After a short delay to avoid being buried under the flood of CES news, part 3 of Touring Windows Vista is up here at WinCustomize. So far we've talked a little bit about installation and explored the new UI elements in Aero and the Start Menu. Today we move into the Control Panel as well as some of the bundled applications and games. This is the half-way point of the series, which we will be finishing up on January 23rd, in advance of the actual launch of Windows Vista. N...
It's rare for any online service to be able to boast 8 million total customers, especially when the service costs users roughly $15/month. It's even rarer in the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming world. Rare though it may be, Blizzard Entertainment announced today that their flagship online game; World of Warcraft, passed the 8 million subscriber mark. This news comes just over 2 years after the initial commercial release of the game, and less than a week before the launch of it...
CES is almost underway, with the past two days focusing on press pre-events where Microsoft and other companies do their song-and-dance for press and various members of the online community. Turns out that our very own Brad Wardell was asked to spend a few minutes to talk about Windows Vista and how you can customize the look and feel of the OS using Object Desktop. Get a glimpse of your favorite skinning tools in action under Windows Vista! The interview is conducted by Vincent Eve...
WinCustomize 2007 is coming very soon, and with the new site, we are looking to expand the coverage of our galleries to serve an even wider audience of users looking to get the most out of their PC. For years we've been the place to go for DesktopX widgets and objects, but now the gadget market is expanding, and we want to reflect that here at WC. To that end, we are looking for talented artists and developers who know how to build Vista Sidebar and/or Google gadgets. If yo...
You can impress your friends and family by telling them you took an MIT class! Perhaps one of the most commonly misunderstood issues online these days is that of copyrights. It's especially important on sites like WinCustomize where copyright issues are everywhere. It happens time and again that people take elements of others works to use in their own without permission, or try to take logos or other visual elements and just don't understand what they did wrong. MIT is offer...
Sure, a lot of us have paired up 500GB disks in an attempt to reach the astronomical number of 1 terabyte of storage space. Or maybe it's a cluster of cheap 250s. Either way, the market's appetite for storage space continues to grow, and now, we've crossed the latest barrier in single drive space (at least for consumers). Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced yesterday that their 1TB 3.5" drive for desktops would be available first quarter of this year. The drives is...
With the start of the new year comes a new round of "Skinner of the Month" articles. Last year we only hit 3 in the 5 months it was running because I fell behind and didn't get interviews arranged in time. This year though I'm trying to get a head-start and lay out several candidates a few months in advance. That's where you come in. Post here your suggestions for skinners you feel should be highlighted in this series. I'll pick through the list and hopefully we'll be a...
Starting in mid-2007, you will be able to purchase notebooks from Apple and HP that feature not the same old LCD screens you're used to, but screens powered by LED technology, much like new HDTV sets from Samsung. These new displays while consuming more power and being more costly to produce, show improvements in a number of areas such as color reproduction, uniformity, contrast ratio and brightness. It is assumed that any LED-based notebooks from these companies will be largely targ...
A lot of ink has been used to talk about Aero, the new user interface built into Windows Vista. Aero represents Microsoft's most recent attempt to create a strong visual branding element to their flagship product. The glassy look, the transparency and the shiny glowy bits added to the UI look dazzling, but will all of that graphical heavy-lifting create a burden for your PC, slowing it down when trying to draw too many windows over one another? According to Principled Technologies, a ...
Media Center has taken its place as the dominant home media center connector in the past year or so as uptake of digital media and the XBox 360 console has taken off. Windows Vista especially will be pushing the Media Center in new directions with new content distribution channels through Live Marketplace, and enhanced connectivity with the 360 and Zune portable media player. Now we all know this isn't Microsoft's first attempt to break into the living room. WebTV was a product th...
Turn the clock back 12 years. Look around you and you may find yourself sitting at a 386 PC, chances are you'd be running Windows 3.1 and if you were really lucky you'd have a 14.4 modem with a connection to The Internet. The web was still in its infancy (having only sprung into existence 2 short years ago) and the 'Net was still small and relatively unexplored. Back in this early time, there was the Internet World Magazine. At the end of 1994, they published a list of best/...
CNet News is reporting on changes within the EU's consumer protection laws that will leave scammers "nowhere to hide" according to the U.K. government. This is being accomplished through increased amounts of cooperation between national enforcement groups throughout the European Union. These changes come about and the end of January when the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation goes into effect. The target are scammers who prey on unsuspecting users via email across natio...
Last week, I began a five-part series looking at Windows Vista and what it might mean to the average user. These articles are meant to go beyond the typical "should you buy this" approach, and is meant to give a high-level break-down of what's new and improved about the latest installment of everyone's favorite operating system. Last week was a brief introduction . This week we look at the Changes & Additions to the Vista User Interface . Next week we'll examine the new cont...
Christmas day is typically a day of family, friends, lots of eating and having a good time. This year however it was also a time for pounding on your favorite online service of choice, as companies such as Nintendo with their Wii Store and Apple with iTunes saw massive increases in traffic as people who received a Wii or iPod for Christmas went online to their respective stores for the first time. Most roughly at the same time. Hitwise, a site which monitors Internet traffic trend...
Welcome to 2007 WinCustomize regulars! With the new year comes a new poll, this one focused towards increasing community involvement in how the site operates. Before I get into the new poll however, lets recap our last poll of 2006: How Old Are You? Every now and then we like to get an idea of the audience we serve here at WinCustomize. Through stat tracking, we have plenty of data on what browser and OS our visitors use, most popular pages visited etc. What we don't...