Sign Up and Join Microsoft Office Starter 2010 Beta Without Invite

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is an edition of Office productivity suite which will be pre-loaded by OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) on new computers and is available exclusively on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will replace Microsoft Works, which currently been pre-installed on new computers shipped. Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010 that intend to provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box.

Office Starter 2010 includes only Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality for creating, viewing and editing documents, but offering a consistent user experience and user interface such as Ribbon menu, and end-users can upgrade Office Starter 2010 to a fully comprehensive version of the Office suite at ease.

Microsoft has started to send out invites to Office Live Workspace users to join the public beta of the new Office Starter 2010 SKU product. Note that the Office Starter 2010 Beta should not be confused with Office 2010 public beta, which will be available soon within November 2009. Microsoft had sent out email updates to Office 2010 Technical Preview and Click-To-Run Technical Preview participants, which announced the closure of respective Connect group, and confirmed the arrival of publicly available Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 Beta. Besides, there is hack to instantly join Office Web Applications, the web-based version of Office.



For Office Starter 2010 Beta, the invite is actually not an invitation to register or join immediately. Instead, interested users are invited to nominee themselves to Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Program by taking a short survey and submit the nomination form. Not all registrants is guarantee access to Office 2010 Starter program. Users who qualify for the beta program will be informed in the next few weeks and be provided instructions on how to register, download, and install the product.



The survey for Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Program nomination form can be accessed here:

http://survey.confirmit.com/wix5/p1059269618.aspx?type=1

Read more...

ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 HD Media Player With Wi-Fi 802.11n Support

ASUS has introduced its new O!Play Air HDP-R3 Wi-Fi-enabled HD media player (successor to popular O!Play HDP-R1), which able to stream a wide variety of audio, photo as well as high-definition video formats wirelessly from various sources including PC, NAS, card reader and other USB or eSATA-connected devices, delivering up to 1080p full HD image rendering to enhance user living room entertainment experience.


Key Features And Specifications Of ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3:

• Capable of stable and rapid wireless data transfers at maximum throughput of 600Mbps thanks to the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi support
• Built-in card reader slots (CF, SD/MMC and MS/MS Duo) to access digital files and photos effortlessly
• O!Link application provides users an easy file browsing and sharing capabilities
• First HD media player with a dedicated music shuffle button giving access to a large number of songs
• Latest eSATA interface delivers up to 6 times faster throughput compared to a USB 2.0 connection
• Supports wide variety of video, audio, image and subtitle formats
• HDMI 1.3, composite audio/video and optical digital audio outputs
• 1 USB 2.0 and 1 eSATA/USB2.0 combo port

The new ASUS O!Play Air HDP-R3 HD media player that measures 181 x 125.3 x 47.7 mm is expected to hit European market soon for about €90.

Read more...

a-squared Free 4.5 (Anti-Malware) and Online Armor Free 3.5 (Firewall) Direct Download Links

a-squared Free is a security product that scans PC for infections of Trojans, viruses, spyware, adware, worms, bots, keyloggers and dialers, and removes or quarantines all infections detected. a-squared Free combines 2 cleaning scanners of Ikarus anti-virus engine and a-squared anti-spyware engine into 1 to provide effective protection against online and offline threats.

a-squared Free is a free edition of a-squared Anti-Malware, and lacks features such as Background Guard real-time scanning, Malware-IDS, Surf-Protection, auto update, scheduled scan and HijackFree.

The latest version of a-squared Free is version 4.5, and it can be downloaded from the following direct download link: a2FreeSetup.exe

Online Armor Free Personal Firewall is a free version of popular Online Armor Firewall. Both a-squared Anti-Malware and Online Armor Firewall, although hosted on tallemu.com, is developed by Emsi Software. Online Armor Free provides end-users with protection to stop attacks and threats from hackers, infectious websites and malicious programs, in addition to protect user’s identify. Online Armor Free provides complete control for both inbound and outbound traffic, and can protect itself from been tampered with.

The premium edition of Online Armor adds more kind of protection and features such as automatic updates, unique “Banking Mode” to protect users when banking online, advanced firewall settings, phishing filter, DNS spoofing protection and more.

The latest version of Online Armor Free is version 3.5, and it can be downloaded from the following direct download link: OnlineArmor_Setup_Free.exe

Users who would like to download and install both A-squared Free and Online Armor Free Personal Firewall can download the setup installer for A-squared Free + Online Armor Personal Firewall Bundle 4.5/3.5: a2FreeOASetup.exe

Read more...

Organizer Note In Tree Structure View Via AllMyNotes Organizer

For those users who frequently use Notepad-like text editor to keep their important notes, then can try out AllMyNotes Organizer as an alternative to their existing text editor. AllMyNotes Organizer is a note taking program for Windows operating systems. The note taking program has been designed for allowing the users to organize their notes into flexible virtual folders that present in tree structure. For easy access and instant searching, all the notes are stored in a single file.


AllMyNotes Organizer includes the following features:

• Comfortable tree-structured organization.
• Functional and yet simple interface with few skins and languages.
• Many drag-and-drop features – drag in files and folders, quickly reorder documents in the tree and even move them between topics.
• Rich-Text editor with different formatting functions.
• View for convenient preview of Notes and Folder content.
• Powerful global search for text across one or all notes with different options. Filter-on-typing for extra fast, real-time. Global search allows powerful Google-like query language (*).

  (*) For example, you can type “+Hello +Jim -Coffee” which will find all notes that contain words Hello and Jim (in any order) and will not contain word Coffee.

• Search or replace text within notes.
• Import/export from or to txt, rtf, and html files.
• Strong security – files are encrypted and can be password-protected.
• Convenient keyboard shortcuts for all editing and file management commands.
• Flexible toolbar editor – to adjust application to your personal needs.
• Wealth of options to customize the program options and user interface.

AllMyNotes Organizer is compatible with most of the Windows operating systems including Windows 7 and Windows Vista. It’s available in two versions, free and deluxe edition.

Download AllMyNotes Organizer

Read more...

Deploying Windows 7 Essential Guidance Free eBook Download

In conjunction with the official release of Windows 7, Microsoft press is now giving away “Deploying Windows 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine” digital eBook in PDF format for those who is looking for guidance specific to Windows 7 deployment. The contents of the eBook are extracted from selected chapters written by industry experts Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, Jerry Honeycutt, Ed Wilson, and the Windows 7 Team with selected Windows 7 articles from TechNet Magazine.


Chapters and topics in the “Deploying Windows 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine” book:

• Deployment Platform.
• Planning Deployment.
• Testing Application Compatibility.
• Developing Disk Images.
• Migrating User State Data.
• Deploying Applications.
• Preparing Windows PE.
• Configuring Windows Deployment Services.
• Using Volume Activation.
• Deploying with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.
• Migrate Already: Why You Should Migrate To Windows 7 If You Are Still Waffling.
• 8 Common Issues in Windows 7 Migration.
• 9 Things You Should Know About Windows 7.
• Can’t We All Just Get Along? Running Windows 7 in Mixed Environments.
• Integrating Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.
• The Good Computing Seal of Approval: Windows 7 Certification.

Download the free “Deploying Windows 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine” e-book in PDF format from download.microsoft.com

Read more...

BitSnoop – Demonoid and The Pirate Bay Alternative Torrent Search Engine

Many BitTorrent (BT) network lovers may be looking for an alternative and new torrent search engine as some of the popular torrent indexing services such as The Pirate Bay and Demonoid is in the doldrums. The Pirate Bay is continuing hit by lawsuit to shut it down, while Demonoid is having an extended downtime, and severe torrents submission data lost due to hardware problems. BitSnoop, a new torrent indexing site, may worthwhile to be bookmarked for unfortunate circumstances where two largest BT search engines ThePirateBay and Demonoid is unavailable, a situation that looks increasingly likely.


BitSnoop, bases in Moscow, Russia, is a new torrent indexer which uses robots to roam the Internet for any torrents available, and constantly update the torrent health (availability of seeders and leechers). BitSnoop features a Google-like clean and minimalistic user interface, and most importantly, TrackerMatch technology.

TrackerMatch generates torrents at BitSnoop. Tracker Match scans through and cross-references each torrents record, analyze and filter them to exclude typos, errors and just junk in tracker URLs. TrackerMatch locates all good working trackers and reliable backup trackers (useful when main tracker dead or down) for the torrents and removes duplicated torrents or ‘bad’ torrents (with fake trackers) to avoid slow downloads.

BitSnoop currently indexes more than 1.91 million torrents (of which 1.29 million torrents are active) with more than 1,501.1 TB of total file size. And the stat keeps increasing. In short, BitSnoop is definitely one of the stop where people looking for something to download via BitTorrent worth visiting.

Visit BitSnoop at http://bitsnoop.com/.

Read more...

Disable and Deactivate Automatic Scanning for Viruses for Downloads in Firefox

Since Firefox 3, a virus scanning feature has been built-in to protect downloaders from malicious or infectious files. The auto file scanning feature is only available in Windows platform and only if an anti-virus application is installed on the system. The Firefox web browser’s virus scanner scans downloads automatically once the file has been completely and fully downloaded to the local computer.

While the virus scanning by Firefox is good and recommended, it may not be needed. Most anti-virus or Internet security products in the market today provides real-time protection which scan a file for virus, Trojan and malware before it’s accessed and executed.

The Firefox virus scanner can also cause considerable delay to access the file from Firefox’s Downloads window. Instead of allowing users to run the file, open the containing folder, go to download page or copy download link, the just downloaded file will display a green running status bar showing “Scanning for viruses…”. Normally, the scanning just takes a few seconds, but the scanning time duration or period increases with the size of the file.

Other than that, when a file is detected as harmful, where it’s accurate or not (false positive for genuine harmless file), it will be blocked by the anti-virus software, and unavailable by users.

Firefox users who do not want virus scanning function of Firefox can easily deactivate the scanning file for viruses feature. To turn off and disable virus scanning in Firefox, follow these steps:

1. Run Firefox.
2. Type about:config in the Firefox location bar.
3. Click I’ll be careful, I promise! button when prompted with warning dialog saying “This might void your warranty! Changing these advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security, and performance of this application. You should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing.”



4. Search and locate browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone preference name. Type in the string into Filter box to get to the parameter immediately.

   The default setting value for browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is true (default status), which instructs Firefox to scan completed downloads automatically.

5. Double click on the line to toggle the value to false (user set status) to deactivate and disable automatic downloads virus scan. Firefox will no longer scan any downloads with immediate effect. No browser restart required.

Read more...