There are a lot of improvements with windows 7 but there are a few things that you will notice more than others and I’ll basically give a run-down of the things that look and feel different in Windows 7.

The first thing you will notice is the task bar, now sports a completely different more compact look and feel, it’s a kind of all in one task bar, system tray & quick launch:

From left to right, the Firefox icon is highlighted, this shows that the program is running. Second along is the Windows explorer icon, this is highlighted but also shows two other boxes behind it, this shows that there are 2 other Windows explorer windows open to make 3 in total. The Windows Media Player icon is there but is not highlighted this is merely “pinned” to the task bar and not running, running it would merely highlight it as the others are. The MSN icon also has 3 boxes indicating it has 3 (or more) windows open.

Now instead of the usual vertical menu we’re used to seeing in Vista/XP when you click on a program group you are greeted with thumbnails of each of the windows to choose from. If you mouse over the thumbnail it will hide all other windows on screen and show the one your mouse is over and of course left clicking will select said window.

The notification area (or system tray) has also changed, it will no longer spring out and show all of the icons it now pops up a small window with them all in. I’m not really sure why they have decided to do this as there is a lot more room in 7 for icons on the task bar. I personally prefer it how it was.

Next up it’s Windows Media Player, they have thrown out the glass style “aero” and gone for a light blue scheme, I’m not sure whether I like it or not as it’s a step backwards in a way but still looks nice. Further looking at WMP you can see that video playing is a little different too, all controls have been moved inside the video screen and disappear after a few seconds:

I definitely like this approach and have always wished VLC would do something similar, this side of WMP is a definite improvement. Most everything else is the same in WMP it’s generally just polished, still no aspect ratio support.

On a very quick note I think windows look a lot neater in Windows 7 as in the above screenshot there is less visual clutter and a more refined colour palette. I also like the new folders on the left, a bit more useful than they were in Vista.

A few other feature’s you will notice but I was not able to screenshot very well include the ability to simply drag a window to the top (and touch) of the screen to maximize it, and then if you want to restore it just drag it back down without having to press any of the buttons at the top right. In the same vain if you move your window to the right or the left of the screen it will put the window in half screen mode and take up half of the width of the screen, if you drag it away from the side it will restore to it’s original size and shape. Both are very handy and when you touch the side/top of the screen there’s a nice visual queue indicating that you’re about to carry out the action.

Fingerprint reading is much improved, it’s now built into Windows login and you will not have to install additional software. I have also noticed that it seems a lot more accurate than the previous program I was using making the fingerprint scanner more useful.

The show desktop button is now all the way to the right of the screen and integrated into the task bar, if you mouse over it you will be able to see the desktop in all of it’s glory before deciding if you want to minimize everything.

Gadgets now do not need you to have that ugly black bar on the right hand side of your screen to use them, they are completely free of it now. They are also availible from a simple right click on the desktop, gadgets now show up just above ‘personalize’.

When windows are maximized they now stay glassy and transparent instead of becoming black, as does the task bar, it’s something I’ve always wondered why it was done in vista, and I can’t really decide whether it is an improvement or just a change.

The Start menu is ever so slightly different as are a lot of other visual aspects of 7.

I’ll probably add more to this article at some point, mainly screenshots.

In the first picture the first thing that jumps out is the weather widget, it’s the best free one I’ve found, it’s called simply Weather Widgets Free and when you tap the widget it brings up a 4 day forecast too. It had no problem finding my location either, which you can set to use GPS to get the weather.

The other thing worth noting in the first picture is the little “1″ above my message icon. This is a widget called SMS Unread Count, which shows the number of new messages waiting, it also shows dialler missed calls too.

The dock bar at the bottom is part of dxtop, the custom icons used on the home screen and the dock are from 3 different icon packs: Vista, Windows 7 & Xbox 360. dxtop allows you to change icons for anything on the desktop or in folders by long pressing.

dxtop is also responsible for the dual tabs in the second picture, the first tab is the normal application list as you can see in picture 3 it makes the list 5 items wide meaning you can see more per screen.

The second tab is a task manager tab, it shows recently used apps, running apps and apps that are running only as a service. If you take a look at the fourth screen the browser is not running but was previously used, the link text is white, dialler in red is a running program and by long pressing it we can kill the process, the weather widget is in yellow which indicates that it is only running as a service and again long pressing allows us to kill the process.

The second screenshot is merely a folder which I added to the dock, all the icons on my dock are currently folders filled with applications or shortcuts, this is built in to android. To create a folder just long press on the desktop and select new folder.

Finally, the last screenshot displays Toggle Settings which allows me to toggle things like wifi etc, I put his as a shortcut on the dock, the very last one that looks like a power button.

This is aimed at those who build or fix PCs, their own or others. I would like to know what your hardware failures have been so we know which brands are doing well and which components people should avoid. I will be collating at least two lists; One for top product failures and the other for top components that fail.

All you have to do is post a comment on this article with the hardware failures you have experienced along with the make of the devices that failed (no registration required), I’ll post the first one below so you know what to expect. Use a real email address so I can get back to you if you win and arrange the prize to be sent out. Please limit the failures to a maximum of 10.

The competition will run for at least 1 – 2 weeks (depending on how many people respond) but feel free to add your failures even after the prize has been claimed.

There are a few stipulations to this contest;
» I will only ship the prize to the UK, USA and most of Europe.
» You must detail at least one piece of hardware including the manufacturer.
» I need to get at least 100 people to respond to get anything meaningful, so if you can spread the word about the “competition” that would be great. Therefore;
» The winner cannot be announced until there are at least 100 respondents.

Good luck everyone and look out for the results.

I was snooping through Google Webmaster tools I was intrigued by their 404 error page helper which tries to add useful links to your error pages. So I decided to set about making my own error page which was as helpful as possible, I know that it’s not the most popular or important site, but it’s nice to do things like this just to see how it works and to get practice.

Main features;
» Dropped the ’404′ as a lot of people don’t know or care what ’404′ is.
» The message ‘Page not found’ displayed in French, German, Japanese, Russian and Italian, it also links to Google translate pages to translate the error page.
» Links to popular pages.
» Links to the latest posts.
» Search within the blog and the entire site through Google custom search.
» A link to the archives.

I understand some of it may be superfluous, but I tried to keep is as simple looking as possible whilst adding as much function as possible. You can have a look at how it works here.

I also posted up the 3360×1050 wallpapers in a post so it would be easier for people to find, check it out here.

Once installed the program kept getting stuck when scanning certain files on my disk, usually in fact the same one each time so finishing a scan was impossible even after 5 hours stuck on the same file. Even when I tried to heal infections the program froze for 5 minutes and failed to remove half of them.

The second issue with the program is that it interfered with my web browsing, half of webpage images did not load, some websites refused to load at all sometimes, including Facebook. It also scanned almost every file in a webpage including flash videos, so instead of getting a video straight up and streaming from Youtube I had to wait for the whole video to download and then be scanned most of the time.

Now to set about making a floorhorse generator!

Edit: Floorhorse collection

I’ve also been playing some Trackmania, which is a nice free racing game, unlike most racing games though the tracks in Trackmania are manic, massive jumps and aerobatics make it a little different and the main premise (which I haven’t touched on yet) is the online play, rankings, teams and such. It’s good fun. Whilst the graphics aren’t brilliant they are nice and smooth. There are also lots of car models available to download from the net. Edit: Video is encoded and ready;

Download (SD): FLV 25MB (640×400/1mbps)

Sticking with the folding@home client for now, currently there are around 20,000 GPU clients ‘folding’ producing around 2 Petaflops (2000 Teraflops) and we’ll assume for arguments sake that the average folder’s PC cost around £500, which is a little high as one can make a system capable of running the client for quite a bit less and I’m not counting montiors etc, but we’ll assume and average gamer. 20,000 x £500 = £10,000,000. Each Blue Gene/L (one of the top supercomputers around) hits around 6 Teraflops per rack each rack consisting of 1,024 dual core PowerPC based processors and cost (2004 data) around £1,000,000 each. Matching the price of the GPU folders Blue Gene/L racks thats only 10 racks pumping out 60 Teraflops, further; to reach 60 Teraflops with GPU folding the cost is around £300,000.

More to come on this, some of us have to sleep.