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By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

The trick is also said to work in Windows Vista, although some are warning that although it works fine in 32-bit versions of Vista, it can cause 64-bit versions of that operating system to crash.

To enter “GodMode,” one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Source: CNET.com

Retail version of Windows 7 has two main primary type of licenses – full or full package product (FPP) and upgrade, where the most obvious differences between full and upgrade versions are different prices for full and upgrade license, and customers have to possess an existing Windows license to be eligible for upgrade license.

Officially, Windows 7 Upgrade version only allow an user to “upgrade” from a previous version of Windows operating system, via “in-place upgrade” or custom install, which replaces old Windows. Even if upgrade path from some versions of older Windows cannot perform “in-place upgrade”, and require user to perform a custom clean install, but it only means that user has to start the Windows 7 installation from within an existing Windows, and choose “Custom Install” during the course of Windows 7 setup.

Windows 7 Upgrade license wants to see an installed and activated copy of Windows XP or Windows Vista before installation is allowed. As Windows 7 setup does not ask for an existing CD or DVD disc of Windows, thus if user full formats and wipe XP or Vista installation so that the drive is empty and blank before using the upgrade disc, setup no longer able to see any existing installation, and will return “Invalid Product Key” error message.

Tip: User is allowed to create or delete hard disk drive or partition during the setup through Custom (advanced) -> Drive options (advanced) option (note: a 100 MB system reserved partition may be created by Windows 7 Setup), or let Windows 7 install wizard backup the existing Windows files to Windows.old directory, and then delete and wipe clean the whole partition volume prior to install Windows 7.

Many people believe that Windows 7 FPP (full version) disc media or ISO is different from ISO image or disc media of Windows 7 Upgrade version. In fact, the Windows 7 Upgrade disk and Windows 7 FPP disc may be similar, if not completely the same. Only product key represents the actual version of license bought, and Windows 7 will validate against the product key, as shown by Microsoft Product Key Checker.

Not everybody has a PC readily installed with a Windows for upgrade. And more people does not have time to install an operating system especially the time-consuming Windows Vista just to install Windows 7 Upgrade version. Good news is that Windows 7 upgrade media or ISO image and product keys can be used to perform clean install or custom install on a blank and emtpy PC without any prior OS installed. With the following clean install hacks or custom install tricks, which not only save the headache of users who need to install on a new or clean computer system, but also mean everybody just need to purchase an Windows 7 upgrade license, which costs up to $100 cheaper over a Windows 7 full edition price.

How to Clean Install Windows 7 with a Upgrade DVD Disc or ISO Image

Note: Users who has downloaded Windows 7 boxed ESD installation files should follow these steps to create a bootable Windows 7 ISO image from unpacked Windows 7 installation files and burn to DVD prior to follow guide below.

1. Boot up the PC with the Windows 7 Upgrade DVD disc media into DVD-ROM drive.
   • Note: May need to change boot sequence or boot order of device in BIOS, and/or press any key to boot from CD/DVD drive.
2. Follow the Windows 7 Install Wizard to install the operating system on the blank, empty and clean system.
3. During installation, when prompted for a product key, DO NOT enter the upgrade version product key.
   • Tip: This step is to prevent “Invalid Product Key” error. User can try to input the serial number to check if setup accepts the key. If it’s accepted, all the rest of steps can be skipped.
4. Unselect and unclick the Automatically activate Windows when I’m online check box during the installation process.
5. After Windows 7 is installed, boot up to desktop, and manually enter the Windows 7 upgrade product key to activate online or activate via phone.

Steps above, which is practically how to perform clean install with a Windows 7 full version media and product key, should work for some, if not most, users. On system that the system still does not accept an upgrade version product key, or face activation failure error code of 0xC004F061, try one or more of the following workarounds to get Windows 7 activated:

Workaround 1: Use SLMgr Commands to Insert Product Key and Activate

1. Open an elevated command prompt as administrator.
2. Use the following command to install product key:
   slmgr -ipk <upgrade product key>
3. Activate Windows 7 with the following command:
   slmgr -ato

Steps above have also been used to clean install Windows Vista Upgrade version. To check activation status from command line, use slmgr -dlv or slmgr -dli.

Workaround 2: Clean Install Windows 7 Upgrade with Double Installs

1. After starting up the just installed Windows 7 system, allow system to boot to desktop.
2. Insert the same Windows 7 DVD media into CD/DVD optical drive tray to start Install Windows wizard again. Alternatively, mount the Windows 7 ISO image to a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive, or directly run setup.exe from the unpacked Windows 7 installation files.
3. Reinstall Windows 7 once again (both Upgrade or Custom Install should be OK), enter product key during installation so that Windows 7 can be automatically activated when user first online after installation is done.

Steps above is originally used as a workaround to clean install Windows Vista with upgrade media, and is less commonly used as it’s time-consuming.

Workaround 3: Clean Install and Activate Windows 7 with MediaBootInstall Registry Hack

1. After booting up, ensure that no Windows Updates pending task which requires a system reboot to finish installing.
   • Tip: Normally, an orange-colored shield icon will be displayed next to Shutdown button in the Start Menu Power Button or at notification tray area if a restart is required.
2. If reboot is required, restart the computer to allow any pending updates is installed.
3. Run Registry Editor (RegEdit).
4. Navigate to the following registry key:
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE
5. In the right pane, change the value data for MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0.
   • Alternatively, just download and execute MediaBootInstall.reg to merge the value into registry.
6. Open an elevated command prompt as administrator.
7. Run the command below to reset Windows 7 activation status:
   slmgr -rearm
8. Reboot the computer.
9. Run the Activate Windows utility (accessible from bottom section of Control Panel -> System and Security -> System, or type Activate Windows into Start Search), type in the upgrade product key and activate Windows.

SOURCE: MyDigitalLife.com

If we did a story every time serial console modder Benjamin Heckendorn put the insides of one machine into the outsides of another, we’d never cover anything else. But his latest work, the PlayStation 3 laptop, is too fascinating not to share.

That this device exists and works is testament to the hardware skills of not only Heckendorn, but Sony for getting the PS3 so small that this would make any sense in the first place.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to want to put this thing on top of your lap for a long airplane flight, but you could. Would you be sterile afterwards? Almost certainly. But what’s life without a little risk?

PS3 Slim Laptop [BenHeck, via 1up]

Software improves lighting on digital photos

By Ian “Gizmo” RichardsA common cause of poor-quality digital photos is the lighting conditions present when the photos were taken. While there’s no magic solution for photos that are already ruined, with the help of some clever software you can get superb digital photos from near-impossible lighting conditions that would normally be regarded as impossible.

Digital photography’s dirty little secret

Digital technology has certainly brought about a revolution in the cost and convenience of photography. But amid all the hype about megapixels, image stabilization, and other technological wonders, there’s little mention of digital photography’s relatively limited ability to correct areas that are too bright or too dark.

This weakness is present not only in digital photography but also, to various degrees, in other digital media. Digital TV has a similar problem, and even audio CDs are challenged when reproducing volume ranges from very soft to very loud.

The problem lies not in digital technology itself but in the implementation of the technology. That’s good news, because it means we can expect enhancements over time. For example, when plasma TVs were first introduced, they were almost laughably poor at reproducing highly illuminated areas. Today’s models have improved greatly. Similarly, LCD TVs have always reproduced black and dark tones poorly, but the latest models give quite acceptable results.

Digital cameras have also improved, although most mass-market models still have serious limitations when reproducing scenes with stark contrasts in lighting. For example, try photographing a white Persian cat lying in the sun on a black velvet lounge. Almost certainly, all the details of the lounge or of the cat will be lost – and quite possibly both.

Old film cameras are generally better at handling these stark contrasts than digital cameras, but even they fall far short of the performance of the human eye, which is quite remarkable in its ability to handle huge ranges in brightness. Consider, for instance, how well the eye deals with a situation such as driving on a dark road at night while encountering an oncoming car with its headlights on. Most cameras would simply display such a scene as two formless white spots on a black background. Yet, thankfully, we humans still manage to see a considerable amount of road detail.

The superb performance of the human eye lies at the heart of many of the problems of digital photography. What the eye effortlessly sees may simply not be reproducible with a digital camera.

The limitations of digital image editors

Most digital cameras include free image-editing programs that can be used to improve the quality of the photographs they create. There are also some excellent free image editors whose features range from the most basic to fully professional tools comparable to Adobe’s Photoshop. However, I’ll focus here on what image editors can’t do.

Most digital editors allow you to make the dark areas of a photo lighter and the light areas darker. On the face of it, this seems like an easy way to fix photos that suffer from having some areas too dark and others too light.

Alas, it’s not that simple. You can indeed lighten the dark areas and expose more detail, but in the process those areas often become grainy and flecked. And when you try to darken the white areas, you may find that they stay white with no more detail revealed. The two images in Figures 1 and 2 are a rather extreme example of this phenomenon.

Figure 1. An image of fireworks on a bridge, prior to enhancing the lighting.

 

Figure 2. The same image with its light areas darkened and its dark areas lightened.

As you can see, it’s possible for a digital editor to recover some detail from dark areas, but it’s much more difficult to recover detail from white areas. This means that, when you take digital photos where the subject has a lot of light-and-dark contrast, you’ll generally have a better chance of improving the picture with a digital editor if your photo is on the dark side rather than too bright.

If your camera allows manual adjustments, try reducing the exposure. If it’s completely automatic, you may – if the light is good enough – improve the image by turning off the camera’s flash.

There’s a far better solution to this problem, however. It involves using advanced computer software.

New image editors improve picture balance

Figure 3. These three images show the same scene captured at different exposures by a digital camera.
__________

In the past few years, two new digital photo-processing techniques have become available to amateur photographers: high dynamic range (HDR) photography and tone mapping. Both techniques are related and indeed often combined.

The idea behind the technologies is to combine two or more shots taken at different exposures into a single photograph. If one photo is underexposed (too dark) and the other overexposed (too white), the computer can take the best information from each to produce a well-balanced composite.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why not simply take one photo that’s correctly exposed to start with?”

As I explained above, it’s not easy to do this with digital cameras when there are both very dark and very bright objects in the same scene. For this situation, HDR is an excellent solution.

Look at the examples in Figures 3 and 4, which are taken from HDRsoft’s Photomatix site. The three photos in Figure 3 were taken at different exposure levels and are combined into the single, superior image in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The three images are combined via HDR to create a single one with improved detail in both the dark and the light areas.

As you can see, the HDR composite has much better balance than any of the three photographs used to generate it. It’s also livelier and more appealing.

Taking two or more photographs at different exposures is not that difficult. In fact, many modern digital cameras have a feature called exposure bracketing that automatically takes a specific number of shots one after the other, each at slightly different exposure levels. Even if your camera doesn’t have this feature, you may be able to capture various exposures manually – providing, of course, that your camera has manual exposure controls.

For best results, you must use a tripod when taking your multiple photos. Still, acceptable results are possible if you hold the camera very steady.

Once you’ve taken the photographs, you need special HDR software to combine them into a single HDR photo. There are many HDR packages available, but before you buy any of them, try the free Qtpfsgui open-source package. (The name is derived from the Qt application framework and pfs back-end library, while gui stands for graphical user interface.) Qtpfsgui is all that most users will need; as a bonus, the program does tone mapping as well.

Qtpfsgui is available for Windows as a 3.8MB .zip file, which can be unzipped and run without an installation routine, or as a 9MB installer package. If you use the .zip version, you must also download a separate .zip file containing DLL files the program requires. Full details can be found in the readme.txt file included in the Qtpfsgui archive.

Please do try Qtpfsgui. Although free, it really is an outstanding program. Download your copy from the Sourceforge site.

Superficially, tone mapping works much like HDR, even though the underlying processing is quite different. Unlike HDR, tone mapping can be applied to a single image, though the results are usually inferior to those obtained using multiple images. However, if you don’t have multiple images, tone mapping is worth exploring. Just don’t set your expectations too high.

The best results I’ve obtained by tone mapping a single image were with Re-DynaMix, a commercial Photoshop plug-in (U.S. $16). You’ll find more information about the plug-in on the MediaChance site.

I suspect that Re-DynaMix is doing a lot more than straight tone mapping. As you can see in Figure 5, the resulting image is noticeably livelier and better balanced than the original. In many ways, the output is similar to an HDR image.

Figure 5. The Re-DynaMix plug-in for Photoshop improved the quality of the image on the left by applying tone mapping and other effects.

One thing’s for sure: HDR photography is here to stay. Indeed, the next generation of digital cameras is likely to include HDR processing in the camera itself. That’s fine, but personally, I like the flexibility of making the fine adjustments I want by using software running on my PC.

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Ian “Gizmo” Richards is senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of the Support Alert Newsletter, which merged with Windows Secrets in July 2008.

The Ultimate Firefox Download Extensions List

Mozilla Firefox is already a complete web browser. Its extensions, user generated add-ons for the web browser, heave it to the next level and make it a browser that sticks out of the masses. This article will list the most important extensions to download files with the Firefox browser.

The following list contains the most important Firefox download extensions. The concentration on the most important (and not an overinflated list) makes it easier for anyone to handpick the best download extensions from the list.

The list is divided into the categories files, images, movies and misc. Each category lists a handful of extensions linking directly to their download page at the Mozilla website.

Files

Down Them All – Firefox Download Manager.

Fire FTP – ftp client for the Firefox web browser.

Flash Got – Download Manager integration in Firefox.

Get Filesize – Retrieves the file size of a selected file.

Save File To – Makes it possible to save files into custom folders without having to open the file browser.

Spiderzilla – A website mirroring software based on the excellent HTTrack.

Images

Image Grabber – Download images that are protected by a transparent spacer image.

Save Image In Folder – Save images in personalized folders.

Save Images – Saves the images from the current tab to a specified location.

Movies

MP4 Youtube Downloader – Downloads Youtube videos as mp4 videos.

Flash Video Resource Downloader – Compatible to most flash video websites.

Video Download Helper – Excellent video downloader that is compatible with hundreds of video portals on the Internet.

Misc

Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer – Helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3

Clean And Close – Replaces the clean up button in the Firefox Download Manager with a clean and close button.

Download Rapidshare @ Office – The add-on converts all Rapidshare download urls to IP and uses the IP to download them.

Download Sort – The extension saves downloads automatically into different folders.

Download Status – Displays detailed download information like the average download speed, the time remaining and the number of files.

Download Statusbar – Displays downloads in a status bar instead of the default download manager window.

Link Alert – Changes the mouse cursor according to the file type.

MD5 Hasher – Calculates hashes of files that have been downloaded to the local computer.

Open Download – Allows to download and open any file from the Internet in the default application for that file type.

RDown – Rapidshare Downloader – Rapidshare Download helper.

Snap Links – Use the right mouse button to mark multiple links at once.

Did we miss any noteworthy extension? Let us know in the comments.

The Ultimate Firefox Download Extensions List

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