By Rich Robinson for Windows Guides
Enable or Disable Location Sensors in Windows 7
The location sensors in Windows 7 enable your operating system and other software to adapt to your current geographical location. Of course, your computer must have a location sensor supporting hardware e.g., a GPS device, wireless WAN radios or other cellular triangulation technologies. Using these location sensors, your applications can know exactly where you are and provide you with relevant information and content. For example, some twitter clients in Windows can use the location sensors and can automatically post your geographical location along with your tweets.
Most of the modern laptops and desktops are coming with some sort of GPS device installed inside them to take advantage of this location sensor feature in Windows. But even if your computer does not have such a location sensor hardware device, you can install a software emulation of such devices. Geosense for Windows is such a software based location sensor for Windows 7 which uses Google Location API to find your present location.
By default, Windows 7 does not enable the location sensors for any user. If you want to make use of location sensor feature in Windows, then you can enable them from the Control Panel in Windows 7. Here is how:
This excerpt appears with the permission of Windows Guides.
Update: Windows 8 will include this same technology
In Windows 8 Release Preview, the built-in Windows Location Provider supplies apps with location data based on Wi-Fi triangulation and IP address data.–microsoft.com
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