Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon and just as with Firefox 3, the browser doesn’t look ground-breaking.  A closer look, however, exposes lots of neat new features from Microsoft, along with a nice addition that has been a part of Firefox for a while.  Follow the screenshots below to learn more about this next generation browser.

Related tabs are color coded, for easy sorting.

Web Slices are another new feature.  They allow websites to create dynamic feeds for IE8.  They are like RSS widgets to the user.

Internet explorer 8 adds a feature called “Accelerators”.  Highlight a section of the page and a blue anchor appears.  Click that anchor to get a popup menu of accelerators, which are actions to perform using that text, such as posting a blog, or mapping an address.  More accelerators can be added from the web to add functionality.

In this example, highlighting the word Internet, and using the Encarta accelerator, brings up a definition of the Internet.

The add-on manager in IE8 allows you to enable or disable troublesome plugins, toolbars and extensions.  It also allows you to manage accelerators, search providers, and settings for InPrivate (which will be discussed shortly).  There is also a link to find more add-ons at the IE8 gallery.

IE8 adds an integrated website checker called SmartScreen.  It checks websites against a blacklist of known malicious websites and blocks them, also allowing you to report a suspicious site.

An icon next to the address bar enables the compatability view, which loads pages as they would be loaded in older browsers for compatability. 

The handy feed discovery menu finds feeds on a page, and gives you a way to view them in one place and gives you one click access to the RSS feed, for subscription.

The Internet Explorer Gallery will be the place to go to find ad ons, accelerators, search providers and web slices.  This allows for easy customization of the browser from one location.

InPrivate allows you to browse the internet without leaving any tracks.  In this mode, IE doesn’t store files in the cache, doesn’t keep cookies, or add to the history.  Simply put, IE covers your tracks while you’re in a session.

Another important new features include, a menu option to go directly to the Delete Browsing History dialog.  The new dialog allows you to clear your cache, delete browsing history, remove cookies, etc, without having to dig through the Internet options dialog.

A nice Firefox feature has finally arrived in IE with the Reopen Last Browsing Session dialog, which allows allows you to restore the last tabs you were working on when you closed IE.  I wish this would work automatically, or be presented as a prompt, like it does in Firefox, but it is nice to know the option is there.  A nice wrinkle Microsoft added is that when bad code on a website, on in an add-on crashes your browser, the offending tab will be closed, and all others restored upon restarting IE8.  In my test, the results were mixed.  A tab crashed the browser, it restarted with IE frozen and unresponsive, and I had to kill IE from the task manager.  When I restarted the browser, the offending tab was gone, and my others remained open.  Interestingly enough, the tab seemed to crash the browser because of a site being coded for IE7 not being able to handle a beta.  As with any beta, the buggy behavior will probably be ironed out by the release. 

Overall, while not as groundbreaking as say, the jump from IE3 to IE4, there were plenty of nice features added, including some that should have been a part of Internet Explorer from a while.  My main complaint is that I wish Microsoft would release interim updates of its browser over time instead of waiting and releasing new browsers to coincide with new operating systems.  This would allow Web Developers to keep sites tailored to new IE features, instead of having to adopt them every few years when a new OS is released.

Written by: Hilton T. Young

Are you tired of hearing your PC crunch like crazy when loading applications or playing a game?  If the answer is a resounding yes, consider yourself not alone.  Adding actual physical RAM (Random Access Memory) to your machine can be an unneeded expense to increase your PC’s performance for many.

If you currently have a second hard drive in your computer, it would be extremely wise to allow your page file to reside on the hard drive that does not contain your Windows OS, gaming, and resource-intensive application files.  When the Windows OS needs additional memory; it accesses the page file on your hard drive.  For a good example, consider you’re playing the popular Crysis video game published by EA (Electronic Arts) and currently have 2 gigabytes of physical memory.  Crysis and the Windows OS’s system files and any other background processes running will at times need more than the 2 gigabytes of installed memory.

To access the needed additional memory, Windows will store the bits of information in the swap file.  It is limited only by the size you set it as or the size of your hard drive if you let Windows manage it.  As a result of this usage of a file residing on your hard drive and the hard drive’s slow mechanical nature, your performance will suffer anytime the page file needs to be written to.  Having the page file on the same hard drive as your Windows OS and games, etc. will be really slow because it takes extra time for a hard drive to access two or more separate locations on a hard drive storage platter.  By setting the page file to a separate hard drive, less files are needed to be accessed on one hard drive at once, effectively making Crysis in the above example run at a faster pace.   This would apply not only to Crysis, but to other games and applications on your PC as well.

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It also pays to optimize your page file to be set within a small range, which will entirely depend on the amount of physical memory you have installed, the operating system you are running, and the amount of page file usage you need to utilize.  Start task manager by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del and go to the Performance tab.  When you have properly optimized your swap file, you will notice that almost all of your physical memory will be cached.  If it’s half and half between your RAM and the page swap, consider making your page swap smaller.  As a general rule of thumb, make the swap file size as small as possible for the minimum value and keep the range between the minimum and maximum no more than 256 megabytes.  This will keep fragmentation of the swap file to a minimum.

Modifying the swap file is easy:  select the settings selection of the advanced tab under system in control panel and from there go to the advanced tab.  Change the swap file to be located on the non-OS residing hard drive in your PC, type in the desired range, and then select Set.  After doing this, a restart will be required.

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For all of those out there who don’t have a second hard drive, Windows Vista can set your flash drive of adequate size (usually a gig or two will suffice) to store the page file.  This is convenient because you don’t have to worry about fragmentation on a flash drive and the same principal applies as with a second hard drive:  your main mechanical drive will have to be in one less place on the platter than it otherwise would.  To have Vista do this, simply insert your flash drive and select to use ready boost.  If the option isn’t there, either your flash drive is too small or an older flash drive with inadequate transfer speed capabilities to be an effective source for your swap file.

*Tip:  Visit AusLogics‘ website and download their Registry and Disk Defragmenter programs.  They are completely free and work very well at what they were programmed to do.  Disk Defragmenter is faster than Windows’ built in one and will keep your disk crunching to a minimum and defragment that speed vital page file.  The registry defragmenter will defragment your system registry and make it smaller.  Since the registry resides in physical memory, this effectively increases the amount of your physical memory.  Considering these two programs are free, you lose nothing by checking them out.

    

Windows Live mesh appears to be a solid move into the cloud based computing market by Microsoft.  I will give a quick intro using screenshots.  A quick overview.  Windows Live Mesh (www.mesh.com) allows you to collaborate by sharing files from your personal computers over the Internet.  It then lets you add users who can access files.  You can also share data from folders on different PCs, which get added to your mesh.  A bonus feature is that the Remote Desktop Connection is a part of your desktop and allows you to remotely control your computers after Live Mesh is installed on them.  The only thing I am missing is document editing features.  If you could somehow use Google Apps on your mesh, this would be a killer app.  As it stands though, I carry a thumb drive with maintenance software as well as the free OpenOffice.org software on it, so even if I’m on a PC with no office suite on it, as long as it runs Windows I am able to do word processing.  Also missing in the interim are drag and drop capability, and MacOS and Mobile support.

HERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS!!!

    The nicest surprise was the fact that Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is enabled on Mesh.  Because RDC requires the computer you are using to be on the local network and have a password on the user account you are logging into, it wasn’t as useful as it could have been.  In the Windows environment, most users aren’t using passwords and thus can’t connect via RDC, and the error message won’t really point the average user to the reason they can’t connect.  Gotta love seeing Vista inside of XP though.
  
    The notifier is installed on each computer you want in your mesh and it is added to your list of devices.  You use your list of devices to connect remotely and control a PC (by clicking the Connect to device link.

    Your Live Desktop shows as a Vista skinned window in your browser, complete with drag and drop and resizing.  Your files are shown in an explorer like window as they are synced.  The Live Desktop comes with 5 GB of file storage so while it won’t hold an mp3 or podcast collection, it will hold your documents and photos.  The only disappointment I saw was that there wasn’t a built in document editor, or photo thumbnails (as with the large icon option in Vista).  Another thing is that Mesh relies on Active X controls so you’re limited to Internet Explorer.  If you use Firefox because your Internet Explorer has fallen victom to viruses, you are out of luck.  One neat feature is that if you install Silverlight (Microsoft’s answer to flash), you are given the option of using the Media view, which is an embedded Windows Media Player for playing video files. 

The Mesh notifier which is installed in your system tray gives you a Instant Messenger-like news feed of files that have been synchronized or deleted.

    The Mesh folder view allows you to add Twitter-like messages to a feed for your shared folder.  This would be a good device to use to notify your users that you have updated a document, or removed a share.

    Mesh lets you assign users to folders and give those users permissions.  This way you can determine who sees files and who can edit them.
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   This is the interface for adding and editing users to a share.  You add them by sending an invitation to users with Live accounts.  You can chose to give them logical roles of Owner (can read, modify and write to documents), Reader (can read documents) and Contributer (can read and add their own documents, but not modify other’s documents).  Who would have thought that Hotmail account from the 90s would be a part of the future in 2008.

    Unfortunately, this is a preview, and features like the ability to drag files from your computer to your Mesh desktop aren’t available yet.

    Overall, Mesh looks promising as Microsoft tries to shift from local computing to cloud computing.  It takes your file sharing from your local LAN and makes it available worldwide for free, using a free Windows Live account.  Microsoft is supposed to be making a shift towards online services (see Microsoft Equipt).  I can see this service as a supplement to their other online services, and the eventual online adaptation of Office.  I would also like to see some kind of media sharing/streaming included, which would be similar to how Orb allows you to share your media over the internet, although the Orb really stresses a computer.  In the end this is a solid preview of the direction Ray Ozzie has Microsoft headed in.  I would also like to see how Microsoft plans on integrating its live services.  I’m not a Mac person, but I guess that it would be similar to the direction .mac is headed in.  I can see signing onto Windows Live search and having your targeted ad banner link you to a new song by your favorite artist.  You would look to a sidebar and see how many new emails you have, today’s events on your calendar, new files added to your mesh, your virus definition status, online IM users, and new stories on your RSS subscriptions.

    My only real concern is user security.  If you’re using a Windows Live account to subscribe to all of these services and put your personal data online, you’d better have a strong password to protect yourself from hacking.  You’d also have to really watch out for the first person who tries to spoof Windows Live to get you to give them your username and password through phishing.

EA SPORTS WILL NOT RELEASE ITS FLAGSHIP GAME ON THE PC

Game developer Electronic Arts has become the Wal-Mart, or Microsoft of the PC gaming industry.  It has practiced the art of buying its competitors and releasing their products under the EA brand.  This practice has hurt the PC gaming community more and more over the years, and shockingly, EA has decided not to release Madden NFL 09 on the PC.

    EA has killed many of its competitor’s games on the PC, and even all together through its business practices.  Game developer Papyrus created NASCAR racing sims that were far and beyond the best, and even their last game Papyrus Nascar 2003 is still a better game than EA’s own Nascar games.  The real issue is that EA saw its competitors were making better games and began throwing money at sports entities for exclusive rights to their licensing.  Without the ability to have the real cars, teams or players in games, developers were unable to continue making competing games because fans want realism.  The most striking incident came when the NFL2k series came out.  It was clearly better than EA’s own flagship sports game.  When they started selling the game for a mere $20, EA went and got exclusive licensing rights to the NFL.  This allowed them to stop lowering the price of Madden to compete, and now Madden costs $60 and isn’t improved upon much from year to year.

    Another gripe I have with EA is that they practice making games that HAVE to be bought each year.  You buy a perfectly good game and its obsolete after a season.  PC gamers will remember how developers like Papyrus and Sierra made their sports games open for user mods.  You could buy a game, and then fans would update rosters so you could use last year’s game with this year’s teams.  You didn’t buy the game because you wanted new rosters, you bought it because the next game had improvements that you wanted. 

    Now EA has begun giving up on PC gamers altogether.  They would rather we pay for increasingly expensive consoles that cost more than computers now.  They say that piracy is the issue, which is understandable since its more difficult (but still easy) to get pirated games on a console.  It would only seem fair for them to leave the PC market, but release rights to licenses for PC developers.  This way, someone could step in and take their place.  As it is, EA is simply dropping PC gamers.  Madden 09 isn’t released for the PC, just as EA has given up on a PC NASCAR sim.  Who is to say they won’t give up on other popular games, like the SIMS or SIM CITY when they figure out how to make them console games.  EA is already trying to buy other big name developers.  We may see the day when EA kills ALL PC games. 
  
    The only good news is that EA’s licenses to sports games end eventually.  The NASCAR license ends in 2009.  If someone out there has the money, please buy these licenses, and make them available to all competitors.  Its obvious that EA will not work to make better games as long as they don’t have competition.