Entries from August 2, 2009 - August 8, 2009

Thursday
Aug062009

Windows 7 Family Pack

Microsoft has announced the pricing for the 3 user family of Windows Home Premium, $150. However, they are also saying that this will only be a limited time offering. The package will include the media and a license that can be used to activate three workstations in a single household. The other side of the coin with this announcement is that Microsoft is planning to offer this while supplies last.

In a briefing yesterday, Microsoft Product Manager Michelle Haven confirmed that the Family Pack is “intended to be a limited-quantity offer” but added that Microsoft plans to listen to customer feedback to “find out if customers love it.”

If you want to have this offer last longer don’t hesitate contacting Microsoft to let them know.

Thursday
Aug062009

Intel Says It Has a Fix for Faulty NAND Flash Firmware

We’ll see… It will be good if this comes out this quickly and works. 

Intel Says It Has a Fix for Faulty NAND Flash Firmware

Thursday
Aug062009

Microsoft’s Windows Experience Blog

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Located mixed in with the rest of Microsoft’s Windows Blog Sites is their Windows Experience Blog which is jam packed with useful tips and reviews about many different Microsoft products.

Whether you are looking for new product releases, extra help on using an application or product reviews that are not included in the other blogs you will find good information readily available to you. Take a quick look I think you will come away with some useful new tidbit.

Thursday
Aug062009

Windows XP Mode RC - Serious improvement over beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

One of the keys for us to use Windows 7 in our company’s computer environment is the ability to use Windows XP Mode to access some of the applications that we are still keeping around. This article discusses the new features that have been added to the Release Candidate and the benefits that each one provides us. Good reading for all of you that have legacy applications and don’t want or can’t update to newer versions.

Windows XP Mode RC - Serious improvement over beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

Thursday
Aug062009

Windows Anytime Upgrade Pricing

Microsoft has announced their Microsoft Anytime Upgrade and Family Pack Pricing. There are three version upgrades that are available.

Here is the basic pricing path from your various starting points to the more advanced versions of Windows 7.

Upgrade to ->

Home Premium

Professional

Ultimate

Starter

$80

$115

$165

Home Basic

$80

$165

Home Premium

$90

$140

Professional

$130

You will most likely come into contact with the starter edition of Windows 7 if you purchase a Netbook PC. The three main upgrades that I see that will have any significance will be taking the Starter Edition to either Home Premium or Professional and Home Premium to Professional. In most cases this will be the primary upgrade paths that most of you will be making.

Below is a chart that shows some of the main pricing differences between the versions put together by Paul Thurott and can be found on his Supersite for Windows here: Be sure to click through to this link to see a complete guide to the feature list comparing each version side by side. This will go a long way to help you determine which product is best for you.

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Wednesday
Aug052009

Launch of the new TechSmith Education Community Blog and Website

image If I were still in education I would be using the TechSmith products all of the time. Even so, I use some aspect of Camtasia or Jing everyday whether it is to include static image in my proposals or blog notes or to create a quick clip image on how to do something on the computer with in a program. I love the ease of use of their products and the integration between them. Camtasia and Jing especially have become my mainstays for quick presentations of products and teaching our clients how to use their computers and software. It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and when you can include the words as well with your narration then you have everything you need in one package.

With the launch of  these two new sites, as an educator you will have more information that you can take advantage of. Be sure to contact us for special pricing and quantity discounts. If you haven’t tried any of these products yet you can get a free download on their site.

Products:

Camtasia Studio Screen Recording and Presentation BoxCamtasia Studio Screen Recording & Presentation

Record your screen simply. Add professional polish. Produce stunning videos at any size. Delight viewers on the Web, CD, or portable devices. Train. Present. Persuade.

Download SnagIt Icon Free Camtasia Studio Trial

SnagIt Screen Capture and Sharing (graphic)Snagit Screen Capture & Sharing

Take a “snapshot” of anything on your PC screen. Send it, store it, turn it into a detailed graphic, find it later. Snagit makes it easy.

Download SnagIt Icon Free Snagit Trial

Morae customer experience software boxshotCamtasia Relay Lecture Capture and Presentation Recording for Organizations

Camtasia Relay allows you to record and automatically produce and distribute any presentation, meeting, lecture, tutorial or demo, and post it for all to see. Give your audience full access to your content anytime, anywhere.

Try Camtasia Relay Free Camtasia Relay Trial

Jing Visual ConversationJing Simple Capture with Instant Sharing

Use Jing to snap a picture or make a quick video of anything on your computer screen...then share it instantly! Learn more.

Screencast.com Media HostingScreencast.com Content Hosting

Host images, video, and pretty much anything else, while maintaining ownership. Share what you want, how and when you choose. Upload. Manage. Share. Use Screencast.com for free: Sign up now »

Let me know if you  have any questions about these products.

Wednesday
Aug052009

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld

High-performance storage for notebook and desktop PCsSince I reported the price drop on these drive a week or two ago I only thought it would be appropriate to add this little bump in the road for Intel’s new consumer-class X25-M and X18-M SSDs (solid state-disk drives). Seems that if you initiate a  Bios password  on the drive you will lose your access to anything on the drive. Intel will be coming with a firmware upgrade to this issue shortly and you will be able to fix this problem. So far that is the only glitch in an otherwise great product. Shipments of these drives have been stopped until the fix is in and been applied to all channel held devices.

Intel confirms data corruption bug in new SSDs, halts shipments | Storage - InfoWorld

Wednesday
Aug052009

Evernote – finally a reason to use it.

image I had talked about this program a while back and had likened it to a poor version of OneNote, a program I am sure that if you follow this blog you know I am a big fan of it. Evernote describes its program: “Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.”

There are clients for:

On the desktop you can create notes the contain both text and audio, find printed and handwritten text within images, Clip web content into notes, capture screen shots and synchronize your notes among all of your desktops and mobile devices. The last feature is what really caught my eye. When I saw that I had an iPhone client I finally found the connection that I was looking for to easily share information between my devices. Information anywhere is a big thing for me and this just one more spoke in the wheel to give it to me.

In the free version you have some file limitations that over the next few months I’ll see if it gives me any problems. They have two versions, free and premium. I have captured a screen shot below showing the differences between the two versions. The paid version costs $45/year or $5/ month if you are not sure that you want to commit to it.

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How does this translate into real numbers we can associate with. Evernote has again done the math for us and here is a chart showing what these limitations might be with real types of data.

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If you are using this to share textual information between devices the free version should be more than adequate. However, if you are capturing a lot of websites, pictures or audio notes than you may want to consider the Premium plan. In my case, I just want to be able to share data between my desktops and mobile easily and this seems like a great method to do so. I am still using OneNote to share the greater portion of info between my desktops, but I needed this one piece to tie in my iPhone and now I think that I have it. We’ll see.

To give you an idea of the text formatting capability on the web interface I have captured a screen shot below for you to look at. It has standard formatting functions including Bold, Italics, Underlining, Super and Subscripting, Left-Center-Right justifying, Strikeout, indent, Line Insertion, Line Numbering and Bullets, creating a hyperlink and clearing a hyperlink assignment, removing formatting and TODO Checkboxes. You can color your text, change fonts and size (these are limited but you have a small amount of flexibility).

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When you are creating a note you have the ability to enter tags for the note to later group on, and to assign the note to a folder that you create that is called a notebook. Once you have assigned tags to your notes then you can list your grouped notes quickly by opening the tags group and showing all of the tags that you have entered. Click on the tag group you are interested in and just the tagged subgroup notes will be displayed. You are given several management tools for your tags as well such as creating new tags, renaming a tag, deleting a tag and removing the tag from all your notes that contain the tag.

You have several methods for getting notes into Evernote. You can clip information from a website, enter info from your desktop application, enter info from a web browser, email to a specified email address, or from your Mobile device. You can then sort your notes on the source of the notes, by the type of information the note contains (images, audio, PDF, Ink, Encrypted text, Attachments, To Do lists, unfinished To Do Lists and Finished To Do lists), when the notes were created and when they were last modified. All in all a wide variety of choices to get at your data and quickly focus on what you are looking for. I didn’t mean to leave out the fact that you can also type in a key word that will search all of your notes and quickly display those notes that contain the search word or characters that you entered.

Lastly, if you wish to create a notebook that you want to share data with others you have that capability as well. Drawbacks, not sure on the onset here that I see too many yet but I’ll get back to you on that.

Monday
Aug032009

How to Series – OneNote – Updating auto capture locations

Every month I update where my OneNote Captures will automatically default to when capturing a webpage or Outlook email. The following video will show you what I do each month so that I everything works just the way I like it too!

How To Series - OneNote Updating auto capture locations