While Apple is giving thoughts over revamping its Mighty mouse by incorporating multi touch features and other aesthetics and wireless options, Microsoft is also unleashing latest technology in the pointing device arena. Microsoft Research and the Applied Sciences Group have developed five input device prototypes that harvest multitouch sensing features. Now that’s interesting coincidence or planned tactic that the timing of both companies touching the pointing device and unleashing the news in tech world.

Although details about mighty mouse multi touch features are still unknown at the moment, in contrary Microsoft prototype devices explores a different touch sensing strategy via a different form factor.  I really like the ORB multi touch mouse since it can be used in games and different actions can bring gaming to next level with multi touch features. These prototypes are really cool and can be of great interest to gamers, graphic artists, computer researchers and casual windows users as, but one thing is for sure Microsoft is definitely extending the idea of pointing device beyond simple mouse and it will be interesting to see how Apple can reply with its mighty mouse for new generation of snow leopard OS.

There is a cool video available below and is a must watch:

I’ve been using windows 7 RC since it was available on my work laptop. The main usage is mainly done for enterprise application development, emails,  documentation, project management, recreational activities and blogging as you can see. I’ve got loads of software installed including backend servers like IIS7, SQL Server 2008 database and integration services,ASP.NET,  MySQL 5, PHP etc are always running in background. With these I’ve noticed that performance is degrading day by day on my pretty fast Windows 7 laptop, even though I’ve got duo core 2.1 and 2 GB of ram.

So I took time out and started to figure out how to tune up windows 7 for maximum speed and performance that I used to get from fresh install. Here are my checklist items and to do list in the way I proceeded in this adventure of mine.

Quick Checks:

1. Check whether you have enough free hard drive space available on your primary and secondary partitions. As you can see below in the screenshot, I had only 6.82 GB free space on my primary partition, and well this is an obvious problem as hibernate files, Page file and temp folders require space for optimal performance. So I removed and moved files to free up 10 GB additional space, which I guess is good enough. Try running Disk Cleanup utility which can be pretty helpful..
2. Other option is to check the Disk for fragmentation, but in Windows 7 this is not an issue anymore and Windows manages defragmentation in background and defragmentation is scheduled to run periodically as illustrated in following screenshot. 
    
   However you can also check when the last disk defragmenter schedule has been run. So all is good in this regard.
     
   If you are an advanced user and want more control over your disk defragmentation, try this O & O Defrag software.
3. Uninstall unnecessary and unused software, special focus should be given to the software which are running in background.
4. Turn off unwanted services which are running in background and are really not required by a general user. Use MSCONFIG.EXE  utility to see which services are in running state and use Google and Bing search engines to see the description of a services in case you fail to identify its functionality and whether it is critical for windows 7 to function.
5. Check the widgets running on Windows Sidebar. If you have too many widgets loaded on your desktop and specially widgets which are loading lot of data consider turning them off, since these widgets are using processing power and memory in background and mostly on runtime. If you don’t really use sidebar gadgets, turning off the sidebar is really the good option. This can be achieved by launching MSCONFIG.EXE utility and un checking windows sidebar.exe from launching in “startup” programs. See screenshot below.
   
6. Lighten up the Windows personalization: If you have selected a heavy Windows 7 theme and have loaded lots of wallpapers in slide show, trying keep things simple here. Heavy wallpapers do take memory and also slide show always involve processing power, can be helpful in lightening up things.
7. If you are using Windows 7 on laptop, tablet or portable device, then consider using high power profile when you want to avail full power of your PC. Since low power device profiles by default have low CPU throttling and cap utilization to consume less battery power. See the following screenshot of a high power profile advanced view.
   
8. Use Windows ReadyBoost: Ready Boost is a great feature of Windows 7 which can improve your systems performance. Ready Boost is a facility that can utilize your USB 2.0 (high speed compatible )flash drive for providing quick access memory which the operating system can use as surplus RAM. Readyboost is useful If you have 2GB RAM or more, with less RAM you will not feed any visible difference.To set up Ready Boost, follow the steps given below:
   Connect a USB flash drive.
   Open ‘My Computer’.
   Right-click the USB Drive.
   Select the ‘Ready Boost’ tab.
   Select the ‘Use this device’ checkbox.
9. Viruses and Malware always hog up your PC resources, use a powerful an light weight anti-virus software and perform frequent virus scans to keep your system clean. I personally am using Microsoft security essentials, and it is really light on windows resources and does the threat detection and cleaning job nicely.

In-depth and advance tips to tune up your windows 7

• Turn off Windows 7 Aero features: Windows 7 Aero features are visually appealing and makes the windows experience very cool, but comes with a processing cost.  If you don’t want to completely turn of Windows Aero desktop features, consider turning off features like “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing”
• Turn of Windows Features which are not required. By default minimal set of tools and features are installed, but Turning off XPS Services and XPS Viewer can be helpful if not required.
• Improve Windows boot up time by Investigating the software which loads up when windows start, removing unnecessary software from loading can result in significant Boot-up performance and overall performance.
  An Advance Utility Autoruns for Windows from Microsoft is a very good utility meant for tech savvy users and professional users who want to keep an eye on every file that loads on startup and manage them.  Launch the exe by unzipping the package, All startup objects are located under “Logon” tab. Make sure not to disable the entries “explorer.exe” and “userinit.exe”, since they are responsible for the logon process and your desktop. See the screenshot below.
  
  Alternately if you are not a power user and wants to simply tweak the startup applications use MSCONFIG.EXE from run command prompt. This little utility lets you tweak the simple startup programs and services, and also lets you customize your boot up sequence as well. Furthermore, there are common available tools which can be launched from “Tools” tab to perform various windows management tasks.
   
• Remove any unwanted network shares from your computer. Access the network shares by Right clicking on “My Computer” and select Manage. Among the items, 3rd menu is of “Shared Folders”, removing these shares can be helpful if you are using windows in a network and many people connect to your machine for accessing shared information e.g. your shared songs folder.
• Clear Windows Event Log on periodic basis, Average user does not pay attention or even is not aware of Windows Event Log, this log is mostly useful for system administrators and developers, and overtime can grow up extensively that even for windows writing into this log can slow things. Clearing up windows event log can be a useful step in overall performance tuning. Right click on the log category such as “system” and select the clear option to clear up log entries.
  
• Do not meddle with Windows Prefetch folder and let windows manage contents and recycling, Prefetch is the technology Microsoft introduced in Windows XP and subsequently added in Windows Vista and Windows 7, the idea behind is that Windows determines and loads the files needed by software in a special folder “windows\prefetch” one time and subsequently will be loaded from this prefetch folder, this resulting in lesser loading times for frequently used software.  Read more about Windows 7 pre-fetch performance here
• Making Internet explorer load faster : Internet explorer (IE8) although fairly quick in loading, can be bogged down by different installed add-ons and plugg-ins. IE8 lets you see the load time of different add-ons, Click Tools > Manage Add-ons, check the Load Time in the right-hand column, and you’ll immediately see which browser extensions are slowing you down

Stay tuned to the next post where we will try to identify which processes, services are hogging up your CPU power, memory, Disk IO, and network. Further more we will also see how to use the performance analyzer facility and also see how viruses and malware can affect the windows performance.

Please do send us any other tips and tricks which can be used to boost the Windows 7 based pc performance which we have missed.

Samsung was declared the biggest phone provider in the US during the second quarter of 2009 by Strategy Analytics. Rightly so, with a jaw dropping phone coming out every fortnight I wouldn’t be surprised if they told me it wasn’t only the second quarter rather an all year phenomenon. Now there is news in the air that Samsung Behold II is going to run Android in its chest and will be provided exclusively by T-Mobile. The Behold II is a 3G phone with a 3.2” AMOLED screen. It will provide access to Google assisted applications like Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search, Google Talk and even Youtube besides the plethora of games and applications available from Android. The gizmo is poised to have a 5 MP camera which will work as a camcorder as well. Off course the phone also has Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz interface installed over the Android base. Other features include LED flash with the camera, Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi and support for 16 GB of memory extension via microSD card. No mention of price or probable date of release, but it is expected before the end of current year.

In what can be described as the first case of its kind the British High Court has served injunction to an anonymous twitter user who was using a fake Id of a lawyer named Donal Blaney to spread conservative news. Now this is a strange case where the identity of the defendant was not known and so the court decided that Twitter would be the best service to issue the injunction! The injunction asks the impersonator to reveal his/her identity and stop defaming Donal Blaney who also happens to be an active blogger. Serving legal notices is a complicated process, there are countries where notices are served in person, then there are places where these are delivered by mail, but Twitter well this is different. Although court notices can be issued by fax or even email in the UK.  The web is changing our lives, it is changing the way we interact, socialize or even entertain ourselves.

Reading news over the web is a pastime and hobby most of us enjoy, primarily because leading news channels/agencies around the world offer free news via their websites. Have a look at BBC, CNN or even Fox ( if you want the contorted view of news), all these and more have dedicated websites offering traditional news in text and photographs, video, RSS and audio off course. CNN has now launched an iPhone application that allows iPhone users to view breaking news, receive live streaming videos and read traditional news using fast Internet, i.e, Wi-Fi or EDGE, for a fee, $2 to be exact. The application uses push technology to deliver on screen messages telling users of breaking news, headlines, and even live newscasts. The application also has built-in support for sharing news via leading social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. Also included is the ability to read news offline, weather forecasting, photo/video uploading and a search facility. This is quite different from the traditional medium and method. This is something totally new. Is this the beginning of the end of print media which by the way is experiencing decreased readership since the birth of web? I think this is just the start and if other companies, I mean big companies follow suit then off course things are going to change.

Google has been providing website translation for quite sometime now, but now thanks to a newer feature web publishers or website owners will be able to provide translation service to the visitors based on their native language. The tool is being provided by Google for free as usual, and can be tested here. Presently multinational companies have their websites in three or even more international languages for the convenience of visitors. The new service will detect visitors browser settings and offer them the translated version in that language. IN all 51 languages are supported and webmasters will have to paste a piece of code in their pages to avail this facility. The idea is to give the visitors a gist of the contents that are available on the page being visited. Impressive is all we can say, but will they include more languages?

Finally Microsoft has released its long awaited free version of Antivirus which supersedes Windows Live OneCare after three months of extensive beta testing. The new tool has been renamed as “Microsoft Security Essentials” or MSE and serves the purpose of real time consumer antimalware which can fight against viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

MSE is available for Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32/64 bit and also for Windows 7 32-64 bit and on its base is Microsoft Windows defender.

Since its inception in 1996 the USB has been going through a much needed evolutionary process. At first it was the USB 1.0 with a top data rate of 1.5 M bit/s, then came along USB 2.0 in 2000 with a data rate of 480 M Bit/s and now the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 is expected to hit the markets in 2010. The SuperSpeed USB which will be backward compatible with old USB 2.0 ports will have a maximum data rate of 4.8 G Bit/s!! Well in plain terms it means a 25 GB HD movie will take a mere 70 seconds to transfer from say a  USB to the PC. Microsoft has however, as usual shied away and USB 3.0 is not supported in Windows 7, as of today. Linux on the other hand is the first OS to have USB 3.0 support built in to it. (Guess these are the benefits of using Open-Source products) Asus was the first hardware manufacturer to introduce USB 3.0 ports in its Asus P6X58 motherboard which never went in to production. This year the Intel developer Forum included a couple of hardware products like a Fujitsu laptop and solid state disk besides other devices which will support US 3.0 connectivity. The time is not far when USB 3.0 will be available in markets. Well that is what the media tells us, by the end of year 2010 to be exact, till then we will have to make use of USB 2.0 which by the way takes some 14 plus minutes to copy the same 25 GB HD movie

Windows and Linux are worlds apart. This has always been the case and so it will be. Sometimes back if you had to use Windows and Linux both, the best option available was to install both operating systems on separate partitions in a single PC. This obviously meant using any one of them at one time. The user would choose the OS he/she wanted to use at boot-up. There was no possibility of using both rivals on the same machine simultaneously. So if you were using Windows and felt a sudden rush to log in to a Unix/Linux environment you would have to shut down good old Windows and reboot in to the other OS. Now Ubuntu has made that a little easier by making a small Ubuntu (mere 480 MB) which can be run right within Windows! Ain’t it cool? This thing is called Portable Ubuntu. It is an executable file which can be downloaded from here. Here is what you have to do to run Ubuntu inside Windows.

Before I write anything about stuffing Ubuntu in a pen drive for creating a Live Ubuntu USB let us first discuss why do we need to do this in the first place? I mean what is the big advantage of loading a USB with Ubuntu when it is already there on a CD/DVD? To make it easy I have summarized some of the advantages of loading Ubuntu on a USB:

• To test drive Ubuntu (Anything on a flash disk loads much faster as compared to a CD/DVD)
• To carry your own copy in your pocket and use it on any PC
• To salvage/recover data from a PC with a crashed OS (Mainly Windows)

Linux has always been labeled as being a difficult OS, one that requires hundreds of commands to be memorized just format a disk or even change a directory. I distinctly remember a the time when I got a copy of Red Hat 6.2 a couple of years back and installing it turned out to be one of the most difficult experiences of my life. Simply configuring the graphics via Xconfigurator used to be a nightmare. But now Linux has progressed a lot and has followed the “point and click” philosophy of Windows and Macs. Similarly, making a Live Ubuntu USB is now more easier than ever. uSbuntu is an application which can be run from Windows XP/Vista to create a Live Ubuntu USB. You can download the application from here. It is a mere 1.5 Mb in size and does not require installing. Just double click and the application launches, see the screen-shot below.

There are five simple steps to creating a Live Ubuntu USB using uSbuntu. In fact the whole sequence is shown in the application itself from Step 1 to 5. I am going to write them down for your ease:

1.   Insert the Pen drive and note down its letter e.g. E:, F: or whatever, select it from the Step 1 pull down menu.

2.   Choose the source from where the Ubuntu contents are to be copied i.e the CD, ISO image or the web.

3.   Select the persistence of the drive in MBs.

4.   Check the relevant fields if you want to hide the files being copied on the Flash drive, format it in FAT 32   or enable launching Ubuntu in Windows.

5.    Click the lighting icon to begin the installation process.

The whole procedure requires takes less than 5 minutes. Finally reboot your PC to load Live Ubuntu. (be sure to set the USB port as first boot device from the BIOS) The best thing about a Live Ubuntu CD or USB is that it is an excellent data recovery tool. I have used it a number of times to salvage my data not only from the logical partitions but also from the primary partition i.e the “C” drive. The Ubuntu that is loaded via the USB or CD/DVD comes preloaded with USB drivers and CD/DVD writing software. Simply select the files that you wish to recover, insert a flash drive and move them on to it, alternatively, insert a writable CD/DVD and save your data optically. Enjoy the experience!