The Windows Live team have finally made POP3 available for everyone. The details are as follows:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

The How-To-Geek has put together a nice little walk through for Gmail users to enable poping your Hotmail mails (and even sending them via Gmail). It took less than a minute to setup and get working – go on try it for yourself.

[via Lifehacker]

It seems Apple want you to not only upgrade your ENTIRE iTunes collection to be DRM-free (not on a song-by-song basis) but your personal information is not removed from the files so as to discourage people from sharing them afterwards. Read more about iTunes Plus on CNET. [via Lifehacker]

There have been a number of posts on Lifehacker and How-To-Geek about nifty little tips, tricks and tools to add nice Vista features to XP. Yet, of those I’ve come across few seem to work without glitches. 

I tried installing the Vista Sidebar and Gadget pack but without success. Alky installed fine, but the actual Sidebar tool kept on failing to load. [via gHacks] So much for having gadgets in XP.

Then I tried installing Shock Aero 3D to get the Vista-looking WinKey+Tab feature which seemed to work nicely and it has various options for display and background effects. [via Lifehacker] This seemed to load and works well without any problems. 

Next thing I liked and wanted to try out was Visual Task Tips which shows you previews of windows as you move your cursor over the item in the taskbar. [via How-to-Geek] Very handy feature which seemed to work well. Doesn’t like Google Chrome Application Windows though.

I’m really keen to see more from Windows 7 – if they can get rid of the need for their OS to run on Deep Blue and fix hardware compatibility issues (which also relies on vendors delivering drivers) then maybe one-day more people will move to Windows 7 than they did to Vista. But for now, I’m sticking to XP, thanks!

I posted recently about Lifehacker’s inital tests between beta versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE. Well they’ve been asked to provide more detailed results. This time they’ve provided a breakdown of speed, memory, etc between Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox and IE – take a look for yourself to see the results – some interesting “winners” in certain categories.