Windows 7 arrives: The time is finally ripe

Nearly three years after the debut of the botched Windows Vista, enough is right with Windows 7 to unseat an aging Windows XP

By Randall C. Kennedy | InfoWorld

If you are wondering what reasons you should think about to decide if you should move up in equipment and into the soon to be released Windows 7 operating system, read this article. Infoworld’s Randall Kennedy wrote a great piece describing the history of Windows 7, its XP and Vista beginnings, and how its new interface and functionality can benefit you in your computing experience.

Some key features that I find extremely useful:

• Search Field – The integrated search field in explorer windows and in the Start Menu is fast and extremely useful. Whether you are looking for a document, email, note or a program, just start typing some key words to search on and see what pops up. I use this feature to pull up programs that I don’t use often so don’t have on my taskbar. Once you get used to using it you will never want to go back.
• Explorer Window Breadcrumbs – we have seen this advancement in many programs. This is another one of those things that once you begin using it you don’t want to lose it, and if it is not part of a program you get angry because it is such a useful function. Each of the arrows above points to a point on the bar that I can click on to go back instantly to that folder level. Simple, fast and easy, just what we want. The points build as I am clicking into each folder so it is laying the crumbs for be to be able to follow back from whence I came from.
• Taskbar and Aero Glass – one of the Aero Glass features that has been better utilized is on the Taskbar. As you are sliding across the icons on your Taskbar you will see a representation of the applications that are currently running in each application program. Take a look at the video below to see how this works.

• Pinning – we have seen the concept of pinning items to your Start Menu before but now you are able to do this same thing with Taskbar. Simply right click on an start menu application icon and you have the choice to pin it to your taskbar. Now you have single click access to your favorite programs.This is not limited to just programs, you  can pin documents and other utilities to the Taskbar as well. In XP I made extreme use of the Quick Launch bar, this feature puts this kind of function on steroids.

One of the things that we have seen is the increase in speed when accessing some of our older applications, even over XP. Now we are attributing this to the way Windows 7 as changed the way it accesses database structure from a server but in reality all we know is that it runs like a speed demon. The tests performed by InfoWorld Labs showed greater memory use and slower speeds when compared to XP and slightly overall performance over the current releases of Vista. But in most cases, you will not be putting this program on your older equipment but moving it onto new equipment as you are refreshing. Microsoft in all their meetings with us has stated that you really want to run this program in 64-bit mode and take advantage of how inexpensive memory has become. So if you are configuring a system, don’t skimp on RAM.

Hardware compatibility – having been built from the Vista kernel, Windows 7 doesn’t have the lack of hardware drivers that gave Vista such a black eye when it first came out. Two years after Vista’s initial release hardware vendors have caught up with drives that support both Vista and Windows 7 quite adequately. In one of my previous articles I mentioned how when installing Windows 7 on my Netbook I didn’t have to go out and search for a single driver to get all of the hardware components functioning. It was great. So this is now pretty much a non-issue.

Third Party Application Compatibility – Microsoft has finally recognized that Windows XP is still the Gold Standard for application compatibility and stability. While we saw many programs failing in the Vista environment, Windows 7’s application support has been much improved. Windows 7 key is VXP or Virtual Windows XP Mode which provides a virtualized WXP image for running applications in their native environment. So if an application doesn’t work right in XP compatibility mode then you can virtualize it. “Still, VXP is compelling in that it provides a fully licensed copy of Windows XP that you can run alongside your Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate license. And it's free.”

Going back to hardware. With the new norm in systems being multi-core (dual and quad for now and more coming down the road) and much larger standard memory configurations, you will want in employ an operating system that uses the these and many more hardware configurations. Windows 7 takes advantage of multi-core systems better than XP with its base architecture. You will be better leveraged for the future applications taking full advantage of these capabilities.

We all loved XP but once you begin to work with Windows 7 I think you will be won over.

US Airways announces they will have WiFi on their planes too!

US Airways will be adding in-flight internet access for WiFi enabled devices on their fleet of 50 Airbus A321aircraft. They will be adding flying hotspot connectivity in early 2010 partnering with industry leader Aircel to offer full internet service. “If this service is available on your flight, you'll see a WiFi icon when you’re booking your flight on www.usairways.com starting in early 2010.”

Although the cost of service hasn't been determined yet, Aircell's current prices for Gogo Inflight Internet range from $5.95 to $12.95, depending on the length of flight and type of WiFi enabled device used.

CameraMate™ High Speed Reader (CF)

If you are stuck with compact flash (CF) then you may want to look at this device from Verbatim. The CameraMate High Speed Reader makes it easy to transfer photos and video from your CF cards.  “Simply connect the reader with the swivel USB connector to get started. Compatible with Windows® and MAC® operating systems, just plug and play to begin transferring photos instantly.”  These are just $14.95.

Features & Benefits

• Supports memory cards formats – CF Type I & II, Microdrive
• Compatibility – Windows – XP, 2000 and Vista, Mac – OS 9.x and higher
• Swivel USB connector for hard to reach ports
• Actual Size – 3.06” x 2.19” x 0.59”

Mizco SD and microSD Card Reader

I got one of these as a combination with a SD memory card that I purchase awhile back. I couldn’t live without it. We have these for under $10 and it is worth having several of them floating around for different purposes.

Media Support:

• microSD
• Secure Digital (SD) Card

Interfaces/Ports

• Host Interface:  USB
• Interfaces:  1 x 4-pin Type A Male USB 2.0 – USB
• Form Factor:  External Hot-swappable

Microsoft Releases Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Industry partners are finalizing new products in time for the worldwide launch.

Yesterday I blogged that this was anticipated, today it is a reality. Here is Microsoft’s PressPass News Release  post yesterday. This press release includes links to other Microsoft sites that will you further insight into these releases. If you browse to the Windows Team Blog page you will get many more links to different aspects of Windows 7. You can find the actual Windows 7 Team Announcement here.(Note: My IE8 errors out on the media reader when this page loads. However, FireFox loads the page just fine.)  All of these blogs they have setup are brand new so there is very little content in them as of yet. They might be worth visiting again in a week or so to see how they begin to flesh out.

Microsoft Releases Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Industry partners are finalizing new products in time for the worldwide launch.

Intel Unveils New Flash Drives, Marks Prices Down

If you have been looking at making your workstations and notebooks more responsive,  less energy consumption and less prone to damage in notebooks. Intel’s products are good but we have been seeing some real good results with OCZ drives as well. However, this is an article about Intel’s product so if you are interested take a look at the link below.

Intel Unveils New Flash Drives, Marks Prices Down

Windows 7 – RTM related dates

Today will probably be the day that Microsoft announces Window 7 has reached the next status level, “release to manufacturing”, RTM. If this continues to hold true, the following dates will have importance to us in regards to this product. Note that if the software is moved to RTM status today, Microsoft will have successfully met their projected deadline for this release.

• OEM’s should have their copies though 2 days after the announcement meaning this Friday if it is announced today.
• Aug 6- Developers and IT Professionals who subscribe to MSDN and TechNet will become available for download
• August 7 – Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance Plans
• August 16 or 23 – Microsoft’s hardware and software partners will receive their copies of RTM.
• Sept 1 – Volume Licensing customers without Software Assurance Plans
• Oct 22 – Consumers and other customers will have Windows 7 available for purchase at retail

That’s all we have for now. Will add updates as they come along.

Hey Bob, can you or one of your tech people answer this question about win 7 working with the VPN?

It’s working fine with the VPN tunnels we are using. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t in the released version that is coming out in October.

I have Win7 running on every computer I have at home and love it. I have only one program giving me grief and it is because it does things that are underhanded in the programming world and I have no doubt that in Oct when the final product is released this company will have an update in its product as well. I spend between 15-20 hours connected from home per week right now and don’t have any glitches at all… none. We are running test systems internally and even with our legacy applications that don’t work well with XP or Vista, Work extremely will with Win7. Some have had an enormous speed increase in reporting functions as well. We are very happy with what we see so far. If you are buying a notebook with thought of using Win7, be sure that you have a decent processor, one that supports the virtual bit technology, and will work with 64bit. You will want as much RAM in it as possible to take advantage of the 64bit operating system and later on the virtual desktop. These are all features that will greatly enhance the use of the machine. So the comment below “I doubt anything will work with Win7” is totally erroneous. It’s a great product that we wish Vista was when it came out. I even have it running on a Netbook with 2gb ram, and an atom N270 processor. I wouldn’t use it as my main system but it does just fine for word processing, email and research purposes that I use it for. It is much faster than with XP that it came with and saw all the hardware components on the netbook without having to search and load any drivers. The applications I have loaded include: Office Enterprise 2007, Live Writer, LightRoom, our service program called Connectwise, Live Writer (blogging software), Skype, JungleDisk Backup Software, LiveMesh, Camtasia Studio, Zune and Jing. We use Astaro for our router and its VPN client is installed. All of this on a lowly Atom Processor based Netbook running Win7.

Adobe admits users vulnerable after downloading Reader

Computerworld is reporting that Adobe admits a flaw in their update process for Adobe Reader. You may not have the most up to date version running that includes the security fixes that are currently available. There are more and more exploits being developed by hackers directed specifically at PDF file technology and it is important that you keep your Adobe Reader software up to date with the latest fixes.  Adobe is promising changes in their auto-updater program to try to fix the update problems with Adobe Reader but they haven’t yet specified what those fixes are going to be. So for the time being, make sure you are aware of the current versions available and get yourself updated.

Adobe admits users vulnerable after downloading Reader

Analyst: Microsoft Windows 7 'Anytime Upgrade' prices won't tempt netbook users | Windows - InfoWorld

People keep worrying about upgrading these netbooks with a more capable version. I know I am running Ultimate on mine right now but for the things that I am using it for, I really don’t need any of the features that Ultimate is giving me. Most people are using netbooks in addition to their current PC’s not as their main computer so they really don’t need much more capability than being able to write a letter, send and receive email and do research on the web. All of these functions don’t need anything that the higher end operating system packages would give them. I may be wrong but I really don’t see it.

Analyst: Microsoft Windows 7 'Anytime Upgrade' prices won't tempt netbook users | Windows - InfoWorld

Friendfeed setup

When I was tweaking my Friendfeed account this week end I started clicking on some items that had some results that really overloaded my email account. You have the ability when setting up the friends that you are following in groups in your system. As always, I was in out of screens so often without taking a long look at what I was choosing in my setup. 

The image to the right shows some of the basic categories that I setup to categorize the people that I am following. The bottom half is what you really need to pay attention to. In the next image showing below, you will see that you have the ability to push emails to your email account for all the people that you have setup in your different categories.

If you go to Settings-Notifications:Email/IM preferences, you will get a dialog box similar to the one shown below:

Notice the listings under Friend Lists…  they match up to the categories I showed you in the first image. You have the system Email/IM or send the information over to your desktop client. Good if you need to keep up on someone or some group that is pushing out data that you need to follow hourly or daily. However, when I checked all the categories to be emailed to me there was a thunderous amount of data being streamed to my email box. Whoops! What can make it worse, is that you can push just the new posts, friends comments and new posts or all comments and new posts. There are some pretty active people that I follow that I really would rather pick the time and place that I read their posts and the responses here rather than in my email. If you are like me, my regular mail quantity is enough I don’t need to artificially need to add to it. So pick and choose how you set this option up. By using categories effectively you can really control how you look and find the information that you want to read.

Welcome to twitterfeed.com

Here is the email auto response from Twitterfeed telling you how to setup your feed post.

Welcome to Twitterfeed!

There's just a few simple steps necessary to get your RSS feeds to publish to Twitter and other services. On the Create New Feed page:

1. Connect your Twitter account to Twitterfeed

2. Copy-Paste your RSS feed URL into Twitterfeed

3. Use the advanced settings to customize how the feed is tweeted. (Optional)

Then just click Create Feed and you're done!

Please note that when you add feeds, it takes Twitterfeed about an hour to initially process them. However once that's done your feeds should be published within minutes from then on.

Once your feeds are up and running, your dashboard will show you stats on how many people have clicked on each post. You'll be able to compare posts and see just how Twitterfeed is helping to build your traffic.

How it all came together

The Issue: trying to automate all of my different blog postings, picture uploads and other content to one feed location for me to work with. I have two Twitter accounts bappleby (personal) and bobstechtalk (associated with my professional side) and I have one Facebook account Bob Appleby that I wanted all my info to post to. By using friendfeed, I was able to combine several feed services to be pulled and included in this one area. There are currently 58 services that have defined on Friendfeed for you to use to do this. Some of them like the BLOG service, will allow you to add any blog site to your feed which is how I got my Squarespace and LiveSpaces accounts posting. You can also add Twitter and Facebook feeds but be careful if you are planning to pull or push to either of those sites from here, you don’t want to create an endless circle of posts between all of these sites.

Here is a complete list of all of the services currently available through Friendfeed:

Once I had my Friendfeed collecting data correctly I was able to go to Facebook and set up my wall  to pull the RSS feed from Friendfeed automatically. You will find this under the options link right under the share button for posting new feeds.  When you click on options you will get a new link in the same place called Settings. Click on the Settings link and a new dialog box will appear.

You are allowed one Blog/RSS site that you can pull from. Click on that from the list and you can paste the location you want to pull from. I posted the RSS from my Friendfeed into the box and it pulled it down just fine.

 http://friendfeed.com/?auth=PLaYbotBMT4Mia4b&format=atom

Press the Update button and you have it saved and you will see your Facebook Wall populate from your feed from Friendfeed.

Now I mentioned that I am also feeding Twitter. I am doing this from two different programs. One, Friendfeed allows me to post from the different feeds I am pulling from to a single Twitter account. So I set up the Twitter tool in Friendfeed and setup that just my personal blog and SmugMug entries were posted to Twitter from here.

I then set up Twitterfeed pointing to BobsTechTalk at Squarespace and created entries to push posts to both my personal and professional Twitter accounts.

You have a few settings that you can add to the post as shown below.

If there anymore tweaks that I find, I will post them here as update comments. Hope this helps you out with your internet publishing.

Yea! It worked

Twitterfeed finally updated and now seems to be posting just fine. I have Friendfeed pulling from all of my sites so everything is coming into one place including smugmug. I’ll have to see how that works.

Trying to automate can be very frustrating

I have been working since 5am this morning trying to get the postings that I make to automatically post to Twitter. I had to go through all my old postings and delete them all because they pointed to areas in Squarespace that no longer existed and you can’t have that happening to frustrate your readers. So that is all cleaned up. Now I have set up two accounts in twitter, one linked to me personally and the other using the moniker BobsTechTalk. I have set up twitterfeed to push posts from here to both sites and I am hoping that this will cause it to happen. Let’s see if does with this post.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

A recent survey reported on by CNET Security writer Lance Whitney, asked the question: “Hey, Why do people respond to Spam?” The response from almost a third of the consumers admitted to responding to a message they suspected to be spam. They also reported that about 80 percent doubted their computers were at risk of ever being infected malware that might be capable of causing other damage without their knowledge. The study is based on interviews with 800 computer users in the U.S. and Canada who said they were not "security experts" and who used e-mail addresses not managed by an IT department.

The results are pretty scary and I hope that bringing this to your attention will remind you to be careful of the dangers you face when viewing and responding to unsolicited and unknown email senders. If you are interested in reading the 60-page survey, it is available at no cost on the MAAWG Web site, www.MAAWG.org. Look for the paper entitled: "A Look at Consumers' Awareness of Email Security and Practices or 'Of Course I Never Reply to Spam, Except Sometimes'"

About the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG)

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is where the messaging industry comes together to work against spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. MAAWG (www.MAAWG.org) represents almost one billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators worldwide. It is the only organization addressing messaging abuse holistically by systematically engaging all aspects of the problem, including technology, industry collaboration and public policy. MAAWG leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., MAAWG is an open forum driven by market needs and supported by major network operators and messaging providers.

Backstage with Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft has put together a few videos on this site to demonstrate some of the new features of Microsoft Office 2010. Currently there are only three interviews but they plan on producing more so come back often to see what they have added.

First Take: Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview | The Download Blog - Download.com

I was a Microsoft regional meeting back in May when I first saw some of the capabilities of this new version of Microsoft Office and I was very impressed with what I saw then. This article outlines some of the highpoints of the new capabilities of Office 2010 which are quite significant. This product won’t be available until sometime next year. If you are doing a lot of collaborative work or have many different devices that you use for production editing, make extensive use of video in your PowerPoint Presentations or graphics in your publications you will find many things that you will want to use in this new version of Office.

First Take: Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview | The Download Blog - Download.com

NBC Sports among the initial group of media producers to focus on the Silverlight 3 platform

Microsoft is releasing Silverlight 3 Platform including support with Visual Studio Pro Edition and  Expression software programming environments. Microsoft will be offering a Visual Studio Pro and Expression bundle for $999. Included with Expression is a rapid prototyping product called Sketchflow. Expression 3 is due out in 30 days and will include Expression Blend, Expression Web design, Expression Encoder (video encoding) and Expression Designer (illustration design).

NBC Sports used Silverlight in the 2008 Olympics is announcing its intent on using Silverlight for online video delivery across all of its sporting programs.

"As we look forward to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver as well as other major championships in 2010, we will be using Silverlight as the preferred technology to deliver the best in next-generation online high-definition video experiences," said NBC's Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media, in a statement released by Microsoft. NBC has used Silverlight and Microsoft Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming for its "Live and Wimbledon" video presentation.

The new Silverlight product will support offline content as well as online, 3D and hardware graphics acceleration. Microsoft says that it has made great inroads with its Silverlight 2 version and states that it is installed on 1 out of 3 PC’s. Adobe has the majority share of this market though. We’ll have to see how well Microsoft does with this next version.

How to shop for your first Digital SLR | Digital Cameras & Camcorders | ZDNet.com

Rachel King wrote a nice article on how to purchase your first DSLR camera. They are good points to follow and I hardily concur. So if you are ready to make the leap consider the seven considerations she outlined here:

How to shop for your first Digital SLR | Digital Cameras & Camcorders | ZDNet.com