Manas T

Bored of the Low Disk Space warnings in Windows 7 ? Here is how you can use Windows 7 Disk Cleanup to free up some precious hard disk space.

Click on Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools. Then click on Disk Cleanup. Alternatively you can open Start Menu and search for Disk Cleanup.

Once open, select the drive you want to clean up. Mostly this will be the drive where you have Windows installed. Select C:\ drive.

Let Disk Cleanup determine which files can be cleaned up.

You will then see a dialog with the files that can be cleaned without any harm to the system. Select the files that you do not need and click OK.

If you have admin access, you might want to clean up system files as well. Click on System Files in the above dialog. You will then see a More Options tab which you can use to remove old system restore points and shadow copies.

Thats it, I freed close to 2GB of space using Disk Cleanup.

works absolutely fine.

Downloaded and installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and now have Windows XP running inside Windows 7 without any problems.

Finally finished downloading Windows 7 and installed it on my Dell. Went with replacing Windows Vista.   For a Beta release Windows 7 feels far more stable and responsive than Windows Vista SP1. It even boots faster than Vista.

Some random things about Windows 7:

1. The first thing I did was turn off UAC but apparently that has a side effect. Desktop gadgets cannot be used without turning on UAC. Don’t know why.
2. If you are beta testing Windows 7, be sure to read this great list of 30 Windows 7 secrets by Tim Sneath. Its a seriously great article about some cool things that are present in Windows 7.
3. If you are annoyed by the Send Feedback link present on all windows, use this simple registry hack from Tech Recipes to get rid of that.
4. Love the desktop slideshow feature of Windows 7. Just select a folder containing wallpapers and specify a rotation interval, Windows 7 will rotate the wallpapers. Earlier people used to downloaded third party software for doing this.
5. Windows 7 includes DivX support in Windows Media Player. So codec packs are not needed more.

Finally Microsoft has put together its act and made Windows 7 Beta available for download (along with the product keys). No secret links are required, just visit the official Windows 7 site and get the product key and the ISO of Windows 7 Beta.

You will need a Passport ID to login. Also Firefox is not supported for the download. You will need IE 7 and above to download the ISO. Thats because MS uses an Active X Control as a download manager to resume downloads.

Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 support the Windows 7 Beta download experience. Please note that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 users behind a proxy server should use the automatic configuration for their proxy server for the best download experience.

It is good that MS has extended the availability of Windows 7 Beta till 24th January. Hopefully the 3.15 GB x64 ISO will have finished downloading by then on my computer.

P.S. – I have a 160 kbps unlimited internet connection.

After reading all the great reviews of KDE 4.2, I ended up installing KDE 4.2 Beta 2 on my Arch Linux. So how does it feel…

Some of the problems which were bugging me on KDE 4.1 were slow responsiveness and lack of features when compared to KDE 3.5. Also the graphics performance was not that good with my nVidia GPU. These were the first things I wanted to be fixed in KDE 4.2.

Thankfully, KDE 4.2 fixes most if not all the problems in KDE 4.1. And if you experience graphics problem be sure to install the latest beta of the nVidia driver. (180.18 is the version available in AUR). The driver makes things on KDE 4.2 a lot smoother.

You can read a pretty nice review of KDE 4.2 Beta here and here along with some delicious looking screenshots.

But in between all these improvements there are some  things which are bugging me in KDE 4.2 Beta.

1. Plasma seems to be taking shape well with Plasma add-ons working pretty good now. But still Plasma keeps crashing every now and then. And everytime I go offline in Kopete, Plasma crashes.
2. The new system tray is nice but it keeps flickering everytime I minimize or restore a window. I hope that is fixed before KDE 4.2 is released. Also the system tray icons seem a bit blurred at times.
3. This one is not really KDE related but I dont like Amarok’s new look and feel. Hope the developers give the UI a second thought.
4. I really hate KTorrent startup. It keeps on stacking notifications on top the system tray. Though the notifications are OK when I am copying or moving a file, KTorrent stacks at least 10 notifications when I open it.
5. KDE 4.2 reminds me of Vista. The taskbar is too similar to the one in Windows Vista. Though KDE has been using that kind of taskbar even before Vista.
6. Theming – KDE 4.2 appearance is not all that customizable.

These are not really negatives. May be I am just stuck with GNOME.

Hopefully I will try out KDE 4.2 final when it is out. For now I am back on GNOME 2.24 + Compiz Fusion.

Did you try KDE 4.2?