Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Microsoft recently added support for Divx and Xvid video to the Xbox 360 via a Dashboard update. This article compares Winamp Remote and Windows Media Player 11, two applications that help stream video content to Xbox 360.

This article compares display quality of two budget-priced 1080p HD-DVD options, the Toshiba HD-A20 standalone player, and the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on drive. Results cover regular DVD upconversion performance, as well as HD-DVD results from Transformers and King Kong.

Adobe came to Minneapolis for their Summer 2007 On AIR bus tour, where they introduced the new AIR runtime environment built to deploy internet applications to the desktop.

RSS Popper is a feed subscription plug-in for Outlook and Outlook Express users that bring RSS, RDF and Atom support, as well as auto-add from Internet Explorer and synchronization support with other readers like Bloglines.

Launchy is a keyboard application launcher for Windows. Keyboard launchers are generally considered easier and faster at launching applications because a user’s hands never leave the keyboard. I’ve been using Launchy at home and at work for a couple of months, and could not go back to using my computer without a keyboard launcher. Launchy consumes just 12MB of memory (on my system), and becomes a natural way to open applications or perform other simple tasks because it is so fast. Launchy is open source and is designed to be skinnable and highly extensible.

Microsoft Photo Info is a tool for adding metadata to your photos. Released in January 2007, this is a free tool for Windows XP SP2 or Vista (32-bit versions) that will help you update batches or individual photos with titles, keywords, descriptions, locations and other information. I’ve been using Photo Info to add metadata to photos I’ve shared on Flickr for 2 days, and it has worked better than any of the other Windows solutions I’ve tried thus far.

After Thomas Hawk’s (heavy user of Flickr and CEO of Zooomr) recommendation of jUploadr over the supported Flickr Uploadr, I was curious to try it and see if it would save me time. jUploadr is written in Java, which means you can run it on Windows, Mac or Linux, where you have a Java runtime environment installed. The Flickr Uploadr tool is Windows and Mac only at this time (I have never used it in OS X).

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a calendar of events that you’d like to share with others, specifically users of Apple’s iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

My winter basketball league recently released the schedules on their web site. We like the web site, but it’d be nice to be able to view the events (each game) in our own calendar applications.

Google Video Player lets you download and watch videos in full high-resolution quality instead of the low quality streamed video available at video.google.com. Videos that contain detailed visual information (like application demos or code samples) must be viewed in their native resolution to discern fine details. This player combined with downloaded video solves the problem of “fuzzy” (but fast) streamed video available online. Google makes a downloadable player for Windows and Mac (though I didn’t test this).

After a fresh installation of Windows XP there are a number of tasks I complete to customize my installation, improve performance, and reduce system resource utilization. The quick tips below show you how to remove balloon notifications and Windows XP Genuine Advantage warnings, fill functionality gaps with Windows PowerToys, and prevent certain actions from happening or applications from starting. If you find some of these tips useful, or have related tips of your own, please share them in the comments.