If you’re annoyed over a duplicate or unnecessary boot option in your Windows XP boot menu, excise it with a handy guide from the How-To Geek. The guide covers removing and modifying entries in the boot.ini, whether they are phantoms from previous installs, recovery partitions, or other operating systems. The guide also covers a low risk way of disabling the boot menu all together to boot directly to Windows without the delay of the boot selection menu. How to Delete, Modify or Disable an Incorrect or Duplicate Entry on the XP Boot Menu
Author of the upcoming book The Power of Less Leo Babauta offers a companion ebook that’s free to download now. Thriving on Less—Simplifying in a Tough Economy tells you how to do just that. The 27-page PDF describes advice garnered from Babauta’s own journey from clutter, debt, and scarcity to a simpler, frugal lifestyle that focuses on the essentials and cuts away the extras. Like Babauta’s popular Zen Habits blog, this book offers calm, peaceful straight talk that makes the super-busy and overwhelmed think “I want to live like that.” Looks like a great preview of what’s to come in his print volume, which gets released this week. Think Babauta’s approach is possible in today’s world or too idealistic? Let us know what you think in the comments. Free Ebook: Thriving on Less – Simplifying in a Tough Economy
Just in time for all the new holiday computers running Windows Vista, Microsoft launches to their new Vista Answers community, a tech help forum where users ask questions and Vista experts offer answers. The site’s already been seeded with common Vista questions and answers from team members. Here’s a sample of some of the Q and A that’s already available. How can I add items to the start menu in Windows Vista? Why doesn’t Windows Vista report all my memory? Should I change the size of my page file?
When you ask a question you can get answer notifications via email, on-site, or subscribe to a thread’s RSS feed. Windows Vista Community Forums [Microsoft Answers via gHacks]
Need to chat with a group of people all running different chat clients and you don’t have time to coordinate everyone switching to a multi-service chat client like Digsby? Stinto is a free web-based chat application, specializing in disposable chat rooms. There is no registration required, upon visiting the site you simply click “New Chat” to generate a random URL and set basic settings like the name of the chat room and how long it can remain empty before it auto-deletes. Email or instant message the URL of the chat room to your friends to get started. Moderate your chatroom with backslash-based commands, much like IRC, such as /ignore and /kick. From within the chat interface you can save a log of the conversation, spawn a new chat room, and lock the chat for privacy. For another disposable chat room option, check out ChatMaker.
Stinto [via MakeUsOf]Feeling the urge for a new wallpaper image? The Web Designer Depot site rounds up 40 wallpapers loaded with colour for your perusal and downloading. Nice selection here of super-colorful items.
If you’re tired of hearing about Windows 7′s upcoming features while you sit and stare at your aging XP or Vista desktop, take solace in a few free apps and themes that can give you a taste right now. While it’s true that Windows 7 isn’t much different from Windows Vista (inside and out), a few neat features are worth trying out, and you can do it without installing the Windows 7 Preview. Here are a few free apps and alternatives that simulate Windows 7′s built-in features.
If you’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s Live Mesh syncing technology and tried it on your Windows Mobile device, then Flickr2Mesh, a simple application to download photos from your Flickr account onto your hard drive or mobile phone, might be of interest. As Aussie Live Mesh guru Angus Logan points out on his blog, the code could also be used as the basis for an application giving you access to your photos on multiple devices. If you want to mass-download Flickr shots but aren’t ready for Live Mesh yet, check out previously mentioned Flump. Flickr2Mesh[via Angus Logan's Blog]
Looking for an ebook read but don’t fancy messing with the complicated authentication schemes that often get in the way? New site eBooks Just Published focuses on newly-published titles that don’t use any form of digital rights management (DRM), making it much easier to read them on a wide variety of devices. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s more fiction than non-fiction on offer. There’s also a useful subcategory of entirely free titles if you’re looking to save a few dollars. eBooks Just Published
Ever wondered just what’s hiding in the various system directories that make up Windows, or why an operating system needs to take up quite so much room? A post at the Engineering Windows 7 blog reveals some of the secrets of Windows’ internal structure (including how some files get counted twice if you try and do a right-click directory size measurement). It also explains why deleting the apparently space-hogging WinSxS directory is a bad idea, which is a useful addition to our existing collection of Vista performance-tweaking myths.
Disk SpaceGoogle’s Street View has been pretty successful since it rolled out in Australia in August, but now the Big G has decided it would work even better with an interface tweak, which includes the not entirely intuitive decision to replace the words ‘Street View’ with a draggable icon of a person (‘Pegman’) on the Zoom control, thereby matching the Google Earth experience more closely. Check the video above for an overview. [via Official Google Australia Blog]
