February 2007
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| Microsoft Office 2007 |
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Microsoft Office 2007 was released to business customers in November 2006 and will be available to retail customers sometime in early 2007. It has a number of new features, the most notable of which is the entirely new graphical user interface called the Ribbon, replacing the menus and toolbars that have been the cornerstone of Office since its inception. You may find yourself scrambling at first to find the new locations of familiar options but Microsoft is providing extensive online help. In addition, it supports a useful new feature called “Live Preview.” This allows you to select a portion or your entire document, hovering your mouse over a formatting option (a new font, for example), and you can see how the appearance of your document changes. If you like the new look, you can proceed with the changes but you can also cancel the change. This allows you to experiment with style changes a lot easier and faster.
Below you can see the Ribbon. |
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Furthermore, Office will also use a new file format, OpenXML as the default file format. It is based on XML and uses the ZIP file container. According to Microsoft, this file format, which is compressed, will be up to 75% smaller than the current Microsoft Office file formats. However, you still will have the option of saving your documents in the old format in case there is the worry of incompatibility with other users. Nevertheless, there will be converters for those users who have the previous versions of Office and are sent files in the new format. If you are interested in checking out the brand new Microsoft Office 2007, you can download a free 60 day trial from their website, Free Office 2007 Trial - you can try out four versions of 2007.
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Windows Vista – Six New Fonts Available |
 Microsoft is well known for their Office products, but less publicized is their work in typography. Microsoft first introduced Verdana in 1996 as an alternative to Arial, which is difficult to read on computer screens due to its poor spacing and narrow letter forms. Ten years later, Microsoft is releasing six new fonts designed specifically for readability on computer screens. These fonts will come standard with Windows Vista, but for early adopters, the fonts are bundled with a compatibility pack for Office 2007. The new fonts are not available on MacOS or Linux platforms.
This compatibility pack will allow businesses using previous versions of Office to read Office 2007 documents.
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Windows Vista - Important Info for QuickBooks Users |
 Microsoft is launching its newest operating system, Windows Vista, very shortly. This OS however, will affect QuickBooks users. QuickBooks 2006 and earlier versions were developed and released before the introduction of Windows Vista. Thus, these versions may be unfavorably affected when used on a PC that runs Microsoft’s latest operating system. For those who wish to upgrade to the latest operating system, it is highly recommended that you purchase QuickBooks 2007 as this version is the only software built to run on Microsoft Vista. However, no action will be required for those of you who choose to stay with XP; you can still use your existing QuickBooks product.
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AIM Chat Logs |
 Recently, AOL instant messenger came out with the latest feature of being able to log your conversations with all your “buddies.” You must have AIM version 6.0 in order to take advantage of this feature. Simply go to Edit, Settings and Click on the IM Logging tab and enable the two check boxes. Once this is done, you will be able to keep track of all your conversations with anyone you chat with online. This can be a great element for saving important conversations that you may need to refer back to in the future. In order to show the logs of everyone you have chatted with, click anywhere on your buddy list, then scroll down towards the bottom pane of the buddy list, click Actions and Show logs. A new window will come up with all the people you have chatted with and you will be able to click on any of the names and get a report of all conversations held since acquiring AIM version 6.0. It is a useful tool for those people who use AIM frequently and constantly need to refer back to previous sessions. However, the logging can also be dangerous because if someone has access to your PC, they can violate a person’s privacy by checking their logs. If you tend to have sensitive information in your conversations, it is good to disable the log feature or simply delete them manually every so often. AIM logs can be very useful, but can be dangerous if you have an easily accessible PC with susceptible data.
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SanDisk Corporation Announces a New Solid State Disk (SSD) |
 SANDisk Corporation announced that they are going to bring a new 32GB Solid state disk to the industry very soon and it’s going to replace most of the legacy mechanical hard disks.
As a technology, Solid State Drives uses non-volatile memory such as flash or volatile memory such as SDRAM, to store data and most importantly it doesn’t have any spinning platters or mechanical heads found in the conventional hard disk drives. Solid state disks have several advantages over the conventional IDE and SATA disks, such as faster read time, faster boot time, lower power consumption, no noise, better reliability. Also, SSD offers field-proven durability to keep mobile PCs working in the toughest of conditions and improves the overall user experience.
SanDisk Corporation says that the SSD is a practical and economically attractive to existing technologies in a wider range of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users. It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 USD.
With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action the way that conventional hard disk drives do and the development team claims that their SSD will deliver two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF). According to the company, the SSD achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB) per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer. This is more than 100 times faster than most standard hard disk drives in the industry. These characteristics make it possible for SSD to deliver higher performance when compared with IDE and SATA hard disk drives.
People could expect a laptop or PC equipped with the new SanDisk SSD to boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in average of 35 seconds. It can also achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drive.
Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its extremely low power consumption rate compared to the standard mechanical hard disk drives. : 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 watts. This is particularly important to extend the battery life for the benefit of enterprise mobile users. The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk Corporation Solid State Drive (SSD) is now available for original equipment manufacturers.
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