Over the past few months, I’ve snapped hundreds of screenshots of the Windows 7 interface, for use in galleries here at ZDNet (like this one and this one) and in Windows 7 Inside Out. But static screenshots don’t do justice to some of the nuances of actually using a feature. So when ZDNet’s crack video production team offered to help me to produce some screencasts, I jumped at the chance. You’ve no doubt heard about Aero Snap and Aero Shake. Here’s a chance to see these features in action. (Hint: Click the Full Screen button, in the lower right corner, just to the right of the Menu button, to see the most detail.

E-commerce sites have two seconds to load a Web page or consumers will click away. And after three seconds nearly all customers will split, according to research by Forrester and Akamai. Akamai had Forrester conduct a followup to a 2006 survey. The 2006 survey found that 4 seconds was the threshold for Web page loading. Three years later that threshold has been halved. Quick page loading is a big factor in loyalty for e-commerce sites. No surprise there. It’s also no surprise that Akamai—which sells services to speed up Web pages—is doing the survey. Nevertheless, the results are interesting.

Intel has reorganized its upper management, and one executive, Pal Gelsinger, is taking a new high-profile role at storage and software company EMC, the companies announced Monday. Gelsinger, 48, had been a major figure at Intel, where he worked for 30 years. Among his roles: chief architect of a flagship chip from the 1990s, the 486 that followed the 386 and preceded the Pentium; the company's first chief technology officer; and most recently co-general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, which brought in more than half of the chipmaker's revenue selling chips for servers and business PCs. At EMC, Gelsinger will be president and chief operating officer of the Information Infrastructure Products group, reporting to Chief Executive Joe Tucci and overseeing the company's businesses in storage, security, content management and archiving, and IT management. "The technology industry has undergone almost incomprehensible change over the last three decades since I entered it," Gelsinger said in a statement. "The rate and pace of change and challenge is not abating in the slightest. EMC is extremely well positioned to play a pivotal role in the IT industry for decades to come, and I am privileged to join Joe and his EMC leadership team in that endeavor."

It’s hard to imagine big, bad search monopolist Google quaking in its boots over Bing (or even Bing+Yahoo). Yet just a couple of months after Microsoft launched Bing, Google announced it is tweaking its own search infrastructure.

Google officials said on August 10 that the company is seeking help testing a new-and-improved search system, codenamed “Caffeine” — complete with changes to its indexing, ranking and crawling mechanisms. Silicon Alley Insider speculates that Caffeine could be the “secret project” to which the New York Post was referring back in June when it reported that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was assembling a crack team of Google search experts to tweak Google’s engine in response to Bing.

Bing, the revamped Live Search, included a number of user-interface changes, as well as tweaks to the underlying Microsoft search algorithm. The Caffeine test site — which anyone can try themselves starting August 10 — doesn’t offer any kind of noticeable UI tweaks. It does, however, change the way results are ranked.

At its annual financial analyst day last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed that the Starter edition of Windows 7 would be limited to devices with small screens, small keyboards and low-power processors. Say hello to the “Microsoft tax”. Details of these restrictions had been leaked earlier, but this serves as confirmation, although the “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” bit is worryingly vague. Although I think that’s what’s behind this vagueness is the fact that Microsoft has had to change plans. Because of bad publicity, Microsoft had to abandon the idea of the three-app limit. This made Starter edition pretty much all the OS that most people would want, especially on a portable system. But the problem with that is the fact that Starter edition is the budget edition, so it doesn’t help Microsoft’s bottom line.

Getting your personal email hacked is generally a personal problem. There might be some minor career implications if it happens while youre running for vice president of the United States, but it tends to be more embarrassing than costly. But when you use the same password for personal email that you use for accessing work-related documents, then things might start to spin a little out of control. Thats apparently what happened to a Twitter employee. Her Gmail account was hacked, and then the intruder allegedly exploited that break-in to access official Twitter company documents stored on Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Apps. The consequences for Twitter arent quite clear at this time -- nobodys saying the pilfered info was on par with the Pentagon Papers or the Nixon tapes. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone likened it to having his underwear drawer searched: It was embarrassing, but nobody should be surprised about whats in there. He was particularly irked that the documents somehow found their way to publications like TechCrunch. The founder of that site, Michael Arrington, apparently had a different take on Twitters underoos: He didnt think exposing any of the info should be embarrassing; in fact, he seemed to think Twitters skivvies were really pretty interesting. TechCrunch and others couldnt resist publishing some of the information, and they didnt confine themselves to 140 characters. Twitter has warned that TechCrunch and the others may have crossed some legal boundaries by airing Twitters laundry, but if the issue does make it to court, there are sure to be some interesting arguments in defense of freedom of the press.