New Autoplay Autorun options in Windows 7

Whenever an external device is plugged in Windows it showed an Autorun options for choosing what happens when you insert it.
It can be configured at Control Panel > Autoplay

 In order to help prevent malware from spreading using the Autorun mechanism, the Windows 7 engineering team made two important changes to the product:
Windows 7: Tips & Tricks
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1. AutoPlay will no longer support the Autorun functionality for non-optical removable media. In other words, AutoPlay will still work for CD/DVDs but it will no longer work for USB drives.

 

 Before the change (left) after the change (right)
2. A dialog change was done to clarify that the program being executed is running from external media.

Before the change (left) after the change (right)
Some smart USB flash drives can pose as a CD/DVD drive instead of standard ones. In this specific scenario, the operating system will treat the USB drive as if it is a CD/DVD because the type of the device is determined at the hardware level.

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Find out How Healthy Your Battery is on Your Laptop

Windows 7 has a feature through which we can find out exactly how much battery you are actually getting from your Laptop battery, i.e. its efficiency, maximum charge potential.

It‟s a well-known fact that as the age of lithium battery increases its charging capacity decreases and it won‟t charge to its full potential as when it‟s new. We can find out exactly how much the battery of laptop is giving now. We can use the powercfg -energy to find out how health your battery is.

1. Open elevated command prompt by typing "cmd" in your start menu & opening it with administrator privileges.

2. Type “powercfg –energy” into the command prompt & press Enter.

3. The command enables tracing for 60 seconds & would collect all the data after observing the system behavior.

4. After analysis it would generate a report.

5. The energy report is generated in HTML format in the directory shown in the command prompt.

Cmd Prompt Address\energy-report.html by default.

6. In the HTML file, scroll to the end till you get information like this:

This shows the battery ID, Manufacturer name, Chemistry, Design capacity and most importantly the last full charge.

So as above screenshot my Dell Studio 15 battery has design capacity of 5200 and now it‟s giving max full charge of 3565 that counts its efficiency to around 70% it has degraded around 30% in 6 months.

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Customize Windows 7 Power Button Action

The “Shut Down” button in Windows 7 can be customized with another action, if you use shut down action very rarely, but you more often restart it or put it on hibernate.

To change the action of shutdown button, Right click the Start Button, go to Properties and choose the „Power Boot Action” to do whatever you want, from the given options. It will give you a drop down list amongst following option to select from.

• Switch user
• Log off
• Lock
• Restart
• Sleep
• Hibernate
• Shutdown

Now the button at Start Menu would change and perform the action as selected.

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Free E-Reader Blio Announces September 28th Launch Date

The battle of the e-readers is about to get a new contestant. K-NFB just announced that their anticipated Blio e-reading program will launch on September 28th for Windows. Android and iOS systems (iPhone, iPad, etc) will follow soon thereafter. Blio has several key selling points. Downloading the reader itself is free, and K-NFB has promised that there will be a million free titles available at the time of launch. Blio is a full color reader and can fully preserve a book’s layout and format, allowing you to read it the same way it was printed or to restructure it for easier access on mobile devices. The e-reader supports note-taking, embedded multimedia, and allows you to freely move your titles from one device to another via a virtual library. It will feature text to speech technology from Nuance, the makers of the Dragon Dictation App we loved. Ray Kurzweil, founder of K-NFB, is wagering that Blio’s advantages will propel it into a fiercely competitive market that is already packed with e-readers.

As we’ve seen in our previous reviews of the technology (here and here), Blio certainly has enough bells and whistles to make it a success. Full color pages that turn in 3D and textbooks with embedded videos are both pretty impressive. However, in the battle of digital reading Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks, and the Sony Reader have all been successful and are all (generally) based on their own hardware. Blio doesn’t have a dedicated hardware platform, and it’s unclear whether that will ultimately help or hinder it.

K-NFB has worked hard to secure support on the publishing side of their enterprise. They are partnered with Baker & Taylor, the world’s largest book distributor, and have secured more than 100 publishers to add titles to their library. Publishers include all the biggest names: Hachette, Harper Collins, Penguin, MacMillan, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Yet the same names regularly make their titles available through the other e-readers as well. It will be interesting to see if publishers prefer the Blio platform because it can preserve their original formatting. No word yet on pricing agreements, which would be the other, and larger, consideration for securing publisher support.

Singularity Hub could be seen as biased towards Ray Kurzweil and his work, so I’m trying hard to come up with some fair and balanced criticisms for Blio. Certainly its late arrival to the e-reader race could be a negative, as could its lack of dedicated hardware. Textbooks won’t be available at first, and there is already strong competition there too, as we’ve recently seen.

But all of these are business considerations. When it comes to the platform itself I’m mostly positive. Blio is free, there will be a large library of free titles (Baker & Taylor have promised another 10,000 sometime after launch), and you can move your titles from device to device without paying. To me that means investing in the new reader when it comes out will be very low-risk. I still have questions about loading speeds, pricing & availability for pay-to-read titles, and usability. There’s no guarantee that Blio will be the next big e-reader…but I am very likely to try it out, especially once they make it available for iPhones.

[image credits: K-NFB]

[source: Blio Press Release via BusinessWire, Blio Twitter Feed]

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Wortmann announces Windows 7-powered 10-inch tablet PC

Wortmann is jumping onto the tablet train too and will later this month be releasing the Terra Pad 1050, a 850 grams tablet PC based on Intel's Pine Trail platform which runs Windows 7 Home Premium.

The mobile device has a 10.1-inch (1024 x 600) multi-touch screen, a 1.66 GHz Atom N455 processor, GMA 3150 integrated graphics, 2GB of RAM, a 32GB solid state drive, a webcam, WiFi (3G is optional), and two USB ports.

The Terra Pad 1050 has a base price tag of €529 and will be backed by a two-year warranty.

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