And might I say justified hype. I personally have found it a good step up from XP, but without the pain of Vista.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft released the RTM version to MSDN and technet subscribers, and I have been using it without any problems at all. They’ve done a good job this time.

Windows 7 is officially released until mid October but what I saw on the net today is a 90 day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise available to try. This trial is mainly aimed at IT pros so they can get familiar with the inner workings and differences to previious Windows operating systems.

Check it out here.

Couple of key notes from MS:

* You have 10 days to activate it.
* After 90 days, the PC will shut down every hour.
* If you wish to use Windows 7 after the 90 days, you need to purchase it and reinstall it from scratch. Bit of a pain, but rememeber it is only a (free) trial

So, if you want to give it a go before deploying it in your business, you have a great opportunity.

There are a quite a few software tools out there on the net that can do that for you, but you don’t need them. I’ll show you a couple of ways (and I’m sure there is more).

* Open up a command prompt (Start>Run type in cmd and press enter)
* Type the following command: Systeminfo | Find “Up Time” (! Case sensitive)

This will take a few seconds and you will see messages that Windows is loading certain information. Eventually you’ll get an output similar to this:

System Up Time: 1 Days, 0 Hours, 57 Minutes, 18 Seconds

The other way is even simpler.

* Again, open up a command prompt
* Type in net statistics workstation
* you get a few lines of info but the one you are looking for will look something like this:

Statistics since 2/3/2009 7:23 AM

But what if you want to find out information about devices that aren’t connected eg USB based devices?

Try this:

1. Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK twice.
6. To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.
7. Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

But what if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? There are a couple of other ways to do it:

My choice is to create a shortcut on your desktop as you will probably use it over and over. Right click on an empty area of your desktop and click on new>shortcut. Enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation and click on next, name your shortcut and click finish. That’s it.
If you want to change the icon, right click the shortcut and go to properties>shortcut>change icon. Browse to the moricons.dll in your system32 folder to see a large number of cions to choose from.

A quick and dirty way to achieve the same result is clock on start>run and enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation in the command dialog box.

If you have fast user switching enabled, another way is to bring up task manager, click on the shutdown menu, and select switch user. Same result.

Yes, the linux learning curve is steep but rewarding when you do start working it all out.

Here is a good website that lists the Windows/OS X software and the linux equivalents.

In a lot of cases there are multiple options which is good. You aren’t tied down to one thing which you may not like.

There is a solution – Auto XP reboot remover. Best thing is it’s freeware as well.

It’s called FEBE.

FEBE ( Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up — It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers. And you can schedule your backups to run automatically too. Very handy.

Have read of it here

As far as what extensions you should be using with firefox, there are a lot of threads out there on the net so I won’t bother flogging my opinion on it – each one of us had their own personal needs, but as with most people, when I reinstall I will want all the extensions back again without wasting time looking, downloading and installing them again.

Found a site where a user listed all his essential programs. It’s here. Not a bad read and I have got some ideas from it myself.

My own tips are as follows:

With your fresh install of Windows and all your applications and drivers installed, use a program like Acronis True Image to make an image of your working OS. So if it craps itself down the track, a restore of your image will save time and get you back to square one much quicker.

If you’re not going to go down that path, create a DVD of all your programs that you install after a reformat. I call mine DR (disaster recovery). Saves me having to look for, and then download all the programs I use.

When your computer first boots up, you have probably seen a message next such as ‘S.M.A.R.T enabled and OK‘ next the the hard drive name. What is it, and what does it mean?

Read on…..

S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, and is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It’s not totally foolproof, but assists greatly in detecting hard drive problems.

For a more detailed explananation, look here.

For checking your drives once Windows is running, HD tune is a must.

Taken this message for example that popped up on my PC:

Granted it’s only a short message, but I’m using this as an example.

Now, rather than writing down the message, all I have to do is copy it to the clipboard with the conventional CTRL-C sequence, and then paste into notepad or something similar.

The output I would get (in this example) is:

—————————
PuTTY Fatal Error
—————————
Network error: Software caused connection abort
—————————
OK

How’s that for easy? I never knew about this ‘feature’ in Windows until a few days ago, and from what I read, it has been around since Windows 2000.