Create 360-degree 3D landscapes from your digital photos
Every so often, a genuinely new technology appears that astounds. Microsoft has launched a service at www.photosynth.com that’s designed to change the way you experience the places you photograph. By uploading a selection of photos you can use the free web service to transfer them into a 360-degree, three dimensional experience that you can click around and explore. The only downside is that it takes a little while to process your photos, so you’ll need a decent broadband connection.
Vista/XP
SUPERFETCH BOOSTS PERFORMANCE for vista
Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed to more intelligently load applications into RAM based on frequency of use. With Superfetch on, your PC should theoretically get faster over time, particularly when loading frequently apps. You won’t see improvement in general performance, like rendering Photoshop files, but Superfetch does tend to make apps load10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.
An old favourite gets a new look.
Now in version 8.0, AVG’s latest release appears to have taken a page or three form from Vista. A redesigned interface sports high-resolution icons and a more colorful palette, and even the system tray icon feels borrowed from Microsoft’s newest OS;turn off one of the security modules and the icon turns red, alerting you to impending doom, even if you’ve only disabled the spam filter. That’s just wacky. Thankfully, you can turn off the ominous notifications.
For the latest version of its AV suite, Symantec went back to the drawing board and completely rewrote the program from the ground up with a focus on speed. Even the installer has been revamped, in an attempt to reduce setup time to less than a minute ( we clocked it at 55 second). Symantec coded its own propriety installer instead of using Microsoft’s, as it has in the past.
