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):

- You can run Windows 7 on your older Windows XP hardware
- The graphical interface makes common tasks easier for daily use
- Windows 7 boasts a horde of new security features to protect you online
- Software compatibility is improved over Vista (most programs work)
- Networking features are improved, easy to share files and folders, etc.
- File copies are faster, near Linux speeds
- Media Center (for supported versions) is more intuitive and easy to use
- Better support for hardware drivers over Vista
- Memory usage and stability improved over Vista
- Better integration with memory/superfetch for speedier application loading

Those are just a few reasons, based on my observations. To be fair, I had some problems with the beta and RC versions, unlike Windows 2000 and XP. From what I can tell, Microsoft has been listening to its customers to build a better operating system.

Be sure to check out my tweak guides for Windows 7:
Windows 7 Tips, Tricks and Tweaks (Part II)
Microsoft Windows 7 Tips, Tricks and Tweaks

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

I’m assuming you’re using up-to-date virus/spyware protection and behind a firewall. If not, you may want to leave the following options enabled.

Security Center
Windows Defender
Windows Firewall

Here’s what I disable. I’m also not utilizing the built-in Media Center and eyecandy.

ActiveX Installer (AxInstSV)
Adaptive Brightness
Application Layer Gateway Service
BitLocker Drive Encryption Service
Bluetooth Support Service
BranchCache
Certificate Propagation
Credential Manager
Desktop Window Manager Session Manager
Diagnostic Policy Service
Diagnostic Service Host
Diagnostic System Host
Distributed Link Tracking Client
Encrypting File System (EFS)
Fax
Function Discovery Provider Host
Function Discovery Resource Publication
Health Key and Certificate Management
HomeGroup Listener
HomeGroup Provider
Human Interface Device Access
Interactive Services Detection
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
IP Helper
Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator Service
Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service
Netlogon
Network Access Protection Agent
Offline Files
Parental Controls
Peer Name Resolution Protocol
Peer Networking Grouping
Peer Networking Identity Manager
PnP-X IP Bus Enumerator
PNRP Machine Name Publication Service
Portable Device Enumerator Service
Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel Support
Program Compatibility Assistant Service
Remote Desktop Configuration
Remote Desktop Services
Remote Desktop Services UserMode Port Redirector
Remote Registry RemoteRegistry
RIP Listener
Routing and Remote Access
Secondary Logon
Security Center
Smart Card
Smart Card Removal Policy
SNMP Trap
Superfetch
Tablet PC Input Service
WebClient
Windows Biometric Service
Windows CardSpace
Windows Color System
Windows Connect Now – Config Registrar
Windows Defender
Windows Error Reporting Service
Windows Firewall
Windows Media Center Receiver Service
Windows Media Center Scheduler Service
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
Windows Remote Management (WS-Management)
Windows Search
WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service

To modify whether Superfetch is enabled or disabled, you can perform the following steps:
1. Click the Start orb and type REGEDIT in the Start Search area.

2. Open the Registry Editor.

3. Click the plus sign next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
then SYSTEM
then CurrentControlSet
then Control
then Session Manager
then MemoryManagement
then click PrefetchParameters

4. On the right side, double-click on EnableSuperfetch

5. Give it one of the following values:

0 to disable Superfetch
1 to enable prefetching when program is launched
2 to enable boot prefetching
3 to enable prefectching of every thing

Click OK.

6. Close the Registry Editor.

Change default Windows 7 Codecs with
Preferred DirectShow Filter Tweaker for Windows 7

Change Desktop Icon Size to Look Like XP
The default desktop icon size in Windows 7 is rather large, to make them look like they did in XP, simply right-click an open area on your desktop and click on Small icons under View.

Installed & Working Apps

Audacity
Autoruns
avast! Antivirus
Boxee
Core Temp
Digsby
Everything
Firefox 3.5.2
Free Extended Task Manager (run using XP SP3 Compatibility Mode)
Gizmo5 (Installed using XP SP3 Compatibility Mode)
Google Chrome 3 Beta
Hamachi
ImgBurn
iTunes (Switchless Installer)
Java jre 6u15
Jave jre 6u16
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack
Last.FM
Nero 9 FREE
Office 2003
Opera 10 Beta 3
Paint Shop Pro 7
Paint.NET
Photoshop CS4
PowerDVD 9 Ultra
PowerISO
ProcessExplorer
Quake Live
Quicktime Alternative
Safari
Skype
SumatraPDF
Swiff Player
TeamViewer 4
uTorrent 1.8.3
uTorrent 2.0 Beta
VLC
WinAVI Video Converter 9
WinRAR
WinSCP
xVM VirtualBox (no networking)

Installed & Working Games

2Moons (copied from XP installation / portable)
Cabal Online
Doom 3 + Resurrection of Evil Expansion
Plants vs Zombies
Quake 4
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Wolfenstein (2009)
Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory

To get 1920×1080 in Doom 3 + Expansion you need to edit the cfg files to reflect the following settings:

seta r_customHeight “1080″
seta r_customWidth “1920″
seta r_fullscreen “1″
seta r_mode “-1″

Not Working

Adobe Photoshop CS3

That’s all I have for now. Please let me know if this was helpful or you have any discrepancies with your version of Windows 7. I’ll update this post as new info is made available.

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!

Savage 2 is cross-platform, meaning you can install it on Windows, Mac OS X, 32 and 64-Bit Linux. Truly amazing for such a great game.

Here’s a video, but you really have to see the game in action to get the full effect!

I’m always looking for the next best MMORPG. Several years playing World of Warcraft will do that to you. I’ve reviewed a few already, and now I bring you a new one.

Cabal – is a free MMORPG that offers vibrant 3D graphics, smooth gameplay and an extensive UI. The game is challenging and chalked full of quests, something that’s often overlooked.

Here’s a gameplay video.

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 promise!” button.

Right-click anywhere. Choose New-> Boolean. Make the name of your new config value “extensions.checkCompatibility” and set it to “false“.
Make another new boolean value called “extensions.checkUpdateSecurity” and set the value to “false“.
Restart Firefox.

For users of the popular Firefox addon, Tab Mix Plus, the Dev-Build can be downloaded here.

2) Firefox 3.5 adds a new “Tab Tearing” feature that lets you drag tabs off the bar and into a new window. If you drag tabs around often, you may find this feature annoying, as it’s easy to accidentally drag tabs off the bar, creating a new Firefox window.

Here’s how to disable it:

First, install the Disable detach and tear off tab addon.

Once you’ve installed the experimental Firefox extension, you’ll need to open up Add-ons from the Tools menu, and then choose “Disable detach tab” from the extension options page.

3) Here’s an old tweak that increases the speed at which Firefox loads pages. If you haven’t already tried it, do yourself a favor and follow the steps listed below:

a) Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.

b) Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

c) Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New–> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“

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This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by right-clicking and creating a New–> Integer or String

“network.dns.disableIPv6“: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0“

Then I realized something terrible, “I’ve got to update these links EVERYWHERE!!” I’m sure I missed something beyond Google Profile, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, twhirl, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Gmail TwitterGadget, boxee, Digsby, FriendFeed and Yahoo Profile.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we only had one Social Network to manage, not 4 or more?

Since that will probably never happen, a universal “ID Code” is a nice idea. Instead of changing your username on both your social site and ALL your connected apps, you’d just enter your “ID Code” once for each app. Your “ID Code” would be linked to your social site’s username. You could then change your username at any time (so long as your new choice is available) and the social site would link your “ID Code” to the new username you selected.

As we’re likely to be using more social nets in the future, not less… we need a better way to manage them, along with our apps.

How do you manage username changes on your social networks, or do you dare? What changes would you suggest to existing and future Social Networking Sites?

Just to start, Bing is a major improvement over its predecessor, Microsoft Live Search. Searching is far more intuitive and results are easily sortable.

There seems to be fewer parked sites containing ads, which is one thing that’s always drove me bananas with Google.

Shopping results in Bing are similar to what Google already offers.

Hovering over a search result to get detailed site info is a nice touch. It’s something we’ll surely see in Google’s future.

Video previewing is also nice. Moving your cursor over a video thumbnail will begin playing the embedded video. Other than that, Google offers the same functionality, while Grid View is a few extra clicks.

I’ve also noticed official sites of companies and celebrities being pushed to the top of search, as they should be. But I’m afraid this is what brings me to the downside of Bing…

What if you’re not a famous celebrity or aren’t the owner of a large corporation? Where will you show up on Bing? Will you show up at all??

While searching for some of the lesser known sites (including my own), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that Bing is somehow not crawling them. You may want to submit your site to Bing, along with your “sitemap.xml” if you’re not showing up. I’m not sure how well this works and when you’ll notice results. The search algorithms of Bing and Google are clearly different.

Bing is still the new kid on the block when it comes to search engines. We’ll just have to sit back and see how it plays out. I’m not compelled to make the switch to Bing at this time, but I said that about Google 10 years ago.

Lack of DRM (Digital Rights Management): The first thing I do once I’ve bought a new Music CD or DVD is rip its contents to my hard drive. I stream all my media to my computers, TVs and various devices via my home network. This way, I have an untouched backup, should my drives and data backups fail. It’s also very convienient to go thru a thumbnailed list of my media vs flipping thru a stack of discs. I can also use my own 3rd-party audio/video codecs without any hassle, allowing for optimized playback. DRM, which is found in current versions of Windows, makes these tasks difficult, as it assumes anyone “ripping” media content, is doing it for illegitimate purposes. As I refrain from “bashing”, I’ll simply say, this isn’t a workable model for me.

nLite: My friends and I have made thousands of custom XP installation discs. They’ve been tweaked for performance and hacked to include commonly used utilities and features, that you would otherwise have to install later. nLite allows you to add all the latest Windows updates, so there’s no more installing Windows, then waiting hours-on-end to download all those updates.

It just works!: On October 25, 2009, Windows XP retail versions will be 8 years old. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that’s the longest lifespan between a Windows release. There’s been 3 major Service Packs released for XP, and while that’s not the record, the OS has clearly become very stable and mature during this time.

Security: While Linux, Mac OS, Vista/7 all have enhanced security measures built-in, with very little effort and knowledge, you can have a super stable and secure XP system running. While this isn’t true of all new operating systems, some of the built-in security measures dramatically reduce system performance, which can and should be replaced with better software to complete the same tasks.

More/most software works with XP: While this probably won’t be true forever, it seems to be the case at the moment. Keep in mind, the jump to Windows 2000/XP took some time as well, but it’s become a standard, at least for the time being. Working for a software company in the past, I can safely tell you, it takes a great deal of effort to get things converted and working properly on new operating systems, chipsets and differing platforms. There are some issues with the more recent games only being able to run on Vista. This mainly has to do with DirectX 10, which is not being offered by Microsoft for Windows XP. In contrast, there are tons of legacy games not yet compatible with Windows Vista and 7. To be fair, Windows XP had the same problem initially.

That pretty much sums it up. There may be a few things I left out, but all-in-all Windows XP is still a very good OS. Let me know what you’re using, what you like and dislike and why.

Podcasts will be available via iTunes, this website and the exclusive tech show website.

Once details become available, I’ll post the information here.

It’s still unclear whether or not it’s actually legal to use any of this software for testing purposes, as Microsoft hasn’t issued an official statement. More on this as it develops.

UPDATE 06-06-2009: There’s still no official ETA on a Microsoft statement, but it’s been rumored that keys downloaded by those who were not directly invited to the TechNet Plus program will be blacklisted in the future. Those who were invited to the program should end up getting their accounts reinstated, while those who were not will remain banned.

UPDATE 06-12-2009: I received an email from The Intrepid Consultants Team, who were involved with the Tech Net Plus pilot program. It pretty much states the fact that this program was never intended for public use and the accounts created publicly have been terminated.

Again, I feel this to be a missed marketing opportunity by Microsoft. Those who were not invited, should have been allowed limited download abilities, thus encouraging people to work with Microsoft rather than against them.

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).

While I personally use a lot of free alternatives to Microsoft products, such as Ubuntu and Open Office, I do support and recommend Microsoft software on a day-to-day basis. You can imagine my excitement when I first read about this offer. I was pretty stoked to say the least and couldn’t wait to begin testing some of Microsoft’s latest software.

I immediately went over to the TechNet site and began filling out the requested information to complete my order. The process was pretty quick and painless, as I was approved and registered in under 5 minutes.

My TechNet Plus Subscription Receipt

After I logged in, I started browsing through the software catalog to see what was available. I was surprised at how little was actually being offered. There was a mix of software, operating systems (both server and desktop), some technical and training resources, administration tools, betas, trial software, publicly available service packs and software (such as Internet Explorer) and some really old operating systems like MS DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. A lot of downloads were listed but grayed out, as they were unavailable. Most of those where products that had Volume Licenses, leaving mostly Retail products open for download.

I did manage to find a few things I wanted to test, so I began my downloads and received my product keys.

After a while, I noticed it was becoming increasingly difficult to get product keys. I had to repeat the process numerous times before they would finally get approved. When the keys would finally go through, you’d sometimes end up with several from previous failed attempts. I remember thinking the servers were probably getting hammered. It was almost midday, so everyone else was starting to get the wonderful news.

So Friday starts off like any other day, except this time I start reading Microsoft has pulled the plug on those who signed up for the free TechNet Plus accounts. Apparently, the information was leaked and not part of any pilot program open to the public.

I logged into my TechNet account this morning, only to find the subscription I ordered removed, reverting me back to a basic TechNet account that offers no premium downloads. I remember thinking this was all too good to be true. I guess I just thought Microsoft was trying something bold to help bring back confidence to its users. The whole Vista thing was a huge disaster for Microsoft and after doing some real world testing of Windows 7, I’m not so sure they’ll be able to avoid a similar launch failure.

It’s a real shame we are being punished for this, as the people responsible for the leak are to blame. I personally feel Microsoft missed a good marketing opportunity and should have allowed minimum download abilities to those who registered accounts under this scam.