Last December 5, 2007, online crowds who own Windows Vista was delighted when Yahoo’s Senior Product Manager, Josh Jacobson, announced the preview version (pre-beta) release of their long-awaited Yahoo! Messenger for Vista through its official blog.

As we all know, Yahoo Messenger (YM) is one of the most popular messengers in the world (other important messengers include MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, etc).

Many YM users who own Vista have been waiting for quite some time. Lots of people dropped their emails through email subscription page provided by Yahoo to acquire the news as soon as it becomes available. I was one of them and I expected a lot.

By first impression, the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista preview version release looks good. Installation is smooth and easy – as usual. When I run the new messenger for the first time, it looks very modern and “Vista.” Yes, it exactly boasts a fresh-looking transparent interface, taking advantage of Windows Vista’s graphics subsystem, the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). YM for Vista lets you customize the window theme and list appearance as you desire. It looks pretty much like a widget, which is great. Soon, programs meant for Vista will follow this interface trend.

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Few days ago, I wrote a post about Paint.NET, the amazing opensource graphics editing program meant for Windows operating system. After I wrote that, I realized I’ve gotten in love with opensource applications so here I am bringing you another nifty program: WinDirStat!

To tell you: WinDirStat is not new, but probably this could be the first time you heard about this program. WinDirStat basically will solve your hard disk mysteries by letting you see your hard disk’s contents in a “bird-eye” view. If ever wondered where your space has gone off or if you want to know which file is eating your space away, this program will help you identify it. Yes, no more hard disk mysteries, bar none.

The first screen you’ll encounter is the hard disk selection (shown in a list above). You will see multiple entries if you have more than one hard disk drives. In my case I only have one, and there is less than three gigabytes remaining space on my 80 GB laptop hard disk drive. This is where the mystery kicks in: how come my hard disk is almost full? I will let WinDirStat solve this for me.

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