Microsoft Talk

If you like watching sports, you’ll love Windows Media Center SportsLounge.1 Included in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate, this rich portal takes your sports television viewing experience to a whole new interactive level. A partnership with FOXSports.com, SportsLounge is the place to catch your favorite games, players, teams, and fantasy sports leagues—all from the most comfortable chair in your den.

Keep an eye on the Live Scoreboard

With On Now in SportsLounge, you can watch your favorite game live, while seeing real-time scores on the Live Scoreboard that runs across the top of the screen. The displayed scores are shown for all the additional games on other channels that are available with your current antenna, cable, or satellite TV service.

If you want to quickly see what’s happening with a different game on another available channel, just select the game from the Live Scoreboard, and Windows Media Center will instantly tune to that channel with instant access—no need to navigate the program guide.

Find upcoming games

You no longer need to search the entire program guide to find out when the games you care about most are coming on. On Later finds all the games airing over a two-week period that are available from your television service and neatly arranges them according to date and sport.

You can record a future game at the press of a button on your remote while viewing the upcoming schedule. Just find the upcoming game you want to watch, press the record button, and Windows Media Center adds it to your scheduled recordings.

Track your favorite players

With the Players feature, you can set up Windows Media Center to track your favorite professional athlete. Players displays stats over the course of the season or the stats for a current or recently played game. If you’re using the On Now feature and watching one game, and your favorite player makes a huge play or is on deck to bat on another channel, you’ll be notified of that event; SportsLounge will give you the option to directly tune to that channel to watch the play.

Microsoft LifeCam users get bonus with access through new Windows Vista gadget.

Microsoft Corp. unveils Video Messages, a groundbreaking service that combines the flexibility of e-mail and voice mail with the personal expression of a video call; it is the video version of voice mail. Video Messages allows consumers to record and send personalized videos that their friends and family can access anytime, anywhere they are online* the perfect solution when they are not available for a live video chat.

Microsoft is offering this new service through a LifeCam video messages gadget and a Web site so everyone can get in on the fun. Video Messages is the perfect way to send a personalized “happy birthday” message to a friend or have the kids leave a quick “hello” message to grandma across the country when she is not home.

“Video Messages offers a groundbreaking way to communicate,” said Bennie Soto, product marketing manager at Microsoft. “It provides a free, easy and fun way to stay connected and share the special moments in your life without thinking twice about time zones or busy schedules; you’ll never have to plan a specific time for video calling again.”

Go, Go LifeCam Gadget

The best way to experience Video Messages is with a LifeCam video messages gadget, available for people running Windows Vista and using a supported Microsoft LifeCam. By downloading the new gadget, LifeCam users can create, send and receive video messages from their desktop. They can even select six of their top friends who will always be visible in the video messages gadget just like storing top friends’ numbers on speed dial for easy access. This added convenience is a great benefit for LifeCam customers because the Video Messages controls are always available; they can just click on a friend’s image, record a video and hit send. A demo of the LifeCam video messages gadget in action is available at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/digitalcommunication/videomessage.mspx.

Just learning about Windows Vista? Now updated with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is easier, safer, and gives you more entertainment choices than earlier versions of Windows. Want examples? Here are ten of the coolest things you can do:

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks
You don’t need to remember folder names to be organized anymore. Save time by instantly tracking down any document, photo, e-mail message, song, video, file, or program on your PC using Instant Search.

Just open the Start menu and begin typing in the Instant Search box—Windows Vista searches file names, application names, the full text of all files, and metadata, and then displays the results right away.

2. See everything you have open at a glance
Have you lost track of what files and programs you’ve opened? Flip through all your open files and windows with a simple click of your mouse using Windows Flip 3DA—you’re just one click away from everything you’re working on.

Plus, in Windows Aero,A when you rest your mouse pointer on the taskbar, you can see thumbnail images of the windows you have open without having to expand them—so you can find what you’re looking for at a glance.

3. Keep photos organized—and ready to share
Is your collection of digital photos getting out of hand? You don’t have to search through folders to track down the ones you want. Now you can tag your photos with a date, keyword, rating, or any label you choose so you can find them quickly and easily in Windows Photo Gallery.

You can also use Photo Gallery to fix and edit photos, and then share them with family and friends through slideshows, e-mail, or prints—so everything you need for photos is in one place.

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree
Making a great home movie just got easier. Use Windows Movie Maker to blend videos and photos into a rich movie, complete with your own soundtrack, titles, and credits.

When your masterpiece is ready to share with family and friends, you can easily create a professional-looking DVD in Windows DVD Maker.U

5. Keep track of your music—and play it anywhere
The larger your collection of digital music grows, the harder it can be to organize and keep track of it. But now you can easily scroll, flip, browse through, and play your entire music library in Windows Media Player 11. You can even create new playlists of your favorite tracks with a single click.

You can keep your music moving with you by easily synchronizing your portable music device. Or you can share the contents of your entire library with other computers on your home network or with digital media devices such as Xbox 360.

6. Surf multiple waves of the web at once
Do you like to jump from website to website? Satisfy your appetite for multitasking without having to open several browser windows. You can open multiple webpages in one window and easily click between them with the tabbed browsing feature in Windows Internet Explorer 7—plus, you can see thumbnail images of all your open webpages at a glance with Quick Tabs.

7. Record and watch TV on your time
Watch TV on your own schedule—not the TV networks’ schedule. If your PC has a TV tuner, you can record, watch, and pause live television on your desktop or mobile PC using Windows Media Center.M

With multiple TV tuners, you can even record one channel while watching another. When and where you watch your shows is now up to you.

8. Bring your TV and PC together—and take home entertainment to a new level
Tired of huddling around the PC for entertainment? Connect your PC to one or more televisions in your home using a Windows Media CenterM Extender like Xbox 360, and enjoy all your digital entertainment on the big screen—from photo slideshows, home videos, and digital music to live and recorded TV shows and movies.

9. Keep the things you need most at your fingertips
No need to open a web browser to check traffic and weather, open a calculator to add up a few numbers and open an application to see your calendar. Now you can put mini-applications called gadgets right on your desktop, where you can see and use them whenever the mood strikes. Just use the Windows Sidebar pane to store and organize your favorite gadgets.

10. Help your kids stay safer
Worried about your kids’ computer use or about what they may encounter online? Now you can give your kids a safer experience and set PC usage boundaries for them by using the centralized Parental Controls in Windows Vista. You can even restrict games and websites based on your family’s values.

Plus, you can better protect your PC and your personal information, as well as your family, with built-in security tools like Windows Defender and anti-spam and phishing filters.

An advertising blitz intended to help Microsoft polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system began this week with a head-scratcher of a commercial.

The ad features Jerry Seinfeld flexing some new shoes, Bill Gates adjusting his shorts and no mention of Vista. Microsoft says the ad is meant to get people talking, and that other parts of the marketing campaign will actually get into what its software can do.

But the advertising, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, is really just “air cover,” according to Bill Veghte, the Microsoft executive who is responsible for sustaining Windows, probably the most lucrative franchise in history.

For more than a year, Mr. Veghte and his team have been developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software.

Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less crash-prone. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never has before, offering training and advice — and even paying to put hundreds of “Windows gurus” in stores.

By now, Microsoft insists that most of the frustrating technical problems with Vista, which was introduced in January 2007 after repeated delays, have been resolved — and many industry executives and analysts agree.

Vista represented a big shift from its predecessor, XP, so it required a lot of new drivers — and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft said, an older driver still worked with Vista, but it slowed down the PC or made it crash unpredictably. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components are compatible with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced.

In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a “retail experience center” to test ideas about the behavior of shoppers. With retailing now accounting for 40 percent of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies. “We weren’t coming in with the tools and people to help them,” said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft.

Microsoft is sharing its research with retailers. It is also paying for a few hundred Windows experts to talk to shoppers in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These Windows gurus technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits and trains them.

With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and fine-tuning of software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the start-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60 percent.

Share more than photos; share an experience.

First there was the snapshot, and then came video. Now there is Microsoft Photosynth, a new service from Microsoft Live Labs that goes far beyond how you now view, experience and share photos.

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark; with a digital camera and your own creativity and inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your “synth” is put right in your shoes, sharing in the same sense of exhilaration and wonder that you did at the time, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Imagine yourself beneath the Eiffel Tower or in the heart of Times Square. Now imagine being able to see that exact scene in an amazing new way. With Photosynth, you can look up or down, pan from left to right, zoom in, or pull back to reveal the full sense of where you were. Photosynth provides incredibly realistic close-up detail of a place as seen in the collaboration with National Geographic. Exclusive synths of some of the world’s most renowned locations, such as Machu Picchu and the Parthenon, were created using photographs taken by National Geographic.

An Entirely New Medium

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to estimate where a photo was taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos. The potential uses of Photosynth can range from sharing experiences to storytelling and documentation:

• Share experiences. Think about the times you have been in the midst of a beautiful location or having a once-in-a-lifetime experience and wished you could share it with more immediacy and sense of place than still photos or video can capture. Photosynth puts viewers in the center of the moment and in control of how they experience it.

• Tell a story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a synth composed of 20 or 50 photos makes visual storytelling as rich and compelling as a short story. Synths capture the totality of important moments in time, such as the anticipation and joy of an entire wedding party and guests at the moment vows are exchanged, or the elation of a child scoring a winning soccer goal as the fans cheer.

• Form a community. Synths can bring the best of your digital photos together with the best of everybody else’s. Imagine if you took a trip to Rome with your friends and each of you took photos of the Trevi Fountain. Later, you can tag and upload all of the photos from each person’s camera to create a synth of it. In addition, you can share that experience and your favorite places with others by embedding the synth in your profile on a social networking site.

• Educate or archive. If you want to re-create how you decorated your home for the holidays or how you planted your garden last season, the ability of Photosynth to provide intricate detail allows documentation impossible to achieve with conventional photos.

Using Photosynth

Getting started with Photosynth is easy:

• To begin, just take a few dozen digital photos — 20 to 300 photos are required, depending on the size of the place or object — with overlap between each shot, from a number of locations and angles.

• Next, download a small, free software application to your computer from http://photosynth.com. This software works in concert with the Photosynth Web site, which is also a free service.

Is this a product and service you’ll use? Tell me how you will use Photysynth in your daily personal and work life.

Browse Encouraging Health.

How many times have you been watching a long video on your computer and had the screensaver come on? Then you play the game of trying to jiggle the mouse every certain number of minutes to make sure it doesn’t happen again…  seems like it would be easier to have a really quick way to disable the screensaver.

Our solution comes in the form of a little utility named flipss.exe which can be used to easily enable or disable the screensaver via a command line argument… we’ll just have to manually create shortcuts for each task.

Create Disable/Enable Shortcut

Right-click on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

You will need to enter in the full path to where you saved the flipss.exe file, followed by either "/off" or "/on". For instance, if you saved the utility in C:\MyFiles you would use this path to create the disable icon:

C:\MyFiles\flipss.exe /off

On the next screen you’ll need to give it a useful name, and then create a second shortcut with "/on" which you can use to turn the screensaver back on.

You can give them different icons by going into the properties for the shortcut and choosing the "Change Icon" option. Personally I moved the icons into the quick launch bar for easier access and indexing in Launchy.

Download Flipss.zip from jddesign.f2s.com

Source | PowerPoint Tip: Copy a presentation to a CD or anyhwere | Word: Compatibility Pack for End Users

This update addresses issues with Media Center for Microsoft Vista.

This download is available to customers running genuine Microsoft Windows. Click the Continue button in the Validation Required section above to begin the short validation process. Once validated, you will be returned to this page with specific instructions for obtaining the download.

Download Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista (KB941229)

Downloading Windows Vista Service Pack 1 from Windows Updates:

• Download Windows Vista Service Pack and unpack it to your system.
• Run SP1Beta_Hack.cmd with administrator privileges and Windows Updates afterwards. It should show KB935509 which you should download and restart afterwards.
• Run Windows Updates again, it should display KB937287. Download and restart your PC afterwards.
• Run Windows Updates for a third time. Download the now appearing KB938371, restart your computer.
• Finally, visit Windows Updates again and you should see the Service Pack 1 Beta for Microsoft Windows Vista available for download.

Removing the Evaluation Copy message:

• This is fairly easy to accomplish. Run watermark_fix.reg first
• Rename user32.dll.mui to user32.dll.mui.old in C:\Windows\System32\en-US\
• copy user32.dll.mui from the archive to that location
• Reboot Windows Vista

Several websites claim that this is the legal way to download Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta. I’m not a lawyer and can only use my judgment here but I really can’t see a huge difference between downloading the Service Pack from Torrent sites or the Microsoft website. Both are not really authorized downloads somehow.

Via GHacks

Related Reading: Vista Cursors for XP | Copy Files Faster

So you haven’t made a move to Windows Vista.

Fair enough! How about transforming the look and feel of XP to look like Vista?

All you need to do is follow these steps:

• Download UX Theme MultiPatcher from here
• Run the setup file
• Grab anyone of the following styles and download them on to your PC
• Double click on the .msstyle file and apply the style.
• Voila! Your XP has a new look

Razor Vista

(Download)

VistaVG

(Download)

AeroGlass

(Download)

Thanks Shankar!

These gadget samples are intended to demonstrate the functionality of the Windows Sidebar scripting elements. In addition, most of the code snippets found throughout the Sidebar Reference documentation are extracted directly from the gadget code provided here.

Source

These simple, easy-to-use customizable job aids created by Microsoft IT help employees get started with something new, learn more about using a technology or product effectively, select the right product or service, or review best practices.

Source

Dear Reader, here is your chance to voice your opinion.

Do you think Vista ReadyBoost feature makes a difference?

Before you read the verdict, leave your comments and then head over here to see the answer.

Source

VistaSp1.net has attempted to organize and collect over a 100+ Hotfixes that have been released till date for Vista into one single package and made available for download. While there is no guarantee that the real SP1 will contain new features, users who do not use Automatic Updates can anyway download and install this package as it simply contains a bunch of software and hardware performance, driver and usability improvements and fixes for Windows Vista.

Download Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista 32-bit Edition (x86) here (149 MB)

Note that this package is continually updated as and when Microsoft releases new hotfixes.

Source

Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB938979)
This is a performance update. Install this update to improve the performance of Windows Vista in certain scenarios.

Update for Windows Vista (KB938194)

This is a reliability update. Install this update to improve the reliability of Windows Vista in certain scenarios.

Update for Windows Vista (KB938979)

This is a performance update. Install this update to improve the performance of Windows Vista in certain scenarios.

Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB938194)

This is a reliability update. Install this update to improve the reliability of Windows Vista in certain scenarios.

If you are using Office 2007, don’t bother opening the file just to view it’s content.

Use the preview pane in Windows Vista to view all parts of your document, and even copy content, directly from Windows Explorer. Notice, for example, the data selected in the preview of a sample Excel workbook in the image that follows.

To open the Preview pane, on the Start menu click Computer to open a Windows Explorer window, or press Windows+E. On the Windows Explorer toolbar, click Organize, point to Layout, and then click Preview. Note that once the Preview pane is open, you can drag the left edge of the pane to reduce or increase its size.

Vista Tips, Office 2007 tips, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar

Vista Tips, Office 2007 tips, MSTalkOnline, Alpesh Nakar