Sunday, March 28, 2010

Change Windows 7 Logon Background

Bored of Windows 7 default logon background ? Want to change it with your favorite picture ? Do not know how to change ?

 

Changing logon screen in Windows 7 is as easy as changing your desktop wallpaper. A little application called tweakslogon from tweaks.com, helps you change Windows 7 logon background in just few clicks.

 

Click here to download a 240 KB zip file and unzip to get TweaksLogon.exe. This app does not require installation and running the app will launch a small window with self explanatory options and preview of the present logon background.

 

Tweaks.comWin7LogonChanger-1

 

To change the background click on “Change Logon Screen” button which pops up a windows to browse for the picture you would like to set as logon background.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Flying Hovercraft

Mr. Rudy Heeman, New Zealand developed a hovercraft that can fly. This hovercraft was built in his garage using various parts from vehicles like scooters and junked cars. This machine fitted with 1.8 liter Subaru engine, can fly to a maximum distance of 225 kilometers with maximum altitude of 3 meters. Wings are removable and it can carry only two people or 160 kg, while in flight. It sets off like a normal hovercraft and can take flight when it reaches top speed of 40mph.

 

Saturday, March 13, 2010

CRS-3 from CISCO – 300 Terabits per Second

John Chamber CEO of Cisco the leading supplier of networking equipment has recently announced CRS-3 (Carrier Routing System - 3) with price starting from $90,000 US (Cheap) that can handle traffics of 322 terabits per second, 12 times its major competitors. What does this mean? For a normal user this means 4 billion MP3 songs on iTunes store to be downloaded in seconds, every movie ever made till date to be downloaded under 5 minutes, over 1 billion simultaneous video calls (total population of India or China), 1Gbps internet connection for everyone in San Francisco, ability to deal with all the image data Google Earth stores about our planet in just under 2 seconds, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in just over ONE second.

 

Cisco-CRS-3-Carrier-Routing-System

 

AT&T which presently deals with 19petabytes of traffic on an average business day is field testing this new router with 100 Gig interfaces between New Orleans and Miami.

 

Lets wait and see if Google plans to use these new routers for its recently announced 1Gbps internet connections to 500,000 households in the US on local fiber networks.

 

Friday, March 12, 2010

Black Logon Screen with Windows Logo

Today my backup administrator came to me saying that he was getting a black logon screen in one of the storage server running Windows 2003. He said C drive was full and so he disabled Windows Search and moved its database to D drive from all users folder in C drive.

 

When I tried to login, below was how logon screen of mstsc (Remote Desktop) looked like

 

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I was able to login with the help of TAB key and everything was working perfect. Found that Windows Search database was still holding GBs of space in C Drive and drive was full. Uninstalled Windows Search, restarted server thinking this could solve the issue. But it didn’t.

Friday, March 05, 2010

SQL Server 2008 Express Advanced Services with SP1 on Windows 2008 R2

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services is a free download and is sufficient for many small and medium sized deployments with database size requirements not more than 4 GB.

 

If you ever tried to install MS SQL 2008 Express with Advanced Services on Windows 2008 R2 machine you would be greeted with Program Compatibility Assistant as below.

 

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If you still click on Run Program you will get an Setup failure dialogue

 

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This is because Windows 2008 R2 supports MS SQL Server 2008 integrated with Service Pack 1. But SQL 2008 Express with Advanced Services with SP1 is not available for download from MS.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Opera 10.5 Released

Opera "Fastest browser on Earth" has been my favorite browser for years from days when I had 56 kbps dialup connection.

 

Today Opera 10.5 has been released with a new JavaScript engine called Carakan improving browsing speed, Windows 7 taskbar integration and HTML5 video support. Startup time has also decreased significantly.

 

Menu bar has been replaced by Opera "O" button on the left top corner increasing browsing space. A Recycle bin has been placed on top right corner which holds all closed tabs to reopen.

 

Click here to download Opera 10.5 and check yourself.

 

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