The Microsoft Daily

The day when we celebrate Romance – Feb 14 known as Valentines Day is coming up soon. And what better to mark the special occasion than a theme!

Download the Official Valentines Day Theme for Windows 7

The HP Slate is a fantastic looking Device! It was first showcased at CES 2010 by Steve Ballmer himself. It was shown running Windows, was fully multi-touch and was demoed running the PC version of Kindle Ebook Application.

Here’s the most recent video of HP CTO Phil McKinney himself showing the HP Slate running full fledged Windows 7 in action :

Check out the Official Teaser of the sexy HP Slate :

(continue reading…)

Image resizing has always been a cumbersome job especially when it comes to batch resizing. With the megapixel count of Digital Cameras increasing at a steady rate, the size of image too increases making it hard to share these pictures online.

But a small Windows 7 compatible PowerToy called Image Resizer makes that job a simple 2 step process.

What it does is that it simply adds a shell script menu when you right click on any Picture. You can even select multiple pictures and batch resize them.

Download Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows 7

These days with a wide range of Operating Systems available, people usually prefer to use Multi Booting to use the various Operating Systems.

Windows 7 Bootloader is usually preferred to be the primary Bootloader to manage the list of all other Operating Systems in the PC.

Many a times, certain problems crop up which messes up or even deletes entries for other Operating Systems.

In such a case, its always easier to manage the Windows 7 Bootloader using a program call EasyBCD.

Easy BCD: (freeware)
EasyBCD is NeoSmart Technologies’ multiple award-winning answer to tweaking the new Windows 7 bootloader. With EasyBCD, almost anything is possible. Setting up and configuring Windows boot entries is simple, and there is no easier way to quickly boot right into Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD straight from the Windows 7 bootloader – on the fly, no expert knowledge needed!

Download Easy BCD

The Microsoft SDL – Developer Starter Kit provides a compilation of baseline developer security training materials on the core Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) topics. This helps you understand and maintain the correct process inorder to design your applications securely.

Microsoft SDL  provides Microsoft Office PowerPoint slides, speaker notes, train-the-trainer audio files, and sample comprehension questions and reference material.

It covers the following topics :

• secure design principles
• secure implementation principles
• secure verification principles
• SQL injection
• cross-site scripting
• code analysis
• banned application programming interfaces (APIs)
• buffer overflows
• source code annotation language
• security code review
• compiler defenses
• fuzz testing
• Microsoft SDL threat modeling principles
• the Microsoft SDL threat modeling tool

Download SDL

Aero feature in Windows is pretty much the main highlight feature since Windows Vista.  Aero, introduced with Vista and provided a totally refreshing glass feel to your Windows.

But this Glass Effect, Transparancy or Flip3D was not made available for Home Basic verion of Windows. This primarly was not cause of the very low pricing, but was due to the Basic version being intended for low config systems.

It disables the internal hardware check which allows you to run Aero only it the tests are passed.All you got to do is download the application and click on Enable Aero.

Aero Enabler is a freeware but make sure you have .Net Framework 3.5 or higher installed.

Download Aero Enabler

If you are a Notebook or Netbook user, running Windows 7, then this is a MUST HAVE tool for you. Power Plan Assistant provides you easily accessible shell menu items to effortlessy switch between various Power Modes thereby allowing you to manage the balance between Battery life and Performance as and when you need very seamlessly.

Here’s a list of Features from their site :

Power Plan Assistant for Windows® 7 – Features and Benefits
Power Plan Assistant is a smart power plan management application, designed specifically for Microsoft® Windows® 7 operating system.
All the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows® 7 are fully supported (on 64-bit operating system, the native 64-bit binaries will installed automatically).

With Power Plan Assistant you can:
1. Easily switch between the Windows® built-in/custom power plans (all, not 2 of them, as when operating via system Power icon) and instantly power off a display
on user’s demand (why wait at least one minute for it to be powered off, wasting energy?). It can be waked up then by pressing any key or moving the cursor;

(continue reading…)

Windows 7 as you all might know by now, offers fully customized themes via  Themepacks. These are very simple to Download and Install offering a One Click Install/Apply procedure.

The only caveat being that Official Windows 7 Themes are scarce and are very limited. But 3rd Party Themes are available which offer pretty awesome customization of your Windows 7 Dekstop.

With the New Year, Smashing Magazine, came up with its own Windows 7 Theme specifically meant to commensurate the new year.

Download Windows 7 2010 theme

It’s been just about 2 months since Windows 7 launch and talks about the next iteration of Windows are bound to happen. I just stumbled across this Video on Youtube called “Windows 8 Copenhagen concept video”

Have a look :

Copenhagen User Experience from Copenhagen Concept on Vimeo.

Microsoft recently filed a patent which depicts an Online Avatar of a person resemble his actual offline look. An over-weight person will have a fat avatar. Via the use of people’s health records Microsoft want to create physically accurate avatars and thus encourage them to lose weight.

The abstract of the patent states:

An avatar generator for a virtual environment reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance. Thereby, many of the incentives of the real world are replicated in a virtual environment. Physiological data that reflect a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication. Thereby, people are encouraged to exercise. Physiological data that reflect the health and perhaps also mood also improve social interaction in virtual environments. People seeking to meet and become acquainted with particular types of people are not thwarted by the artificiality of avatars. The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, peak flow, pedometer, etc.)