Windows posts

The Inside Windows Live blog has announced that Microsoft has temporarily disabled active links for Windows Live Messenger (WLM) 2009 users. Its motivation: to prevent the spread of a malicious worm plaguing users of the instant messaging program. An infected user who is chatting with someone else could unknowingly send a poisoned link to other users -- who then click the link and download its malicious payload.

This is a fairly common way for infections to spread, and on a network as big as Live Messenger such worms can spread in a big hurry. Shutting down active links -- where URLs are automatically turned into clickable links in chat windows -- is a good first step, and will keep WLM 2009 users safe while Microsoft works on a permanent fix.

Not sure if you're running Live Messenger 2009? If you see the message box above on your main window, you probably are. The missing feature the message refers to is the disabled link support.

If you're running Live Messenger 2009, this might be a good time to consider upgrading to the 2011 version. WLM 2011 isn't affected by this particular worm thanks to its built-in Link Safety defenses. You can download the new version from Microsoft here as part of Windows Live Essentials 2011.

I recently covered Aerofoil, which can be used to make your laptop a bit smarter about its power usage. Now you can show your desktop computer or Windows Home Server the same kind of love using SmartPower. While SmartPower has some features in common with the previously covered Shutdown Timer, there's one major difference: it can make your computer wake up, too.

You can use SmartPower to force your computer go to sleep every day at 2AM and wake up right before you're due back from work. Combined with Windows' auto-logon feature, it would seem to you as if your computer is constantly on. In reality, though, you would be saving quite a bit of power -- as well as wear and tear on its hard drives and fans.

SmartPower also lets you set other conditions. For example, you can have your computer go to sleep at 2AM unless it is currently downloading something, or if a program is running, or if there's a specific host on the network (for example, your laptop is on, and you're streaming media from your home server).

All in all, this is a clever application. It does something that I wish had been built into Windows in the first place.

Download SmartPower for Windows

Ever thought: 'You know what my iPhone is missing? Windows 3.1!' Well never fear, because Windows 3.1 is here -- courtesy of iDos aka DosPad. The folks over at PikiGeek have put together a guide to getting the Grandfather of the modern Windows operating system running on your iDevice of choice. You unfortunately need a jailbroken device, but with the latest release of redsn0w or limera1n, even iOS4.1 is unlocked with ease. After a bit of fiddling, you'll be able to play Minesweeper and even SkiFree, with Windows 3.1 running at full speed. How's that for progress!

Head on over to PikiGeek for the guide or checkout the instructional video we've included after the jump.

[Via Mobiputing]

Ever wanted to use your non-jailbroken iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad as a USB flash drive? Then head on over to Phone Disk right now and grab yourself a free download for either Windows or Mac. Once installed, Phone Disk lets you use your iOS device of choice like a flash drive, with the majority of the file system available for browsing. Like a 'disk mode' or 'mass storage device', you can dump pretty much anything you like on any free storage space you might have, for transport anywhere to any other computer with Phone Disk. Simple, elegant and useful. Free till 1st December 2010.

[Via Lifehacker]

Mailto:// links are still pretty common on the Web, and they can be somewhat bothersome if you use a Web-based email app like Gmail or Hotmail. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell Windows to open your webmail's compose page instead of trying to load a desktop program like Outlook Express or Windows Mail?

There are actually several ways to get Windows to do this, but not many are as simple as GmailDefaultMaker. It's a free program that allows you to choose whether you want mailto:// links to open with Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, or Yahoo! Mail during the installation process.

Once the install has completed, you'll never notice GmailDefaultMaker at work -- there's no taskbar or system tray icon. It's still doing its job, however, but like a lot of handy little programs it just works and stays out of the way.

No, this won't let you email files from your desktop with a right-click. Affixa may be the answer if you're looking for a more full-featured solution.

Download GmailDefaultMaker

In a move to decrease Russia's dependence on American technology, the Russian government has announced plans to develop a state-sponsored national operating system. Shifting away from Windows would mean both money savings for Russia, and increased digital security.

150 million rubles (5 million dollars) have been set aside to create an operating system that will be based on Linux. It's not yet known whether this national distro will be built from scratch, or simply a branch of a popular distro like Ubuntu. Speaking to AFP, Russian politician Ilya Ponomarev said "The devil is in the details," and that a meeting to decide the exact specifications of this new operating system would occur in December.

This move is a sign that Europe and Asia continue to be unnerved by the US-dominated technology industry. The last few years have seen a massive shift towards open-source software across Europe and Asia, and also a marked increase in the activity of European and Chinese space agencies.

Russia [System operates you!] won't be the first country to work on a national operating system either: China's Red Flag Linux first appeared back in 1999, and only last week India announced its plans to build a proprietary, hyper-secure operating system.

Droid Explorer is, at a glance, a dream app for Android owners. As you can see from the screenshot above, it provides a delicious Windows Explorer-powered portal to everything on your phone. It's also free, and open-source.

The tools provided by Droid Explorer range from the very handy (browsing the file system, installing/uninstalling apps, backing up and syncing your data) -- through to the positively power useresque (debug console, ROM updating, SQLite exploring). Needless to say, at least half of the tools can probably brick your phone, so be careful.

You can also send SMS massages (though I didn't get this to work), capture screenshots and video (like other tools of this ilk, it's still only a few frames per second) -- and, most importantly, you can even shut down your phone! Never again do you have to click through a bunch of menus to shut down your phone.

Despite how awesome it all sounds, don't get too excited: Droid Explorer is beta software and unless you have one of the confirmed-compatible devices, it might simply refuse to work. It only half-worked with my cheap-and-cheerful LG smartphone, but it's possible that I botched one of setup steps.

The installer took a few attempts (and reboots) before it would play ball. And even then, you still need to root your phone and install BusyBox! Being able to really manage your phone from a Windows PC really makes all the pain worthwhile, though.

Yesterday's session of the MAX 2010 conference saw the announcement of the latest iteration to AIR, Adobe's desktop runtime for HTML, Ajax, Flex, and (of course) Flash. AIR 2.5 brings greater device support with it, covering smartphones and tablets running BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android and iOS; Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop; and TVs, with Samsung the first to jump on-board the AIR bandwagon with its Smart TVs due in 2011. With support for hardware features, such as accelerometers, GPS, cameras, microphones, and multi-touch, and hardware acceleration (currently only available for Windows) to make sure that the experience is still smooth, AIR could make quite a convincing write-it-once, get-it-out-on-everything platform. Adobe's even leveraging its Adobe InMarket to help developers get their AIR-driven apps packaged and into various app stores, minus its 30 percent cut of course.

Whether you'll be able to get AIR apps through Apple's approval process remains to be seen, but given Apple's relaxed stance, anything's possible. Excited Flex and Flash developers should be able to get the SDK imminently (currently still showing 2.0.2 at the time of writing), while the rest of us will have to sit back and wait with baited breath to see whether AIR 2.5 improves on its rather clunky forefathers.

It's taken a while to get there, but Defraggler 2.0 is finally ready for download -- at least in beta form.

The new version is more efficient and faster than ever, and Defraggler can now perform boot-time scans. Using the expanded configuration options in Defraggler 2, you can choose to run a one-time defrag, or you can set it to run each time you reboot your system. Defraggler's Drive Map has also gotten a visual update, and it even allows you to set customized colors and block sizes.

As with older versions of Defraggler, you're still able to exclude certain file types and folders and schedule defrag operations.

Defraggler 2.0 is shaping up to be an impressive update, and the beta has been very stable so far in my testing. Take the new beta for a spin, and share your thoughts in the comments!

Cakes are nice and all, but phenomenal sales figures are even sweeter. That's what Microsoft is celebrating today.

Over at the Windows Team Blog, Brandon LeBlanc reports that Windows 7 has sold more than 240 million copies so far. That's not too shabby for just over a year on the market. The post also goes on to say that Windows 7's global market share is closing in on 20%.

While the numbers are impressive thus far, don't forget that most businesses won't be jumping on the Win7 bandwagon until SP1 is released -- which should happen early next year.

It'll be interesting to see if Windows 7 sales can keep up their current pace. What's the daily average work out to? About 630,000 or so? Dang.

Have you ever wanted to create an archive of tweets? Perhaps of your own, or a subject, so that you can analyze trends, see who tweets or retweets a particular keyword the most, or even filter by source. Well that's where The Archivist comes in.

Brought to you by Mix Online, a self declared 'opinionated group of designers and developers at Microsoft,' The Archivist is available in two flavors: a Windows-based client or a browser-based Web app. The free service allows you to search, analyze or download, via an Excel document or ZIP file, all the tweets that have a set of user definable keywords in them. Using the term 'downloadsquad' for instance, the Web app produces graphs and pie charts to display tweet volume, the number of tweets versus retweets including 'downloadsquad,' the top words, users and URLs associated with the search term, plus the top source, be it Twitterfeed, TweetDeck, Web, etc.


As you can see above, 'downloadsquad' is most commonly associated with the word 'Android' at the moment -- given our recent coverage of some high profile Android news that's hardly surprising. But that kind of analysis could be really helpful for brands, sites or even celebrities -- to be able to see what people associate with them. Searching for Nathan Fillion for instance, shows that Twitter currently thinks he should take the part of Nathan Drake in a movie based on Uncharted. Of course you could have found this out using Twitter's own search, but combining that with powerful analytics provided by The Archivist, could give you real insight into why and how prominent the search results really are. You can even sign in with your Twitter account and save an auto-updating archive, which can then be compared with other archives of your creation.

So if you've ever wanted to analyze a Twitter trend, see what people are saying about you on-mass or want to compare keyword usage, then the free service provided by The Archivist is well worth checking out using either the Web app or the Windows-only client.