Abdussamad's blogspace

Microsoft's new operating system and the successor to Windows XP, Windows Vista is being released to bulk buyers soon but it will take until early 07 before it is available for retail consumers. Vista has some steep hardware requirements. Its much touted aero user interface will require a high end graphics card and loads of RAM. For starters you need a 1 Ghz cpu which shouldn't be a problem for most users. You also need a 1GB of RAM! A whole Gig! I mean talk about being a pig. But the really surprising part is the 15GB hard disk space requirement. How many DVDs does it come on :o ? Of course everybody is complaining now but people will eventually upgrade. We have to there is no other option if you want the latest and greatest software to work with. Windows Vista is certainly a boon to Microsoft's OEM "partners" .

The most important question though is whether you still have to restart your computer after installing every little thing? Its been 21 years since Windows was first released and you would think that by now MS would have learned to make a stable and reliable OS .

Your collection of bookmarks or favourites can be very valuable indeed. They are the little gems you discovered during many years of web surfing and it can be a pain to be without them. Bookmark base is a small program that allows you to carry your own synchronized set of Internet bookmarks or favourites on your usb flash drive. You can then plug your key drive into any computer at home or work and it will update the local machine's bookmarks with a single click! If your worried about your privacy and don't want to place your bookmarks on multiple machines you also have the option of opening individual sites straight from bookmark base.

The really great feature of bookmark base is its cross browser compatibility. Bookmark base supports a large number of browsers including Mozilla Seamonkey and Firefox, K-meleon, Opera and Internet Explorer. So if you use firefox at home but have to use IE at work you can still use the same bookmarks! Bookmark base also allows you to perform simple operations on your bookmarks such as organize them or rename them. It can also verify your bookmarks to make sure that they work. If you like you can try out bookmark base by downloading a trial version.

Stuck as I am on an ancient slow as molasses dialup connection, I find myself rather annoyed by the new practice by some Pakistani ISPs of redirecting scrath/prepaid card user's requested pages to their own ad filled pages. Cybernet and gerrys are the two biggest culprits. Both of them randomly redirect you to a page filled with their ads and a continue link. The people at Gerrys advertise their stupid dsl service. Fortunately I am smart enought to use firefox and adblock plus which prevents the fat ads from squeezing my bandwidth. Nevertheless its damn annoying to have to refresh a page multiple times just to see a website.

I have however discovered a few solutions to preventing these redirects. For cybernet you either use any of thier dial in numbers NOT ending in 65 or you configure a proxy server. Often their other numbers don't work so you have to use the one ending in 65. Using a proxy always works. You can find many online lists of proxy servers by googling for them. In the case of gerrys you have to use their proxy server proxy.gerrys.net. Of course you should still use FF and adblock plus because cybernet is fond of pop ups as well. Sigh....

Here are a few useful windows shortcuts

• Double click on a windows title bar to maximize it. Repeat to restore it. This is easier to do because the title bar is a wider area than the little square maximize button in the top right corner of a window.
• windows key + m to minimize all windows. Functions sort of like the show desktop shortcut
• select a file or shortcut icon and press alt-enter to view its properties window.
• windows key + L to do a quick log out. Useful if want to quickly zip away from your computer but don't want to leave yourself logged in.
• windows key + e will display my computer.