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Showing posts from 2009

Saving your computer from Virus for FREE

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For years, you have relied on ratings of various FREE anti-virus software to choose the one you want for your home PC. the choice has been mostly between AVG or Avira. If you were me, you would believe that one should pay for minimum 2 softwares on your PC: Your Operating System i.e. Windows Your Anti-Virus i.e. Norton/ McAfee Now, Microsoft wants you to keep your computer safe for you. After including a world class firewall since Windows XP, Microsoft has now made available a FREE antivirus for your PC. This antivirus is called Microsoft Security Essentials . The antivirus is available as a FREE download from the link above. It is 4.28 MB of download for Win Vista/ Win 7. Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for home PC and counters viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. The software runs in the background and silently monitors the files for all the malware. It schedules scans when the PC is most likely idle and interrupts the user only

Gaming monster comes to India – Dell Alienware range

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For all you PC gamers out there, there is reason to rejoice. The internationally acclaimed Alienware range is here in India! Dell has launched its Alienware M17x and this represents premium performance in the Dell consumer product portfolio.  On to some specs of the the 17” monster: Up to Dual 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280M graphics processing units (GPUs)2 with SLI™ technology Configurable with Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme Quad-core overclockable Mobile Processor1 Up to 8GB DDR32 1333MHz Memory 1TB3 7200RPM or 512GB of Solid State Storage Capacity (Raid 0) Optional Beyond HD resolution with a WUXGA 1200p (1920 x 1200) Edge-to-Edge LCD design Internal Wireless a/g/draft-n with MIMO (2x2) Technology AlienFX Illuminated Keyboard NVIDIA GeForce® 9400M G1 GPU with HybridPower™ technology Microsoft Windows Vista® (64 bit) [and free upgrade to Win 7 on availability] My first impression of the machine was – it looks intimidating and big. With its alie

Microsoft India launches Online Services

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Cloud based services have been in focus for a few years now. From FREE online email services (e.g. hotmail, gmail) to paid online services (e.g. Google Apps, Office Online, Yahoo Premium emails), the adoption of these services has been steadily rising. The safety of these applications have been questioned (as exposed by recent Twitter docs leak).. While Microsoft had launched its service in US way back, it has now launched these services in India. These services follow the initial launch of Hosted Exchange and Hosted Dynamics. These pay as you go/ subscription based services are meant for companies who want to avoid internally maintaining these basic IT services. The service is being launched as Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite . This suite includes Microsoft Exchange Online , Microsoft SharePoint Online , Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communications Online . Exchange Online provides email, calendaring and contact management. Sharepoint

My Election Wish 2009 #indiavotes

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India is going to be voting soon. I have been thinking on how we can improve the whole political process and quality of candidates. The systemic issue with our voting process has been that educated people have stayed away from voting. IMHO, the reason being they don’t want to sweat out standing in a line or going to the nearest booth for lack of simple amenities. I think there is a simple solution to the above available via technology. EC should make available voting via internet. If this made available, educated people who have access to internet and feel unmotivated to visit the election booth can vote via a very personal device – their computer. this would reduce burden on the voting booths and hence the expenditure for EC. also, the chances of fradulent/ bogus voting would be reduced as it will be difficult for anti-social elements to reach everyone’s home (rather than the voting booth). I have heard people say that internet is not available for everyone. I agree and I am prop

Microsoft makes its Web Design tool FREE

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Today, everyone has a blog. Everyone knows how to design a website (atleast with the right tools). To support this new era, Microsoft is making available its web design tool FREE for everyone. This free tool (called Sharepoint Designer 2007 or SPD) has been made available at http://www.microsoft.com/spd to download. Sharepoint Designer is successor of the FrontPage tools that many of the people  are already aware of. In addition, this tool has excellent support for customizing the FREE SharePoint Services app that comes with Windows Server. One might think that by releasing this software for free, Microsoft may be abandoning Sharepoint Designer. However, that’s not true. Sharepoint Designer will continue its development and next version will be released in the future. While SPD is free, Microsoft also has a professional suite of web design tools available – Expression Web. Lately Microsoft has been making available many of its tools available for FREE e.g. SQL Server Express ,

New Version of Windows Live Mobile released

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Today Microsoft has released a new version of Windows Live client for Windows Mobile devices. If you are using any of the Live services – Live search, Messenger or hotmail, you want this locally installed on your Windows Phone as well. the download can be accessed from: http://wl.windowsmobile.com .  The version currently available is v10.6.0046.0800. the exciting addition to this suite has been inclusion of Live Messenger that was earlier taken out of the Live Mobile suite. so, now u can be on IM even when you are on the move. Live Messenger works well over GPRS networks and let’s u have text conversations with your Live Messenger contacts. If you don’t want the client on your mobile, you can access Live services with web browser at: http://mobile.live.com Technorati Tags: live , mobile , windows

Windows Phones gets a lot of Bling

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  Today the twitterverse is occupied with news of skype releasing apps for iphone. Well, that is old news for Windows Phone users: http://skype.com/download/skype/windowsmobile/ But today, Microsoft Phones are getting a lot of bling.. Here’s some of the bling it is getting: MySpace now enables use of Silverlight on their site With its rich media capability is going to be a big help to all the musicians and actors on myspace :).. Tomorrow, the SDK to develop this application will be released on the CodePlex Open Source site. In addition, Windows Phone will also be getting an app for Myspace users soon. In fact, plan is to enable Windows Phone users to experience other  social networks right from their Windows phone, including Facebook and Windows Live. Windows Marketplace for Mobile Windows Marketplace had been announced earlier (to be available later in the year) and today they talked about few additional things. Marketplace will be available as an Windows Ph

To see a browser – Take off its clothes

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This is from a recent trip that I took and met few people who were Firefox users. Most of them were using FireFox at home and IE at work.. and most of them felt that FireFox was “faster” –meaning it would load websites faster and FF itself would load faster.. So, I devised this test and called it the “ Naked Browser ” challenge. Are you upto taking this? Here is what were are trying to do – kill most of the add-ons in IE and then test it against FF. Here are some step by step instructions - Make sure you are running the IE8 Release Candidate 1. To make sure that you are on this version, just go to IE Help menu and click on “About Internet Explorer”. you should see Release Candidate 1 mentioned as follows: Go to Tools –> Manage Add-Ons. In the Manage Add-Ons window, click on each Application and disable the add-on. You can can disable the add-on by clicking on the “Disable” button located at bottom right, once you have selected the application in the upper window. Next, change the

What’s your Phone Ishtyle?

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Internet is spread with numerous surveys you can take to know yourself. From what cricketer are you to what colour are you, everyone has taken a survey of some kind. The surveys are a lot of fun and very entertaining. Now Microsoft offers to tell you your Phone personality or Phone Style. It will ask you 5-6 questions and then tell you your phone characteristics. I took the interesting quiz and here is what it said for me: I’m Always in Control On a good day, success means a leisurely game of tennis or lazing at the swimming pool. At other times, you’re travelling for a project and meeting challenging deadlines. Work or play, Windows Mobile puts you firmly in the driver’s seat. The suggestions offered to me were HTC Touch Viva and ASUS M930. I would say it is pretty much on mark :) And the site even offers you a Windows Mobile phone as a prize and for that you will need to refer a few friends to the site and complete a slogan.. So, if you want your phone to d

Search for Voice: Microsoft Recite

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Microsoft Recite is a search technology for your voice that runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 or higher devices. With Microsoft Recite, you can use your voice to easily store, search and retrieve the things you want to remember, where and when you need them. Recite even lets you remember and search in multiple languages. You can record your shopping list, friends’ birthdays, addresses, school happenings, gift ideas, get-togethers, favorite wines… anything you might need or want to remember later. Later, you just need to search with your voice and it retrieves all recorded notes. How Does It Work?  Microsoft Recite’s voice search works by voice pattern matching . It analyzes the patterns in your speech and finds matches between two recordings -- the notes you stored on your phone, and the search you do using your voice. This is different from speech recognition, which has to accurately convert spoken words to application-readable input. The free software can be downloaded from: ht

Win32/Conficker.B/Downadup infections

Reports of a new worm Conficker, Kido or Downadup are doing the rounds. Win32/Conficker.B exploits a vulnerability in the Windows Server service (SVCHOST.EXE) for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2008. Attacked systems may lock out users, disable our update services and block access to security-related Web sites. Microsoft addressed this issue in October with Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 , and Forefront antivirus and OneCare (as well as other vendor’s anit-virus products) helped protect against infections, many systems that have not been patched manually through Server Update Services and Microsoft/Windows Update or through Automatic Updates have recently come under attack by this worm. The systems which have already applied the out-of-band released MS08-067 in October 2008 are protected, unpatched system user have experienced system lockout and other problems. However, given the present spread, Microsoft has taken the following a