For that- open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with notepad and paste the following at the end:

127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sea.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wwis-dubc1-vip60.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sjc0.adobe.com

PS: This is not for cracking your pirated Adobe CS4. Please buy original product, and if you don’t have that much money you can go for alternative tools like GIMP for Photoshop, Aptana for Dreamweaver etc.

Edit hosts file in Windows 7 & Windows Vista

This may sound silly suggestion to even post on Windows Reference but will help avoid some annoyance with Windows Vista and Windows 7. The host file is the one where one enters hostname and IP Address pair manually as against being served by a Name server (ex: DNS). As always the “host” file is under C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ or %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\ and hence cannot be edited by normal users.

To edit the host file,

Click Start – search for “Notepad“, right-click and select “Run as Administrator“. This should launch notepad with elevated privileges. Now, open the host file from the File menu, edit and save.

You’ll find dozens of weather reporting services online, but all of them give you the weather in the traditional old sunny/cloudy/raining kind of way. None of them, however, will tell you if today will be as pleasant as Naboo.

Star Wars weather isn’t a revolutionary way to check the weather report, but it’s a nice diversion from a lifetime of “partly cloudy with a chance of rain”. Rather than simply reporting the weather and forecast, Star Wars Weather gives you the conditions based on the climates and conditions of locales in the Star Wars universe like Hoth, Naboo, and Endor.

If you know of a fun site for sharing information in an unconventional way—stock quotes via Shakespeare perhaps, like “True is it that we have seen better days.”—let’s hear about it in the comments.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications

Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install

We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

• Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
• Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
• Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
• Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
• Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
• You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.

Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim

Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software

If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

via lifehacker

Now, I am not saying that you shouldn’t help people out, in fact it is always nice to do so. What I am actually trying to say is: wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy solution to the same common windows problems that you have to fix every time? Missing Recycle Bin icon, hijacked IE homepages and the likes are very common. If the computer happens to be running Windows you can use the following tool to quickly fix a lot of common problems and save yourself some time!

Case in point: Fixwin. Fixwin is excellent little tool that can save you a lot of time that you would spent searching for a solution or a registry key value on the Internet. You can download FixWin here. The software doesn’t require installation, just extract and run FixWin and you are all set to squash some problems!

The Fixwin page as well as the application start page recommends two initial steps (which make a lot of sense) that you should follow before using FixWin. First step is to run the System File Checker utility. SFC as it is known, checks for corrupted Windows file and can replace them if required. Follow that by creating a System Restore point.

Once you have created a System Restore Point you now have an assurance. You can always restore the computer back in case things go wrong. You are now ready to fix some issues!

FixWin provides one-click fixes for a number of common windows problems. The issues (and their fixes) are divided into categories like: Windows Explorer, Internet, Media, System and a miscellaneous category. Click on any category and you will see the many common problems that can confront you. Towards the right is the “Fix” button that will do all the magic. Click on it and behind the scenes, FixWin will modify a value or two in the registry to give you the desired results. FixWin can also be used to enable utilities like task manager, command prompt, registry editor and others which may have been disabled due to virus infections.

There may be occasions where the computer at hand has multiple issues that need fixing. One important thing to keep in mind in such situations is that you should only apply one fix at a time and then restart your computer. This lets you know if the last fix was successful and in case something goes wrong, you instantly know what caused it.

Keep in mind that there can be many reasons leading up to a single issue, FixWin tries to fix the most common cause for an issue. If something else is causing the problem, then the problem can persist after applying the fix as well. In such a case, we advice you search various forums that are out there for your problem, before applying other fixes

All in all, FixWin is a great tool to have in your repertoire for dealing with common windows problems. Granted it may not offer solutions for every issue that you are likely to encounter but it can save you valuable time and headache when dealing with common issues pertaining to Windows. Do you know of other applications that provide similar one click solutions? We would love to hear about them.

via make use of

Zapr (Windows XP only)

Zapr is, in essence, a small Web-server that sits in your system tray. Instead of leaving your entire machine open, you select what files are to be served, and can password-protect them as you see fit.

For demonstration purposes, I have uploaded a compressed ZIP file of the most-recent Editors’ Picks from open-licensing music site CCMixter. The selection process was as simple as opening a file in any Windows program. Next step was to select the privacy level. Once that’s done, your selected file is instantly available for download, either as a public link from username.zapr.com, or as a private link you can send to select friends and colleagues.

No other uploading is required as the files are served directly from your PC. This means no file-size or bandwidth limits. Of course, this also means that for your friends to get at the files, you must leave your PC on with the Zapr client running. As long as that’s not an issue for you, then Zapr is the fastest and easiest internet file-sharing solution I’ve seen for Windows users.

Moving on now to the Web-based fare.

FileAI

FileAI works much like Zapr, but consists of a Java-based in-browser client. Any platform that supports Java should work with FileAI. There is no size or bandwidth limit, much like with Zapr, because the files are again served directly from your PC.

Downloads can be password-protected and also limited by how many times a file can be downloaded before it expires. FileAI promises “Bit-Torrent-style” distributed file transfers among multiple recipients. Downloading a file is as easy as visiting the site and entering a transfer-ID number or clicking a direct link. The Java client handles all transfers.

File Dropper

File Dropper claims to be the fastest file-sharing site, and it certainly is fast. It can’t be much simpler. Upload a file of up to 5GB in size and receive a download link to pass to your friends. Uploads start immediately upon choosing the file. The site will try and up-sell you on its new premium services, but most of us will find the quick and signup-free basic service to be sufficient.

File Shaker

At first glance, File Shaker looks a lot like File Dropper, just a bit more colorful. File Shaker offers the same quick, login-free, basic upload service, with the maximum file-size bumped-up to a whoppin’ 10GB. Upload time for the same ZIP file was about equal to File Dropper.

For a dead-simple 10GB upload, you can’t beat the price, although given File Dropper’s push for premium accounts, I would not be personally surprised if File Shaker drifted towards the same business-model.

There you have it. The four easiest solutions I could find for sharing files both large and small. I certainly could have missed out on a few gems, so commenters, please let me know what I’ve missed. I won’t take it personally.

via (makeuseof)

Today, we’re announcing our first beta-quality release since the Thunderbird project was re-energized about a year ago. It’s exciting to see the first in what will be a series of releases aimed at a broader set of testers make it out the door.

In some ways, this is a typical beta — we’ve changed a lot of code since Thunderbird 2, and we need a lot of people to tell us if we’ve made any boo-boos when fixing bugs. It’s also a good beta in that we’ve moved the product forward, in part thanks to new capabilities in the underlying Mozilla platform, which gives us faster performance all around, an add-on manager which will be even more useful for Thunderbird users than for Firefox users. We also have important new mail-specific capabilities, including a new “autosync” system that gets Thunderbird to download IMAP message bodies early, so they’re already there when you need them, and a much faster implementation for deleting and moving IMAP messages, which I can’t imagine living without at this point. The one-click add-to-addressbook is also an elegant and shameless ripoff of the Firefox bookmarking model, which our alpha users love.

As a result, I feel that even for a first beta, Thunderbird 3 is much better than Thunderbird 2, thanks to a lot of hard work by a motley crew of great contributors worldwide, to whom I’m very grateful. All that and more is described in the release notes, which I encourage beta testers to read.

However, in some other ways it’s far from a typical beta. In particular, unlike the traditional definition of a beta release, we’re definitely not done making feature changes, including some pretty significant feature work that we expect will be integrated in Thunderbird 3 in later beta releases, some features that will live as optional add-ons, and some experiments which may end up in later releases of Thunderbird or not, depending on the result of the experiments.

I’ll talk a bit about some of these upcoming attractions, as I’m quite excited about them (and some more that will have to wait for another post).

First, the autoconfig work, which refers to a complete rethink of the account configuration process in Thunderbird. The account “wizard” in Thunderbird made sense in the early days, but over the years it has acquired complexity and lost relevance, as email systems have gotten more complex. Unfortunately, if you’re lucky enough to have a secure email server, the current Thunderbird user interface unjustly punishes you by making you go through 8 pages of questions and you end up with an account which requires manual tweaks before you can check mail. That’s not good. To deal with this, we have rethought account configuration completely, and came up with a dialog which, when it lands (becomes available by default), should make account configuration really, really easy. It’s been hard to come up with an elegant minimal user interface that hides all of the complexities of email configuration, but it’s worth doing it right.

Next up is tabs. Thunderbird 3 has a great opportunity to be basically coming up with a tabbed interface at a time in history where we’ve learned a lot about how tabs work well or poorly. In Thunderbird 3 beta 1, it’s a fair bit easier to work with tabs than it was in Thunderbird 2 (although many improvements are planned before the final release). For example, it’s much easier to create new kinds of tabs (the calendar Lightning add-on makes great use of those, for example, as I show below). One simple example of this is Bryan Clark’s “glodabook” add-on, which is a starting point for exploring new ways of navigating the address book.

Next up is conversations. Thunderbird’s default mode saves emails you send in a “Sent messages” folder, and emails you receive filed in other folders, typically decided on a per-message basis by the users (more on that below). This is a fine default strategy, but it can make it hard to find related messages if they’re not in the same place (e.g. messages that are replies to emails you sent, or messages that are part of a long conversation, some of which is in your archive folders, and some of which is in your inbox). Thunderbird 3 includes a powerful search engine (”Gloda”) which is designed to let us efficiently find messages that are related, no matter where they are. In particular, it makes it quick to take a message and “show it in a conversation context”. This lets you view the messages you sent interspersed with the messages you received, but also messages from earlier in the conversation which you may have archived. This is still experimental, and not enabled by default in 3.0b1, but early results are very promising:

Next up, search. Part of the Gloda search engine mentioned above is a powerful full-text search engine, which seems to be working quite well so far. Thunderbird search is already better in 3.0b1 than in 2.0 because we’re more aggressively downloading emails, and doing a better job of finding the downloaded copies. With the new search engine, we’ll be able to efficiently do searches like “show me all messages from bryan mentioning ‘conversation’ in the body or the subject”. And we think we can make that easy for users to discover as well:

First we do autocomplete on existing contacts:

and then encapsulate them in graphical objects to simplify the display:

On that topic, one of the design topics we’re exploring is how to make it easier for users to be smarter about search. Thunderbird has always had very powerful search capabilities, but to use them people have to think like database programmers, which most of us aren’t. We have some plans there to help people build smart searches based on starting with the simple searches people are used to from the web, using suggested sub-searches based on analyzing their search results. Now that we have the search engine in place, we can start to experiment with many different search models, and see what works best.

The last two screenshots are particularly exciting to me because they demonstrate that we can leverage the foundational bits of Thunderbird, and experiment with new ways of working with messages, without disrupting the user experience that Thunderbird 2 that many users are comfortable with. What’s equally exciting is that these new ways can themselves be platforms for experimentation, whether by us, or by others. One such experimentation topics is conversation visualization and interaction models. Andrew Sutherland implemented an add-on that shows thread arcs (here using a view that it out of date by a whole week):

Thunderbird has always been an interesting experimental playground, because of its open source nature and the add-on model. The technology platform in Thunderbird 3 will make it even more so — 1) we have better technology that allows new ways to slice the data, 2) as we’re exploring new features through the use of add-ons ourselves, we find out early what changes we need to make to make the platform more extensible, and 3) because we’re fully leveraging web technologies, something which is a bit new for Thunderbird. In particular, all of the views above build on some of the most compelling advances in web technology, from the canvas widget to Javascript toolkit-based animations (JQuery for now) and modern CSS features.

Finally, last but not least, the Lightning calendaring add-on is moving along great. The Thunderbird+Calendar team has made a lot of progress on tackling the stack of issues that made it hard to integrate into the new Thunderbird codebase. We’re not done yet, but it’s looking great:

There are some other add-ons that some contributors are working on that I’ll talk about as they get polished and ready for screenshots.

As always, we love to get ideas for interesting new capabilities we can bring to the platform. We’re focusing on some of the basic capabilities we think are crucial to solving today’s mail problems, such as search and message management, but it’s a huge field, and email users are desperate for innovative ideas.

We’re identifying way more topics of interest than we have time to tackle, so we’re hoping to reach out to designers to get a broader set of participants helping us with some of the design challenges of a modern approach to messaging, within the context of Mozilla Labs. More on that soon.

Whether you’re a designer or an implementor, if you want to build new features on top of the views we’re building, add new kinds of data to add to our database (twitter, facebook, rss, etc.), or new visualizations, do get in touch.

If you’re interested in the extensions above, and aren’t afraid to try out code that changes daily, my recommendation is to use an IMAP server, Shredder (the nightly builds of Thunderbird, which are already different than the beta 1 build), and the extensions at the following locations:

• lightning nightlies (see links at the bottom, and check out the lightning nightly updater)
• exptoolbar (conversation & search results views)
• glodabook (addressbook)

via_ ( ascher.ca)
]]> http://watchlist2in.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/thunderbird-3-beta-1/feed/ 0 varghese2lijo Addressbook prototype Conversation view autocompleting contacts experimental search results view exptoolbar-visophyte-js-thread-arcs calendar tab http://watchlist2in.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/tech/ http://watchlist2in.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/tech/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:16:20 +0000 varghese2lijo ]]> Google continues to strengthen its position as market leader in search engines by enhancing its Google Book Search service. Besides books, Google scans, OCRs and other digitalized reading materials, avid readers of Magazines can now make use of this search tool from Google to look for millions of articles extracted from magazines. Currently Google is collaborating with a handful of publishers and authors such as Building Systems, Popular Mechanics, Ebony, Popular Science, Prevention, New York Magazine, Jet, etc.

Users can use google to look for articles available from the associated magazines. The articles are not limited to current issues but also backdated issues digitalized by Google and are available to be read in full color and in its original context. Besides searching for articles, users can also click on to “Browse all issues” to view issues from across the decades. Google has created a summary for each issue, e.g. number of pages, publisher name, contents, etc for users’ easy reference.

Google stated that more and more magazines will be added in time to come to make this service more attractive. This is a great attempt by Google to make information and knowledge more accessible to the world by digitalizing historical data. While this may seems like an exaggeration, magazines do capture a piece of history as a way of understanding the perspective of the day.

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