Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The quickest way to get Windows 8 installed is to take a blank PC (or empty partition) and install Windows 8 from USB.

What You’ll Need

• Blank partition/hard drive
• 4 GB USB drive (32 bit/64 bit ISO), 8 GB USB drive (64 bit ISO with developer tools)

To install Windows 8 Release Preview from a USB thumb drive, you’ll need to:

1. Format your thumb drive and copy the installation files
2. Boot from your thumb drive
3. Install Windows 8

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The location sensors in Windows 7 enable your operating system and other software to adapt to your current geographical location. Of course, your computer must have a location sensor supporting hardware e.g., a GPS device, wireless WAN radios or other cellular triangulation technologies. Using these location sensors, your applications can know exactly where you are and provide you with relevant information and content. For example, some twitter clients in Windows can use the location sensors and can automatically post your geographical location along with your tweets.

Most of the modern laptops and desktops are coming with some sort of GPS device installed inside them to take advantage of this location sensor feature in Windows. But even if your computer does not have such a location sensor hardware device,  you can install a software emulation of such devices. Geosense for Windows is such a software based location sensor for Windows 7 which uses Google Location API to find your present location.

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Windows “version 8″ is upon us. Bringing changes to the old, the safe, the familiar. Some say the changes are for the best. Others dread them, swear to keep the Seven (or XP)  for a long time to come. Some even say they will never abandon XP as long as there’s hardware to support it. That is how changing things affect us.

However, things that seem new and daunting will undoubtedly after a period seem like the most natural thing in the world – something you just can’t imagine life without. Do you think that the changes in “Version 8″ are something you can live without ?

Some 20 years ago when Windows had reached the age of 3, people had not yet gotten used to the expressions “Double-click” or “Right-click”, “Drag and Drop”, “Minimize”, “Maximize”. Common users also were quite skeptical to this new fancy gadget called a “Mouse”. Very few people could imagine using this “contraption” for work and even fewer seeing it as a time-saving device. Can you imagine life without it today? Maybe you have to – the introduction of smart-phones, tablets and the upcoming Windows 8 – might force you to re-imagine life – without it… back to square one as it were.

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Some of the programs that we use in Windows, have a system menu containing an option – Always on top.  If selected, this feature sets a window to be always on top of other windows. This is very useful if you want to work across multiple windows but want to focus more of your attention on a particular window. You can set that window to be always on top and keep an eye on it. I personally use this feature to set my TV Tuner window to be always on top so that I can enjoy TV programs while doing work at the same time.

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Previously, we asked you if you use the Windows command prompt and many of you answered and stated you do not; for those that do use the command line interface (CLI), many use it infrequently. In this guide, we’ll go through the basics of the command prompt, show you examples of how you can use it, and show you how to customize it.

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Although you can set Windows Explorer to show you the thumbnails of all your pictures, it usually makes it slower to browse through different folders. Additionally it also creates multiple thumbs.db files in each folder and all such files may take up considerable amount of disk space. An alternative to thumbnail preview feature of Windows is adding an image preview in the right-click menu. This can be done easily using the free FastPreview shell extension. It adds an Image Preview in the right-click context menu so that when you right-click on an image file, you see its preview right inside the context menu.

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