I got hold of the Beta version of Microsoft’s forthcoming Operating System – Windows 7. In terms of looks it is very similar to Windows Vista. The first change you will notice is the new Taskbar which merges the Quick Launch toolbar and gets rid of text labels for the items. When I first heard about the new Taskbar, I didn’t think it would do well because icons might not be enough to recognize the applications. This is where the increase in the taskbar height comes in handy. The larger icons provide easy switching and save a lot of horizontal space.

The taskbar is smart enough to detect an ongoing operation and shows a small progress bar behind the icon. Say you are downloading a file using Internet Explorer in the background and working on a Word document. You don’t even need to switch to the download dialog window to see how much of the file has been downloaded. Just move your eye to the taskbar icon, handy eh?

The taskbar also shows multiple thumbnails of grouped items; all of which can be previewed full screen without even having to switch to the windows (also no clicks or keypresses required).

Another improvement is the desktop preview feature which can be activated by moving the mouse inside the vertical rectangle at the extreme right of the taskbar. Again, no clicks required. To get back to the current screen, just move your mouse away.

Coming back to the taskbar icons, I noticed that unopen taskbar items which are pinned to the taskbar have a whitish glow below the icons. For open windows the background is a gradient based on the color which forms the majority of the icon (looks really cool, I must say).

Speaking of looks, the bootscreen of Windows 7 is what should have been done to Windows Vista.

I guess they rushed Vista’s release and left a lot of things uncompleted. Windows 7 will most certainly address these issues and be what Windows Vista should have been after such a long development period. The naming of Windows 7 seems more of a marketing nature, than technical. If you look at the versioning of Windows, you’ll find the major version has been updated only when there has been a substantial change in the Operating System core. Windows 9X systems (95, 98, ME) where all version 4, 2000 & XP where v 5. So should have been Vista & Vienna as version 6. But, as I read in an article somewhere, Vista is a tainted brand and so Microsoft decided to get the V out. Say bye to Vista/Vienna & hello to Windows 7.

partho Reviews

uCertify provides an interactive software that helps you in preparing for the various vendor certification exams. They provide PrepKits for Microsoft, CompTIA, CIW, Oracle, Sun Java, Cisco, Adobe and EC-Council. Whatever be the certification you are appearing for, you are sure to find a PrepKit for it. They even back all the PrepKits with a 100% money back guarantee, if you cannot clear the exam in your first attempt.

The PrepKits comprise of a variety of tests. The Diagnostic test lets you assess your current level of preparation while the Practice tests resemble the actual vendor certification examination, both in terms of format and difficulty. The Final test, designed to be even harder than vendor exam and a customizable test complete the list.

The PrepEngine is the central point for all the PreKits you have purchased. The interface is intuitively designed and requires no real time to get accustomed with. Other PrepKits can be installed and switched onto from within the application. Keyboard shortcuts facilitate working with the software without having to switch your hands back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. They also frequently update the PrepEngine (having myself experienced one such event during the course of writing this review). The application help is a bit cramped up because they don’t feature any categorization, indexing or search facility.

A variety of reports showing your performance with respect to the exam objectives and tests already taken are at your disposal. The PrepKits also contain study notes, tips, advanced articles and a well compiled listing of How Tos with media in the form of images.

Summing it up, the uCertify PrepKits are an excellent worth of your precious time and money. In the unlikely event of not getting through the certification exam, you can always get your money back.

Good News

Readers of Maxotek Blog can now avail a 10% discount on the uCertify PrepKit of their choice by using the discount code given below.

partho Shareware

No matter what the critics say, FTP still is the best way to transfer your web pages and associated files to the server. FileZilla is an open source, simple, quick and reliable FTP client that packs in a lot of features. The software targeted at the 32 bit Microsoft Windows platforms, is licensed under the GNU General Public License. All in all, a must have for all the site administrators out there.

Here’s a listing of some of it’s features.

• FTP & SFTP Protocol support
• Site Manager to store connection & initialization details
• Support for Proxy
• Multi-threaded download/upload
• ASCII/Binary/Auto Transfer Modes
• Download/Upload En-queuing

Links:-

Source Forge Project

partho Freeware

Notepad++ is a free, light weight but powerful editor which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. With features such as syntax highlighting and folding, full drag & drop support, auto completion, regular expression search/replacement this tool is a must have. It can also be set as the default HTML editor, so when you click on View > Source under Internet Explorer, the HTML code will open with Notepad++. Another plus point is that it has a plugin architecture which allows further extendability. One of the bundled plugins is a Hex Editor.

This project, based on the Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component), written in C++ with pure Win32 API and STL (that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

Quick Links:-

• Full list of features
• Screenshots
• Download

partho Freeware