How to expand your primary partition in Windows Vista
Hello. Yesterday, I have installed Windows Vista on my computer. Actually, I had already done that before, but due to the lack of memory of my laptop, I reverted back to Windows XP. After upgrading the memory to 1.5GB, I decided to give Vista one more trial.
The installation was successful as before. But this time, Windows Aero can be done. Last time, even Windows Sidebar did not load automatically after the installation. Maybe 512MB is not enough to run Windows Sidebar efficiently. And I started to love Windows Vista. Microsoft was right with the “Wow” of Vista.
Back to the main topic. After the installation, I realized that my primary partition was only 15GB, which is minimum requirement for Vista. The size of the partition was enough at the time I used XP, but now I need to expand the size.
Vista can do the partition resizing without third party software (link), but for the primary partition, you can only shrink the volume. Therefore, I visited Windows Marketplace to find compatible disk manager software for Vista. And they do have solution, which will cost you $50.00.
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 is compatible with Vista and has resized my primary partition to the size I wanted. The only problem I had by this software was, I cannot open it and the error said that I don’t have enough privileges to run the program. This can be fixed by using “Run as Administrator” optio
And for those who hasn’t try Vista yet, do try it and feel the Wow!
Save Session – Start your Firefox with previous session
Current internet browsers such as IE7 and Mozilla Firefox allow users to surf the web using tabs function. This makes the surfing neat and easy as you can browse many webpages just in one windows. The new Firefox allows users to restore their latest session if Firefox is not closed properly such as during blackout or your computer stopping from responding. And this feature really helps me a lot.
But, what can I do, if I want to intentionally save the current session and want to restore it when I open the Firefox again? A little trick that I have found is by killing the Firefox process. You can do this by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL to open the task manager and kill the process with image name firefox.exe.
It works great but this is not practical. There must be an easier way. Then, I searched in Mozilla addons page and I’ve found this plugin for Firefox, Save Session. By using this plugin, you can save your session by just clicking on the menu “save session and exit” under the File Menu. On the next start of Firefox, you will not be asked whether you want to restore the session or not, instead the session will be restored automatically.
To download this plugin, you can go to this page. -Save session-. By the way, it is compatible to Firefox version 2.0 – 3.0a4.
Windows Live Hotmail ended the test phase
New Hotmail account can be set up at www.hotmail.com. If you already have Hotmail account, you can switch to this new version by clicking the button “Join Windows Live Hotmail” after you have logged into your account. But, as I went to www.hotmail.com (German version), I could see that they only offer 1GB space. After clicking the button to register a new user, then you will see the 2GB spaces offered.
Some new functions offered by Windows Live Hotmail are:
- Double space with 2GB (before only 1GB)
Hotmail is quiet slow in free email service competition. GMail is now offering to 3GB and Yahoo!Mail is planning to give unlimited storage. - Colorcodes for doubtful and suspicious emails.
- The ability to be accessed via internet reada cellphones or PDAs using the address http://mobile.live.com
- “Safety Bar” function. This will show you the potential of the mail to be dangerous to you. White for know email address, yellow for unknown sender, and red for mails with potentially dangerous contain.
- The Outlook design. Besides, you can also use right click for some context menus such as making a new folder, which is not offered in GMail. You can also move you emails using Drag and Drop.
- Integrated chat with Windows Live Messenger. You can chat direct on the email interface. Just like GMail and GTalk.
I’ve already regsiter my new hotmail and ready to test it. Why don’t you get one now? It’s free by the way.
