Transfer data files to a new PC

Moving all of your old files and templates from one PC to another—not to mention duplicating all of the settings and preferences that you spent hours perfecting in your old copy of Windows—has been a royal pain for years.
Microsoft provides a better solution to this problem with its Easy Transfer utility in Vista. The program accepts files and preferences from Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines, as well as machines running Vista.
You can select just data files to transfer to the new PC or transfer entire clumps of e-mail messages and contacts, Internet settings, and complete user accounts as well (see Figure). No information is deleted from the old PC, so you have plenty of time to confirm that the data has been transferred correctly before erasing anything on your obsolete system.
The transfer requires that you install an Easy Transfer program from Vista to the older computer. Also, both the new system and the old one must be capable of exchanging data through one of the following methods:

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  A local area network

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  A USB Flash drive or external hard drive

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  Recordable CDs or DVDs

Microsoft is also promoting the use of a USB Easy Transfer Cable. This procedure, like the other methods just listed, also involves installing to the old computer the Easy Transfer program, which can be found on a CD that’s included with the cable. You then plug the provided cable into both machines and start the transfer from the new machine.

Encrypt sensitive data folders and entire drives

Various third-party solutions have long been available to encrypt sensitive data folders and entire hard drives. With Vista, Microsoft now enters this market with BitLocker Drive Encryption.
BitLocker has some advantages over competing encryption products because, integrated as it is into Windows, it can check the integrity of a computer system before the Windows user interface is ever loaded. BitLocker can tell when a hard drive has been moved to a different computer—as would be the case if a drive had been stolen—and can defend against brute-force attacks.
BitLocker also integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory domain service scheme. The remote storage of digital keys that can unlock or restore data if a user forgets a password is a difficult and labor-intensive chore for IT administratrors. BitLocker handles this by using Active Directory to escrow the keys securely, while still being able to help an authorized (but forgetful) user access crucial data that’s stored in a password-protected drive.
BitLocker is available only in Vista Ultimate Edition, which can be purchased separately or upgraded to from the Home and Business Editions, and Vista Enterprise Edition, which can be purchased separately or upgraded to from the Business Edition.

Computing at the rate of 1$ per hour

Why shouldn't computer power be like water or electricity—a utility you turn on and off and purchase only as needed? That is the concept behind the newly launched Sun Grid. Companies and universities can run processor-intensive projects over the Internet on Sun's grid of 10,000 computer nodes and pay only for the processor time and storage space they use. Most projects require multiple CPUs (mostly 2.4GHz Opterons) working cooperatively, but you are charged at a rate of $1 per CPU hour in the same way the electric company charges kilowatt hours. Many experts believe that in the next decade home computing, too, will follow this model and move from standalone PCs to low-power workstations that tap into a grid of on-demand CPU power and storage.

Visual display of Information in Google

If you're the type that appreciates visual displays of information, you're bound to like the TouchGraph Google Browser. This Java applet allows you to start with pages that are similar to one URL, and then expand outward to pages that are similar to the first set of pages, on and on, until you have a giant map of nodes (a.k.a. URLs) on your screen.



Start your journey by entering a URL on the TouchGraph home page and clicking the Graph It link. Your browser will launch the TouchGraph Java applet, covering your window with a large mass of linked nodes, as shown in fig above.
Hold your mouse over one of the items in the group of pages. A little box labeled info pops up. Click on that, and a box of information about that particular node appears, as shown in fig below.



The box of information contains title, snippet, and URLpretty much everything you'd get from a regular search result. Click on the URL in the box to open that URL's web page itself in another browser window.
TouchGraph does two rather useful things. First, it allows you to see at a glance the similarity relationship between large groups of URLs. You can't do this with several flat results to similar URL queries. Second, if you do some exploring, you can sometimes get a list of companies in the same industry or area. This comes in handy when you're researching a particular industry or topic.
For a look at all the ways you can customize the TouchGraph Google browser, be sure to check out the Full Instructions page at http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGB_FullInstructions.html.

Fit the full URL on Printouts

Sometimes, you want to print out some Web page you’ve found, so you can recommend the site to a friend later. But if the Web address (URL) is a long one, it’s likely to be truncated in the footer of the printed page. That’s because IE, by default, uses a large font and cuts off any of the URL that doesn’t fit on the same line as today’s date.

You can make URLs print in full almost every time by clicking Tools➪Internet Options. On the General tab, click the Fonts button and then select a Web page font that’s more compact than Times New Roman, such as Vista’s Cordia New. (This font, which is similar to Arial, also becomes the default font for Web pages that don’t specify a font.)

If that doesn’t print the entire Web address, give URLs a separate line. To do so, pull down the Printer toolbar and select Page Setup. Enter &b&u in the Header field to devote the full header to the URL (aligned to the right). Then enter &d&b&p in the Footer field to print the date on the left and the page number on the right at the bottom of each page. (This procedure eliminates printing each page’s title, represented by &w. A Web page’s title takes up space that’s best devoted to printing the full URL, in our view.)

Internet Explorer 7.0

IE 7 won’t win any awards for innovation, having not quite caught up with features its free competitor, the Mozilla Firefox browser, came out with two years ago.

Besides the tabbed windows, IE 7 has (thankfully) copied several other features from Firefox, Opera, and other non-Microsoft browsers. These include the ability to add Internet search engines of your choice to IE’s search bar and a default Shink to Fit setting so Web pages will fit your printer’s paper size.

However, IE 7 has also gained a few new features that other browsers may themselves need to catch up with.

Pressing Ctrl+Q or clicking the Quick Tabs tab on the IE 7 toolbar tiles all of your open tabs into a convenient thumbnail view (see Fig). When you have a lot of tabs open, Quick Tabs can save you a substantial amount of time that you might otherwise spend clicking at random to get back to a particular site.

Page Zoom is another handy feature. When you’re viewing a web page that’s just too small or too large, hold down the Ctrl key and press + to make the page 10 percent larger, – to make it 10 percent smaller, or 0 (zero) to return the page to its original size.

These special keystroke sequences work exactly the same way as they do in Firefox, except that IE 7 scales both images and text. The keystrokes work whether you use the symbol keys on the main keyboard or the numeric keypad.

There’s also a small Page Zoom button on the extreme right of IE 7’s status bar. You can click it once to scale a Web page to 125 percent, click it again for 150 percent, and click it a third time to go back to 100 percent.