SG OwnBlog

Microsoft's "re-imagining" of Windows 8 is focused very heavily on a new, Metro-style touch-based interface. However, they make a big deal of saying that it's just as usable with a mouse and keyboard—and  no matter what device you're on, you can switch between the simple Metro interface and the traditional Windows desktop  to fit whatever your needs are at that given moment. Performance One of the issues that's been on our minds since they  previewed this new interface  was whether this will keep bogging Windows down with more running processes, and whether running a full Windows desktop on a low-powered tablet was really a good idea (after all, we've seen Windows run on netbooks). Performance was the first thing they addressed today: Windows 8 actually has better performance than Windows 7, even with this metro interface running on top of a desktop. Tablet users and netbook users should notice a fairly significant performance increase with Wind

  Disk Cleanup is a wonderful yet somewhat basic tool for carrying out disk cleaning activities on Windows machines. We sometimes may feel irritated to use this tool. Instead we switch to other alternatives. But we can extend its functionality a bit by following a few tips and tricks. At a Run dialog, type:  cleanmgr /sageset:1  Up will come the Disk Cleanup, select the drive, then select what you wish to keep and what you dont. Then click OK. Next time, type:  cleanmgr /sagerun:1  Then the cleaner goes to work to clean whatever you selected. You can assign another number for another type of cleanup if you want. E.g.  cleanmgr /sagerun:2 might be more or less agressive about cleaning, depending on what you chose with cleanmgr /sageset:2  You can even create shortcuts for the different lists of destroyables you have. But always make sure to use sageset before applying its settings to sagerun.  Thanks to PrairieMoon for this tip. 

Microsoft WebMatrix is intended to serve the website creation, customisation and publication needs of designers and amateurs, and not as a substitute for Visual Studio or other professional development tools. As a professional developer, I can see why it might appeal to its target audience, but I can't stand to use it myself for more than 15 minutes at a time. Rick Grehan's  preview of WebMatrix  in November covered most of the product features well, so I won't repeat his descriptions and analysis. Since then, a few features and gallery items have been added, which I'll discuss as I go along. I've included a handful of screen images at the end of the article. Rick picked on the weakness of the editor and the lack of a debugger, and until I worked with the product myself, I didn't understand how kind he was in the way he phrased his objections. After spending time with WebMatrix, I know otherwise. By choosing the WordPress framework, for example

If you find the latest version of  Firefox is not up to the mark, you may as well try out the new Pale Moon Browser. Now for all the Firefox purists out there, I must mention here that this is actually Firefox on steroids, as per speed that is. Firefox is an open source project, meaning which, you can actually change the code any way you want and release it. This allows for more customization. You can keep the features you like and trash the rest. Actually when Mozilla releases a version of Firefox, they keep maximum compatibility in their mind. Which means it is made to work on very low end machines, thus sacrificing speed and efficiency.Pale Moon tries a slightly different approach. Instead of trying to create a browser for everyone, they try to build a Windows optimized browser. At this point of time, Pale Moon has completely discontinued the Firefox 4.x and 5.x versions because they were largely similar any way. Their main development centers around the Firefox

Microsoft has decided to revolutionize the user interface of the Windows Operating System(again). In the upcoming Windows Operating System, the most striking change, according to me is the new look of the Explorer, The first time I saw it, I could not believe my own eyes. Everyone is going minimal these days. Putting  an Omnibar, removing clutter, keeping most used buttons and trashing the rest and so on. Then I first saw this. Home Tab for Explorer I instantly dismissed this as one of the thousands of fan site creation or something like that. But Googling around I found out that this was absolutely authentic! In the process I found this. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/26/improvements-in-windows-explorer.aspx Honestly, I never hated the ribbon as long as it was kept for applications like Office etc. But now that it is in Explorer, Windows Explorer, I take a strong exception to it. Just one look at it is enough to make me go nuts. What were they thinking?

We love Macs. We adore the Apple logo. We know it's not just  "some kind of fruit company" ! So now, as I test my PC for some Mac Mac-king, I will provide you the list of sites that I found very useful.  [Photo Courtesy : wired.com] Oh! I forgot to give an Introduction Introduction Hackintosh  is a term used in the  Apple Macintosh  user community to mean different things throughout that platform's lifespan, but now generally referring to the use of  Mac OSX  on non-Apple hardware. Currently, the most common Hackintoshes are  Intel  based, although some programmers have made  kernel  patches to work on  AMD -based computers. Prior to the  Apple-Intel transition , the term most often referred to an Apple-manufactured Macintosh computer that its owner had performed various  hardware hacks  on. The alt.hackintosh  Usenet  newsgroup gives its description as "Clever programming on Apple's Macintosh." Things to Remember Before you begin it i

Introduction This is a quick step by step guide to help all .Net developers to take advantage of the new features of Windows 7. What you will Need   Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework Can be downloaded from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack Minimum .NET Framework version required is 3.5 SP1. A Windows 7 machine. Getting Ready   You will need to compile the Windows API Code Pack Dlls, after extracting the WindowsAPICodePack.zip file open the WindowsAPICodePack.sln located inside the WindowsAPICodePack folder and Build the solution this will produce the following Dlls * Core * Shell (Note : it depends on the Core project ) you will need to add a Reference to them in your applications. Compatibility with Different Versions of Windows   the application will crash and exit if for example a feature exclusive to windows 7 was called and it was running under a windows vista or a windows XP environment. so to prevent your  a