My Top 5 IE8 Accelerators

If you haven’t heard of them ‘Accelerators’ are a new feature in IE8 which are designed to make your browsing tasks quicker and easier.

Accelerators allow you to perform an action by simply highlighting text on a webpage or just right clicking on a page and selecting your chosen accelerator.

Below are my top 5 IE8 accelerators:

1. ‘Google Reader Accelerator’

Simply right click on the RSS feed page and click the accelerator to subscribe to it with your Google reader account.

http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/bookmarks/Subscribe_with_Google_Reader/

2. ‘WordPress Accelerator’

Select any text on a webpage and select the accelerator to start a new blog post containing the selected text.

http://www.wordpress.com

(Login to your dashboard and you should find it available for download)

3. ‘Twitter Accelerator’

Select some text on a page and select the twitter accelerator to send the text as a tweet from your twitter account.

http://openbrolly.com/2008/08/31/ie8-accelerator-for-twitter/

4. ‘Google Maps Accelerator’

Select any bit of text (Postcode, Address etc) and select the google maps accelerator to open the location in google maps.

http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/Default.aspx

5. ‘Google Mail Accelerator’

Select some text and select the google mail accelerator to create a new email message containing the selected text.

 

http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/Default.aspx

Hope you find these accelerators helpful and as useful as I do!

Windows 7 RC

Just thought id write a quick post about the recently released Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100). I am now running this as my main OS and must say I am pretty impressed. Microsoft seem to have channeled all their effort into fixing Vista’s flaws and providing a stable base similar to Windows XP.

Boot up/load time of the OS is incredible, vista would take a good few minutes to load all my applications and be booted up ready for use. In contrast Windows 7 can go from login screen to fully loaded in under 30 seconds. I have been using 7 for about a week now and have not managed to make it crash or blue screen once so it seems strong in the reliability stakes.

The interface of 7 is very similar to vista except for the modification of the task bar to display the icons of the currently loaded apps rather than the icon and the text. This means you can fit a lot more onto the taskbar, its a bit odd at first but fine when you get used to it.

A new addition in windows 7 is ‘Virtual XP Mode’, this is a downloadable add-on from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/ that is basically a glorified virtual machine. It allows you to run any application inside of a windows XP environment, great for those who don’t want to move to 7 because of compatibility issues.

All in all I am very impressed and certainly won’t be going back to vista! The RC is currently available for download from the MS site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Once registered you can also download a serial key. The RC build expires in 2010, plenty of time as 7 should be released by then.

Windows 7 Public Beta Released

For those of you that don’t already know, Microsoft have just released their public beta of their latest OS – Windows 7.

They claim to have ironed out all the problems that existed in Vista’s early days and I’ve been told by people who have tested it so far that they can’t make it crash, sounds promising! I myself am going to download an put in a VM so I’ll post what I think up here.

I will post the official download links up here later as I am currently blogging from the airport before flying to Hungary which I’m told is freezing cold!

IE 6.0 crashing when opening documents from SharePoint/WSS

I’ve been experiencing random crashes in IE whenever I try and open a document from a WSS/SharePoint site for a while and couldn’t find a fix. Well today I found this hotfix from MS:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

I installed it on my machine, rebooted and hey presto – the problem has disappeared!

They state that the problem occurs because:

“In this scenario, the older version of the Name.dll file becomes the registered version. When the Owssupp.dll file is used, it tries to use functionality that is not available. This condition causes Internet Explorer to crash (stop responding).”

I thought I would post my find up here as I’m sure some people are probably suffering the same problem!