Aero snap is the Windows 7 feature that automatically resizes your window to full size when you drag them to the top of the screen, or to half width if you drag them to the side of the screen.

This option can be very useful if you have a couple of open windows that you want to resize quickly, but if you use a lot of open windows this helpful option can become an annoyance and start to get in the way.

Thankfully there’s an option to turn it off in the Windows Control Panel in the Ease of Access Centre. To get there click on the Start Button and in the ‘search programs and files’ box type Ease of Access Centre.

Now click on ‘make the mouse easier to use’ and tick the option ‘prevent Windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the side of the screen’. To get the Aero snap feature back again just un-tick the box on the Ease of Access Centre page.

Microsoft has started showing select customers the next version of its flagship office suite, code-named Office 15.

The company said on Monday that the Office 15 technical preview was being shared under non-disclosure agreements, with the customers testing early builds and giving Microsoft feedback on their experiences.

“At this early point in our development cycle, I’m not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division,” Microsoft Office development chief PJ Hough said in a blog post. “With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio.”

Hough’s announcement coincided with Microsoft’s publication of the SharePoint 15 technical preview managed object model software development kit (SDK), for those on the technical preview programme.

Microsoft Office 15 is still something of a mystery though, as very little information has been released so far.

Source: ZDNet

Microsoft has given further details on how its app and games marketplace, called Windows Store, will work in the upcoming Windows 8 platform.

The tool is designed for downloading Windows 8 apps that use the Metro interface on tablets and PCs. Unlike Apple’s iTunes App Store, it does not handle mobile apps, as these are distributed for Microsoft OS-based handsets via the Windows Marketplace.

Windows Store, which is expected to arrive alongside the Windows 8 beta in late February, has been designed to put content in front of people rather than making them search for titles, according to Jonathan Wang, a program manager at Microsoft. “On the Store landing page, we will continually feature new and exciting content, changing frequently so that customers come to expect there’s always more to explore within the store. The landing page integrates featured content with navigational content — like categories and lists of featured apps,” Wang wrote in a blog post on Friday.

Source: ZDNet

The Resilient File System (ReFS) will make its first appearance as a storage system in Windows Server 8, after which it will evolve into a system for client storage, then ultimately for boot volumes.

On Monday, Microsoft used a post on its Building Windows 8 blog to lay out details on ReFS.

“Along with Storage Spaces, ReFS forms the foundation of storage on Windows for the next decade or more,” Microsoft development manager Surendra Verma wrote. “We believe this significantly advances our state of the art for storage… we expect that we will see ReFS as the next massively deployed file system.”

The “staged evolution” of ReFS, beginning with its use as a file server, is the same approach Microsoft has taken with previous file systems.

According to Verma, ReFS has many of the same features and semantics as NTFS, which was introduced in 1993. These include “BitLocker encryption, access-control lists for security, USN journal, change notifications, symbolic links, junction points, mount points, reparse points, volume snapshots, file IDs and OpLocks”. If a file-access API can access an NTFS volume, it will be able to access data stored on ReFS. What has changed is the on-disk storage engine underneath the reused code.

The ReFS engine exclusively uses the so-called B+ tree structure to represent stored information. Verma indicated this will mean a simpler system, with the choice of structure designed to be as scalable as possible. When ReFS is used alongside mirrored Storage Spaces, corruptions will be “automatically and transparently fixed”, Verma added, noting that ReFS also had a ‘salvage’ feature for making sure that non-repairable corruption does not affect the availability of “good data”.

Responding to readers’ questions about the blogpost, Verma also stressed that Windows 7 users would be able to read ReFS-formatted partitions from a Windows 8 Server, either by using a new file system driver or by sharing a folder out from the server. “Note that support for NTFS is going to be present in Windows for the foreseeable future, so you should always be able to access all your NTFS data across versions without any problems,” he added.

Source: ZDNet

There are many posts about installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 on a Windows 7 PC but this is my own personal experience and shows how I had to overcome quite a few hurdles before getting SharePoint installed and running on my own copy of Windows 7.

First up, this installation is for testing purposes only. So keep in mind that this is just a standalone environment for developing SharePoint solutions and is not meant to be a full scale production platform.

This installation requires that you use a 64 bit operating system – either Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

I do not want to regurgitate the many blog posts and sites that breeze through the installation of SharePoint Foundation 2010 on Windows 7 or Vista. In fact I found the Microsoft article on installing SharePoint perfectly suitable as long as you know your DOS commands. Check it out for yourself – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869%28office.14%29.aspx.

The Prerequisites

However, before you can even start to install SharePoint Foundation 2010 you must download and install a number of so called prerequisites. You cannot use the built in prerequisite tool because the default installation works only for Windows Server 2008. This means you have no choice but to install the prerequisites manually.

If you are using Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows Vista Service Pack 2, you must install the following prerequisites:

1. .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
2. Windows PowerShell 2.0
3. Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable

If you are using Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Vista Service Pack 2, or Windows 7, install the following additional prerequisites:

1. Microsoft FilterPack 2.0. This can be installed by opening a command prompt and typing the following: c:\SharePointFiles\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\FilterPack\FilterPack.msi.

(To open a C: prompt – Click Start and type command into the search programs and files search box. Right click the Command Prompt at the top of the search result and select Run as administrator.)

2. Microsoft Sync Framework
3. SQL Server Native Client
4. Windows Identity Foundation (KB974405)
5. WCF hotfix (KB971831) for Windows 7
6. ADO.NET Data Service Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Required Windows Features

Next enable each of the required Windows Features. The quick way to do this is by copying and running the following command in a Command Prompt window.

start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;^
IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;^
IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-ASPNET;IIS-NetFxExtensibility;^
IIS-ISAPIExtensions;IIS-ISAPIFilter;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;^
IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-HttpTracing;IIS-CustomLogging;IIS-ManagementScriptingTools;^
IIS-Security;IIS-BasicAuthentication;IIS-WindowsAuthentication;IIS-DigestAuthentication;^
IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-Performance;IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-HttpCompressionDynamic;^
IIS-WebServerManagementTools;IIS-ManagementConsole;IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility;^
IIS-Metabase;IIS-WMICompatibility;WAS-WindowsActivationService;WAS-ProcessModel;^
WAS-NetFxEnvironment;WAS-ConfigurationAPI;WCF-HTTP-Activation;^
WCF-NonHTTP-Activation

After Running the Code

Once you’ve copied and pasted the above code make sure all prerequisites are met and no critical error is present in your computers event logs.
If you have any problems installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 from here on check that all the required Windows Features are enabled.

The command in the previous step enables all of the required features in the Internet Information Services section of the Windows Features dialog box (which you can access through the Programs section in Control Panel).

The Installation

When all the above downloads are installed download SharePoint Foundation 2010. From the Microsoft website – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595

Place the SharePointFoundation.exe file into a folder on your C drive named SharePointFiles i.e. C:\SharePointFiles

Now you have to extract the SharePointFoundation.exe program files so you can access and amend a single configuration file.

To do this open a C: prompt – Click Start and type command into the search programs and files search box. Right click the Command Prompt at the top of the search result and select Run as administrator.

Here’s where some people have a problem as you are usually dumped at C:\Users\Name and you need to be at C:\. Just type CHDIR.. to move up a rung and CHDIR.. to end up at the C:\ prompt.

Now copy the entry below and paste it immediately after the C:\ prompt.

SharePointFiles\SharePointFoundation /extract:c:\SharePointFiles

This assumes SharePoint Foundation is installed and placed on your C: drive in a folder called SharePointFiles and is named SharePointFoundation.exe, otherwise you need to change paths accordingly.

Once the files are extracted go to the c:\SharePointFiles folder and you will see a list of files.

Open the Files folder and then the first Setup folder and right click on the config.xml file and select Edit. This will open the configuration file in Notepad.

Now add the following setting Id as the last entry before:
</Configuration>

<Setting Id=”AllowWindowsClientInstall” Value=”True”/>

This line of code above gets SharePoint Foundation 2010 to install on a 64 bit edition of Windows.

The entire config.xml file should look something like this:

<Configuration>
<Package Id=”sts”>
<Setting Id=”SETUPTYPE” Value=”CLEAN_INSTALL”/>
</Package>
<DATADIR Value=”%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Data”/>
<Logging Type=”verbose” Path=”%temp%” Template=”Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Setup *.log”/>
<Setting Id=”UsingUIInstallMode” Value=”1″/>
<Setting Id=”SETUP_REBOOT” Value=”Never” />
<Setting Id=”AllowWindowsClientInstall” Value=”True”/>
</Configuration>

Now save and close the Notepad file.

Once you’ve completed all the above steps go back to the SharePointFiles folder and run the setup.exe program to install SharePoint Foundation 2010.

On the Choose the installation you want page, click Standalone to install everything on one developer workstation. After the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.

Once the installation is complete you should see the Central Administration page.

Blank Pages and the Solution

This is the next potential problem, as I got a blank page at this point. Even after a reboot and going to Start/All Programs/Microsoft 2010 SharePoint Products and clicking on SharePoint 2010 Central Administration I still got a blank page.

After some online research I found that this problem is to do with the setup of host names and/or problems with the loopback check.

According to Microsoft there are two methods to work around this blank page issue and you should use one of the following methods – the one that’s most appropriate for your particular set up.

Method 1: Specify host names (The preferred method if NTLM authentication is desired)

To specify the host names that are mapped to the loopback address and can connect to Web sites on your computer, follow these specific steps:

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.

Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.

Quit Registry Editor and then restart your PC to see if you can log in to SharePoint Central Administration.

Method 2: Disable the loopback check (less-recommended method)

The second method is to disable the loopback check by setting the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key.

To set the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key, follow these steps:

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.

Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

If you now get a log in page that will not accept your windows password this last step should help.

First go to User accounts and make sure you have a password set for your Administrators account. If not create one and then restart your PC.

Now run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard again and try to open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

Password not Accepted

If you now get a log in page that will not accept your windows password this last step should help.

First go to User accounts and make sure you have a password set for your Administrators account. If not create one and then restart your PC.

Now run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard again and try to open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

If your password is still not accepted you will need to enable Basic Authentication under the sites section of Internet Information Services (IIS). To do this open Internet Information Services (IIS) and expand the Sites section. If you do not know where to find IIS just copy Internet Information Services and paste it into the Windows Search programs and files box. Click on the resulting link.

In the left hand column of IIS click the arrow to open up Application Pools and the Sites folder. Open the Sites folder and select SharePoint Central Administration and click on Authentication under the IIS Group in the right hand panel. Next on the Authentication screen enable “Basic Authentication” by right clicking and selecting Enabled.

Now restart your PC and see if you can now log in. If not run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard again. And then try to open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

By following all these steps I was finally able to get SharePoint Foundation 2010 set up as a testing server on my 64 bit Windows 7 Professional PC.

The only downside is that I now have to log in every time I start up my computer!

P.S. This whole process with pictures and an even fuller explanation is available as a Free eBook.

Windows 8 will include a smartphone-style reset-to-factory-defaults function, along with a way to reinstall the Operating System without deleting certain apps and settings.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that the Windows 8 reset function would be useful for those decommissioning or recycling PCs, and the refresh function would help people whose PCs are “not working their best” but who do not want to have to back up all their data and reinstall from scratch.

“Today, there are many different approaches and tools to get a PC back to factory condition,” Microsoft program manager Desmond Lee wrote in a blog post, listing manufacturer-provided tools, third-party imaging products, Windows system image backup and a clean reinstallations. “While these tools all provide similar functionalities, they don’t provide a consistent experience from one PC or technique to another,” Lee said.

“As we began planning for Windows 8, we asked ourselves: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could just push a button and everything is fixed?’” According to Lee’s post, the bootable Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) in Windows 8 will offer the option of erasing and formatting the Windows and personal data hard-drive partitions, and automatically installing a fresh copy of Windows. The PC will then restart with the newly cleansed system.

There will also be an option to “thoroughly” delete data while performing the factory reset. This option will “write random patterns to every sector of the drive, overwriting any existing data visible to the operating system”, Lee said, while conceding that well-resourced people could theoretically still recover data from the drive afterwards.

Source: ZDNet

Microsoft’s IE 9 could soon be the third most popular web browser, in spite of the fact that it’s only available on Windows 7 and Vista.

According to NetApplications figures for browser market shares, published on 1st January, IE9 now has 11.48% of the global market, and is closing in on second-placed Firefox 8, which has 12.28%. However, IE8 remains the market leader, with a 27.43% market share, as measured by logging visits to web sites by personal computers.

The December rankings are skewed because Google is currently upgrading users from version 15 (8.71%) to version 16 (7.07%) of its Chrome browser. Since Google more or less forces upgrades, Chrome 16 should soon have a market share of 16+ percent putting it in second place, ahead of both IE9 and Firefox 8.

Microsoft took a big risk by not developing a version of IE9 for the decade-old Windows XP operating system, which still has a large market share. XP users could easily defect to Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead of upgrading to Windows 7. However, Microsoft decided to bet on the rapid development of IE9, IE10 and future versions rather than invest in XP, which is clearly in terminal decline.

Source: ZDNet

Microsoft has issued its final Patch Tuesday release of 2011, with 14 bulletins, covering 20 vulnerabilities.

After a number of small releases, Microsoft has given IT departments an early Christmas present of three critical and 11 important bulletins.

The critical security holes affect Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, although only one affects the latter. Both Windows Server 2003 and 2008 are vulnerable, although the latter is only affected by one flaw.

“Five of the ‘important’ bulletins affect Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 including all Office versions for Macintosh as well,” explained Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, who described this month’s Patch Tuesday as “significant” in his blog post. “One of the remaining bulletins addresses Internet Explorer 6 through 9 and the remaining bulletins apply to all versions of Windows.”

A total of 10 could allow remote code execution, which will worry any IT departments wary of talented, malicious hackers.

Microsoft will release the bulletins on 13 December. To view the whole advisory, head to Microsoft’s Tech Net.

Source: IT Pro

Google Chrome has now captured some 25.7% of web traffic. Firefox now slightly lags behind with a 25.2% share of the worldwide market.

Measuring such things online is an inexact science, and other analysts offer slightly different assessments. But all agree on the trends, prompting questions over Firefox’s chances of keeping pace with two fiercely competitive commercial rivals.

Google’s only remaining superior in market share terms is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the leader of the browser pack now on 40.6%.

When Google released Chrome in late 2008, Mozilla’s Firefox was the only serious rival to Internet Explorer, and for a year that remained true. Firefox’s market share peaked around November 2009, when more than 32% of web traffic came from its users. Since then the trend has been downwards, at an ever accelerating speed.

The force behind Firefox’s decline is clear enough. Soon after its peak, Google began aggressively promoting Chrome, which had mainly been used by only the early adopters and developers. Its alleged speed advantage was advertised on billboards and television, and crucially, users of Google’s dominant web search engine were encouraged to download and use it.

Microsoft has outlined how IT professionals will be able to set up Windows 8 using a flash drive, and has also claimed that the installation process will be much quicker than that for earlier versions of Windows.

Windows 8 will play down the need to type in the product key during installation. Those setting up the new version of the OS via the web delivery method will not have to type in the key at all, as it is ‘pre-keyed’ in the download file for the unique user.

However, IT professionals and other advanced users may want to install Windows 8 from a USB key while leaving the installation process unattended. In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft Setup and Deployment team member Christa St Pierre explained how this can be done:

When putting Windows 8 onto the flash drive, the user will be able to copy-and-paste the product key into an ‘unattend answer file’, which will itself need to be copied into the root of the USB stick. This will make it possible to leave the installation running without having to be there. Similarly, the user will be able to use the same file to pre-set the UI language and automatically configure the PC to boot multiple operating systems. “You could configure multiple boot options manually in the Advanced Setup GUI and BCD configuration, but why do that when you can script it? The unattend framework is very flexible and you can instruct Setup to format, create, or modify partitions on the PC’s disk(s),” St Pierre wrote.

St Pierre added that advanced setup from a USB drive was not supported in the Windows 8 developer preview build, but would be in the finalised version.

Another change can be found in the way Windows 8 will handle the transfer of preserved files from the old Operating System to the new. While previous Windows installation processes did this file-by-file, the Windows 8 process will move whole folders. There is just one transport folder, rather than the two needed for the Windows 7 upgrade, and Microsoft has also made various other tweaks to speed the process up. The result, St Pierre claimed, was that Microsoft had “virtually eliminated” the difference in upgrade times between a clean install and upgrades involving hundreds of thousands of preserved files.

Source: ZDNet

The processes Windows goes through during Start Up can help you determine where your PC hangs or produces a blue screen. For example the if the POST cannot detect necessary hardware or determine the boot device it will halt and not let Windows start up at all.

By knowing were a problem lies its far easier to get help.

At QBS PC Help we have several articles that can help track down start up problems such as:

PC POST Beep Codes

Problems with the Power On Self Test (POST)

PC restarts many times and then boots up

PC System Fails CPU Test

Here’s a list of process that occur during Windows Start Up:

1. After pressing the power button, the PC’s firmware initiates a Power-On Self Test (POST) and loads firmware settings. The POST is a set of routines including a memory check, system bus check and other low-level stuff so that the CPU can initialize the computer properly. The POST process ends when a valid system disk is detected. All modern BIOS’s allow the boot device to be set manually, so you can boot from a floppy, CD-ROM, hard disk etc.

2. Firmware reads the master boot record (MBR), and then starts Bootmgr.exe. Bootmgr.exe finds and starts the Windows loader (Winload.exe) on the Windows boot partition.

3. Essential drivers required to start the Windows kernel are loaded and the kernel starts to run, loading into memory the system registry hive and additional drivers that are marked as BOOT_START.

4. The kernel passes control to the session manager process (Smss.exe) which initializes the system session, and loads and starts the devices and drivers that are not marked BOOT_START.

5. Winlogon.exe starts, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and any Group Policy scripts are run. When the user logs in, Windows creates a session for that user.

6. Explorer.exe starts, the system creates the desktop window manager (DWM) process, which initializes the desktop and displays it.

P.S. If you want to go deeper into this subject check out Windows On/Off Transition Performance Analysis at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows

The new, slimmer Xbox 360 has a lovely black gloss finish with built-in Wi-Fi, making it easy access to the wealth of entertainment on Xbox LIVE, where HD movies and TV stream in an instant.

A 250 GB hard drive means you’ll have plenty of space to store your favorite games and movies. All in all, more games, more entertainment and more fun.

The Xbox 360 comes bundled with Kinect. Kinect brings games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways – no controller required. Easy to use and instantly fun, Kinect gets everyone off the couch moving, laughing and cheering. See a ball? Kick it. Want to join a friend in the fun? Simply jump in. Even control an HD movie with a wave of the hand. Featuring a dedicated, specialized port, the Xbox 360 250GB is built to connect seamlessly with the Kinect Sensor.

Check out all the mouth watering details at Amazon.co.uk -Xbox360 plus Kinnect

Windows 8 Server isn’t just a new version of the familiar desktop client – it’s also a new version of Microsoft’s server software. And as with the Windows desktop, Microsoft’s BUILD conference has seen the release of a developer preview of Windows 8 Server, focusing on what Bill Laing, head of Microsoft’s Server and Cloud Division, calls “optimising your IT for the cloud”.

What’s clear is that Windows 8 Server isn’t a revolutionary change. Instead, it’s an evolution that builds on features introduced in Windows Server 2008, optimising it for private cloud operation and for operation at scale, while retaining the features that small and medium-sized organisations need.

It’s a balancing act that’s a big challenge for Microsoft, and one the company needs to handle carefully if Windows Server is to continue to be successful.

Source: ZDNet

Do you want a great looking presentation, but without all the design elements you find in the themes that come out of the box in PowerPoint 2007?

Well the simple, and great looking option is to use a Slide Background.

A slide background is a simple gradient that will turn any standard barebones deck into one that looks very professional.

To add a simple background to your PowerPoint 2007 presentation:

1. Click on the “Design” tab of the ribbon

2.Look for the “Background” group – on the right hand side of the ribbon

3. Click on “Background Styles”

4 Select your preferred background

You will notice that not all the colours of the rainbow are available.

Background styles are linked to the current colour palette that you have selected in the document. If you play around with the colors by clicking on the Colors button whilst you are still on the Design Tab of the ribbon, you will notice the background colour change to match the new palette.

According to reports an app store is officially among the features Microsoft is working to include in Windows 8, much like Apple’s App Store for OS X.

The revelation, which confirmed months of rumours, came on Wednesday from Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky in a Building Windows 8 blog post entitled “Introducing the team”. Among a list of teams associated with building the forthcoming operating system was “App Store”.

Sinofsky said that work on the new OS is organised by feature teams, of which there are about 35, each containing 25 to 40 developers. “Many of the teams listed below describe features or areas that you are familiar with or that you can probably figure out based on the name,” he said. “As we post more, team members will identify themselves as part of these teams.”

Rumors that Microsoft was developing an app store for Windows have been around for more than a year. Based on a series of Windows 8 documents leaked in June 2010, Microsoft has reportedly been eager to match Apple at its own game by offering its own dedicated app store. An app store appeared in a demonstration of Windows 8 that Sinofsky gave at the All Things Digital D9 conference in late June. Included in the start-up menu tiles was a direct link to a Microsoft Store, suggesting that Microsoft was working it own version of an online application store, similar to Apple’s App Store.

Source: ZDNet

Nearly one in four British internet users now use Google Chrome as their web browser just three years after it was launched.

It is now the second most popular browser, overtaking Mozilla’s Firefox and quickly gaining ground on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), the current market leader.

IE’s market share is still falling despite the programme being pre-installed on almost every computer sold in Britain.

According to new figures, Chrome accounts for 22 per cent of the British web market compared to 45 per cent for IE. Apple’s Safari is number four with a nine per cent share.

Chrome is also the number three browser worldwide, with one in five users preferring it, according to Statcounter, a web metrics firm.

Chrome’s growth comes on the back of Google’s domination of the search engine market, which it is led for years.

Google said Chrome’s surge in popularity could be explained by its speed, security and a new national advertising campaign. Chrome was the first Google product ever advertised on British television.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer responsible for Chrome, said the company’s aims was speed. He said users should “never be happy” with existing speed.

Source: The Telegraph

If you are still using Windows XP be aware that Microsoft support for this Operating System will end on the 8th April 2014. That’s not a bad run considering Windows XP is now 10 years old!

So now is the time to make sure your Windows XP installation is fully up to date.

By now you should have Service Pack 3 installed. To check if you have, right click on My Computer and select Properties. Under the System heading make sure it says Service Pack 3. If it lists Service Pack 2 or even Service Pack 1 its time to update your Operating System to SP3. (If you need to install this update it probably means you do not have Automatics Updates enabled).

How to get Service Pack 3

The easiest way to get SP3 is to turn on Automatic Updates which will download SP3 when it’s available for your computer. You only need a few clicks to begin the installation and the rest of the process should be automatic.

To turn on Automatic Updates yourself, follow these steps:

Click Start, and then click Run. Copy and then paste (or type) services.msc in the Open box, and then click OK.

In the Services console, right-click Automatic Update, and then click Start.

Close the Services console.

If you do not want to wait for Automatic Updates you can install Service Pack3 by using Windows Update at the Windows website.

Click start, All Programs and select Windows Update. This will take you online to the Windows Update section of Microsoft’s website which will check your PC to see what updates you need to install. If it selects Service Pack 3 download and apply it.

Problems installing Service Pack 3

Occasionally Service Pack 3 refuses to install and if that happens to you these are the steps you need to take.

Method 1: Exit all open programs, restart your computer, and then try to reinstall Service Pack 3

Sometimes an installation of SP3 is unsuccessful because a previous operation was not completed for some reason. By restarting your PC, you close any pending computer operations and restart the process. Once your PC is up and running go to Windows Updates http://update.microsoft.com to reinstall Windows XP SP3.

Restart your computer and check if the installation was successful.

If the installation is successful, you are finished.

If the installation fails try the next step.

Method 2: Temporarily disable any antivirus, antispyware and third-party firewall programs

Installation failure may occur when a third-party program, such as antispyware, holds a file open or when it locks a file that the Windows XP SP3 installation program needs. Before you try to reinstall Windows XP SP3, follow these steps:

Exit any open programs, and then restart the computer.

After the computer has restarted, disable any antivirus, antispyware, and third-party firewall programs that may start during the start-up process (these steps may increase your security risk). You can usually do this from the program notification area. The program icons typically appear in the lower-right corner of the computer screen. To disable a program from the notification area, right-click the program icon, and then click an appropriate option to disable the program.

Once you have disabled the software go to Windows Updates http://update.microsoft.com to reinstall Windows XP SP3.

Restart your computer and check if the installation was successful.

If the installation is successful, you are finished.

If the installation fails try the next step.

Method 3: Download and reinstall Windows XP SP3 from the Microsoft Download Centre

If you have problems obtaining the service pack from Windows Update, obtain the stand-alone update package from the Download Centre. To download the file, click the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24 To copy the download to your computer for installation at a later time, click Save or Save this program to disk. To start the installation immediately, click Open or Run this program from its current location.

If the installation is successful, you are finished.

If all the above steps do not result in a successful installation of SP3 the next few are for more experienced users, but they are well explained in the QBS PC Help article that this blog post is based on – http://www.qbs-pchelp.co.uk/windowsxp-thefinalcountdown.html – so have a go these steps if all else fails!

Microsoft released four security bulletins for Patch Tuesday today, including one that fixes a critical hole related to Bluetooth in Windows 7 and Vista and three less serious patches that plug 21 holes affecting all supported versions of Windows and Visio 2003.

The highest priority is MS11-053, which fixes a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer by sending malicious Bluetooth wireless packets.

Jerry Bryant, group manager for security response at Microsoft, downplayed the possibility of exploitation in the wild, saying there are mitigating factors, including the fact that Bluetooth on a target device would have to be discoverable, which is not the default mode.

“So an attacker would have to be in line-of-sight of you and would have to brute force their way into discovering your (network) address, and that would be assuming you are actively advertising it for them,” he said in an interview. “There are tools out there to help an attacker do that, but they are expensive and take a long time to run. It’s a serious issue but I don’t think it will be something we see active exploits on in the near future.”

Marcus Carey, security researcher at Rapid7 noted that many people regularly rely on Bluetooth-enabled devices, or have Bluetooth set to “on” and don’t realize it. “This should concern users who have internal Bluetooth devices or people that use after-market Bluetooth headphones, mouses, keyboards, and printers through USB,” he said. “The problem with Bluetooth is that often people have their Bluetooth devices activated and are totally unaware that they are transmitting.”

Source: CNET

Microsoft released 16 security bulletins on Tuesday fixing a total of 34 holes, including critical holes in Windows, SMB Client and Internet Explorer.

Nine of Microsoft’s bulletins are rated “critical” and the remainder are rated “important.

There are four “critical-level” updates that Microsoft said in a blog post should be addressed first.

They are:

• MS11-042, which fixes vulnerabilities in the distributed file system that affects all versions of Windows.
• MS11-043, which closes a hole in SMB Client on Windows.
• MS11-050, which is a cumulative bulletin resolving 11 bugs in Internet Explorer.
• MS11-052, which fixes a vulnerability in the Microsoft implementation of Vector Markup Language and affects Windows and Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.

Affected software includes Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Office XP, 2003, 2007, 2010, Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac, SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010, and Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Client.

Microsoft also gave an update to a change it made in Windows in February. Disabling Autorun in order to make using USB thumb drives safer appears to be having an affect, Microsoft said. As of May, infections detected by the Malicious Software Removal Tool per scanned computer declined by 59 percent on Windows XP machines and by 74 percent on Windows Vista machines compared with the 2010 infection rates on those platforms. (The updated Autorun settings were built in by default on Windows 7.)

Not to be left out of this patching frenzy Adobe’s quarterly security bulletins fixed a hole in Flash Player that was reportedly being targeted in attacks. It also produced fixes for it’s Shockwave Player and Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe said it will now offer users the opportunity to turn automatic update on by default.

Source CNET

Gridlines are a great tool to use if you have a number of different objects in your Word 2007 document, and want to ensure proper alignment between them all.

To turn on gridlines (which appear in the background of your document, and do not get printed):

1. Make sure you are on the ‘Page Layout’ tab of the ribbon.

2. Look for the ‘Arrange’ group – on the right hand side of the ribbon.

3. Click on Align.

4. Click on ‘View Gridlines’.

To turn gridlines off again, just repeat the process above. You will notice that there is another option when you click on ‘Align’, called ‘Grid Settings’. Using this feature you can customise how the grid appears and impacts in your document. For example, you can ensure that objects snap to each other, the spacing of the grid, and whether the grid uses your margins or not. This is a very good option to use if you want fine control over the placement of objects in your document.