AS the windows 7 has many interesting and very useful features so that this windows is getting popularity. But now we will see some of its features.
64-bit support
The windows has 64-bit support as well . In 64bit you can use more RAM—4 GB and up—a 64-bit computer can be more responsive when you're running lots of programs at once.
Accessibility
Windows7 gives you more ways to interact with your PC by taking advantage of new strides in speech recognition and touch technology.
Action Center
Action Center consolidates message traffic from key Windows maintenance and security features, including Windows Defender and User Account Control. If Windows requires your attention, the Action Center icon appears in the taskbar. Click it and you'll see both alerts—and suggested fixes for any problems.
Aero
Aero visual hallmarks include subtle animations and translucent glass windows, which you can personalize. Pick from the included color palette, or create your own custom tints with the color mixer.
Audio
Windows7 is smarter about sound thanks to Automatic Stream Management, a new feature designed to route audio to the right place. Playing a CD? The sound emerges from your speakers. Making an Internet call? You'll hear it on your headset.
Video
Windows7 has new features to make images and text look better, especially on LCD monitors.
Device management
Think of Device Stage as a home page for your hardware: When you plug something into your PC, you'll see a menu of popular tasks for that type of device. A multifunction printer, for example, will show options for printing and scanning. In previous versions of Windows, these were often located in separate menus.
DirectX 11
DirectX 11 includes numerous improvements. It's designed to be more efficient, leverage the power of today's multi-core processors, and provide support for sophisticated shading and texturing techniques such as tessellation. The result: smoother 3-D animation, and graphics more lifelike and nuanced than ever before.
Gadgets
Gadgets put information and fun—like news, pictures, games, and the phases of the moon—right on your desktop. Drag a gadget close to the edge of the desktop—or another gadget—and watch it snap neatly into place for a streamlined look. Open windows getting in the way of your gadgets? Use Peek to make them instantly reappear.
Paint
A new ribbon—the strip across the top of the window that shows what Paint can do—makes this tried-and-true program easier to use, with choices displayed out in the open rather than in menus.
And Paint's new realistic digital “brushes” will bring your pictures to life in shades of watercolor, crayon, and calligraphy.
Peek
Peek gives you the power of X-ray vision, so you can peer past all your open windows straight to the Windows7 desktop. Simply point to the right edge of the taskbar—and watch open windows instantly turn transparent, revealing all your hidden icons and gadgets.
To quickly reveal a buried window, point to its taskbar thumbnail. Now only that window shows on the desktop.
Remote Media Streaming
Windows7 introduces Remote Media Streaming, which provides easy access to your Windows Media Player12 library over the Internet.
Snipping Tool
Snipping Tool captures a screen shot of anything on your desktop, like a picture or a section of webpage.
Snip a whole window, a rectangular section of the screen, or draw a freehand outline with your mouse or tablet pen. (Or your finger, if you're using a PC with a touchscreen.) Then you can annotate, save, or e-mail the image using buttons right in the Snipping Tool window. Snipping Tool is available only in the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions of Windows7.
UBUNTU OPERATING SYSTEM
Software Center
Instant access to thousands of free and open-source applications.
Categories include Education, Games, Sound and Video, Graphics, Programming and Office.
Simply select the applications you want to use and the Ubuntu Software Center will add them to your computer.
Email and chat
Chat with friends and colleagues through Empathy which integrates Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more.
Evolution gives you email, an address book and a calendar and works well with colleagues and friends using MS Outlook.
Browse the Internet
Ubuntu includes Mozilla Firefox 3.5 for faster and safer browsing.
For a choice of other open-source web browsers visit the Ubuntu Software Center and take your pick.
Photos
Upload from your camera or phone to F-Spot.
Manage, tag, share and sort your photos.
Upload easily to your favourite social network or photo-sharing sites including Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and many others.
Music and videos
Plug in your PSP, iPod, MP3 player and use Rhythmbox to download, store, buy and play music.
Share playlists with your friends.
Access Last.fm directly through Rhythmbox to stream your favourite music.
Stream and play video from YouTube, BBC and others.
Office applications
Create professional documents, spreadsheets and presentations with OpenOffice.org 3.1.
OpenOffice.org is compatible with all office applications including Microsoft Office.
The big difference is that OpenOffice.org is free (and promises never to introduce Mr Clippy).
Play games
Over 400 completely free and completely cool games. Solitaire is not the only game in town.
Visit the Ubuntu Software Center to easily browse, select and install games.
Store, sync and share
Integrated "Ubuntu One" technology gives you 2 GB of online storage for free.
Easily share files between your own and your friends' computers.
Upgrade at low cost for more storage if you need it.
Accessibility
At the core of the Ubuntu philosophy is the belief that computing is for everyone, whatever your circumstances. Ubuntu is one of the most accessible operating systems around and is fully translated into 23 languages with many more to follow.
FEDORA 12
Spanning Desktop
In the latest version of '''Xorg''' included in this release, if you have a dual monitor setup, your desktop display will span across them instead of using a cloned display by default. This matches the behaviour of other operating systems.
Better webcam support
The better webcam support feature for Fedora10 did much to improve webcam support in Linux. We now have a library (libv4l) for decompressing various proprietary video formats in user space, and almost all applications that use webcams have been patched to use this library.
ABRT
The ABRT automatic bug reporting tool replaces bug-buddy and kerneloops in the Fedora12 desktop. ABRT has an extensible architecture and can not only catch and report segmentation faults and kernel oops, but also python backtraces. In contrast to bug-buddy, it can catch segmentation faults in any binary, not just GTK+ applications.
GNOME 2.28
The GNOME 2.28.1 desktop is part of this release, and is the default environment used in the Fedora Desktop Live image. The Desktop Live image is a downloadable CD you can use to test the new GNOME environment with or without installing it.
Gnote
Gnote is installed by default in GNOME for this release replacing Tomboy. Gnote is a port of Tomboy from Mono to C++ and consumes fewer resources. Gnote is both an applet that can sit in your GNOME panel as well as an individual application you can run within other desktop environments.
Sound preferences
The GNOME sound preferences now supports profile switching.
Empathy
Empathy replaces Pidgin as the default instant messenger in GNOME. Empathy is better integrated with GNOME and provides audio and video functionality for users of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber) with more improvements planned. Empathy supports importing accounts from Pidgin on first run so you can migrate more easily.
GNOME Shell — preview of GNOME 3
A very early version of GNOME Shell is now available in the repository. GNOME Shell is a key part of GNOME 3 and is in active development with the heavy involvement of Fedora developers and interaction designers.
Fedora Studio
Fedora Studio is an optional multimedia menus package that allows users to have their audio and video applications classified in their desktop menu. In previous versions of Fedora, all multimedia applications were in one large group. This package makes it easier for users to navigate audio and video applications.
Virtualization
Virtualization in Fedora12 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support KVM, Xen, and many other virtual machine platforms.
emacs
emacs has been updated to version 23. Emacs 23 has a wide variety of new features, including:
* Improved Unicode support.
* Font rendering with Fontconfig and Xft.
* Support for using X displays and text terminals in one session, and for running as a daemon.
* Support for multi-file commits in distributed version-control systems (VC-dir).
* New modes and packages for viewing PDF and postscript files (Doc-view mode), connecting to processes through D-Bus (dbus), connecting to the GNU Privacy Guard (EasyPG), editing XML documents (nXML mode), editing Ruby programs (Ruby mode), and more.
mercurial
Version 1.3.1 of mercurial now includes experimental support for sub-repositories.
Languages
Fedora12 includes all of the popular programming languages.
Haskell
Fedora 12 includes the haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2. Haskell Platform is standard set of libraries and tools which provide a stable known platform for developing Haskell projects.
php
Fedora 12 includes version 5.3.0 of php. This includes a number of significant new features including support for namespaces, late binding, more consistent float rounding as well as a number of performance enhancements.
Puppy Linux
* Easy - Just use a CD or USB flash to boot a PC. Puppy Linux is downloadable as ISO, an image that can be burned to CD or DVD.
* Fast - Because Puppy is small, it can live in your PC's memory and be ready to quickly execute your commands, whereas in other systems, programs are first read from drive storage before being executed.
* Save Money - Even if your PC has no hard disk (ex, broken hard disk), you can still boot Puppy via CD or USB and continue working. Old PCs that no longer work with new systems will still work good-as-new with Puppy.
* Do More - Puppy boots in less than a minute, even in old PCs, and it does not require antivirus software. Administering Puppy is quick and minimal. With Puppy, you just have to take care of your data, which you can easily save to USB flash (Then forget about your operating system!). Your data can be read by other computers.
* Do Magic -Help your friends suffering from computer malware by booting Puppy and removing malware from their PC (use antivirus that is built-in or can be installed in Puppy). Example - bad Autorun.inf is easily removed by Puppy (Just delete it as well as its companion exe program). If your friend thinks that she has lost data from her corrupted hard disk, boot Puppy and try saving her data!
* Carry Anywhere (Portable) - Because Puppy is able to live in CD/DVD or USB flash, as well as save data to these same devices, you can carry your programs and data with you.
· Puplets - Special Builds for Sharing
Puppy Linux is a live CD that is easy to remaster, and puplets are remasters with special features. They are different in one or many ways from the standard (official) Puppy.
Geany is a brilliant text editor
This is a great little application if you are a programmer. It has many uses which
you will discover after a short period of time.
Console
This is similar a DOS window although the commands are different to DOS.
The console is handy when you are having problems with software. It lets you run the problem software from the console and will display error messages which may give you a clue to the problem.
Abiword a MS Word compatible word processor This is an excellent Word processor. It's probably on a par with Microsoft Works although not as functional as Word however. If you need that level of functionality
I would suggest you use Open Office Write.
Seamonkey a great browser similar to Internet Explorer. mtPaint is similar to Windows paint. I like this better.
Microsoft Windows 98 second edition
windows 98 Second Edition includes many improvements and enhancements not included in the original version of Windows 98. These include fixes for known issues in Windows 98, and new tools and capabilities to help you be more productive. It may be useful to install this version of Windows to update your system files, obtain access to the tools in Windows 98 Second Edition, obtain the fixes for known issues in Windows 98, and so on. This article describes the updates in Windows 98 Second Edition. It provide the compatibility for USB's .
* Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)
* Device Bay Controller
* DirectX Version 6.1
* Microsoft Connection Manager Version 1.2
* Microsoft Dial-Up Networking (DUN) Version 1.3
* Microsoft Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM98)
* Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 5
* Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.1
* Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA)
* Microsoft NetMeeting Version 3.0 (build 4.4.3345)
* Microsoft Wake-On-LAN
* Microsoft Wallet Version 3.0
* Microsoft Windows Driver Model (WDM) Modem
* Microsoft Windows Media Player Version 6.2
* Microsoft Year 2000 (Y2K) Updates
* MSN, The Microsoft Network Version 5.0
