.::REALITYRECALL::.

Los Angeles will test a migration to Google with 30,000 employees

The new version of Windows seems to be a lot for stable than previous releases, however you never know when a malfunction might occur. Today we take a look at an option in Windows 7 that lets you create a System Repair disc in case you need to boot from it to recover your OS.

Create System Repair Disc

Type system repair disc into the search box in the Start menu.

The dialog box opens where you select the right drive and click Create disc. A CD will be fine as it only takes up 142MB of space.

Using the Disc

If you are having problems with your machine just pop in the recovery disc and boot from it and enter into Windows Setup [EMS Enabled].

After it boots up you can access recovery tools or restore the computer back to a system image (see our article on creating a system image in Windows 7).

Now you can choose from different recovery options to help you get your machine back up and running.

You never know when an Operating System disaster might occur, but having a System Recovery Disc to boot from should be part of your backup and recovery toolbox in case it does.

This is fantastic news if it turns out to be true (but this is normally a pretty reliable source). The website Marketsaw is reporting that Spider-Man 4 is going to only have ONE villain… and that villain is going to be The Lizard.

You might remember that a couple of days ago it was confirmed that Dylan Baker was indeed going to be back for Spider-Man 4 as Dr. Connors… but it was never mentioned if he would become The Lizard or not. Looks like he will!

I think this is good news… especially the one villain part. What do you think?

Phoenix Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes has agreed to sell the beleaguered club to the NHL.

This awesome infographic shows the internet costs and speeds around the world for the top 20 nations in the ITIF Broadband Rankings. Unsurprisingly, we don’t compare too well.

Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps. We, in comparison, average 4.8mbps and pay $3.33 per 1mbps, putting us at #15. Be sure to click the above image to see it in its full glory. [Zach Klein]

Windows 7 adds loads of great shortcuts for switching between apps, moving windows around your screen, moving them to another monitor altogether, and much more. Here’s a quick-reference master list of the best new Windows 7 shortcuts.

We’re nuts for keyboard shortcuts here at Lifehacker, and Windows 7 brings a handful of great new ones to add to your muscle memory. It’s also got a few handy mouse-based shortcuts you’d do well to add to your repertoire. So let’s get shortcuttin’.

Window Management Shortcuts

One of the best changes in Windows 7 is the ability to “snap” windows to the side of the screen, maximize them by dragging to the top of the screen, or even move them to another monitor with a shortcut key. Check out the video for a demonstration of how some of the keys work.

The full list of keyboard shortcuts includes:

• Win+Home: Clear all but the active window.
• Win+Space: All windows become transparent so you can see through to the desktop.
• Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window.
• Shift+Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window vertically.
• Win+Down arrow: Minimize the window/Restore the window if it’s maximized.
• Win+Left/Right arrows: Dock the window to each side of the monitor.
• Shift+Win+Left/Right arrows: Move the window to the monitor on the left or right.

You can also interact with windows by dragging them with the mouse:

• Drag window to the top: Maximize
• Drag window left/right: Dock the window to fill half of the screen.
• Shake window back/forth: Minimize everything but the current window.
• Double-Click Top Window Border (edge): Maximize window vertically.

Taskbar Shortcuts

In Windows 7, using the Windows key along with the numbers 1-9 will let you interact with the applications pinned to the taskbar in those positions – for example, the Windows key + 4 combination would launch Outlook in this example, or Win+Alt+4 can be used to get quick access to the Outlook Jump List from the keyboard.

You can use any of these shortcut combinations to launch the applications in their respective position on the taskbar, or more:

• Win+number (1-9): Starts the application pinned to the taskbar in that position, or switches to that program.
• Shift+Win+number (1-9): Starts a new instance of the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Ctrl+Win+number (1-9): Cycles through open windows for the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Alt+Win+number (1-9): Opens the Jump List for the application pinned to the taskbar.
• Win+T: Focus and scroll through items on the taskbar.
• Win+B: Focuses the System Tray icons

In addition, you can interact with the taskbar using your mouse and a modifier key:

• Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program or quickly open another instance of a program.
• Ctrl+Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program as an administrator.
• Shift+Right-click on a taskbar button: Show the window menu for the program (like XP does).
• Shift+Right-click on a grouped taskbar button: Show the window menu for the group.
• Ctrl+Click on a grouped taskbar button: Cycle through the windows of the group.

More Useful Hotkeys You Should Know

The new hotkey goodness didn't stop with the taskbar and moving windows around—one of the best new hotkeys in Windows 7 is the fact that you can create a new folder with a hotkey. Just open up any Windows Explorer window, hit the Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut key sequence, and you’ll be rewarded with a shiny “New Folder” ready for you to rename.

Here’s a few more interesting hotkeys for you:

• Ctrl+Shift+N: Creates a new folder in Windows Explorer.
• Alt+Up: Goes up a folder level in Windows Explorer.
• Alt+P: Toggles the preview pane in Windows Explorer.
• Shift+Right-Click on a file: Adds Copy as Path, which copies the path of a file to the clipboard.
• Shift+Right-Click on a file: Adds extra hidden items to the Send To menu.
• Shift+Right-Click on a folder: Adds Command Prompt Here, which lets you easily open a command prompt in that folder.
• Win+P: Adjust presentation settings for your display.
• Win+(+/-): Zoom in/out.
• Win+G: Cycle between the Windows Gadgets on your screen.

Windows 7 definitely makes it a lot easier to interact with your PC from your keyboard—so what are your favorite shortcuts, and how do they save you time? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek is quickly wearing out the keyboard on his new Windows 7 laptop. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Google Docs has officially thrown open their data doors, allowing users to back up all their documents to whatever formats they choose and compressed into a ZIP file. It’s serious peace of mind for those concerned about the cloud.

The feature seemed to arrive very recently without any official blog post or explanation, but it seems to be working for more than just a select few testers. The only catch to using it is selecting all your files, as the Google Operating System blog explains. I frequently "hide" (or basically archive) documents I'm not using frequently, so I only had to head to the "Hidden" view in the left-hand view selector—those with more complex filing schemes should try the "All Items" view, or a wildcard asterisk search to pin down what they want.

Once you’ve selected or searched for what you want to export, you’ll have to scroll all the way down until all the documents are exposed, then hit the checkmark box to select them all. Finally, right-click somewhere in your selected docs, choose “Export,” and tell Google how to export your word, spreadsheet, and PDF files.

While you’re securing your Docs data somewhere other than on Google’s servers, take a peek at other free tools to back up online accounts—you'll feel a bit less tethered to the whims of various server administrators and account security representatives.

Nigel Dawes tallied twice, and Calgary scoring leader Rene Bourque had three points as the Flames cruised to a 5-2 home win Saturday night over an Oilers team decimated by injuries and illness.

It might have been the only mistake by Casey Printers all day, but it was costly. The British Columbia Lions quarterback was intercepted in the end zone by Saskatchewan’s James Patrick, giving the Roughriders a 33-30 overtime win Saturday in Regina.

Hey, you — yeah you, the BlackBerry Storm owner over there. You listening? Good. That mythical software update we heard about just last week is obviously the real deal, and a screen grab from Verizon’s internal systems has shown up to prove it. We’re told that it should go live tomorrow (that’s October 25th for those in strange, potentially illegitimate time zones) at 6PM. On the whole, it’ll make your Storm act a lot more like the forthcoming Storm2, but specifically you can expect a “faster, more accurate and more natural text input experience, word completion, a virtual QWERTY keyboard in portrait view and enhanced sensitivity when editing, copying and pasting.” You’ll also get the ability to “enable Auto Correction as opposed to Word Completion in landscape view.” The full changelog should be coming soon, so hang tight! Oh, and cancel those plans for tomorrow night, okay?

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Update: Check out the full (purported) changelog after the break!

Continue reading BlackBerry Storm update landing tomorrow, bringing lots of good stuff (update: now with changelog!)

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

BlackBerry Storm update landing tomorrow, bringing lots of good stuff (update: now with changelog!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has today rolled out some design changes to the map and hybrid views in Google Maps. Google say that the changes,

“include numerous refinements to color, density, typography, and road styling worldwide. For example, in map view, local and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colours have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things“.

Here is a comparison of the old (left) and new hybrid view,

In this view you can see that more roads are clearly visible in the updated design.

Here is comparison of the old (left) and new map view,

In this new view place names are clearly more visible.

I also think that at the higher zoom levels far more interactive business icons are being displayed. Google doesn’t mention this in their announcement, so I can’t be sure of this. However check out Haight St, San Francisco below, this number of points of interest looks new to me.

Anyway TechCrunch are fans of the new design. They say that “it’s clear to see that the new look is much nice (sic). Gone is much of the clutter cause (sic) by darkened street outlines.“

Via: Google LatLong

_____________

Prime Minister Stephen Harper kicked off Friday’s news conference in St-Georges, Que., by saying he would like to see more than six National Hockey League teams in Canada.

Get ready to duck (again). The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, has now reached an operating temperature of 1.9K–colder than outer space itself, according to Ars Technica.

That means the LHC will soon be ready to begin crashing particles together, after a catastrophic failure and series of repairs over the past year took the accelerator out of commission.

The current prognosis is that the LHC will begin operations sometime in the next five weeks. It will accelerate particles at speeds very close to the speed of light. In effect, they’d run around the 16.7-mile length of the accelerator over 11,000 times per second, the report said. That necessitates the accelerator contain a vacuum that’s an order of magnitude less dense than the moon’s atmosphere. In other words, this is tough stuff, so let’s give those guys a break about that whole catastrophic failure thing. (Image credit: CERN)

The much anticipated release of Windows 7 is finally upon us. This Thursday, October 22, Microsoft's latest operating system arrives on the scene looking to win over skeptics disappointed with the much-hyped but often criticized Windows Vista. Whereas its predecessor got off to a rough start with plentiful compatibility issues and incessant "allow or deny" prompts annoying users, Windows 7 represents a major leap forward and has generally been regarded as a snappier and more polished operating system. We've been playing with it ever since the beta became available, and can honestly say that much of the hype is justified.

Read full story…

Motorola tonight released the full specifications and a photo gallery of the highly-awaited Droid phone on their public Web site, pre-empting the anticipated October 28 announcement of Verizon Wireless’s first Android smartphone.

According to the Motorola site, which was first noticed by the Boy Genius Report blog but then independently confirmed and loaded by PCMag, the Droid is a large touchscreen phone with a sliding keyboard. It’s 2.4 x 4.6 x .5 inches in size and weighs six ounces. That’s relatively heavy, but slim. Its color will be “licorice w/brown sugar accents.”

The phone has an unusually high-resolution, 3.7″ 480×854 touch screen; the iPhone’s touch screen is only 320×480 resolution.

The Droid’s OS is Android 2.0, as Verizon previously showed on their teaser Web site for the device. It is the first Android 2.0 phone.

The Droid has a 550 Mhz processor, according to the site, which didn’t describe the processor architecture. The architecture is important because most Android phones up until now have run on 528 Mhz ARM11 processors, which some users consider sluggish in some circumstances. The recently announced Samsung Moment upped the ante to an 800 Mhz ARM11. If the Droid runs a newer form of architecture, known as Cortex-A8, it could be faster with a lower clock speed.

More details and photos after the jump.

The Droid will come with a 16GB MicroSD card pre-installed, according to the site. It runs on Verizon Wireless’s CDMA EVDO Rev A network and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, but not GSM networks.

For multimedia, the phone will come with music and video players. It will capture 720×480 video at 24 frames per second – that’s unusually good – and will take 5-megapixel stills with image stabilization and dual-LED flash.

In terms of other software, the Droid supports Microsoft Exchange sync and comes with the QuickOffice Microsoft Office document viewer, Facebook, and lots of Google apps (including Google Search by Voice), but no IM program for non-Google protocols.

Motorola promises up to 270 hours of standby time and 6 hours, 25 minutes of talk time on the 1400 mAh battery. That’s quite good for a Verizon phone.

Verizon has made it clear that the Droid is their most anticipated launch of the year. They’ve been sending out an unusual amount of teaser information, culminating in a recent invitation to an October 28 press event.

Earlier this month, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said his company was making a major commitment to releasing many devices with the Google Android OS, including two smartphones coming this year. In wire service photos that day, he and Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed two phones, one of which was the Droid. The other looked a lot like Sprint’s HTC Hero phone, but with a Verizon logo.

The Motorola Droid Web site’s main page, at http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DROID-US-EN.vertical, was live at 8:30 PM ET on Thursday night but taken down by 9 PM. A tech specs page at http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DROID-US-EN.alt was still live at 9 PM.

Verizon’s official Droid site can be accessed at www.droiddoes.com.

Post by Sascha Segan

The Droid’s face is mostly a 3.7″, 480×854 capacitive TFT LCD touchscreen.

On the back of the Motorola Droid, there’s a 5-megapixel camera with flash.

Slid closed, the Motorola Droid is 2.4 x 4.6 x .5 inches in size.

The Motorola Droid is relatively slim for such a powerful smartphone.

Filed under: OS Updates, Utilities, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware

Microsoft offers tool to burn Windows 7 ISO – or put it on a USB flash drive originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By now, it’s just silly to analyze Windows 7. All you really need to know is that it’s better than Vista, and if you use a PC, it’s probably your next OS. So let’s give Win7 a 27-reviewer victory lap.

CNET
“Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still turn out a strong, useful operating system.”

PCWorld
“…the final shipping version I test-drove appears to be the worthy successor to Windows XP that Vista never was.”

NYTimes
“[Microsoft’s] three-year Windows Vista nightmare is over.”

IT Pro
“Windows 7…is competent and functional due to internal improvements and the user interface is attractive and good for productivity.”

bit-tech
“For want of a better way of describing it, Microsoft has essentially fixed Vista and the result is arguably Microsoft’s best operating system to date.”

Guardian
“Windows 7 is simply the best version of Windows you can get.”

Slate
“Indeed, the new Windows is not only the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. It is arguably the fastest, most intuitive, and most useful consumer desktop OS on the market today.”

Maximum PC
“…Windows 7 is unquestionably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has ever released, and is the true successor to Windows XP.”

Tech Radar
“No version of Windows is ever perfect, but Windows 7 really is the best release of Windows yet.”

PC Mag
“It’s far and away the best OS we’ve ever seen from Microsoft.”

Wall Street Journal
“I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.”

ElectricPig
“With Windows 7, Microsoft wants us to believe that it’s got its OS back on track and for the most part we feel they have.”

Engadget
“Where Vista felt like a sprawling mess, Windows 7 has patched up the holes and feels like a tight, unified mechanism.”

Telegraph
“Windows 7 is the operating system Vista should have been…”

Hexus
“This is the operating system that Windows Vista should have been.”

Digital Trends
“…Microsoft has returned for redemption with Windows 7, otherwise known as “what Vista should have been.”

AP
“Windows 7 [is] a slick, much improved operating system that should go a long way toward erasing the bad impression left by its previous effort, Vista.”

V3
“…Windows 7 is a worthy successor to Windows XP…”

Federal Computer Week
“There is nothing wrong with Windows 7 – and we’ve always thought Vista was a better operating system than its reputation suggested – so if a new system happens to come with it, then you’ll get a fine operating system.”

PC Pro UK
“We like Windows 7 a lot – so much so, that the disappointment that was Windows Vista has already become a distant memory…”

Technodorm
“If you have the money to spend, there is no reason why you shouldn’t upgrade.”

Laptop Mag
“If Vista left you somewhat disillusioned with Windows, we suggest you upgrade to Windows 7.”

Cult of Mac
“I need to go wash my eyes out with bleach.”

The Inquirer
“Windows 7 is as pretty as Apple stuff, just as easy to use, and does not treat you like a moron.”

Computer World
“…it’s finally time to upgrade.”

TechWorld
“Windows 7 feels like an anti-Vista…”

Gizmodo
"…if you're coming from Windows XP, Windows 7 will totally feel like a revelation from the glossy future. If you're coming from Vista, you'll definitely go "Hey, this is much better!" the first time you touch Aero Peek. If you're coming from a Mac, you'll—hahahahaha. But seriously, even the Mactards will have to tone down their nasal David Spadian snide, at least a little bit."