Discover The Any Key » Windows

Microsoft Security Essentials Ship Date Revealed

jinnangoto — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:17:05 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

Microsoft’s new anti-malware software which is to intended to replace the discontinued Windows OneCare will be released tomorrow, Sept. 29th. Microsoft Security Essentials, codenamed Morro, was offered earlier this year as a beta to 75,000 users and now it will be made available as a free download to the public. From my use during the beta I found MSE to be a very capable AV software. It offers a much lighter footprint than the massive AV suites and along with Windows Defender, bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and a free download for XP users, it is a great antivirus/antispyware solution.

Additional Info:

Story from pcadvisor.co.uk
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3202792

Story From zdnet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4091

Windows 7 Pricing Revealed

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:25:37 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

Microsoft released information on Windows 7 pricing. Essentially Windows 7 will be made available for the same price as Windows Vista with the exception of Home Premium which will get a price cut of $10 for the upgrade and $40 for the retail version.

From June 26-July 11 Microsoft and retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon will offer pre-orders for Windows 7 with a special upgrade price of $49.99 for Home Premium and $99.99 for Professional.

As with the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft will offer free upgrades to Windows 7 for all computers running Windows Vista Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. Although as with Vista details of the free upgrade (particularly regarding extras fees) will be left up to the OEMs. a

All the OEMs will be able to ship Windows 7 for all languages by the Oct 22 launch. All languages will be made available for the retail version by the end of October. In Europe, The full version of Windows 7E (created in response to the Anti-trust investigation in the EU) will be offered at the upgrade price until December 31st when upgrade versions are expected to be made available.

So here are the Prices:

Windows 7 Home Premium (upgrade version) – $119.99
Windows 7 Home Premium (full) – $199.99

Windows 7 Professional (upgrade version) – $199.99
Windows 7 Professional (full) – $299.99

Windows 7 Ultimate (upgrade) – $219.99
Windows 7 Ultimate (full) – $319.99

Prices and details about the expected Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade where you can go from one version of Windows 7 to another higher version have not been released yet. Also no word on any type of Family Plan or multiple license discount, but keep your fingers crossed.

My Thoughts:

Overall I’m not surprised at the prices, although I had hoped that Microsoft be more aggressive with the price cutting. I didn’t expect them to cut prices as drastically as Apple did with Snow Leopard ($129 was cut to $29) but a 10% discount across the board in this economy would have been nice. Still the special offer for preordering Windows 7 gives pretty substantial savings so I suggest that people take advantage of that deal.

Be Prepared: Windows 7 Beta Will End on July 1, 2009

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:21:12 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

If you downloaded the official Windows 7 Beta back in January (build 7000 if you’re keeping track of these things), it’s license expires on July 1st and Windows will start automatically shutting down every two hours. So now is a very good time to move on from the beta to the Release Candidate(build 7100). Unlike the beta the RC will continue to function. You can download the RC until August 15 and it will stay valid until march 2010.

You can download the RC from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx. If you are so inclined you can try and get the latest build of Windows 7. Although these are not released by Microsoft and are really only available from somewhat questionable sources **cough—bittorrent. If you go for these later builds, be sure to check the MD5 checksum of these downloads to makes sure that you are not downloading and installing spyware and other unwanted additions. You can get a free md5 hashing tool from http://www.winmd5.com/.

May 2009 Windows 7 Release Candidate?

jinnangoto — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:02:28 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

A download page for the Windows 7 Release Candidate was mistakenly posted on Microsoft TechNet. The leaked download page was taken down shortly and now is directed to the Beta download page. Interestingly, the RC download page was dated May 2009. It’s a very clear sign that we are going to a final release of Windows 7 later this year, just in time for Back to school sales and the holiday.

You can see a copy of the RC download page at ArsTechnica.

5 Great New Features in Windows 7

jinnangoto — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:57:39 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

Microsoft publicly unveiled its new upcoming Operating System, Windows 7, to a cheering crowd at the recent PDC. It promises to be more polished, more efficient, and more reliable than Windows Vista. Regardless of whether all the negative coverage of Vista was deserved or not, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s answer to all of those shortcomings.

From what I saw about Windows 7, it didn’t disappoint. The prebeta build, not surprisingly, is very much like Windows Vista. However after working with Windows 7 for a while I can see that it is very stable and usable for a prebeta release. Also its clear that the Windows 7 team has been paying close attention to small details which shows a level of refinement that was missing from not only Vista, but all versions of Windows(XP included).

Windows 7 brings many new features into windows, and here are five that I’m excited about.

The New Windows 7 Taskbar

Microsoft’s official line is that Windows 7 will be released in early 2010, but It’s speculated that it could come as early as August or September of next year. Now, that’s almost a year from now but it’s inevitable that we will soon hear from Apple fans about how Microsoft has copied yet another Mac Feature by turning the Dock into their new Taskbar. While the philosophy behind the taskbar and the dock are very different, I will admit that there is something very Mac-ish about the Windows 7 Taskbar. For instance you can easily reorder the icons on the taskbar (much like you can with the OSX dock). What I like is, Windows 7 allows a lot of customization of the notification area of the taskbar (the icons in the bottom right corner representing programs running in the background). By default all items are hidden from the notification area and you can specify what you want to show up.

Changes made to User Account Control

Windows 7 is also scaling back Vista’s signature feature, User Account Control. I really like UAC and I appreciate what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it, but for the majority of the world UAC was the annoying popup that asked permission for every little task. Deserved or not, That was how people saw it and Microsoft responded by allowing greater customization to UAC’s behavior through a slider. You can set it to always notify or to never give notifications. It’s likely but not entirely clear that setting UAC to never notify is more insecure, but it is great that Microsoft is giving its users a choice.

Plugging in a Projector is now Easy

Many will probably see this as minor feature of Windows 7, but It’s a little thing that will save people a lot of grief. If you hold down the Windows Key + P you can select from various settings for external displays. You can choose Extended Desktop for running with dual monitors, or you can choose a mirrored display if you want to connect your computer to a projector. This is a wonderful feature for everyone who’s ever needed to show a Power Point presentation over a projector. It always bugged me that every single computer manufacturer seemed to have their own weird key combination for connecting the computer to a projector. Function + F5 or Function + F3, there was no standard way of doing this. It was incredibly confusing for novice users. This is a really proactive solution by Microsoft to a real problem.

Homegroup Networking

I am really interested in how Windows 7 is going to handle Networking. Windows Vista inherited more of a business centered networking model. While things like Printer sharing was greatly improved, Plainly speaking it was a real pain to set up things like file sharing. Windows 7 introduces a simpler and easier way to network called Homegroup. It allows all computers (presumably running windows 7) on the password protected Homegroup to easily share documents, photos, and music. At the same time it allows a lot of control over what is shared. For example when you bring your Work laptop home and connect it to your homegroup, your work documents are not viewable over the Homegroup. While homegroup is interesting and exciting I’m holding out full judgement of it until I see how it handles a network of non-Windows 7 computers.

Bitlocker on a flash drive

Bitlocker is not a new feature, but Windows 7 allows you to enable bitlocker drive encryption on a portable USB flash drive. Encrypting the drive is now quite easy. Data loss is a serious problem and unfortunately the cheap and abundant flash drives are easily lost. Enabling bitlocker on these drives will greatly mitigate the potential damage of losing a drive with important data. However like Homegroup I want to see that this is compatible for different operating systems or even different versions of Windows 7 (Vista home users could not use Bitlocker). If you encrypt a flash drive with bitlocker you are going to want to be able to recover the data on a Mac or on an older Windows computer otherwise it severely limits it’s usefulness.

Set up the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter to run automatically

jinnangoto — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:47:02 +0000

By Jin Nan Goto

The Windows Disk Defragmenter is an extremely useful tool to maintain your computer’s performance. If you have a badly Fragmented hard drive you will notice that booting Windows and loading programs are extremely slow. Taking these file fragments and combining them and cleaning up all the clutter in the hard disk can speed up load times considerably. For computers running Windows XP and all older versions of Windows defragmenting the drive is usually the first step in speeding it up.

In Windows Vista the disk defragmenter runs automatically by default. It only runs when the system is idle and will not effect the computers performance. My Vista machine runs the defragmenter every Wednesday at 1am. Vista uses the Task Scheduler to schedule the weekly defragmenting and you can schedule XP to defragment automatically using XP’s task scheduler.

These steps are all available at Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article 555098
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555098

You can open the task scheduler from the Start Menu –> Accessories –> System Tools. Or you can access it from the Control Panel under “Scheduled Tasks”. When you open the Task Scheduler click on “Add Scheduled Task” to open the new task wizard. When you are presented with a list of programs to run automatically, click the “Browse” button and navigate to and open the file C:/Windows/System32/defrag.exe.

Over the next few steps you will select the time and frequency of the new scheduled task. You don’t need to run it every day but you can schedule it to run late at night every couple of weeks when you are not using the computer. After you set the schedule be sure that you check “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” before you click the finish button.

In order to run the defragmenter automatically you need specify the drive that needs to be defragmented. Simply type “C:” at the end of the Run field and click “ok”.

Changing Windows Update To Microsoft Update in Windows XP

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:11:44 +0000

(Originally Posted May 9, 2008)

Nobody writes perfect software and programs are constantly being updated an patched to fix security vulnerabilities. One of the most essential ways to harden you computer against attacks such as malware is to make sure that the software on your computer is up to date. All modern operating systems offer mechanisms for updating themselves. Windows uses Windows Updated to automatically search for new updates and install them. Due to the explosion of spyware, virus, trojans, and all kinds of malicious junk it is very important to stay current with all the critical security patches.

While Windows Update does a decent job patching your operating system, windows is not the only software that needs to be patched. While third party programs such as iTunes and Adobe reader have their own update program, Other software from Microsoft, such as Microsoft Office, can use Windows Update. Except you have to change Windows Update to Microsoft Update.

Step by Step Installation of Microsoft Update

The first step to turning on Microsoft update is to run the windows update tool. I did this by selecting Windows Update from the Start menu. If it is not on your start menu you can also find it by selecting “Run” from the start menu and typing in “wupdmgr.exe”.

Once you have Windows Update open, click on the “Upgrade to Microsoft Update…” link on the right hand side of the page.

Next hit the “Start Now” button, pretty self explanatory.

In the next step, you are instructed to read the license agreement. Once again you can just click the button and proceed.

At this point you may be prompted to install the ActiveX Control to run Microsoft Update. Click on the yellow bar at the top of the page and select “Install ActiveX Control”.

From there the only thing left to do is to push the “Install” button to confirm the installation of Microsoft Update.

Congratulations you are done. Also, make sure that Automatic Updates is set to on so that you get updates as they come out.

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