Google announced last Tuesday that it has its sights on dethroning Microsoft as desktop OS king:

“The new operating system, announced late Tuesday night on Google’s Web site, will be based on the company’s nine-month-old Web browser, Chrome. Google intends to rely on help from the community of open-source programmers to develop the Chrome operating system, which is expected to begin running computers in the second half of 2010.”

Google is focusing on the Netbook market, which is a smart first step. I’m not sure how successful they will ultimately be beyond that though. Netbooks are perfectly suited to a browser based OS - they’ve got inherently less RAM and CPU power and are targeted specifically to the Internet/e-mail user. I don’t see any wholesale switch from Windows anytime soon for one of Microsoft’s major demographics - business users.

Also, gamers and developer are likely to stay with Linux and Windows, at least for the time being. But, having said that, Google’s OS is built on Linux, so there probably wouldn’t be that big a change from, say Ubunto to Chrome (or whatever they end up calling it)..

Of course, I’ll still have to give it a try when it comes out… just for curiosity’s sake!

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After a wee bit O’ overzealous registry cleaning last week, I had a minor panic. Well, a picture being worth a 1000 words, here’s what I saw when I opened windows explorer:

The good news (I suppose) is that I knew the instant I hit the Delete key that I had selected the wrong key. The bad news was that I had no way of finding out what key that was.

So, I did some Googling for various permutations of “missing windows explorer folder treeview” and eventually stumble upon the following registry edit:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}]
@=”Explorer Band”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\InProcServer32]
@=”C:\\WINNT\\SYSTEM32\\SHDOCVW.DLL”
“ThreadingModel”=”Apartment”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories\{00021493-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]

I saved that to a new notepad document, saved it with an “.reg” extension and double-clicked it. Voila, my missing treeview returned!

It sure beats reinstalling the OS for something so simple.

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