Philipp Lenssen from the Google Blogoscoped blog does some iterations on the Google Mail userinterface while he investigates the question “What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?“. He ends up with a userinterface which is very much like the hotmail I knew before I replaced it with my current gmail account.
Have fun reading.
p.s. Did you notice that the gmail space has increased to around 5GB lately? Google continues to amaze (frighten?) me at how much data they can store.
A few weeks ago, my Dad and my Brother both bought identical Windows Vista machines, at the same shop, at the same time. Although the hardware specs of these computers were terrific, the performance of Windows Vista was “moderate” to say the least. An even bigger problem was that some of the older XP programs my dad had been using did no longer work on the shiny new Vista machine. The shiny 3D effects had to go in favour of something that “just worked”.
If you’ve ever had the “pleasure” of configuring and sharing a printer between Windows machines, you probably know how tedious it is to get one machine to send a print job to the printer connected to another machine. And don’t even get me started on how to do that on a Linux machine, or any mix of these two systems.
If you have large or many zipfiles in a folder, windows seems to lock up when opening the folder containing the zipfiles. This is because Windows is “smart” and decides to pre-scan the zipfiles and display them as folders. Installing free zip tools like zipgenius will not change this behaviour, although you would expect that.
To unregister the Windows zipfile support service, use the following command (Start -> Run…):
regsvr32 /u zipfldr
To enable the Windows zipfile support again (I can’t imagine why), use the command:
regsvr32 zipfldr
Source of this brilliant tip is dans blog, which I found after some googling ofcourse.
When copy-pasting in Windows, sometimes the clipboard bar appears, and if you’re really “lucky”, it also pops up a waring, distracting you from your work. The clipboard holds only 12 items, and I have never met anyone who used more than one. There is no way to turn this irritating feature off, unless you want to use the dreaded registry editor.
Feeling brave? Follow the instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/207438.
Thinking about switching to a Mac? I’d say go for it, but read this article first. It really sums it all up.
Hi, do you also think Windows Vista gets too much credit for stealing Apple’s Mac OSX, a.k.a. Tiger? Here’s a funny little movie on nytimes.com with proof that Windows is “not” an OSX ripoff. Very funny.
The Ati installer just crashes because there is already an old version of the driver on the system. Any normal manufacturer would be able to upgrade the driver, no? No. This is a windows system, and even with the slightest sign of problenms, you end up digging forums where people have found how to edit the registry to get things done. And then it will still not work. Windows is so full of crap, I even found a driver cleaner tool. And no, that also did not work.
I can not wait to replace my shoddy PC laptop with an iBook or macbook pro. Mind you, this is an Acer Ferrari 3000 laptop I’m typing this on, which should be a decent laptop. But the Windows way just screws it all up.
Every 10 hours of PC, I spend 2 to 4 fixing problems or upgrading drivers. Every 10 hours of Mac, I spend 0 hours updating drivers and 0 hours fixing things. I see an easy winner here in the productivity departement….