It has been 7 years since Windows XP was launched. During its lifetime it got many upgrades including 3 Service Pack releases (Service Pack 3 being the latest). The Service Pack added many new and useful features so as to increase the life shell of Windows XP.

After the release of Windows Vista many Windows Users wanted to shift to Windows Vista but could not because of the high system requirements of Vista. Soon after the release of Windows Vista many transformation packs were launched, which transformed the looks of Windows XP to Windows Vista giving the users of XP the feel that they were using Windows Vista.

Even though these Transformation packs were not able to provide the performance of Vista but they managed to copy the looks of Vista pretty well. These transformation packs were able to copy all the eye candies of Vista except one – the Start menu of Vista. There were many themes which copied the look of the taskbar of Windows Vista, but failed to provide the same functionality. Being a Vista user myself, I can easily say that I really miss the Vista Start bar in Windows XP.

So today Techunknown.com presents to you Windows Vista start menu for Windows XP!

Download it: http://vistastartmenu.com

As you can see from the above image, Vistastart menu provides functionality similar or better than Windows Vista start menu can provide.
The search box is similar to Vista’s start menu and it even saves your last search. When you search for any file/application via the search box given, the search begins instantly but it is little slow compared to Windows Vista Start Menu but not that slow to irritate you. When you search for a file/application via the search bar and you type the full name of the application for example “paint”, the application also shows applications or files with similar name like Printers etc.

As you can see from the image, it even shows system files and folder. Also unlike Start menu in Vista and XP where you have to click on “Programs” to show you all the installed programs which you have in your PC, VistaStart Menu opens the “Program” group or slide by default thus saving you one mouse click when you open an application from the “Programs” menu.
There is also a quick start group where you can put in all the applications which you access frequently. All the applications present in the start menu have a shortcut, if you would have seen the previous images properly you would notice that there is a small straight line passing through the applications menu after certain intervals. These straight lines divide the “Program” menu into certain groups. The first group has “A” assigned as its shortcut so if you will press “A” you will be automatically taken to the first group and then all the applications in the first group will have a number assigned to them, pressing that number either launches that application or takes you to the sub group of the application. These shortcuts work only when you use the “Windows” key to access the start menu and not when you used the mouse to access the start menu.

You can also move the Start Menu to another location! Yes you read it right to another location! You can even resize the start menu. Amazing isn’t it. To move the Start Menu all you got to do is hover your mouse near the “Get Pro Version” and then just drag the start menu to the location you want it to.

Now from the next time whenever you open Start Menu it will open from the same position where you had placed it earlier.

The Bad Side-

After the good side comes the bad side. Sometimes whenever I used to click on the start menu, VistaStartMenu just did not pop-up. I had to click multiple times before it used to pop out. Also as I said earlier, searching via the Search Box is a bit slow compared to Windows Vista Start Menu. Also just for the information of its users or the user who are going to download it, it eats up 11Mb RAM usually with the max going to 20Mb.

Conclusion-

In the end I would like to conclude that Windows XP users who can’t shift to Vista because of its high system requirements should download VistaStartMenu immediately but for Vista users I would say if you can cope up with the slow searching time and the extra “11Mb RAM” I will say it’s worth it.

TechUnknown Rating – Very Good

Pro’s – Finally an alternative to Vista Start Menu, and for XP users finally a Vista style Start Menu

Con’s – Slow in searching via search box, Sometimes the Menu just does not pop-up even after clicking the Start Button multiple times

Knol is another Google project which aims to include user written articles on various topics ranging from science medical information, geographical and historical information, entertainment, how-to’s and all.

It was officially announced on December 13th 2007, but opened in beta to public on July 23 2008.
Google defines “knol” as a unit of knowledge.
All contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.

Knol is being described as a competition to sites such as Wikipedia, but in its layout and model, it most closely resembles About.com.

It still has a long way to go to be fairly useful to general public.

Information source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

Another search rival to Google cropped up, this time maybe a bigger one, CUIL.
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It claims itself as the biggest search engine on the planet.

Cuil’s hype is understandable given its claim of indexing 120 billion web pages compared to approx 40  billion by Google.

Some quick facts about it:

1. Most popularly being pronounced as COOL.

2. Cuil is an old irish word for knowledge.

3. Its robot web-crawler is named Twiceler.

4. Cuil’s two main goals as pointed out clearly in the about section of the search engine is: One-how to index the whole internet, not just a part of it and Second-how to analyze and sort out its pages to get relevant pages.

5. Main features of its search are Drilldowns, Roll-over definitions, tabs and navigation suggestions.

6. The main people in its foundation are TOM COSTELLO, who has earlier worked mostly in IBM
And Anna Patterson, who was a key person in the technical line of google adsense and google search index.
Both of them happen to be spouse.

But on the performance front the search engine failed miserably.
The news of its failure is floating all over internet. It can’t even produce relevant results for common words and queries. In that way it can’t even challenge rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is still a distant dream.
If you want to test it, just type its name in Google.com and Cuil.com simultaneously and see the difference. Holes like this in the search engine can put it into grave forever.
Right now, Google still rocks.

The only thing that went into its favor was large investment, which enabled it to build reliable cluster of servers. Most of the new start-ups are launched with lots of pomp, but crash (die) as soon as the initial users and traffic increase. Atleast cuil was able to survive that phase and did reasonably well.

While browsing i found a simple site, but which is worth lots of appreciation because of the research it has done on interactive interface.

I was browsing http://dontclick.it . And the last click i did with my mouse was on the homepage of the site. Believe me no clicks after that to browse a whole website. And the whole site structure and interface is quite interesting and appealing.

You must be wondering how is that possible? The navigation on the website works just by hovering your mouse over menus or links of the pages you want to view and it comes up with a nice animation or rollover.

And as the website says, the research on the interactive interface is not a joke. It records the mouse gestures and movements of every user that logs on the website.
If by chance you click anywhere on the website by mistake or knowingly, it displays and error screen and asks you “was that an accidental click or knowingly?”.
It contains whole statistics of how many people visiting the site still missed the conventional mouse clicking or not.
It even displays a spiky cover for your mouse if you are too much obsessed with clicking the mouse.

Hope to see more of such websites soon.

Windows PC can be transformed into Mac (visually), without going into hassle of installing many visual themes, windowblinds, docklets….and the list goes on……
The solution is a simple all-in-one installer FlyakiteOSX.

“FlyakiteOSX is a transformation pack. It will transform the look of an ordinary Windows XP+ system to resemble the look of Mac OS X. The installer simply automates the process of replacing critical system files, setting registry tweaks, and installing extras such as cursors, sounds, visual styles, etc. FlyakiteOSX DOES NOT contain any spyware or ad-ware of any kind. All files needed for FlyakiteOSX are stored in the Windows directory in a folder named ‘FlyakiteOSX’ that is hidden by default. All registry values for FlyakiteOSX are written to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\FlyakiteOSX.”
All the documentation and FAQ’s about installer can be found at:

http://www.flyakiteosx.com/
http://osx.portraitofakite.com/

The installer is very simple, the whole visual system is light on the CPU, and is completely safe to install and remove.

Screenshots:

Download:

http://www.flyakiteosx.com/files/FlyakiteOSX%20v3.0.zip

Already existing Google translation service, has added now Hindi in its translation application, which works quite well, infact very close, if not too accurate to Hindi grammer.

Google translates any text or web page from English to Hindi. or vice-versa.Now, it translates 14 dialects language from English including Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic language from Asian continent.

First log on http://www.google.com/translate_t and then type the word to be translated, choose the language as per requirement and press enter

I felt quite excited and tried to translate this Blog, from English to Hindi. The tool did the job very fast and here is the screenshot of what i got :

Click on the image to zoom

Experience : The final output was quite amazing to read an English tech-blog into Hindi, but the mistakes, or maybe the clash of English grammar with Hindi dialect, was quite a mess up, proved hard with my grey cells.

Review-http://www.techshout.com

1. The site’s intension looks promising.
2. The professional approach is missing definitely.
3. Uses no customized theme, uses three column Kubrick’s theme, with just a customized header.
4. Too much full of ads.
5. Focus is on quantity of post rather than quality, content is updated like 3-4, sometimes more posts in a day.But all of them about every new hardware, game, gadget and anything latest, without a through product review and no personal opinion.
6. But sadly, has Google Pagerank 6 (surprising!)

Suggestion:

1. Put on a more professional approach.
2. Shed some bucks and get a new customized theme like engadget, spending on content writers heavily without watching the layout of blog is useless.
3. Remove hell lots of ads, apply quality and content-matching ads, if the content is worth, traffic will surely pour in and the money too.
4. Do a through review of anything, before going to post. Number of posts in a day doesn’t matters neither the quantity. Posts worth reading, are the thing that attracts the visitors and give a good reputation and feedback.

One strange search engine i came across:

http://googlepirate.com

The search engine clearly indicates it has no connection with Google.com, but still it uses Google to search the web, but with something it calls Google-hack, strange??

Impression:The search results are exceptionally accurate and refined, worth a try.

Gone are the days when geeks or nerds were thought of as a totally different species of human beings, who were unappealing, disgusting irritating.

Watch this video on Youtube: Click here

This interesting video shows 3-4 reasons to a non-geek or simple guy “Why a Geek Will Steal Your Girlfriend in 2008″…..and believe me the arguments given in favor of the topic look appealing and genuine, if you like me watch it from a geek’s point of view

One site that is referred to in the video is Geeksaresexy.com where the so called “controversial”, article was posted on which the video is based upon, is another interesting site to browse through, which genuinely tries to shout “GEEKS ARE SEXY”

After watching this video, i hope all the hot girls would definitely be thinking of spending their time, in front of a computer with sexy geek, like me. (I wish some girl would term even me as sexy….oh !! )

And all boys, just be aware or the geeky boy-next-door, could steal your girlfriend…for the reasons you know now.

http://www.insideorkut.com/

This blog has been around for a while, and has in fact covered everything about Orkut in such depth and detail, that it should be termed as official site for Orkut .

Everything about orkut can be found here ex: Scrapbook flooders, scrap-all-at-once, new useful orkut scripts, orkut tools like Scrapboy, Orkut toolbar, Orkut messenger, and the most famous Greasemonkey script(for Firefox).

Hosted on Blogger itself, handling vast amount of traffic becomes easy for this blog, and this way Darnell Klayton, the owner of the blog saves some bucks too !!

Verdict: A frequently must-visit site for all orkutters.