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Written by WinPlanet Windows Software News on November 28th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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Written by WinPlanet Windows Software News on November 28th, 2007 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
Say hello to an orchestra of sound snippet in your instant messenger. The Windows Live Messenger 9.0 beta was released today sporting a handful of new features as already uncovered last week by LiveSide. One feature in particular called Signature Sound is giving users the power to customize the sound their contacts hear when they come online. However as annoying that might sound (pun), what’s more interesting and actually useful is the embedded sound editor used to customize your Signature Sound and every other sound in Messenger.
From here, you can select any sound files in WMA, WAV or MP3 format to edit. Once you click on a valid sound file, it will take a few seconds to analyze the file and display a sound wave spectrum for you to edit.
The interface for this editor is similar to any mainstream sound editor applications in which it displays a selection box with a start and end point to clip a segment of an audio track. Messenger restricts all of its sounds to a maximum of 5 seconds which might seem to restrict creativity, but you’ll be thankful when your friends pop online later.
The user can move the left and right boundaries anywhere between the two blue arrows to define a start and end of their sound clip. To move back and forth in the timeline, you simply drag the wave left or right to move the “5-second window”. Alternatively you can also click the rewind or fast-forward buttons to step back or forth in seconds. On top of all that, it’s a nice touch to be able to perfect the clipping by adding a fade in or out. Then it’s as simple as clicking play to preview.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was how similar it is to the iTunes Ringtone editor for the iPhone. Both of which are dead simple yet unsuspectingly fun and addictive to perfect that perfect clip. Thankfully you don’t have to pay 99cents every time you sign online so it’s a lot more attractive to experiment with.
I’m sure it won’t take very long until someone figures out how to make full-length Signature Sounds which would play the entire Beethoven 9th Symphony every time you signed on. In which case you would want to tick the checkbox to disable Signature Sounds.
Written by Long Zheng on November 28th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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I know it is taged as Vista SP1..but I`m giving here the hack because of the growing Popularity...So Enjoy!
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update
pause
Copy paste this in a Notepad and Save it as SP3.CMD. It will add some registry keys which will make Windows Update believe that you are a member of the private beta program. Then, you launch Windows Update (via Windows help) to download Windows XP SP3.
Written by ShaDow on November 28th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.
Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.
Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.
In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that although the company understood the interest in the service packs, they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their release. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs," the spokesperson said.
If SP1 does not evolve sufficiently, it could be another setback for Vista, with many businesses waiting to adopt the operating system until the service pack is released.
A year after its launch, only 13 percent of businesses have adopted Vista, according to a survey of IT professionals.
Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.
Microsoft has not done enough to make users aware of the benefits of Vista, NPD analyst Chris Swenson said at the conference. "The problem is that there are a lot of complex new features in Vista, and you need to educate consumers about them...much like Apple educating the masses about the possibilities of the iPhone or focusing on a single feature or benefit of the Mac OS in the Mac-versus-PC commercials. Microsoft should be educating the masses about the various new features in a heavy rotation of Vista in TV, radio, and print ads. But the volume of ads (for Vista) has paled in comparison to the ads run for XP."
XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the first six months of U.S. retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7 percent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release.
Microsoft has had to allow PC manufacturers to continue to sell XP on new PCs, setting a deadline for the last sale at January 31. However, the pressure from manufacturers and consumers has been so great that Microsoft has been forced to extend the deadline another five months, until June.
According to Microsoft, sales of Vista have been picking up, with the software giant reporting 88 million units sold.
Written by ShaDow on November 28th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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