Face Time

Back in December Facebook unveiled a significant redesign to user profiles, which now feature a handful of photos at the top of the page, new sections for featuring your family members and best friends, and some other mostly-cosmetic tweaks. On March 10, the site is launching a similar design for ‘Facebook Pages’ — the public profiles used by brands, businesses, and celebrities to communicate with thousands or millions of fans at once.

Nine Inch Nails

The Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate is now available. For all intents and purposes, this means IE9 is feature complete. Small changes might occur, but it's mostly bug stomping from here on out. Here are all of the major new features -- and some of the smaller, less-obvious, but equally neat changes too.

Sum of the Parts

Sumatra -- the lightweight, open source alternative to Adobe Reader -- has just updated to version 1.3 Sumatra now uses libjpeg-turbo for faster rendering of some PDFs and its printing support has been improved. Documents can also be zoomed and rotated using your keyboard via the + and * keys, respectively.

Sumatra 1.3 also sports a handful of interface tweaks and adds support for the forward and back buttons common on more "sophisticated" mice.

The Spoken Word

There's little doubt that using voice is considered the "holy grail" of dental practice management software. Few people know, though, that this is already built into Windows.With Windows 7’s Speech Recognition, it’s easier than you might think.

Microsoft has been working on its voice command steadily over the years. XP introduced it, Vista smoothed it, and 7 has it polished. It’s strangely not advertised as a feature, even though other voice command and speech recognition programs are hundreds of dollars. It may not be as perfect as some of them, but there’s definitely something amazing about vocally telling your computer to do things and it actually working.

Back From the Dead

Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera's memory stick.

Packing on the Pounds

Windows 7 SP1 was released yesterday for download via Windows Update or direct from Microsoft. Appearing in beta form last year, it's not the smallest of updates, weighing in at up to just under 2GB in size for the full dual disc image, but SP1 brings with it a slew of patches, fixes, and updates, all rolled into one neat and tidy package.

While Windows 7 SP1 doesn't bring any standout features for the consumer, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 does include some important back-end improvements to both performance and security. Highlights include the addition of Dynamic Memory, which enables a higher density of virtual machines to be set up; plus RemoteFx, which adds greater graphical power for thin-clients giving them more of the full Windows experience.

Head on over to Microsoft for the full and sordid details, while you can either hit Windows Update for a smaller, more tailored download for your system, or download the full thing from the Microsoft Download Center.

Take 2

Looks like the new iPad 2, which has been rumored for months, will be announced on March 2. You can read the news here.