Earlier this year, Intel was criticized for allegedly keeping the USB 3.0 spec to itself in a bid to lock customers into its chipsets. Such a move had many worried of a forking of the spec, with Nvidia, AMD, VIA and others threatening to co-develop a more open USB 3.0. 
Intel, of course, denied those claims and today helped dissipate concerns over potential multiple versions of the standard by making a royalty-free draft specification available to its competitors. The Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification for the USB 3.0 architecture (also known as SuperSpeed USB) will allow chipset makers to develop hardware that can communicate with USB 3.0 system software in a standardized way.
Support for the new specification appears to cover all the major players, including AMD, Dell, Microsoft, NEC and Nvidia. This is very important to stimulate adoption by consumers and should mean product development using USB 3.0 will soon be underway. The new standard will offer ten times the bandwidth of its predecessor, USB 2.0, supporting data-transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps.
If you use your notebook computer as your main computer and if you have a spare monitor, then you can put your monitor to good use by making it your Laptop’s secondary monitor. It doesn’t really matter if the second monitor is a CRT or TFT, both work fine. First, let’s see why you would want to add a secondary monitor to your laptop. Here are a few reasons:
.It instantly doubles your desktop space with buying a larger monitor.
.You can work with two maximised windows at the same time.
.If you are working on a tool like Photoshop, which has lots of toolbars and panels, you could move the tools to the second monitor and have a large work area on your main monitor.
.If you need to compare two documents, you can open each of the documents in a different monitor.
.When browsing your picture library, you can view the thumbnails on one monitor, and use the second monitor to view the pictures full screen.
.If you need to stay on top of your e-mail while working, you can keep your inbox open on one monitor and work on the other.
These are just a few suggestion but actually how you use the dual monitors is only limited by your imagination. Now lets see how to set up the secondary monitor. Make sure that both your Laptop and the monitor are switched off. Connect the monitor to your Laptop by connecting it to the VGA or DVI connector, typically found on the rear of your laptop computer. Now switch on your laptop and the monitor. You will notice that initially, only one of the two monitors is activated. You can usually switch between the monitors by pressing the hotkeys in your laptop. Normally, it is a combination of the Fn key with another key with an image of a monitor on it (normally found on one of the function keys). To bring on the display on both the monitors you’ll need to adjust your display settings by following these steps:
1.Right-Click on an empty area on your desktop. On the context menu that pops-up click on Properties and on the resulting ‘Display Properties‘ window, go to the Settings tab.
2.Click the monitor icon labeled 2, and then select the Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor checkbox.
3.If necessary, drag the monitor icons so that they are arranged in the same way as the monitors on your desk. Clicking on the Identify button will help you know which monitor is 1 and which monitor is 2.
4.If need be, change the resolution of your secondary monitor to the most appropriate settings. You change the resolution of both the monitors independently.
5.Click Apply. Windows XP will activate your new monitor.
6.Finaly, click OK.
Once your monitor is set up, you can use your mouse to grab the title bar of a window and drag it to your new display. Make sure that the window your are trying to drag is not maximised, in which case you will not be able to drag it. To be able to drag it, first double-click on the title bar and then drag it. It may take you a while to get used to working on dual monitors, but once you do, it will forever change the way you work with your computer. Be creative and experiment with the sizing of application windows and what information you can keep in constant view while doing multiple tasks.
Cuil, a brand new search engine, launched recently, is pitched as the world’s latest, largest and fastest search engine. At the time of launch itself, Cuil claims to have 120 billion pages or three times the volume of Google Index.
Cuil has been founded by the husband-wife duo of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. Originally called Cuill (Irish for knowledge), pronounced as cool, has now been named Cuil. Summary of Cuil’s features as claimed by Cuil:
• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories Cuil does have some interesting feature to offer. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed”, “cocker spaniel” and so on. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog”. Similarly by clicking on New York, one would get tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees and so on. Cuil works to understand how words are related to get more relevant results and it tries to categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.
Will Cuil overtake Google? Though Cuil has the potential to compete with Google, in it’s present form, it lacks certain important features that we have become used to in Google, like the advanced search for one. In Google, you can create queries to search by file types, restrict your search to a particular website and stuff like that. Cuil lacks any kind of advance search at present. But, Cuil will probably come up with similar or even better features in the future. Anyway, you can expect some good competition in the coming days. Remember, it took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.
Intel has announced that its latest range of desktop processors will officially be called, Intel Core processors.This new Intel processors will be based on company’s upcoming microarchitecture formerly codenamed “Nehalem”.
The first products by Intel in this new family of processors, which also includes an “Extreme Edition” version, will carry an “i7” identifier and will be formally branded as “Intel Core i7 processor.” This is the first of many new identifiers to come as different products launch over the next year.
Intel claims that products based on the new microarchitecture will deliver high performance and energy efficiency. Besides, they also feature Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, which is also known as simultaneous multi-threading, and is capable of handling eight software “threads” on four processor cores.
The products based on the Nehalem are expected to be in the production by the end of 2008.
The trend of social networking that started up in North America is catching up across the globe significantly. As per a comScore Inc. data, the social networking sites like Facebook.com, Hi5 are gaining increasing user base from the Asia-Pacific, Middle East –Africa and other regions.
According to comScore, that measured the popularity of the sites in the digital world, North American user base has shown a growth of about just 9 percent, while the maximum increase comes from the Middle East-Africa region showing 66 percent growth of users using social networking sites. comScore also shows a 35 percent and 33 percent of growth in the consumer base in the Europe and Latin America regions respectively.
One more vital statistics that comScore has provided is that Facebook rules the world. Becoming the top global social networking site, Facebook is enjoying a good 38 percent more user base from North American region that totals up the visitor base to 49 million from the same region.
Next in line of popularity is MySpace.com followed by Hi5. Hi5 is shows a doubled audience base totaling to more than 56 million and sites like Friendster, Orkut and Bebo.com show an increase in the audience by 50 percent, 41 percent and 32 percent respectively, from all over the globe.
Many a times you want to delete a file but you get an error message ‘The file cannot be deleted as it is in use by another person or process’.We are sure that the particular file is not in use at all.Repeatedly trying to delete the files yields same result.
Lot of people seem to have faced this issue.Anyway here is the solution .Just download a small freeware called Unlocker and install it.Now, right click on the problematic file from the right click context menu ,click on ‘Unlocker‘. In the resulting window select the file name and click on ‘Unlock‘. Your file is now freed. Now you should be able to delete the file without any problem.
Also there is option to delete,move or rename the problematic file.Remember the files once deleted do not move to recycle bin and cannot be recovered without the help of special software.
Download it Here:
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/unlocker1.8.7.exe
