PaulSpoerry.com

If you’re like me you hate seeing the image to the right… the Apple Update. Well, Microsoft has some good news for movie fans. If you want to watch .mov files in Windows 7, you don’t need to install Apple’s QuickTime. Say goodbye to those annoying updates, popups, and prompts to download other Apple software like itunes, Safari, etc. (I hate Quicktime almost as much as I hate iTunes).

The support for .mov files was mentioned deep in a long list of changes that are coming to the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

On the Engineering Windows 7 blog, in a post entitled ‘Some changes since beta for the RC’, Chaitanya Sareena, Senior Program Manager on the Core User Experience team, says “We’ve since added support for Windows Media Player to natively support the .mov files used to capture video for many common digital cameras.”

Awesome news if you watch trailers in .mov format (particularly Apple Movie Trailers), or if you camera outputs to the .mov format. On any other Windows system you have to have QuickTime (or… as I’d recommend, VLC media player) to watch a .mov file.

Microsoft is so eager to make Windows 7 available to people (probably because despite ~300 million copies of Vista in use it has a negative perception) that it’s going to give away the Windows 7 beta for free.

According to Ballmer, Windows 7 will be available to developers immediately, and to the general public on Friday, January 9. It will be a free download from Microsoft’s site. Windows 7 Beta has been out in the wild (i.e., BitTorrent) since December, but if you’ve been waiting fora legit copy before you tried it out, you won’t have to wait much longer (FYI… I’ve tried it and while the task bar is a bit disorienting at first it runs very fast in a virtual machine and looks generally to be solid for a beta release).

What’s new in Windows 7? Under the covers it’s very similar to Windows Vista. However, aside from performancing tweaking the what is at the core of Vista, modifying the task bar and giving us virtual folders there are some new additions: Digital Living Room Network Alliance (DLNA) compliance in Windows Media Player (WMP) for easier media sharing, Bitlocker to Go for encrypting USB storage devices, Direct Access for network access without VPN, and new support for sensors and devices that will enable location-aware laptops.

“Oh lord, not another Vista article!” Like me, I’m sure many of you might be thinking something along those lines whenever you see an article with the word ‘Vista’ in the title these days. We’ve had what can only be described as a plethora of articles on Windows Vista, almost all of them repetitive, one-sided and of little practical use. Some of them have bordered on the absurd, such as Infoworld declaring Windows Vista to be the second biggest tech blunder in history, giving as its reason a one paragraph description that serves more to highlight the author’s ignorance than provide any actual logic for their decision. We’ve been suffering under the weight of these nonsensical, sensationalist and opinion-laded pro- and anti-Vista articles for far too long.

So what makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it’s as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn’t matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don’t: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we’ve been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it’s worth using again now – this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts.

What this article doesn’t do: it doesn’t try to make you believe that Vista is the greatest (or worst) thing since sliced bread. It doesn’t try to force you to think a certain way by taking liberties with the truth just to prove a point. It doesn’t try to highlight how witty and incisively sarcastic I can be. And most certainly this article doesn’t try to dazzle you with technical jargon.

Read the full article over at TweakGuides.com

Windows Vista lets you use hotkeys for the first 10 items in the Quick Launch menu. These hotkeys are assigned automatically, so there’s no need to do anything other than understand how they work.

For each icon in the Quick launch bar, the hotkey Win + number is assigned. These are assigned from left to right, 1-9 (and 0 for 10).

For instance, in the following screenshot, you’ll see that the first 4 icons are:

1. Show Desktop
2. Flip3D
3. Windows Media Player
4. Internet Explorer

That would mean the automatic hotkeys are assigned like this:

1. Win + 1   – Show Desktop:
2. Win + 2   – Flip3D:
3. Win + 3   – Windows Media Player
4. Win + 4   – Internet Explorer

Scraped from: HowToGeek

Vista’s start menu search box is one of the nicer touches to the new OS. In fact I rarely use the programs menu’s anymore and instead just start typing the name of the program I want to run. I’ve always been big on keeping my start menu clean. I create logical categories like Media for DVD burning software and graphic programs, System for antivirus and compression utils, Games for… duh… games, etc. For most users, their start menu is a nightmare.  You know who you are, you have folders that pop out under all programs that scroll out 2-3 levels deep.

With Vista you have Instant Search and you are never more than a few keystrokes away from whatever you’re looking for. This feature, which is available almost anywhere you are in Vista, enables you to search for a file name, a property, or even text contained within a file. It’s uber slick. Instant Search is also contextual, optimizing its results based on your current activity—whether it’s searching Control Panel applets, looking for music files in Windows Media Player, or looking over all your files and applications on the Start menu.

So with all this power, what is there to do? Tweak it! The biggest detraction from the search is that by default it searches an index of all files on your computer. Seriously, how often are you going to do that? Probably never, the search box isn’t a good use of searching for a file on your PC.

To change the settings right click on the Orb (previously called the start button) and click properties. You’ll see a dialog like the one to the left (click to see full size image), scroll down to the search options. I’ve disabled search files. As I said above, I don’t think the start menu is the right interface for searching for files across the entire pc. If you don’t use Windows mail and contact you can disable Search Communications. If you favor FireFox over IE, you can disable Search favorites and history too. If you are an IE user, you might wanna leave this on. I personally find this a LOT easier to find a webpage that I wanted to go to, but couldn’t remember, than the IE history. I suggest leaving Search Programs on… as that’s the seriously cool feature of Instant Search.