If you’re one of those people, and I believe they are still around, who still likes the Windows XP Luna interface (that’s the lollypop blue one), then this is a download for you.

Rather then transforming XP into that fancy Aero interface, or something too Mac-like or even Ubuntu earthiness, XPrize simply turns XP into… XP.

Not quite, but it updates the Luna interface to a more modern look complete with glassy effects and cuts back on some of that bevelly goodness. It still looks like XP, but more in line with 2008 rather then 2001.

XPrize also does a good job of updating all those hundreds of interface quirks which are left over from Windows 95. You know, all those icons buried in the control panel and explorer. In fact the website says it patches 150 system files and updates hundreds of resources.

It’s very similar to the official Windows Royale theme, but with the addition of a new boot screen, animations, icons, logon screen, images, screensavers and more.

Personal Information Managers, short PIMs, become increasingly popular especially in the young and hip Internet user group that tries to do everything electronically instead of using the pen and paper approach of previous generations. It’s only logical that life is organized by one, or multiple, applications as well and Total Organizer is one of those programs.

As with every Personal Information Manager Total Organizer combines a calendar, an organizer, a to-do list, notebook and contact management software. Total Organizer uses a tree view that contains categories and subcategories with all those information. A category work could for instance contain different project subcategories each with their own calendar, notes, to-do list and contacts.

The main category combines all information from its subcategories which is important for the schedule obviously. The root category finally contains all information from all categories offering an overview of all activities, notes, contacts and the like.

Keywords can be assigned to every information that is being added to Total Organizer which can be helpful when searching for specific information. Popup reminders can b

With the recent announcement that Britain’s largest cable Internet Service Provider Virgin Media will start warning its customers, or better the part they suspect to download files without having the proper rights to do so, that they will face prosecution if they do not stop the behavior. Virgin Media calls it educating their customers during a ten week trial campaign but their letters will apparently be accompanied by letters from the British Phonographic Industry that threatens disconnection and court appearance.

Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

The interesting question will be how they will pick the customers that will receive the warnings. Will they actively monitor P2P networks, will they only react when the BPI sends them a list, will they verify those lists ? What about false positives ? Someone who is download music from Jamendo using the Bittorrent protocol. Will he receive a warning as well ? What about secure Usenet connections ? IRC, FTP, file hosts. How the hell will they be able to determine that a file that is being transferred is indeed a copyright violation ? Filenames alone are without doubt not the safest way of determining that. So, how will they do that ?

My second assumption would be that Virgin Media could have some ties with the BPI or a company that is a member of the BPI. I really do not have enough time to research this so if anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

The speed difference of USB Flash Drives that support the USB 2.0 standard can be more than 15 MB/s with maximum speeds of about 30 MB/s for fast drives. That’s still less than modern hard drives are capable of but better than a few years ago. I think it’s really astonishing that there are only a few recent comparisons of USB flash drive speeds available on the first results pages of Google. A recent (another one) comparison from May 2008 that tested seven USB flash drives showed differences of more than 15 MB/s between the fastest and slowed drive while copying files of a certain size

If you already have an USB flash drive and want to know how it compares you can test the speed of it with the free version of HD Tune which can benchmark USB drives as well. The free version will only test the read speed and access time but it should give a good impression of the capabilities of the device at hand.

To make the test accurate you should set the test speed to Accurate in the benchmark options. The last two steps are to select the USB flash drive from the pulldown menu at the top and to click on start to start the benchmark.

Those speed differences are really interesting. It’s probably a good idea to research USB flash drives extensively before buying one. What’s your experience with those drives ?

Open Office recently pushed 3.0 as a beta release.It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start centre, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.

To be honest I can’t say there are a great many useful downloads available at the moment, but some of them would be pretty handy if you use Open Office on a regular basis:

Professional Template Pack
A collection of elements to create your own professional style templates for documents, forms and presentations

Sun Web Blog Publisher
Microsoft Word 2007 comes with some impressive blogging capabilities, but now Writer can too. This extension supports “many popular blog services’”, so having not used it I can’t guarantee it’ll work for yours, but give it a try and see.

GoogleDocs to Open Office.
This works for both Google Docs and Zoho and can import and export your documents and presentations between Open Office and thestwo online services.

Oxygen Office Gallery Extras
A compilation of clip art and templates for your documents. Comes with multiple languages and with some other extras.

Pagination
A simple little dialogue to insert page numbers, works with all localizations.

Crop Images
Crop images in Draw and Impress with this add-on.

Writer’s Tools
If you live in Writer during the day, churning out documents or whatever it is you do then this pack will provide you with all the extra functions and features necessary. There are some pretty useless additions to this set, but some notable tools are:

• Lookup Tool
• Email Backup
• Remote Backup
• Start/Stop Timer
• Add to Basket
• miniInvoices

Test Fonts
This seems pretty handy, it searches for all the fonts contained in the document on your system. It then reports on missing fonts, all used fonts and gives statistics on available fonts.