I downloaded Chrome from the official website and followed the instructions for installation. The first glitch was that it hanged while trying to retrieve Firefox passwords and bookmarks, at least that’s what the installer said it was doing. The CPU utilization was upwards of 97% and the memory usage was 16,828k. I decided to kill the process after 10 minutes. Chrome was installed but it failed to get the Firefox user data.

Next, I went to Chrome settings and tried to import the bookmarks and passwords. It did get them but the support for passwords seemed to be a bit patchy. It worked for some sites and didn’t for others. This is some data I collected: -

I liked the fact that each instance of Chrome ran as a separate process, the memory footprint in smaller and seems to be faster. But, not much data to go by

This is when Chrome got my PC, I think it was my visit to cricinfo.com (no malice intended, just a fact) when all the trouble started. It could have been some other site but these were the same sites I visit with Firefox. My notebook was infected by both Ad-ware and multiple viruses. This caused a 3 day downtime, not very convenient as works piles on.

In the end, I have decided to go back  to Firefox. The good thing which came out of this is that I used my home notebook w/ Linux in office and decided to get a linux desktop for work. I am a new user of Linux as my base OS but have been working on Free BSD based OS (JUNOS) for a few years and use Linux servers for development, so lets see how it goes.

Microsoft, as a part of its efforts to overcome the language barrier to computing, has showcased a variety of custom made products directed specifically at the vernacular language market – a market that has been largely left untapped till now.

The new initiatives include Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu – for MS Office and Windows.

MS does even one better and created tools for developers.

There’s more in store for developers as well. Directed at vernacular language developers, it has launched the Captions Language Interface Pack (or CLIP) in Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, and Tamil. CLIP uses a tool tip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008 making it the first ever instance of Microsoft releasing a tool specifically to help students and beginner developers in India use the product in their own language.

The original article from Techtree.com is Microsoft Launches Windows 7 in Hindi

The second and controversial is the launch of $20 laptop which would come down to $10 w/ mass production. The model is called Sakshat. This is an excerpt from India Unveils $20 Laptop:

The Sakshat model scheduled for display in the city of Tirupati Tuesday has 2 GB of memory, which is expandable. It has Wi-Fi and fixed Ethernet capability and will consume just 2 watts of power. The laptop was created over several months in a cooperative effort involving government, academic, and commercial interests.

…

The Sakshat is thought to use a simple version of Linux open source software as an operating system.

There are little details available about the “notebook” and as it is government backed there is doubt if the cost is actually that low or government subsidies are involved. An article in the Indian Daily “Hindu” has some more details and the device really is an hand-held and not a “laptop”.

The 10” long and 5” wide hand-held device, resembling a palmtop or a modem, helps e-learners access the Web easily. Priced versions of e-content available on the Net can be accessed through this device.

It doesn’t seem to have any input devices build-in and a very small display. This is from a Times of India article, $10-laptop proves to be a damp squib:

The so-called laptop actually turned out to be a storage device containing megabytes of data info which can be accessed by a user by connecting this device to a laptop. It meant that unlike the internet, this device can display that information that has already been stored.