Lively from Google

GOOGLE, KNOWN for its plain-Jane approach to Web design, has come up with something much wackier.On Tuesday the company introduced Lively an online tool that allows people to embody a cartoon-ish online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The rooms can be added to any blog or Web site.

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Online chat rooms are two-dimensional - they include text, and sometimes voice and video. Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars.They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one an-other. Users can design their own virtual environments, hang-ing on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa,
Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Inside Google, the product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at the University of Arizona have been testing Lively for several months.

Hiberfil.sys

Hiberfil.sys:

• How to delete it
• What is it's function?
• How do I use it?

In theory, it is supposed to be a quick shortcut or power saving option that allows you to leave your PC in suspended animation until you are ready to work again. However, in practice, most people find little time difference between shutting down and using hibernation. For people who use drive imaging to backup their system, the hiberfil.sys file can bloat the backup files - making them larger (sometimes over 1GB bigger!) and therefore slower to copy/restore.

Hibernation temporarily 'freezes' the computer when the PC becomes inactive, so it won't work if you have tasks running constantly (eg downloading files). However it can be handy if you want the computer to sleep after a task has completed (such as creating a video).

OK, that's the role of hibernation - so what is the hiberfil.sys file and why is it so big? Hibernation takes everything in memory and writes it to your hard drive as the hiberfil.sys file. If you have 512MB of memory, then hiberfil.sys will be about 512MB. If you have 1GB, the file will be around 1GB. The important point to remember is that even if you don't use hibernation, hiberfil.sys will still take up this huge amount of disk space. The way to remove the file is to turn off the hibernation feature (by default, hibernate is activated automatically when XP is installed). Here's how to do it:

• Open the Windows Control Panel
• Double-click Power Options
• Click the Hibernate tab, de-select the 'Enable hibernate support' check box, and then click Apply.
• Restart your computer and hiberfil.sys will be automatically deleted.
• If you change your mind in the future and would like to use hibernation, go to the Windows Help & Support Center and search for 'enable hibernation'. It should be the first result. The instructions detail some other steps you may need to follow to reactivate the hibernation.