Windows

First in a series. It was an innocent time. There was fun, fanfare and pride. Thousands of people worked together to complete something that would affect billions of lives -- that would be the most successful product of its kind. Ever. Eighteen days later the world they knew changed.

Ten years ago today, Aug. 24, 2001, in Redmond Washington, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Jim Allchin, then vice president of the platforms group, officially released to manufacturing Windows XP. The RTM marked a huge achievement for Microsoft, which finally had a consumer operating system based on the NT kernel. Windows XP marked the end of the DOS/Windows 9x legacy and the beginning of a new lineage of Microsoft operating systems, continuing the path paved by Windows 2000 some 18 months earlier.

As you browse the contents of your hard drive in Windows Explorer, you will no doubt have noticed that depending on the type of folder you have selected, different buttons are displayed in the toolbar. While Windows generally does a pretty good job of determining what you might want to do with a particular type of file, it is not always right. Explorer Toolbar Editor enables you to choose which buttons you would like to have on display and when.

For example, when you are browsing through folders containing music, or performing searches of these folders, it is likely that you will either want to listen to these files or burn them to a disc so it makes sense to have the relevant buttons on display in the toolbar. However, if you would prefer different buttons to be displayed, or you would like these buttons to be displayed for other folder types, Explorer Toolbar Editor enables you to makes the necessary changes without having to edit the registry.

August 24th marks the tenth anniversary of Windows XP's release to manufacturing -- ahead of its late-October 2001 launch. That's right, next week. Betanews asks readers to share their recollections about Windows XP, whether beta testing, RTM, launch or anything else. We want to share your stories.

Ideally, we want to publish your recollection as its own story with your name, photo and bio. You write it -- we edit and publish during the RTM week anniversary. If there are enough really good stories, we'll do a second round of recollections during the October launch anniversary week. Please email your stories to joe at betanews dot com -- or, if you must, comment below.

PC shipments have been downright glum over the last couple quarters, with tablets (c`mon, friggin' iPad) sucking away consumer dollars. But that hasn't stopped Windows 7's advance, which is getting a boost from the huge corporate Windows XP install base moving onward. Today, Gartner predicted -- and, frankly, it's no shocking palm reading -- that Windows 7 will become the "leading operating system" this year.

Yeah, tell me something less obvious than my nose. But summer is a slow season even for analyst firms. Gartner needs to say something, so customers will keep buying those expense reports and that journalists (yeah, like me) write about the data -- lest somebody forget Gartner still exists.

Back in May, when Microsoft announced "Mango," the first major update to Windows Phone, the Redmond company named some new hardware partners who would launch devices running Windows Phone Mango: Acer, Fujitsu-Toshiba, ZTE, and Nokia. So far, Nokia's "Sea Ray" Windows Phone Mango device has been shown, and Acer's W4 was shown off at Computex in Taipei. Tuesday evening, Fujitsu Toshiba Mobile Communications officially announced its Windows Phone Mango device, known as IS12T.

IS12T includes some impressive capabilities, including a waterproof and dustproof chassis, a 13.2 megapixel camera, and 32GB of onboard memory, and will be available in Japan beginning in September 2011. Global availability and further specs have not yet been announced.

Windows 7 continues to charge ahead as a successful operating system release for Microsoft. CEO Steve Ballmer revealed in a Monday keynote at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles that the number of licenses sold worldwide has now surpassed 400 million.

Microsoft's latest version of Windows already runs on a little over 27 percent of all worldwide computers, according to data from Net Applications. Even though Windows 7's share has nearly doubled in the past year, it still has not been able to unseat the market leading Windows XP, still running on over half (51 percent) of all PCs.

Two-thousand votes and 93 comments later, we have an answer to the question I posed late last month: "Could 70 percent of you be running Windows 7?" The answer is no. Three quarters of respondents are running Microsoft's flagship operating system. Well, so much for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion coming out next month.

That 76 percent of Betanews readers -- well those of you responding to the poll -- run Windows isn't surprising. Most people do. But the number of Windows 7 users is simply astounding, which says much about Microsoft's success courting developers, IT folks and techies -- among other Betanews readers.

At the D9 Conference on Wednesday, Microsoft gave the public a much deeper look at Windows 8 than it had previously, revealing the company's progress in making a Windows that is scalable to the most popular types of interfaces in addition to the most popular instruction sets.

The result looks a lot like Windows Phone, but it has a lot of the underpinnings of Windows 7.

That sure is hell what I want to know after looking at poll results for a question about Internet Explorer 10. In April, I asked Betanews readers if you cared that Internet Explorer 10 beta runs only on Windows 7. One conclusion to draw from the 3-answer poll -- 69.33 percent do (well, those responding) use Microsoft's newest operating system.

Unfortunately, there are only 975 responses, and they don't exactly jive with an earlier poll (not that they need to). But I'm wondering, and even optimistic about percentage of readers running Windows 7, so I'm asking again. Please answer the poll below about what is the primary operating system running on your primary PC (whether work or home).

Foxit Software has released version 5 of its popular, lightweight PDF viewer, Foxit Reader. Version 5.0 now boasts XFA electronic form-filling capability, the ability to fit a document to the width of the page and split the screen into two or four panes, and a redesigned interface that includes an option to mimic the ribbon used in Office and Windows 7.

Other highlights include the ability to view thumbnail previews of PDFs in Internet Explorer and previews of PDF file attachments in Microsoft Outlook. Foxit Reader 5.0 also includes additional customization tools, including the ability to skin the application, plus an enhanced search tool.

While it's easy enough to check the time on your computer by looking at the clock in the system tray, and the weather by visiting any of a number of web sites, you may still want to check out Metro Home. This is a Windows desktop widget that displays the date time and weather in a stylish and customizable interface that fits the Windows Phone 7 look.

The widget comes from the same stables as HTC Home, a similar widget that apes the look of HTC's Android widget, but in this case the information is displayed in a form that will be familiar to Windows Phone 7 users as it closely mimics the Metro interface.

Customizing the Windows boot screen is something that Microsoft has never made easy. The fact that the images involved are hardcoded into system files is enough to put off all but the most seasoned of tweakers. Windows 7 Boot Updater is a free tool, currently in the early stages of beta, that can be used to customize the animation and text that are displayed during Windows' boot process.

The utility can be used in a few different ways, with the most basic options making it possible to simply change the default text from 'Starting Windows' and '© Microsoft Corporation' to anything of your choosing. You can also adjust the font size, color and position as well as choosing a background color other than the black default.

OneUp Industries, a company launched by the author of such notable Stardock applications as Fences and ObjectDock, has released a public beta of its first software offering. Bins 0.95 is a Windows 7-only application that allows the user to group taskbar icons into convenient folders, or "bins" (hence the title). It's based on a similar feature that's found in Mac OS X, which supports "stacking" of dock icons in a similar way.

Once installed, Bins sits unobtrusively in the background; the user simply drags one icon onto a related icon and places it in the pop-up balloon that appears above the primary icon to group them together. Additional related programs can be grouped in the same way. Icons can be rearranged by dragging and dropping: the left-most icon becomes the primary icon and, until the next beta release, only the primary icon supports jumplists.

After a year and a half on the market, more than 350 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold, and Microsoft on Friday has claimed Windows 7 to be the "fastest selling Operating System in history."

Windows 7 launched with power in October 2009 and appears to have actually picked up momentum this year. Market analysts at NPD estimated Windows 7 launch sales were 234% higher than Windows Vista; and by September 2010, just short of a year after launch, Microsoft said 175 million licenses had been sold.

Signaling that Microsoft is ready to move beyond one of its more forgettable releases, the next version of Internet Explorer that debuted at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas earlier this week will not run on the Windows Vista operating system.

The move may be a surprise considering Vista as an operating system is a little over four years old. Support for Windows XP, launched in 2001, only ended with IE9 as the company claimed the operating system lacked the technologies necessary to operate the browser.