Lee Ferree

It’s been a while since I’ve recommended a Windows upgrade to anyone. Most people are running Windows XP and it’s been great (for the most part). In good faith, I couldn’t push people to invest their time and money into Windows Vista. Even with the recent release of SP2 for Vista, the operating system still leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve spent the last couple years doing “down-grades” to Windows XP as a result.

I’ve been running the Windows 7 RTM since its release on TechNet, and I must say, I’m impressed. Not only does it work well on new hardware, but also legacy (Windows XP) hardware. Windows 7 is what Windows Vista “should have” been.

Here’s some reasons you should consider an upgrade to Windows 7 (as I’ve observed):

A while back I wrote about tweaking Windows 7 to gain better performance from your hardware. With the official Windows 7 release just a couple months away and the overwhelming popularity of low performance netbooks, I thought it’s a good time to update my list. The following list contains the services I’ve disabled in Windows 7. These tweaks work great for me, but your mileage may vary. Proceed with caution, as I’m in no way responsible for your computer “blowing up”!

The following list was compiled from Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit.

Beyond the horde of free apps I use, I also like finding great, free games…

What do you get when you combine RTS with amazing 3D graphics?

Savage 2 – perhaps the best game of its kind. The gameplay is excellent, UI and voice-driven tutorials, superb!

Mozilla released their new Firefox 3.5 browser today. Here’s some tips, tricks and tweaks that may come in handy after you upgrade.

1) If you use a lot of Firefox addons like I do, you may find some of them aren’t working with Firefox 3.5 yet. To get around this, simply do the following:

Type “about:config” into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful,

I got my Facebook username Saturday morning, like millions of others. Then I started thinking, “Maybe I should mirror my new username with all my other Social Networks.” I was mainly concerned about the big kahoonas, Twitter, MySpace and FriendFeed. The changes were pretty painless and I remember thinking, “Sheww!!”

Then I realized something terrible, “I’ve got to update these links EVERYWHERE!!” I’m sure I missed something beyond

Many of my friends have been asking me what I think about Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. With numerous television commercials, even the computer illiterate have heard about Bing. In addition, NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” features a game where selected audience members use Microsoft Bing to play for prizes. With all the hype, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of Bing vs Google to see how Bing really stacks up.

Just to start, Bing is a major improvement over its predecessor,

To be fair, those who know me, know I prefer Linux to Windows in almost every instance. But I’ll save that for another post. I will admit, Microsoft has done a good job with Vista SP2, as it cleans up a lot of the major bugs in the OS, and Windows 7 is certainly a major improvement to its predecessor. With that said, I’m not going to sit here and bash Windows Vista and Windows 7, but rather, tell you what works for me personally in Windows XP and why I like it so much.

Lack of DRM (Digital Rights Management): The first thing I do once I’ve

I guess it just goes to show, you can’t believe every thing you read. While my TechNet Plus account is no more, I’ve installed Vista and Office 2007 Enterprise and the supplied keys are working. I still haven’t checked my keys against every thing I downloaded, but I can safely say not all keys were blacklisted and possibly none ever were.

Wednesday started off like any other day, until you started reading your morning Tech News. I poured my first cup of coffee and started going through my feeds in Google Reader as usual, when I started seeing numerous posts about Microsoft giving away FREE TechNet Plus subscriptions as part of a pilot program they were doing.

A Microsoft TechNet Plus subscription is aimed at IT Professionals who want full-version Microsoft software, beta software, professional support incidents, managed newsgroup support, a technical information library, Microsoft eLearning courses, online concierge chat, the TechNet Magazine, and many other resources for evaluating, deploying, and maintaining Microsoft software. The subscription normally goes for $349 (download-only) or for $599 (download and DVD shipments).

In my last post I talked about My Top 10 Free Software Apps, one of those being Mozilla Firefox. Here’s a list of my Favorite Addons for Firefox.

NoScript
The best security you can get in a web browser! Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks.