stilldrey

before windows 7 came out we worked on being able to explain and demonstrate 7 features in 7 minutes – these 7 second demos are great and really get to the point.  i’m going to have to consider a couple of my own!  i came across these on digg, so now they have been dugg!

this is what i’ve been waiting for – an oem that provides windows 7 without all the trialware that if you didn’t order you probably don’t want.  this morning i was checking out the sony vaio cw (which looks like a great notebook) and noticed besides configuration options like blu-ray, 8 gb ram and a 500 gb hard drive, you can choose a software option sony calls “fresh start” (explanation from sony included below)

fresh start

fresh start provides a basic computing environment where specific vaio® applications, trial software and games are removed from your unit prior to shipment. any additional software applications added to your notebook will not be affected by this application.

brilliant spot on the tonight show with conan o’brien.  intel co-inventor of usb ajay bhatt isn’t the dude in the commercial – conan wastes no time asking really funny questions and some of the suggestions ajay actually agrees to – watch and learn.

wow – how cool is this?  obviously anyone with a portable music player or using sync with the jukebox feature (why not for ipod or zune?) is familiar with album art, but what about online search?

bing’s billboard’s past albums – recognize any of ‘em?

woo hoo!  you can shrink and grow a partition (even the one windows 7 is running on from disk management – one of my favorite really geeky tips)

finally!  i found instructions on how to setup boot from vhd on windows xp so that you can start windows 7.  if you join the chicago windows user group on live.com, you can learn how as well!

this requires windows 7 enterprise or ultimate and you have to setup the vhd of windows 7 ahead of time

i’ve not been a big fan of netbooks primarily because of three things:  1) screen resolution, 2) keyboards and 3) processor limitations.  i have written before about my gateway lt series netbook, but found a dell inspiron 11z that appears to address at least the first two concerns (it has a slightly faster processor than the gateway).  i’ll share some additional findings from the gateway – most of which should apply to the dell as well.

the gateway is light, has a great big hard drive (250 gb) and is great running windows 7.  it’s not a great full screen movie device (a little under powered in the processor department), but for web video does quite nicely.  it has a built in webcam and it was upgraded from the windows vista basic that came with it (the dell has windows vista home premium standard today – not certain if it comes with a free windows 7 upgrade).  both the gateway and the dell have 2 gb of ram.

if you are looking for a light portable computer (maybe to supplement a powerful desktop computer when you are on the go), netbooks can be an option, but i’ve found these two choices have a better mouse track pad layout (buttons are below the track pad instead of to the left and right) and have a useable resolution (1366x768)

i just joined the windows clubhouse and noticed a number of great posts and a couple challenges – check it out at clubhouse.microsoft.com and sign up today!  two that caught my attention were an apple bootcamp 3.0 post (about support for x64 and windows 7) and a lenovo x301 review (from the same person).  looking forward to reading and rating more of the posts and seeing if some of the other new hardware from hp and dell is reviewed there.  the intel core i7 systems have my attention lately.

a question came up today at one of the it pro windows 7 sessions today about applocker - whether you can setup an applocker policy on windows 7 professional.  here's the answer - straight from the windows 7 professional help for applocker (you can setup applocker from the local computer policy on windows 7 professional)

applocker is available in all editions of windows server 2008 r2 and in windows 7 ultimate and windows 7 enterprise. windows 7 professional can be used to create applocker rules. however, applocker rules cannot be enforced on computers running windows 7 professional. organizations should use applocker for all computers that support it.

someone asked me if there were ways to vertically maximize more than two windows using aero snap (snap one window to the left hand side of the screen and a second to the right hand side dragging the windows or using the windows key + left and right arrow keys) and sure enough a taskbar option comes through for this!

right click on a unused area of your taskbar and you can select show windows stacked

up to three windows are maximized horizontally and stacked one after the other

show windows side by side with three windows will vertically maximize and give each a third of the horizontal screen space

if you have four windows, both stacked and side by side arrange the 4 windows the same as shown above.

four

so somehow i missed these two videos until this evening – kanye west interrupting  taylor swift as she accepts the best female video award at this year’s mtv video music awards – ouch!

when stars act selfless – now that’s just cool.

it’s been an entire year, but later this month tekken 6 comes out for the xbox 360.  since then i’ve added a second xbox to our home, begun watching netflix movies instantly on them, created my own custom avatar and gone back to mainly wireless game play even in titles like rock band and guitar hero.  the xbox has easily been elevated to the most important device in our home theater setup.  it’s now connected to a windows 7 media center, zune 80 gb (when that’s not in my ford fusion) and our windows home server.  during parties it’s hooked up to our in wall speakers and music is played from one of the 3 or 4 locations that it can pull from.  tekken was the game that pulled me back to owning a game console (playstation 2).  i have since owned an xbox, a psp, as well as my two xbox 360s, and a wii (mainly for the sports games) always longing for tekken to debut as a multi-platform game.  this october, tekken finally will and between that and some other game titles i’ll probably check out this fall, at least one of the xboxes will see some use as what it was originally purchased for – playing games.

gamertag: stilldrey

here’s another thing that i’ve taken for granted for the past three years using windows vista – secure wireless access even in public.  panera is my favorite place to find it and as you can see by the screen shot below even as i post this blog entry, windows 7 knows that this wireless network is public so it does advertise my homegroup, shares, etc.  i’ll post more on using windows 7 at home over the weekend (there are some more really cool things you can do there).

wireless access at panera – windows 7 knows it’s a public network.

foxit software has one of my must have installations after the many installs and upgrades i've done of windows 7 over the past year.  i typically have occasional need to open a pdf file, and foxit reader does that job well, but what i really like is the ifilter for searching for the correct pdf to open and more recently (thanks to dan orum for this) tim heuer's pdf preview handler (with foxit software sponsorship and license).

in windows 7, you can press and hold down the windows key and press + to zoom in on the screen.  with the aero glass interface the experience is very similar to mark russinovich’s zoom it.

you can press the + key multiple times to really emphasize a portion of the screen and by default once zoomed the zoom follows the mouse around the screen (so you can navigate an enlarged desktop on a projector).

zoom it version 4 has also been enhanced – check it out along with other systernals downloads on technet.