Windows 7 introduced a large number of productivity improvements for the taskbar. Taskbar is the horizontal area, typically at the button of the screen in Windows 7 (location is configurable, so sometime you can see taskbar on the side or even on top of the screen). Task bar is the home of the Windows Start button, it also shows the application(s) you are running and shows the status icons of the key processes of operating system. In this article we are going to find out the key improvements Microsoft had introduced in Windows 7 and how are they going to help you out work faster and more effectively.

All computer users would like to become as productive as possible in their use of technology. This series of articles covers new features of modern platforms and describes how you can become more efficient in using it. The first article in the series is about Windows 7 and how you can become more effective managing your files.

There is an extremely helpful feature that was introduced in Windows 7 by Microsoft:  the Preview Pane helps you quickly preview different type of documents in Windows Explorer. It will help to save you time when browsing and previewing files of the various types. To initiate this feature open up Windows Explorer and navigate to any folder of your choice, where different documents are located. Once inside the folder the preview can be initiated by the simple keyboard shortcut ALT+P. Preview supports a large number of file extensions for preview – a much bigger list than previous versions of Windows.

Another way to get to the preview mode is to use the menu in Windows Explorer and enable it via Organize->Layout->Preview pane. But for faster access, just hit ALT+P on the keyboard to show or hide the pane.

I just got an email from eBay that Star Wars is being released on Blu-Ray next week. I was certainly excited. I’ve seen it in HD on TV and it looked pretty cool. It’s actually sort of funny watching it in HD because you can tell how fake everything is.

Anyway, eBay has the Complete Collection for $89.99. I went to Amazon and found it for $79.99. That’s a good price for 6 blu-ray discs.

Then I came across all the negative reviews for the collection. 2 out of 5 stars. Wow. I usually don’t touch something that low on Amazon. I was surprised.

I like Star Wars. They’re great movies. But I’m not an extreme fanatic so I wasn’t up to snuff on some of the changes Lucas Film has made to these movies. Some of these changes were on the DVDs they released in 2004 so you can see how behind I am… but maybe you are to.

Apparently the studio has added some new special effects and even some extra scenes. This has made certain Star War aficionados very, very angry to say the least. Here a couple quotes from 1 star reviews I read:

“Seriously a sad day for Star Wars fans the world over!!! I always believed in the phrase, ‘don’t fix what ain’t broken’”

“this release not only fails utterly to preserve a major artifact of our cinematic heritage, it goes further in that its producer has made it clear that he will never allow that seminal work to be accurately preserved”

Me personally, not a big deal. I think I’d still pick up the full set. I wouldn’t remember enough to tell if a new scene was added… I don’t think… I don’t know… well, I guess I’d have to watch it to be sure.

What do you think? How do you feel about this? Did you blow a gasket when you learned what crazy George Lucas did to this classic series? Or will you pick up the blu-ray set anyway?

Tell us below…

So yesterday Steve Jobs stepped down from his position of CEO of Apple.

According to a press release published on the Apple website, his letter to the board of directors and the Apple community was short and sweet.

Essentially he said that if there were ever a day he didn’t think he could fulfill his duties as CEO, he would let them know. And he did.

Jobs will serve as chairman of the board at Apple, and although he won’t be CEO, you can bet he’ll still have his hand in product strategy and design.

Tim Cook, former COO of Apple, is now the new CEO.

What do you think? Does this change anything for Apple?

We had a visitor to our youtube channel send us a message that they installed a hard drive alongside the drive that is already in the machine and now it will not boot up.  Instead it gives the error “BOOTMGR missing”.

This is a pretty common error and is relatively simple to fix but it can be pretty confusing the first time you see it.  In your computer’s bios it keeps a boot device order.  Most of you will know the boot order from needing to set it to boot from cd to use your diagnostic cd or load a new Operating System.  However some computers also keep another order that is called “hard drive boot priority” and it decides which storage device boots first when you are booting from a hard drive.

If you hooked up a hard drive to “device 2″ on your motherboard when you first installed it and come along and plug in a drive to a higher port (0 or 1) the bios with automatically default to booting from the newly installed drive.  Since this drive is meant for data storage and has no OS on it you get a BOOTMGR or boot manager missing error.  Going into the bios and setting your hard drive priority to the correct drive should correct this issue.  If you have multiple drives that are the same model (they will show up as the same thing) then just try them in a few different configurations until you find one that works.