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With so much being said about Google Chrome’s performance (I’ve played with it… it IS fast), everybody started wondering about FireFox’s reaction. After all, it has been the golden boy as of late. The question on everyone who’s a follower of FireFox beta’s is how does the new beta Google Chrome browser stack up against the beta 3.1 FireFox release in JavaScript performance. Note… BOTH of these are beta releases.

Here are the results from head-to-head SunSpider on Windows XP on a Mac Mini and Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro, testing against last night’s Firefox automated build and yesterday’s Chrome beta:

The entire results of the test are worth looking into as they provide where V8 (Chrome) excels versus TraceMonkey (FireFox) in JavaScript performance.

Get the full scoop here.

Scott Hanselman, the studmuffin of the Microsoft world drops some knowledge and clears up some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download. From Scott’s site:

Which installer do I use?

Here’s the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators.

• Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it’s run on. It’s complete, all platforms, installable offline.
• Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs.
  • NOTE: If you’re IT and inside an office, you’ll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a network share. Check out the Deployment Guide for Administrators for ways to push it out via AD or SMS.

So how big is it the .NET Framework download, really?

It depends on what you’ve already got installed. Here’s some examples of my results using an XP SP2 machine.

Scott goes into much greater detail on his blog here. He’s also launched a section of his site called SmallestDotNet, it checks you browser’s “UserAgent” and figures out what version (if any) of the .NET Framework you have (or don’t have) installed, then calculated the total size if you chose to download the .NET Framework. Easy huh. The bummer is that it doesn’t work with FireFox.

Microsoft Office Labs releases the first community prototype from Office Labs: Speed Launch. Community prototypes are projects Microsoft employees work on in their spare time. The goal of Speed Launch is to provide lightning quick access to all the documents, files, and websites you use often. It runs on either XP or Vista, but note that it requires .NET Framework 3.0.

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Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. It allows you to pretty much ignore your start menu and do all kinds of time saving stuff from the Executor itself.

No doubt I’ve been in love with a similar application called Launchy for quite some time. Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. It indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Many have come, but Launchy still stands as the king. But Executor brings with it many features that Launchy doesn’t have and it might be time to make a switch.

One of the major differences between the two is Executor’s emphasis on keywords. Although it does text search for just about anything, Executor gives priority to user-assigned keywords for launching apps, documents, and folders. What’s more, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any keyword for quick launches without even invoking Executor. It’s also has a small footprint on your system clocking in at just about 10 megs.

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I’ve been a long time customizer of the Windows interface. Windows XP always looked like it was designed by a team from Fischer Price (hey, it’s “My First PC!”). Vista is of course much better looking in the visual department but there are still tons of GUI customizations out there that many people prefer. If you want to change the way Windows looks, then get a copy of WindowBlinds by StarDock. A WindowBlinds skin can make Windows look like an alternative operating system, like their favorite sports or car brand, or something completely new. Because WindowBlinds uses the latest hardware acceleration features of modern video cards, WindowBlinds won’t slow down your computer and uses very little memory. (btw… StarDock’s entire suite, called Object Desktop is awesome).

If you’re using Vista with a WindowBlinds skin what’s lacking is customizing the Windows Vista SideBar. The Sidebar of course allows you to run those (sometimes) handy Gadgets on the side of your screen.

Enter Stanimir Stoyanov who has create a very useful application that automates customizing the appearance of the Windows Vista sidebar. If you change your skin and want your sidebar to match, Windows Sidebar Styler makes it very easy to change the look.

1. Visit Stanimir Stoyanov’s blog and download the latest version.
2. Once installed, start up the Windows Sidebar Styler. You can find it in the start menu under Stanimir Stoyanov.
3. You can replace individual graphics used to create a custom theme by scrolling through the Available Resource List, right clicking on a resource and selecting Replace.

   

   Alternatively, you open a theme that was already created by clicking on the open button that is just to the right of the big Apply/Play button.

   

4. Once you have your changes made or theme loaded, hit the big Apply/Play button and you are finished.

   

Looking for more Windows Sidebar Styler themes to download? Check out WinCustomize.

CyberNet offers a simple tweak for increasing the size of the Alt-Tab thumbnail previews in Vista:

One of Vista’s features that I use all of the time is the new Alt-Tab for switching between applications. Unlike Windows XP, Vista actually shows thumbnails for each application that you are running so that it is easier to identify what you’re looking for. And they just aren’t screenshots either like a lot of the imitators in XP, instead they show live previews of the application. Overall, it is just really nice.

The above is what the default Alt-Tab looks like in Windows Vista, and if you click on the image you’ll see the full-size version. That’s on a 1920×1200 screen, which makes it obvious that it doesn’t take up the whole width of the screen. Unfortunately Microsoft did not scale the width of the Alt-Tab based upon the size of the monitor.

If I’m running Vista on a monitor capable of 1920×1200, I want to utilize the space available. And as it stands, Alt-Tab shows 7 previews in a row before it creates a new row. I’d rather leave that number alone and have it make the thumbnails bigger when I have a larger resolution available.

That’s when I came across this site which gives some registry settings that you can modify to change the width of each thumbnail, and ultimately the size of the Alt-Tab display. To change the size just download this registry file, and after it is on your computer, right-click on it and select Merge. This will import it into your registry using the values I’ve specified in the file (optimized for displays that are 1680×1050).

The first thing you might want to do before Merging the file is to open it in Notepad (or any text editor) and adjust the MaxThumbSizePx to match something close to your resolution.

1024×768: MaxThumbSizePx = 00000078
1280×1024: MaxThumbSizePx = 0000009E
1680×1050: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000d2
1920×1200: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000f5

You do not need to restart your computer to see the changes, they should be instant. This is what the end result looks like on my 1920×1200 monitor (yeah, compare this to the screenshot above):

If you don’t like how it looks, and don’t want to mess around with it, you can always revert back to the old Vista Alt-Tab dimensions by removing the following “folder” from the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Windows’
CurrentVersion’Explorer’AltTab

That will delete all of the settings that you just entered in, and the Alt-Tab appearance will revert back to how it was previous to importing the values into the registry. If you wanted to mess with all of the values, it might be easier to open the registry editor, findi the location above, and edit the values there since you can enter them in as a normal decimal number:

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.