By Popular demand I have created this thread. Share your tips, tricks, tweaks, shareware, freeware, etc.
Just like in the Mac thread IF YOU HAVE NOTHING GOOD TO POST KEEP IT TO YOURSELF!
when does office 2010 come out, do we know yet? i was thinking of buying 2007 but if 2010 is coming out soon i might wait.
or i could wait till it comes out and pick up 2007 for a cheap price
Not bad, but if you are just going to type stuff it seems like overkill and overpriced. I like the specs though.
Me just type? Nah, its a raw gaming machine, that will allow me to do anything and everything, without any slow down.
Want something that's going to last me years, and is just a badass.
This thing could last a LONG time.
Those laptops are so over priced!
What's the CPU in it?
Think I'm going desktop in year.
In the next week or two, Windows Update will list a new, "Important" update for you to download. It'll be called "Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7," and if you're running a bootleg copy of Windows 7, beware.
The optional update will sniff out 70 "known and potentially dangerous activation exploits" that are meant to distinguish a genuine copy of Windows 7 from a pirated one.
However, if you're busted with a bootleg, it's not that big of a deal. Microsoft promises that none of your personal information will be sent to them. Instead:
If any activation exploits are found, Windows will alert the customer and offer options for resolving the issue – in many cases, with just a few clicks. Machines running genuine Windows 7 software with no activation exploits will see nothing – the update runs quietly in the background protecting your system. If Windows 7 is non-genuine, the notifications built into Windows 7 will inform the customer that Windows is not genuine by displaying informational dialog boxes with options for the customer to either get more information, or acquire genuine Windows. The desktop wallpaper will be switched to a plain desktop (all of the customer's desktop icons, gadgets, or pinned applications stay in place). Periodic reminders and a persistent desktop watermark act as further alerts to the customer.
It is important to know that the customer will see no reduced functionality in their copy of Windows – a customer's applications work as expected, and access to personal information is unchanged.
Of course, even if your Windows 7 copy is completely legitimate, there might be good reason not to download the update. Windows validation has been known to mislabel legit copies of software as pirated, which even if rare, is a pain that nobody wants to deal with.
Looking to extend your 30 day trial of Windows Vista/7? here's a quick trick.
Go to Start>Command Prompt
Right click on Command Prompt and select Run in Administrator Mode
Once opened, type slmgr /rearm
Restart and you should have 30 more days to activate
You can only use this trick 3 times.
On March 16, Microsoft is making a first developer preview of Internet Explorer (IE) 9 available for download from www.IETestDrive.com.
The IE 9 Platform Preview doesn’t include the IE 9 user interface; instead, it is the plumbing, specifically the new Microsoft JavaScript engine (which is codenamed “Chakra”) and the new graphics subsystem, coupled with a home page full of test sites. There’s no back button and no built-in security. It’s basically the IE 9 rendering engine and early developer tools.
Microsoft officials will show off the IE 9 developer preview and discuss Microsoft’s planned support for more of the emerging HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 standards with that product during the Tuesday morning Mix 10 keynote.
“We love HTML5 so much we actually want it to work,” quipped Dean Hachamovitch, the General Manager of the IE team, during a briefing I attended at Microsoft last week about IE 9.
As Microsoft supports more of the HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 markup, the company expects its ACID3 ratings to go up, officials said. At the Professional Developers Conference in November, Microsoft officials showed a very early build of IE 9, which earned an ACID3 score of 32. The build out today is up to 55, according to company officials.
HTML5 applications are a lot richer and demanding, in terms of graphics and speed than Ajax applications. So it’s logical they’ll work better on multi-core machines where the browser can take advantage of multicore performance, Microsoft officials argue. That’s why Microsoft’s new JavaScript engine is built to take advantage of two cores, with the second core compiling JavaScript down to native machine code to help speed up the browser. (Once the native code is available, there’s no need to use interpreted code on Core 1, meaning an app spends less time in JavaScript.)
Microsoft is planning to deliver a lot more preview builds of IE 9 before it hits beta. In fact, the team is committing to delivering an update every eight weeks, and to interact with developers via the Microsoft Connect feedback loop. Microsoft officials wouldn’t say when to expect the first IE 9 beta or to provide any kind of ship date target for the final release. (I’m still betting Microsoft will deliver the final a few months before Windows 8 ships, in 2011 or so.)
Microsoft’s high-level goals for IE 9 include making the browser snappier, maintaining compatibility with Web sites at at least the same level as IE 8 and, ultimately, enabling developers to use the same markup across IE 9 and other non-Microsoft browsers. That last of these three guiding principles is more theoretical and real at this point, but it’s interesting Microsoft is thinking this way.
I’ll be curious to hear what developers think of the preview once you download it.
Update: Hachamovitch said in a Q&A with press and analysts following the keynote that IE 9 will not support XP. (No big surprise there.) The preview runs on Vista SP2 and higher (which I’d figure will be the operating systems supported once IE 9 ships in final form).