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GIBBS: That’s why I didn’t give the email address.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that, thanks to a “compromise,” his boss will be able to keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry and use it for e-mail.

Q: How specifically will this be allowed to be used? I mean, will all
members of his senior staff be able to email him? And how will you keep
a proper chain of command and chain of communication with him? Who can
email him and who can’t?

“It’s not just the flow of information,” Obama said in a recent interview with CNBC. “I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips for me, and I can read newspapers. What it has to do with is having mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside of the White House in a meaningful way. And I’ve got to look for every opportunity to do that–ways that aren’t scripted, ways that aren’t controlled, ways where, you know, people aren’t just complimenting you or standing up when you enter into a room, ways of staying grounded.”

One limitation of the BlackBerry, though, is that it does not appear to have been certified by the National Security Agency as secure enough for Top Secret voice communications. For that, there’s the chunky, unwieldy, but built-to-military-specifications Sectera Edge, a combination PDA-phone that runs Windows Mobile.

Q: — hacker in Russia and China is already at work.

GIBBS: Let me get some guidance from the Counsel’s Office before I
do something like that, so that the hackers that Bill has instructed
won’t start.

GIBBS: The president has a BlackBerry, through a compromise that
allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of
personal friends in a way that use will be limited and that the security
is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate, but to do so
effectively and to do so in a way that is protected.

So I think he finds it as an important way to continue to communicate.
There’s a process by which people that have access to the email will be
briefed before anything like that can happen. Jeff.

Q: Will the records be kept?

Update 2:15pm PT: Here’s more from today’s exchange:

This makes sense. As we reported last week, federal law explicitly exempts from disclosure any “personal records” that do not relate to the president’s official function.

GIBBS: The presumption regarding those emails are that they’re all
subject to the Presidential Records Act. There are, as you know, some
narrow exemptions in the Presidential Records Act to afford for strictly
personal communications. But, again, the presumption from the Counsel’s
Office is that they will be subject to the Presidential Records Act —

Q: Are records kept?

Gibbs didn’t offer details, but the contours of the compromise seem to be: official, work-related e-mail messages will be subject to the Presidential Records Act and the possibility of eventual disclosure. But strictly personal communications–with family, for instance–will be exempt.

Q: Are you trying to wean him off of it?

President Barack Obama will be able to keep his beloved BlackBerry, an aide confirmed on Thursday, making him the first U.S. president to use e-mail regularly.

GIBBS: Nobody can do that. I think he believes that — he believes
it’s a way of keeping in touch with folks, a way of doing it outside of
getting stuck in a bubble.

GIBBS: Well, I’m not going to get into all those specifics, for
obvious reasons. But a limited group of senior staffers and some
personal friends — it’s a pretty small group of people —

That will, Gibbs said, allow Obama to continue to keep in touch with people and avoid getting “stuck in a bubble.” (The new Washington insider test: Do you know the president’s secret e-mail address?)

I’ve gotten emails from him — not recently, or not in a few days, I
should say — that go from anywhere from something that’s very strictly
business to “Why did my football team perform so miserably” on either
any given Saturday or any given Sunday.

Thursday’s official confirmation ends weeks of speculation about whether Obama would follow the lead of his two immediate predecessors. Bill Clinton sent only two e-mail messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using e-mail in January 2001 but said he was looking forward to e-mailing “my buddies” after leaving Washington, D.C.

Those include electronic records that are “of a purely private or non-public character” and don’t relate to official duties; the law lists diaries, journals, notes, and presidential campaign materials as examples. Similarly, the Freedom of Information Act prevents files from being released if the disclosure would significantly jeopardize “personal privacy.”

Q: Can you put a rough number on it?

commentary

Capossela’s assumption that Microsoft will be able to charge companies more under the cloud model seems optimistic, given the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

Microsoft expects to lose margins as “cloud” competitors start to eat away at its core businesses.

That’s not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a very good thing for customers, who get more value and pay less for it.

Those who desire outsize margins, as Google still gets, need to learn to charge for something other than the software. Pure software businesses will be less profitable, going forward, because the software industry has matured and will increasingly look like other industries that depend primarily on service.

Open-source and cloud-based computing are focusing the software industry on customers and service thereof, not on software. It is a highly profitable future, but perhaps not as profitable as it has been.

Put more bluntly, there’s not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings–not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.

Is this cause for mourning? Of course not. It’s just what has always happened to technology-driven industries. Anyone wanting to see where software is going needs only to study the railroad. Or, in Google’s case, the billboards along the side of the road.

Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But the software maker still has a lot to learn, if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because “the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware,” as Nick Carr notes:

Open source and the cloud (or software as a service, if you like) are still plenty profitable, but the software model for writing once, then digitally copying and charging everywhere is out the window.

Sezmi, formerly known as Building B, isn’t naming those partners yet, so it’s not clear exactly how many channels or how much Web content will be accessible on the box. But the company nevertheless is willing to call its offering “a complete TV 2.0 solution.” In addition to content, a Sezmi box allows for up to five personalized accounts and lets members share their video playlists with friends.

Currently in testing, Sezmi has already inked partnerships with a number of broadcasters, content companies, and broadband service providers. The ambitious company hopes to start putting its wireless boxes in U.S. residences in a number of major markets by the end of 2008.

Enter Sezmi, the latest start-up hoping to capture the market: on Thursday, the venture-backed company unveiled a piece of hardware that it claims will be able to handle broadcast and cable TV, as well as streaming and downloaded Internet video content.

(Credit:
Sezmi)

“To deliver the full range of content that consumers expect at an affordable cost, we had to create a network that overcame the limitations of broadband and better aligned with mass-market content consumption,” co-founder and president Phil Wiser explained in a release. No pricing information has been provided yet.

It’s able to bridge the gap between television and broadband, according to Friday’s announcement, thanks to an in-house technology called FlexCast.

“Sezmi focused on the television consumer and built an entirely new television offering from the ground up to meet the needs of viewers that want a premium experience at an affordable price,” co-founder and CEO Buno Pati said in Friday’s release. “We have rallied support across multiple industries, and are excited to work with our partners to offer a new and differentiated TV choice to consumers.”

We’re constantly hearing that seamless integration of television and broadband video is fast approaching, but nobody’s gotten it right yet. That hasn’t stopped new companies from jumping into the mix.

Hey, Sezmi: Feed us more detail, and maybe we’ll be more enthusiastic.

Image sharing and markup, no download required.

Bonus: What’s CallWave doing in this market?
Prior to releasing this product, CallWave made and sold an “Internet answering machine,” that did speech-to-text summaries of your voicemail. The company is backing away from that product. CallWave CEO Jeffrey Cavins told me that while there was good uptake from techies, the service was too hard to configure for general consumers. If cellular carriers had gotten onboard to offer it to their subscribers, the product would still be supported. But they didn’t.

Fuze also runs on some smartphones, like the Blackberry Bold, and includes support for video. I haven’t had a chance to check that out but it’s an important feature–you’ll be able to participate in a Web meeting while you’re sitting an airport waiting area with your laptop put away. On other phones, like the
iPhone, you can monitor the chat room but not see the shared screens.

Fuze is a Flash app, and reminds me a bit of Adobe’s own Acrobat Connect, with which it competes (it’s a very good product, too). There are several other products in the space, too, including Vyew, which was recently updated, and the open-source DimDim.

On the downside, you can’t (yet) use Fuze for screen or application sharing, since that would require a software install on the sender’s side. The company is working on that, although the people I talked to there want to push the “no download required” pitch as long as they can, which explains the delay.

I used the tool briefly and although I found some bugs and performance issues in this early version, I like the design and found it simple to use. You can upload documents to share (images, text files, PowerPoint presentations, even videos), and once you’re sharing them, use simple drawing tools to mark them up and illustrate points. On the shared video player, you can sketch over the top of a paused video, and the sketches stay attached to the particular frame; you can see which frames have markups by little icons on the player’s progress bar.

There’s a new WebEx competitor hitting the market: CallWave’s Fuze. Its advantages: No download required on either the viewing or the presenting side. It works with video and allows markup of video frames. And it has some nice call-handling features.

I like the feature in the program to call people into a conference bridge, instead of the usual procedure, which is to e-mail them a phone number and access code. It will save a lot of time in online meetings if you can pull in your participants.

Fuze is priced at $29.95 a month (much less with yearly commitment). That’s a bit high, and I expect competition (and the growing popularity of free products) will steadily push the prices down on remote presentation apps. I’m glad about that. I can’t stand WebEx.

Use of Twitter in the United Kingdom has increased tenfold year-over-year, according to a report from market research firm Hitwise. According to the report, “Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited Web site in the U.K., up from a ranking of 2,953 (in 2007), for the week ending January 19, 2008. U.K. Internet traffic to the Web site has increased by 974 percent over this period.” Hitwise also said Twitter is still growing at a rapid rate, which is partly due to British celebrities publicly joining the site.

OneSeason.com, a company that offers virtual goods and a gaming platform for sports enthusiasts, announced that it has secured $3.5 million in a Series A round of financing that was led by Charles River Ventures. The company’s founder, Mike Sroka, said he will use the funding to build out the site’s virtual-goods marketplace and enhance features in its social-gaming network.

According to the company, it has added a Google Notebook import function, which allows users to import all their Google Notebooks into Zoho’s software. The company also added the ability to link between notebooks, record audio and video, and chat with other Zoho users through a new instant-messaging application built into the software. The updated Zoho Notebook is available now.

Zoho announced on Wednesday that in light of Google suspending Google Notebook, it has enhanced its own service, Zoho Notebook.

Social network Bebo on Thursday announced that it has partnered with Motionbox, a service for sharing personal videos, to bring video-publishing tools to Bebo’s users. Those who wish to use the Motionbox platform on Bebo will have access to its basic membership, which includes online-editing tools and secure storage. Bebo users who want to post high-definition videos will need to sign up for Motionbox’s subscription service and pay $29.95 per year.

Mixx, a Digg-like social site that caters to a more “mainstream” audience, has inked a deal with online advertising agency Federated Media to handle all its advertising endeavors. Mixx now joins Federated Media’s group of content sites that employ the company to connect them with advertisers.

Federated Media’s executives said they will work closely with Mixx representatives to develop “conversational marketing executions” that will cater to Fortune 500 brands. Advertising rates have yet to be determined.

MySpace says that 1 billion songs have been streamed since the News Corp. social network debuted its MySpace Music service last month.

The iTunes Music Store, the biggest name in digital music, hit the five-billion-songs mark in June after over five years in business. But it’s not really comparable to MySpace Music, because iTunes is a software download rather than Web-based, and charges 99 cents per song. MySpace Music streaming is free.

“We can confirm that we hit a milestone of one billion music streams only a few days after launching the new product,” the company said in a statement, and a MySpace PR representative clarified to CNET News that the number only includes songs streamed since MySpace Music’s debut. “More importantly, we are still compiling our metrics on engagement and unique users which will tell a much richer story on how positively the community is responding to the new music experience. We’re excited to share more information and data as soon as it’s available.”

Let’s do some simple math: if MySpace has about 120 million members worldwide, that’s slightly over eight songs per member. Obviously, not all MySpace users have streamed any music, and there are probably quite a few who have streamed far more than eight songs. That’s also a rough estimate, considering you do not have to be a MySpace member to stream songs–any visitor to, say, the Jonas Brothers’ MySpace page could simply hit the “play” button.

MySpace Music launched on September 24, with the catalogs of all four major record labels as well as indie music distributors encompassed by Sony ATV. The debut was accompanied by heavy promotion from big-name artists, across other Fox Interactive Media properties, and even a billboard in Times Square.

But a billion is still a big number–and CNET News is waiting to hear from some third-party analysts and research firms to see if anyone has a different take on it.

But before you run off and start doing this, I should note that there is one issue: you might miss some stories because you’ll be away from Twitter or you’ll not have it open in your browser. In those cases, you’ll be forced to go to a site’s individual Twitter profile. Yeah, it’s a pain, but believe it or not, that has only happened to me a couple times. More often than not, the big news is always readily available.

And that’s why I actively seek out Twitter profiles for all the sites I subscribe to. Sometimes, I can’t find one and I’m forced to check my reader whenever I want to know what’s going on at the site, but more often than not, the site has a Twitter profile and I’m able to follow all its updates right through the microblogging service.

Power of the Twitter profile
Just because people are my best resource, it doesn’t mean that they’re the only way to find reliable information on Twitter. In fact, I’ve found that most of the sites I subscribe to in my RSS readers already have Twitter profiles, and whenever an article is written on their site, it’s immediately published in their Twitter stream. In essence, it’s an RSS reader built into the single online tool I use most often. Why should I waste my time with Google Reader?

There are times when those I follow miss some stories. News aggregation profiles have my followees covered by taking news stories from sites that I may or may not follow and posting them on Twitter for everyone to see. Meantime, I don’t miss a single headline and I’m given an opportunity to find the best stories from the best sources as quickly as possible.

Doing that can be quite simple. More often than not, I’ll employ “Remember the Milk” or a similar tool that lets me use Twitter to manage my tasks. These tools typically work well and help me achieve my single desire: to fully exploit Twitter and get everything I can out of it.

Twitter has quickly become my ideal replacement for the RSS reader. But for that to happen, I needed to use a three-pronged approach: follow people so they can do the heavy-lifting, follow news sites so they mimic my RSS reader, and follow news aggregators to catch anything I might have missed from the first two groups.

But I’ve realized now that it goes beyond just knowing other people. I now know that by following other people, your chances of getting more news, and getting it faster goes way up. And that’s precisely why Twitter users have kept me from having to rely on my RSS reader for news.

CNET News has its own Twitter profile and so does CNN. SunTimes is an outstanding Twitter profile with a wealth of information and Webware’s Twitter profile is an ideal profile to follow if you want Web news. Heck, you can even follow me on Twitter and find out whenever a post of mine goes up on my Digital Home column or here on Webware. You really don’t need an RSS reader for all that.

But in recent weeks, I’ve realized that each day I use the best feed reader of them all and I didn’t even know it: Twitter. Since then, I’ve used it exclusively as a replacement to my RSS reader and I couldn’t be happier. Believe it or not, Twitter is the best way to find all the best news.

As an avid Twitter user, I’m constantly trying to find ways to extend its functionality and make it more than a place to converse with friends and discuss what’s going on in my life.

So, ditch that RSS reader and start using Twitter for all your news consumption. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

People, people, people
I’m a firm believer that you should follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. I think it would make the community a better place and by doing so, you actually get more out of the service than by only following a select group of friends.

But in recent weeks, I’ve realized that I’ve been missing the boat in a very big way. In the past I’ve used sites like Bloglines, Google Reader, and others to track prominent sites, and find out what kind of stories they’re covering each day. Some are related to technology, while others focus solely on sports. No matter the topic, the RSS reader made it easy to find out what’s going on in the world without being forced to go to all the different sites individually.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Based on my testing, Twitter’s updates are actually ahead of some of the RSS feed updates for some of my most trafficked sites. For example, CNN’s Twitter profile posts the update sooner than its RSS feed updates and FoxNews updates are posted at about the same time. In other words, you won’t need to wait longer by using Twitter instead of Google Reader to get updates about the news from your favorite sources. So as long as your sources have Twitter profiles, why use that RSS reader?

News aggregators? You bet
The final piece in the puzzle to create a Twitter account that will replace your RSS reader is to follow news aggregators, like Digg’s page, TopGossip, and BreakingNewsOn. Each profile takes breaking news from a slew of sources and puts them into their own Twitter stream. It’s ideal.

Since that time, I’ve been more aware of the connection between Twitter users and the news. More often than not, news breaks first on Twitter, and I’ve found that I’m brought to sites with the best coverage because the community cuts through the junk.

Remember when US Airways flight 1549 landed safely in the Hudson River? I didn’t hear about it in my RSS reader and I didn’t even see it on TV. No, first I heard about it from folks on Twitter.

I simply checked Twitter to see what some of my followers were up to and almost immediately, a deluge of discussions on Flight 1549 cropped up. I immediately went to my RSS reader and discovered something I didn’t expect: none of the blogs I was following was covering the story yet. At that moment, I realized that Twitter’s value went beyond connecting with others.

In fact, I find the most unique stories in those news aggregation profiles. Often times, they’re filled with sites that I don’t subscribe to in my RSS reader and I don’t normally go to them on a daily basis. So when they update the stream with a really interesting article about something that I probably wouldn’t see elsewhere, I have the opportunity to be exposed to new and exciting things. And in the process, I’m once again ensuring that I have access to news that I may have otherwise missed or taken too long to consume with an RSS reader.

I do appreciate the Google-simple start page.

Presdo is smart, but not brilliant. You have to hold its hand after you first tell it what you want.

I found setting up test meetings in Presdo quite easy and almost fun. But I’m also left scratching my head. Presdo, at the moment, doesn’t give you any real insight into when it would be good for you or anyone else to meet, meaning the thorniest part of setting up a meeting–choosing a time–is still completely manual. Nor does the clever location finder link in to a service like OpenTable for restaurants or Fandango for movie tickets. And the natural-language starting gate for Presdo is cute, but it’s not smart enough to obviate the need for you to carefully check its work on the event page that it creates once you type your plain text.

You kick off a meeting by typing into a plain English description of what you want to do, such as, “Get lunch on Monday with Joe,” or, “Set up book club meeting with Jack, John, and Claire at Sparky’s Diner.” Then you get a screen showing what the system thinks you mean. It guesses at the times and dates, and you enter in missing information like e-mail addresses. It also helps you find and map locations for meetings.

What makes this service peculiar is that it does very little that you can’t otherwise do through e-mail and Web surfing. However, it packages everything up so nicely you might not notice.

See also: IWantSandy and ReQall (review)

I like the idea of new, pure interface for scheduling meetings. And Presdo does do a nice job of keeping your e-mail free of hard-to-follow messages about meetings. But I want much better integration into other calendar-related services before I start to use it.

Once your meeting is set up, the system e-mails the other attendees with your plans. They can propose new times and places. The whole back-and-forth is captured on your event’s dedicated page. Once everyone buys in to the plans, attendees can pop the meeting into their calendar (Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, or Google).

Of all the meeting time brokers I’ve seen, Presdo is the most peculiar. Which means it’s worth checking out. Unlike other apps I’ve covered (Timebridge, Jiffle, Tungle, Timedriver, etc.) Presdo’s strength is not that it automates the selection of meeting times that work out for attendees (it doesn’t), but rather that it helps script the dialogue that’s usually a part of the back-and-forth in setting up a meeting.

The free AT&T Wi-Fi offer comes as Starbucks phases out a seven-year relationship with T-Mobile, which had provided its customers Wi-Fi under hourly and daily rates. While existing T-Mobile account holders will still be able to sign on and use the T-Mobile service, AT&T has officially taken over all of Starbucks’ hot spots.

AT&T’s free Wi-Fi access for Starbucks coffee shops is finally here.

I went to the Starbucks right around the corner from the CNET office on 29th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday expecting to see a packed house of free Internet users. But instead, the patrons I spoke to sipping coffee and tapping away on their laptops weren’t even aware that they could get free Wi-Fi.

“Our philosophy is that we want broadband to be on demand,” said Mike Woodward, vice president of business mobility for AT&T. “People don’t think that they want to connect to the network using DSL or 3G cellular or Wi-Fi. And now we’ve lined up our assets to deliver all these various flavors of broadband.”

Starting Tuesday, Starbucks coffee shops across the country are offering two hours of free Wi-Fi Internet service through AT&T. In order to get the free service, customers must buy a Starbucks Reward Card with a minimum of $5 credit on it. Customers also must sign up for the free Wi-Fi online at Starbucks.com. To keep the card active, customers must also use their Starbucks Card at least once a month.

The free service is part of Starbucks Reward card program, which started in April. Under this program, members can get free syrup and milk options with drinks as well as free refills of hot and iced brewed coffees. They can also get a free drink when they buy a pound of coffee beans. And now they’ll be getting two hours of free Wi-Fi Internet connectivity courtesy of AT&T.

Even the Starbucks employees didn’t know or understand the ins and outs of the new program. When I asked how I could get online, the Starbucks employee who was helping me said she thought I could just sign up for the free service on the Starbucks Web site from a connection at my home or office. She wasn’t aware that I needed a Starbucks Reward Card. And she was unaware of the two-hour time limit on the free service. Still, as an employee who was given access to the service with no strings attached, she said she is excited to have free Internet access. Previously, Starbucks employees were only offered discounted T-Mobile access.

Free Wi-Fi in Starbucks is part of AT&T’s broader effort to give customers more choices using Wi-Fi. The company is also enabling its broadband and wireless data users to get free Wi-Fi at any of AT&T’s 17,000 hot spots around the country. Under this program, subscribers aren’t limited to the amount of time they can access a hot spot. These AT&T broadband and wireless data subscribers can also use their existing AT&T account information in the Starbucks hot spots. But unlike non-AT&T customers, they don’t need to purchase a Starbucks Rewards Card and there is no time limit.

(Credit:
Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

(Credit:
Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Laptop users at Starbucks in New York City.

“The discounted service just wasn’t worth it to me,” she said. “And it certainly is about time that we offered free Wi-Fi. Every other cafe and coffee shop around here seems to offer complimentary Internet.”

The free service is only for two hours and must be used in a single session. New members will also get a voucher for a free drink.

Starbucks on 29th Street and Park Aveneue in New York City.

Adding free Wi-Fi to the mix is supposed to help lure customers, who may be forgoing their tall lattes in an effort to save money. While the idea is certainly a nice one, it seems like Starbucks and AT&T haven’t done a great job promoting it.

To tone down the animations in XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties > Advanced, and click Settings in the Performance section. Under the Visual Effects tab, click “Adjust for best performance,” or choose Custom and select the options you do and don’t want in the window below. When you’re done, click OK twice.

Set Vista notification pop-ups to stay on screen longer
Sometimes the little windows that pop out of the taskbar to notify you of some event, such as a USB device you just plugged in being ready to use, disappear too quickly. To extend the duration of notification windows in Vista, click “Make it easier to focus on tasks” in the Ease of Access Center, scroll to the bottom of the resulting dialog box, and change the setting under “How long should Windows notification boxes stay open?” The default setting is 7 seconds, and the available options let you change this to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 5 minutes. When you’re done, click Save or Apply.

Show shortcut keys on menu items
Microsoft doesn’t always make it easy for people who prefer to navigate around Windows and their applications using keyboard shortcuts. To make the key hints visible on menus in Vista, click “Make the keyboard easier to use” in the Ease of Access Center, check “Underline keyboard shortcuts and access keys” under “Make it easier to use keyboard shortcuts,” and click Save or Apply.

I described the top four options (all carryovers from XP’s Accessibility Control Panel applet) in a previous post. To change focus by hovering, click “Make the mouse easier to use” and check “Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse” near the bottom of the dialog box. Click Save or Apply to activate the change.

See hints for shortcut keys on Vista menus by choosing this option in the Ease of Access Center.

Mouse over a window to make it the focus
About once or twice a week I find myself happily typing away only to discover after crafting the perfect memo opener or e-mail retort that the focus had switched to another open window. Not only have I lost the data I thought I was entering, I might inadvertently purchase a Winnebago if I press Enter while focused on the wrong page in my browser.

You can set Vista to change the focus to whichever window you mouse over via the Ease of Access Center. Press the Windows key and U to open it.

You could spend hours hunting for the settings that will do away with these four Windows annoyances. At least Vista collects them all in the Ease of Access Center. These usability settings are spread far and wide in XP.

The only way I know of to change the duration of notification windows in XP is to tweak the Registry. This is also how you disable notifications altogether. I’ll describe the procedure in a future post.

Bonus tip: To keep programs from stealing the focus, choose Focus under General in the left pane, click “Prevent applications from stealing focus” in the right pane, and choose the number of times you want the window to flash when this happens.

Knock off the frivolous animations
Save some CPU cycles–and maybe your tired eyeballs–by telling Windows to do without the fancy-schmancy animations. In Vista, click “Make it easier to focus on tasks” in the Ease of Access Center (the same dialog I described above for tweaking notifications), check “Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)” under “Adjust time limits and flashing visuals,” and click Save or Apply.

Extend the time Vista's notification windows stay visible via this setting in the Ease of Access Center.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

You start typing only to realize 10 seconds later that the focus is on the wrong window. You see a Windows notification pop out of the taskbar only to have it fade away before you can figure out what it means. You get distracted by all of Windows’ pointless animations. You miss seeing keyboard-shortcut hints on menu entries and elsewhere in Windows dialog boxes.

Add the shortcut-key hints to XP by right-clicking the desktop (or pressing Shift-F10 while on the desktop), choosing Properties, clicking Appearance > Effects, unchecking “Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key,” and clicking OK twice.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The simplest way I know of to change this setting in XP is to use the free Tweak UI utility. After you download and install the program, open it and double-click Mouse in the left pane. Choose X-Mouse among the entries that appear, and check “Activation follows X-Mouse” in the right window.