At the edge of tweaking
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Firefox 19 comes with a built-in PDF viewer. It looks like this:
Although I like this new feature, because it works fast and looks smooth, you might want to disable it for whatever reason (for example, if the full PDF is not rendered perfectly) . Read below to see how.
According to fresh rumors, Microsoft has switched to kernel version 6.3 in the upcoming update to Windows. Windows 8's successor's screenshot has been leaked to the public by the famous underground WZor team:
If you are a Windows 8 user, you must have observed that the new Task Manager has a Startup tab to manage applications loaded at startup. It includes an interesting "Startup impact" column:
I would like to explain to you what exactly the "startup impact" values mean and how they are calculated for every application.
With Windows 8, Microsoft has "re-imagined" the Language settings Control Panel. The most notable changes have been made to the way users switch input languages and to the Language Bar. Even some power users have been having issues with configuring language settings and have been asking me for help when they moved to Windows 8. So, today I will share several tips to make your life with configuring languages on Windows 8 easier.
Windows 8 has done radical changes to the application distribution model. There are two types of applications or "apps" in Windows 8 - Desktop apps are one type that we all have used for years, and Modern apps are the other, formerly known as Metro apps. Modern apps were created principally for touch screen devices, such as tablets and for simple uses. If you are not a tablet user and do not have a display with touch screen support, or if you are a power user, you may find Modern apps useless.
Even if you click "Uninstall" on the Start screen for the built-in apps, they are not completely removed from your system as they are "Staged" so that Windows can re-create the built-in apps for a new user account. So, they continue to take disk space unnecessarily on your PC, in the C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder.
You might be interested in knowing how to remove these bundled Metro apps from your user account and free up a significant amount of disk space. Read below to see how.
In Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced the DWM (Desktop Window Manager) which implements fancy animation effects, transparency and Aero skins for window frames. Ever since Vista, it allows you to slow down window animations by pressing the Shift key (the animation you see when any dialog or window appears on screen, or when minimizing, or closing a window). This is a hidden feature that has to be enabled with a registry tweak. Read the rest of this article to learn how to enable it.
An MSFN member 'BigMuscle' has implemented Aero Glass with transparency and blur for Windows 8. His tiny portable app Aero Glass for Win8 v0.2 hooks the DWM API in Windows 8 and creates real blur and transparency effects on window frames using Direct 2D and Direct 3D.
It is just AWESOME:
Ever since Microsoft introduced the theming engine in Windows XP, they don't allow visual styles (themes) which are not digitally signed by themselves to be used. Windows 8 is no different in that regard, so we need to patch certain system files to be able to use these themes. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can use third party themes:
Install the UxStyle software developed by Rafael Rivera. The main benefit of this app is that it keeps system files untouched on disk and works transparently in memory.
Just follow the instructions in the installation wizard.
If you have multiple user accounts in Windows 8 (e.g. one for yourself and another for your family member), you may notice a new annoyance in Windows 8 - it signs in the last user automatically who shut down/rebooted the PC. Most users would not like to be signed in automatically and would instead prefer seeing a list of users at the logon screen, from where they can choose which user account to login with. Today, we are going to share a way to prevent Windows 8 from automatically signing in the last user. Let's start.
In case you aren't aware of this, Windows 8 delays the startup for all desktop apps. Shortcuts located in your Start Menu's Startup folder as well as the items which run from various Registry locations will be launched after a delay of few seconds. This behavior was implemented by Microsoft probably because Windows 8 is a tablet-oriented OS (another example of how the Desktop takes a backseat in Windows 8). However, you can reduce this startup delay for desktop apps by editing the Registry. Read this post to learn how.
