March 17th is St. Patrick's day, a day most often commemorated by corned beef and cabbage, green beer, short little red-headed guys with funny hats and all sorts of people wearing buttons that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish!"  Well, we thought it might be fun to get into the spirit of the upcoming holiday here at WinCustomize with a mini-contest of sorts, something to get everyone thinking a little more "green".  Here's what you have to do to participate: Create five St. Patrick's Day t...

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 and the radical UI changes brought with the new ribbon interface, it looks like there's an opening for competition in the office productivity space to gain some ground against the Redmond giant.  Corel, owners of the WordPerfect suite is jumping into the fray with both feet this week with the release of the beta version of their flagship word processor. The WordPerfect Lightning beta is free to download and offers a new degree of online services...

Imagine you walk into a McDonalds and instead of swiping a credit card, or handing over cash, you use your cell phone to place and pay for the order.  Seem a little far-fetched and silly?  Well, NTT DoCoMo and McDonalds don't think so as it's a new service they're planning to roll out in the near future.  Already in Japan, and the UK consumers can purchase items like train tickets via their cell phones.  It's the next step in making ordering and paying for services and pr...

Google offers a wide assortment of free tools to users ranging from email, to calendaring, to instant messaging and office productivity apps.  Basically, you have access to all the tools necessary to manage your day-to-day life and work with ease.  Well, it would be easy if the applications were actually integrated seamlessly together, but at this time, they aren't.  Google Mail and Google Calendar work together sort of, but the integration isn't all that smooth.  Other piece...

Since the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000/2001, the looming specter hovering over the shoulder of the common IT worker has been "outsourcing."  Or at least that's the boogieman the media has chosen to hoist up to scare everyone into thinking their jobs are doomed to be taken away by someone in India making a mere fraction of their current salary.  But if you listen to Bill Gates, richest man on the planet and the mover/shaker behind Microsoft and it's meteoric rise to becoming o...

One of the biggest frustrations with installing a new operating system is finding, downloading and installing all the various device drivers you need to work the gizmos and doodads in your PC.  Most support websites are difficult to navigate, as if they're intentionally trying to hide the drivers from you, making you sift through dozens of menus and links to get to the software that will power your peripherals and expansion cards. In response to this, a site has stepped up with an up-to-...

Last week we mentioned that Microsoft was backing away from sales forecasts that it's now calling "aggressive" for Windows Vista through 2008.  A lot of people marked slow sales up to a combination of hardware and software support lagging, and the lack of compelling reasons to move away from Windows XP considering how stable of an OS it has become in the last 5 years.  However, it seems Microsoft sees the issue a bit differently. In the same call last week with analysts saying t...

Remember when Microsoft analysts were claiming that Windows Vista sales were going to be spectacular and spark massive growth in the industry because consumers would be falling over themselves to upgrade?  Well, turns out those forecasts were a little bit too aggressive.  Now though, Microsoft itself is admitting just that.  CEO Steve Ballmer said as much yesterday in a strategy presentation to analysts, saying that Vista would create a "small surge" in PC sales in fiscal 2008. ...

We often lean heavily on the members of our community to help each other out in learning how to use software like SkinStudio, IconDeveloper and DesktopX.  They're not easy tools and require a fair bit of invested time to really get a feel for how to get them to do what you want.  DesktopX is probably one of the most difficult creation tools since it requires both coding and graphics skill. After numerous tutorials on the subject, community member, and gadget guru, RomanDA is steppi...

We've all had to deal with them, the unwanted calls at inconvenient times trying to sell us things we don't want.  In recently years many of us have flocked to sign up for the Do Not Call list, barring telemarketers (except non-profits and political groups) from disturbing your dinner.  However, the calls still come.  Companies ignore the no-call lists and don't respect your requests to be removed from their database (something they're obligated by law to do if you request it) and...

Google, friend to all, guardian of the environment and... financier of piracy? Sounds strange, but that's the latest criticism leveled against search giant Google this week.  By allowing two software piracy sites to run Google AdSense ads on their site, a few pirates walked away with over $1.1 million in ad revenue.  Many media giants such as News Corp, Disney and Time Warner are screaming bloody murder over Google's apparent support of software piracy sites. Google's defense is ...

Windows Home Server, the next big product from Microsoft, is slowly gathering marketing steam since the announcement at CES last month.  Previously, only a handful of testers in and out of Microsoft had access to the beta, to test and try to help work the kinks out.  Now however, Beta 2 is approaching and MS wants more people to get their hands on the code and put it through the paces. So if you're up to the task, and have a spare PC you can dedicate to the effort, head on over he...

Google announced this week that the extremely popular Gmail webmail service is now open to anyone who wants an account.  The service launched on April 1st, 2004 as a beta product and invite-only.  Gmail quickly caught on with tech enthusiasts, and a strange vortex of hype and demand surrounded it due to it's invite-only method for allowing people to create accounts.  Gmail is also notable for the amount of storage space it provides to users.  Starting at 1 gigabyte, the total...

Ok, so most of us remember the smiling flying people in the commercials for Windows XP, and now we're dealing with the annoying "WOW!" people in the Vista commercials, and we're more or less entertained by Apple's Mac vs PC ad campaign.  Ad campaigns for operating systems are pretty hit or miss, and in the case of Microsoft, typically miss.  So it's no surprise that one of their first, a commercial for Windows 386 is incredibly bad. Don't believe me?  Well, Gizmodo dug up an ol...

A big deal at CES that received surprisingly little press coverage in general was Windows Home Server, the little box that would tie it all together and help you bring the power of the PC to every corner of your house.  Hooked in with a Windows Vista machine running Media Center, and an XBox 360 with the Media Center connector capability built-in, the potential is definitely there for a server designed to fit in with the home media and information space. Well, Microsoft is starting to re...