זה רק אצלי?

[Jan22]

עוד

Q. Will Aero make me more productive, or is it just fluff? A. Some aspects are just fluff; some will make you more productive. Translucent windows and nice animations, for example, may not directly increase your productivity; but they're easier on your eyes, so you might be able to spend more time at the keyboard without tiring. Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D, which let you preview thumbnails of your open windows, and live Taskbar thumbnails should make it easier to find the window you're looking for. Q. How do I enable or disable Aero effects? A. Right-click your desktop, and select Personalize, Window Color and Appearance, Open classic appearance properties for more color options. In the Color scheme list, select any non-Aero scheme, such as Windows Vista Basic or Windows Vista Standard, and then click OK. Q. I heard that Windows Vista itself will sometimes decide to disable Aero. What's up with that? A. In general, Vista will disable Aero if it determines that it needs to improve performance, recover from a technical issue, or (in the case of laptops in power-saving mode) reduce demands on your battery. According to Microsoft, Java apps are the most common trigger for disabling Aero. Remotely viewing or sharing another machine's desktop can cause Vista to disable Aero, too, and Vista disables Aero when presenting a User Account Control (UAC) elevation prompt. Q. What did Microsoft do to the Start Menu this time? A. Microsoft has redone the Start Menu yet again, but this time around you might like the change. Gone is the annoying flyaway menu for the All Programs selection. With Vista, when you click All Programs, applications and folders appear directly above it for easier access. There's also a useful search box for quick searches. The Run link is gone too, unfortunately, but you can make it reappear. Q. How do I make Run appear, and how else can I customize the Start Menu? A. Right-click the Taskbar, choose Properties, and click the Start Menu tab. Click the Customize button and you'll be able to add the Run link--and change the Start Menu in many other ways as well. Q. Does the clock on the right side of the Taskbar have any new features? A. It may look like the Windows XP clock, but it's much better. In fact, you can put multiple clocks there, showing times from around the world. Click the clock and a much larger clock (along with a calendar) appears. Click Change date and time settings, and customize to your heart's content. Q. Is that thumbnail in the Taskbar actually playing video? A. Yes! Hover your mouse over any window minimized to the Taskbar, and a "live" thumbnail will pop up showing the exact contents of that window, including any live video. Q. What happened to Alt-Tab? A. Microsoft made it useful. It's now called Windows Flip, and it shows you thumbnails of all your windows as you flip through them, so you can quickly choose the exact window you want to open. Q. What's this 3D task-switching thing? A. Now you're talking about some serious eye candy. Windows Flip 3D (Windows-Tab) is Windows Flip with a membership in the Flying Walendas. It stacks your windows in three dimensions, and lets you scroll through them with your mouse or click one to select it. It adds up to sort of a poor man's Expose (from Mac OS X Tiger).​

 

[Jan22]

עוד

MULTIMEDIA Q. What's new in Windows Media Center? A. It has the same basic features as before, but it sports a redesigned menu system, mainly so you can control it from an Xbox 360 over your home network. Q. Has Windows Media Player changed? A. A new interface gives you additional ways to organize and browse your media collection. For example, you can access your music by an album cover view. Vista's search feature is integrated into Windows Media Player, so you can find media more easily, too. And Windows Media Player includes tie-ins to URGE, a for-pay music service that Microsoft launched with MTV. Q. Will Vista play HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs? A. Not without third-party software. Though Vista ships with the infrastructure necessary to support HD-DVD--drivers, file system, codecs, and other components--you'll need additional dedicated software to play an HD-DVD video, and the OS has no native support for Blu-ray Disc. Q. Because of Digital Rights Management for prerecorded high-definition media, will I need to buy a new monitor to play premium high-def content? A. You might, regardless of whether you're running Vista or Windows XP. For a PC to send next-generation video content to a display, the display must support HDCP--and while most HDTVs do support this copy-protection technology, many older monitors that support high-def resolutions do not. NETWORKING Q. Has setting up a network gotten any easier? A. Yes, much easier. A simple wizard walks you through the process--and it works. Troubleshooting is better, too. And the Network Center provides a quick overview of your network so you can see whether everything is working right. Q. Is connecting to hotspots and wireless networks easier in Vista than in XP? A. Yes, it's far superior to the XP method of connecting. You can see a lot of detail about a wireless network before you connect to it, and you can save network connections so that you automatically connect whenever you're within range. Q. How good is wireless network security under Vista? A. There's good news here as well. When you first connect to a wireless network, you tell Windows Vista whether it's a public or private one. (A public network, such as a hotspot, can be used by anyone, so it's inherently insecure. A private network, such as your home network or a corporate network, is more secure than a public one.) Based on your answer, Windows Vista applies a constellation of security settings to that network, and it reapplies those settings whenever you connect to it. Network discovery--which Vista uses to allow other devices to connect to your PC and to share its files and folders--is turned off in public networks (to increase your security) but turned on in private ones. Q. Are there any problems with mixing PCs that run older versions of Windows with ones that run Vista? A. Unfortunately, yes. Windows Vista uses a new protocol, Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD), for networking. LLTD speeds up the process of connecting to other devices, and it allows Vista to grab information about each device and display it in the Network Map. But earlier versions of Windows lack LLTD, so PCs running older versions of Windows may not show up on the Network Map at all, or they may appear sporadically, or they may show up only after a long delay. Microsoft says that it intends to release a patch for XP that should solve the problem; but as yet it has no similar plans for earlier versions of the OS.​