Limited time-period offer.

This offer expired on Sep. 29, 2011.

The insanely popular Angry Birds game has drifted across many platforms and has its latest version Angry Birds RIO peaking popularity levels. Here’s to let you know that you can download Angry Birds RIO (Windows) for free before September 29, 2011, thanks to Intel AppUpSM Center.

All you need to do is to register at Intel AppUpSM Center before Sep 29, 2011 to get your free copy of the Angry Birds RIO game for Windows. Just go to AppUp.com and download the ‘Intel AppUp’ application for Windows. Register a new account and look under the ‘My Apps’ tab for the free game.

Less than a week to go for happy holidays so we thought why don’t we give away yet another great Windows 7 goodie this Christmas season. A few days back we gave you Christmas 2010 Windows 7 Theme and you did like it a lot. This time we bring you Santa Claus theme for Windows 7 loaded with high resolution wallpapers. Download this Windows 7 theme and share it with your friends. Please don’t hotlink to the file (Santa won’t like it you see). Share this page’s URL instead.

Download Santa Claus Windows 7 theme

Wallpaper Credits: Crestok, HDWalls, dA

Don’t miss this another Christmas 2010 themepack:

Oh times fly so fast. I still remember the time we published Christmas Themes and Wallpapers last year as if it were yesterday. But the festival is back and we, too, are back with some really beautiful, handpicked and high-resolution wallpapers packed into a Windows 7 theme. The preview below will definitely make you click that download link for sure. ;) I won’t say anything further. Credits fly out to the wonderful designers. If you do share the themepack, please do not hotlink. Use the link to his post instead.

Download Christmas 2010 Windows 7 Themepack

Wallpapers included can be found here.

Don’t miss the LATEST Santa Claus Windows 7 Theme:

Happy Christmas!

Last week Windows 7 enjoyed its 1 year birthday bash and it was about time Microsoft roll out the Service Pack 1 of its flagship product. The Release Candidate (RC) version of Windows 7 SP1 has been made available to general public. You need to have RTM version of Windows 7 to install the service pack. In a case where you’ve installed a Beta version of SP1, you need to uninstall it first. The Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 is also made available.

As we told you earlier, Windows 7 SP1 brings nothing drastic to the system. It’s just a collection of minor bug-fixes that were released over previous months. The Windows Server 2008 SP1 has 2 new features – Dynamic memory and Remote FX, as decided. The final version of SP1 is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2011.

PS: The installer performs genuine validation prior to SP1 installation.

Download Windows 7 Service Pack 1 & Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 [Release Candidate]

Microsoft is about to has released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 and going by its screenshots shared by the Fast Company and ZDNet, IE9 does look promising. It all rests on whether or not the experience of using it is as awesome as the screenshots make it appear.

In our previous post, we discussed the some of the features of IE9 like the ability to pin web apps on the Windows 7 taskbar. This new feature will enable developers to make web-apps (or should I say, a special version of the site) that can be pinned to the taskbar with functions accessible using jumplists.

Internet Explorer 9 is claimed to be developed from scratch and offers full support to HTML5 and CSS3 technologies along with DirectX based GPU graphics rendering for HTML5 content.

As far as the UI goes, IE9 looks pretty classy. If you have noticed, Windows 7 taskbar buttons take the color theme of the application icon which looks very aesthetic and also helps distinguishing buttons. You will see similar effects in the ‘Forward’ and ‘Back’ buttons of the new IE9. The theme-ing is based on the colors of the favicon.

Microsoft will has released the first IE9 Beta along with IE9 ready apps like: CNN, eBay, Hulu, ZDNet, Amazon and IMDB. [images courtesy:ZDNet]

Download IE9 Beta

I still remember the time when the first Vista transformation pack was made available for XP and how I went so crazy to download a 31MB file on my dial-up connection. Well, Vista came and gone and even Windows 7 seems so 2009. We need something new, don’t we? So here it is – The Vienna 5 Transformation Pack for Windows 7!

Now don’t ask me why the name Vienna. It’s been one of the most speculated names for the next version of Windows after Vista but that didn’t happen. Maybe to pay a tribute, a deviantArt user, AppliArt named it Vienna 5 Transformation Pack.

Before I give out the download links, enjoy the screenshots:

This transformation pack is available for Windows 7 and Windows XP. Visit the below links and download the required version.

Download Vienna 5 Transformation Pack / 96.2 MB

After you download it, run an update available for it by clicking the below link.

Update for Vienna 5 Transformation Pack

Beginner Quick-tip

Windows Media Player 12 is my favorite music player on Windows and it has evolved to a great extent. I have shown some WMP tricks in the past and today I am back again with yet another small trick that will enable / disable automatic preview of songs just by hovering over them. This small tip will work for Windows Media Player 12 that comes bundled with Windows 7.

» First, open up Windows Media Player 12. Click ‘Organize’ > ‘Options’.

» In the ‘Library’ tab, just check the option ‘Automatically preview songs on track title hover’. Press OK.

» Now you can preview songs just by taking your mouse pointer over the title of the song. A small pop-up will appear and the song will start playing immediately when you click ‘Preview’. Moving your mouse away will stop the preview.

Enjoy previewing songs

There are lot of wallpaper managing software available on the internet today. Mostly all of them have pretty much similar functionality like maintaining a list of wallpapers and changing them at regular intervals. Today we have featured a slightly different wallpaper managing software – Dream Desktop.

Dream desktop is different in a sense that the wallpapers it uses are located somewhere on the internet. The application lets you browse through their ever growing collection of extremely high quality wallpapers. You can either choose to display all the wallpapers in the collection or your marked favorites at specified time intervals. Apparently you can download the wallpapers too if you wish.

Dream Desktop is much sophisticated too. Every aspect of the client software is superbly intuitive and is low on resources. It also gives notifications when new wallpapers are added to their online collections. Apart from that, the upcoming versions will support games too. Download Dream Desktop and experience it. I find the software rather awesome.

Download Dream Desktop / 696KB

Beginner Tip

Today I had a discussion with my friend about a troubleshooting session in which he wanted to change icons of some the folders. He wanted to use the native new Windows 7 icons which he could not find the new icons in its default location. Although he figured out after a while, I thought of sharing this small info.

So if you want to use the new 256×256 Windows 7 icon library, you might not get it in the default shell32.dll. Here’s what you need to do:

» Select the folder. ‘Right click’ on it > ‘Properties’.

» In the properties window, click the ‘Customize’ tab.

» Here, click the ‘Change Icon…’ button.

» In the window that appears, you will find that the icons here are very old (from Windows 2000 and XP era). You just need to replace the location to C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll (where C: is the Windows installation drive)

Replace ‘shell32.dll’ with ‘imageres.dll’ and you will be able to use new 256 x 256 Windows 7 icons. imageres.dll is the new icon library.

» Select your desired icon and click ‘OK’.

Enjoy new 256 x 256 icons !

Windows 7 has been around for a year and by now, I think everyone using it might have gone thoroughly familiarized with it. However, Windows 7 has some hidden perks that very few might have discovered; one of them being able to select multiple items using check-boxes. Like this:

Unlike the traditional tiring method which involves holding down the Ctrl key while you select multiple folders, this method is very handy. Just keep on clicking on the check-box shown on the top-left corner of the folders while you have a drink with your other hand.

How to use check-boxes to select items:

» In Windows Explorer, click ‘Organize’ > ‘Folder and search options’.

» In the window that appears, go to ‘View’ tab and select ‘Use check boxes to select items’ and click OK.

That’s it! Now you can select files using check boxes!