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.

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,

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).

After all the fuss on Friday, Microsoft has now released Windows 7 Beta 1, and it is readily available to the public. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you’ll need to download the ActiveX plug-in that allows the Microsoft Downloader to download the 32 and 64-Bit versions of the new beta operating system.

I’ve only run the 32-Bit version, as I’ve had problems with the previous 64-Bit builds. Here I’ll share my results with what’s compatible, what’s not, what tweaks can be done to increase performance and some general eye candy. Enjoy!

A scripting hack that can steal passwords from any version of Internet Explorer versions 6-8 is leading security experts to recommend using another browser (at least) for now. Microsoft is asking users to be cautious while they work on a fix.