as a winner, you’ll need to create an account (if you don’t already have one) over at Stardock, and then they’ll go ahead and add the copy of Tweak Vista to your account.

The contest will end tomorrow on Tuesday, November 20th at 12 PM central time and the winners will be announced shortly after. Please be sure to include your email address in the email field of the comment box because this is how we’ll contact you, should you be chosen as a winner.

Thanks to Stardock for sponsoring this giveaway!

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Microsoft just announced it’s had itself a solid second quarter, posting an $6.63 billion profit on record revenues of $19.95 billion. That’s more or less about the same as last year, when it racked up a $6.66 billion profit on $19 billion in revenue — and while the numbers look stable and Redmond managed to slightly beat estimates, things are changing fast underneath the bottom line: strong Kinect and Xbox 360 sales drove Entertainment and Devices Division revenue up 55 percent to $3.6 billion, but Windows and Windows Live revenue fell nearly 30 percent to $5.05 billion. That means the revenue gap between Microsoft’s consumer device business and the Windows business is now just some $1.3 billion, compared to $4.8 billion this time last year — and it undoubtedly explains why Xbox got top billing at Ballmer’s CES keynote this year, after traditionally being ignored, and why Microsoft is moving Windows to ARM as the mobile and tablet spaces heat up.

As for Windows Phone 7, there’s nary a peep, even though Microsoft was just crowing about moving 2 million licenses yesterday — we’re taking that to mean the infant OS hasn’t had any meaningful impact on revenue yet. We’re going to jump on the call at 5:30PM ET, we’ll let you know if anything good happens.

Update: Corrected the profit numbers: it’s a $6.63b profit and a $8.17b operating income, not a $8.17b profit.

Update 2: As noted by our friend Michael Gartenberg, Microsoft’s Q210 Windows division revenue was boosted by the inclusion of $1.71 billion in deferred Windows 7 upgrade sales and OEM pre-sales, so if you take those out, the gap between Windows and Xbox went from 3.1 billion in Q210 to 1.3 billion this quarter, and Windows sales are down 8 percent. It’s not a huge change for the big picture, but it’s worth noting the revenue deferral in context — Microsoft moved cash around so it would have a huge launch quarter for Windows 7, and now things are evening out.

Microsoft announces Q2 earnings: $6.63b profit, Xbox revenue up 55%, Windows down 29% originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

It has been a known fact for quite some time that Microsoft will be shipping seven versions of Windows Vista, but will all seven versions be on the same DVD? This speculation could be good for all of the hackers because certain feature sets would only be unlocked by product keys. This makes it easy for those that want the best version but don’t want to pay the highest price, because you can go buy the cheapest version and find the crack that will unlock the best version. Of course, people are probably thinking ‘if you are going to crack a version that you bought then why buy it at all?’ Well, some ISPs are really hammering down on people downloading illegal software, but it is very very difficult for them to catch and punish someone that is only downloading the crack! I really can’t see Microsoft making this move but I am sure we will soon see.

News Source: Longhorn Blogs

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This article was written on October 01, 2009 by CyberNet.

A few weeks ago we wrote about a free audio converter that was pretty nice, but when installing the app it tries to also put a bunch of third-party software on your machine. I made sure to point this out, but our readers stepped up and mentioned several other apps that are both free and clean. One of them, called winLAME, was recommended by Ian and really caught my attention. Not only is it free, but it’s also open source.

There were a few reasons why I really liked this app. First, it already has support for Windows 7. Second, it has presets for people looking for no-brainer audio conversion in addition to custom settings for people looking for more control. It’s basically a four-step process: Select your input file(s), select your output settings, choose from one of the quality presets or customize the advanced settings, and then let it go to town. And not only can it convert your audio files, but it can also rip CD’s.

Here’s a more complete list of features and supported formats:

• Encoding and decoding of many audio formats, including:
  • .mp3 via LAME mp3 encoder (encoding) and MAD (decoding)
  • .ogg Ogg Vorbis
  • .aac via libfaac/libfaad
  • .wav, .aiff, .au, .voc and many more, via libsndfile
  • .wma via Windows Media Audio codec
  • .flac via FLAC library
• Uses LAME features, including:
  • high quality and optimized mp3 encoding
  • nogap encoding of continuous-mix-cd’s
  • optimized 3DNow! and SSE routines
  • ID3 v1 and v2 tagging
• Easy-to-use wizard-like user interface style for easy encoding setup
• CD Audio extraction (aka. CD ripping), including freedb support
• Presets for fast settings setup
• User interface translations to english and german language
• Batch Processing
• Detailed HTML Help File
• Easy install- and uninstall process
• Small size

If you’ve got some audio files to convert this is one app that I highly recommend downloading.

winLAME Homepage
Thanks Ian!

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Acer debuts education-minded Aspire One E100 with Android and Windows originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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