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Thinking about joining a new club? Take a look at the Windows Clubhouse

Groucho Marx famously said…

"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

Head off to the ClubhouseWell, there’s an exception to every rule. I found such an exception in the Windows Clubhouse.

The Clubhouse is a community where you can connect with other members and help people learn how to use Windows.

"The Clubhouse is all about sharing content and ideas. Showing what you do best. Voicing your opinions. Being an active member in a community that will select the best content for display on the Windows Vista and Windows Live sites."

This is a place where you can create and rate content about Microsoft products, share through posts on your blog and provide feedback on other’s posts.

More info:

I went ahead and posted my own profile here and tagged a few of my favourite blog posts, answers to popular questions on everything from Windows Live to the latest on Windows 7 to show up in the feed.

Tags: articles, blogs, Windows 7.

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Windows 7 Release Candidate now available, with more info on what’s new in the RC, MED-V, and improved SSD support

Windows 7 Release Candidate Takes the StageLots of news today (as noted in the news today) on the availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC). Remember, only download the Windows 7 RC from a trusted source – via Microsoft – to save yourself the security risk.

As noted on MSDN and TechNet, the RC is an opportunity for enthusiasts, IT professionals, developers and folks like you to take the OS for a spin and test it a real world environment. With the Microsoft Windows 7 Compatibility Center site now live, you can also get more help with devices and applications on Windows 7 as noted here (from my Twitter post).

Stephen Rose – Sr Community Manager – Windows Client IT Pro put together a video for the Springboard site on what some of the new features in the Windows 7 Release Candidate area. You can find it in his post "Want to learn what’s new in the Windows 7 RC?" and view it here, too.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:9bbba6ce-394b-4cdf-9780-aaa52d7d77e1&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="What&#39;s New in the Windows 7 RC" rel="noopener noreferrer">Video: What&#39;s New in the Windows 7 RC</a>

You can also read more about Windows 7 Pro & Windows XP Mode in the Q&A with Scott Woodgate as he discusses the new Windows XP Mode with Virtual PC and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).

As noted by Microsoft_Gov, Windows 7 RC will have 13-Month Life Span, and PC users can run it until June 1, 2010.

Elinor Mills of CNETNews offers a quick look at some of the security enhancements in Windows 7, with mentions of DirectAccess and BitLocker To Go. 

And a personal favourite story of mine today, from the Engineering Windows 7 blog courtesy of Michael Fortin, is the Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives (aka SSDs, also as picked up in Tom’s Hardware WRT optimization for Solid State Drives).

Around the office, many of us have been particularly interested in the features in Windows 7 to reduce writes. The article is a good read and be sure to check out the frequently asked questions: I read it with interest as I build a new Windows 7 Media Center PC (details to come) which has a 60GB SSD at its heart coupled with a low power WD Green drive for content storage. Prices are getting quite affordable for good sized SSDs (I’ve looked at 30-128GB drives and settled on a performance 60GB model) and reliability is higher than ever.

"Many of today’s Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices dropping precipitously, most analysts expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating hard disk drives (HDDs).

"In Windows 7, we’ve focused a number of our engineering efforts with SSD operating characteristics in mind. As a result, Windows 7’s default behavior is to operate efficiently on SSDs without requiring any customer intervention. Before delving into how Windows 7’s behavior is automatically tuned to work efficiently on SSDs, a brief overview of SSD operating characteristics is warranted.

"… we believe the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us. SSDs can deliver on the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices steadily dropping and quality on the rise, we expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs. With that in mind, we focused an appropriate amount of our engineering efforts towards insuring Windows 7 users have great experiences on SSDs."

Tags: articles, blogs, Windows 7.

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Download Windows 7 RC from a trusted source – via Microsoft –and avoid peer to Peer and save yourself the security risk

Windows 7 Release Candidate Takes the StageAs I recommended today, friends don’t let friends download bad things from peer to peer. So wait until the official downloads to the Release Candidate (RC) of Windows 7 are available.


As noted online today, the Windows 7 RC posted today (April 30th) for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Materials provided here include info on the official press release, Q&A and more. Learn what’s new in the release candidate and hear from Microsoft partners about how they’re preparing today for Windows 7.



MSDN and TechNet subscribers can get the bits at http://technet.microsoft.com. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center at http://microsoft.com/downloads.


A personal note: please don’t use P2P to get Windows 7 Release Candidate, as has been noted in the in the news. See this page for info on getting bits from Microsoft http://bit.ly/uJATN. As Roger Halbheer (in his blog on Security) offers reasons why you should not use P2P Windows 7 Builds…



“… I refrain from downloading it from any of the untrusted sources. The reason for this is pretty simple: You never know (and it is illegal).


“Years back (and I have told this story over and over again) we ran an event where we fixed PCs of consumers for free for a whole week. Pretty often, when we found an infected machine, we found P2P software on it. When we talked to the person owning the PC he/she usually told us the “my son/daughter installed that and uses it”. We know that P2P is one of the most dangerous source of malware.


“Read now, what happens with Windows 7: Leaked Windows 7 RC torrents infected with trojan“


Plan accordingly. And please remember to back up your files before installing the RC.


Tags: articles, blogs, Windows 7.




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Thinking about preparing for Windows 7? I’m thinking it’s time for a new hard disk

Hard DiskSitting through lunch today between meetings and mail, I thought about what every self-respecting geek waiting for the release of Windows 7: what should I do in order to prep one of my older computers for this new OS? 


Today, I thought I’d start with one upgrade to consider (and a point of failure I’d like to avoid): a new hard disk for my laptop. 


Keeping in mind that as noted here (that the Beta will stop working on August 1, 2009), I intend to rely on my dual boot configuration for Windows 7 to fall back to Vista and then move to the RC… and ultimately to the release version of Win7 from Windows Vista. (I used this strategy for machines at home, as mentioned in my later post from the article “How To Dual Boot Vista and Windows 7″ from NetworkWorld.)


To continue using your PC, please be prepared to reinstall a prior version of Windows or a subsequent release of Windows 7 before the expiration date. You won’t be able to upgrade from the Beta to the final retail version of Windows 7.


Luckily, Jason Cross over at ExtremeTech obliges with his article, How To Upgrade Your Laptop Hard Drive, in which he steps through the how-to of moving the contents of your current hard drive over to a new one, likely larger given the incredible value per GB these days.


Considering the drive in our now out of warranty Dell Inspiron m600 successfully running on Windows Vista SP1 – even more so my so-called revitalized Notebook (Toshiba M200) – I think that I have the perfect candidates for new HDDs. With 1GB of memory on the notebooks already, the major upgrade investment for me is the HDD… and a good value considering a new 250GB drive will run you as little as $60. (I still remember fondly by original 20MB drive that I paid a small fortune for a then-new Mac Plus.)


If I had to consider the work needed to upgrade an old notebook, I’d probably buy a new computer given the cost of PC notebooks these days (never mind small notebook PCs for a moment). As I found in my post Me : “What kind of a computer should I buy?” for $679, I was able to get a new Sony with a 15″ widescreen, Intel Core 2 Duo T5800, 250GB HDD, 4GB of memory, Wireless-N (draft 802.11n). We will upgrade this computer to Windows 7 as soon as it comes out on the market – it’s the one PC at home (my wife’s) we have not installed the Windows 7 beta for obvious reasons to husband/family IT Pros. 😉


In the example below, Lauren found even better in value for money, as noted on the page of the recent Microsoft television commercials.




Laptop Hunters – Behind the Scenes


 


Tags: Windows 7, how to, hard disk.




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Thinking about the Windows 7 upgrade experience, have you backed up your files lately?

This week the Windows 7 team posted on delivering a quality upgrade experience for Windows 7, noting that many people are running the Windows 7 Beta full time just as many of us do daily at Microsoft. And the team is encouraging users to revert to an earlier Windows Vista image on their PCs and perform an upgrade to the next publicly available pre-release build…

"The supported upgrade scenario is from Windows Vista to Windows 7. Before you go jump to the comment section, we want to say we are going to provide a mechanism for you to use if you absolutely require this upgrade.  As an extended member of the development team and a participant in the Beta program that has helped us so much, we want to ask that you experience real-world setup and provide us real-world telemetry."

The Real World, as in moving/upgrading from Windows Vista to the next public Windows 7 build. And yes, it’s a challenge to have to reinstall your applications and set up your desktop all over again, as Ina Fried noted in her column yesterday, "Windows 7 beta upgrade won’t be easy".

This is one reason I advocate setting up a dual boot system for Windows 7, as I did on some of my machines, particularly at home. (This was also mentioned in my later post in the article "How To Dual Boot Vista and Windows 7" from NetworkWorld.)

OK, deep breath. It’s not that bad, but there is some work involved.

General housekeeping advice: make sure you do an inventory and find your original installer discs for your applications, and note your serial numbers. An easy way to note your installed applications is to use the Windows Instrumentation command-line interface (WMIC) to generate a list as noted here.

I’ve also seen feedback on the request to mount the ISO and avoid having to burn a DVD: we know. As noted, this feature isn’t in Windows 7, but there are several third party tools (and many are free) that allow you to create a DVD from the downloaded ISO. Lifehacker covered the best CD & DVD burning tools and noted ImgBurn "emerged victorious" in their Hive Five Best CD and DVD Burning Tools. I’ve also used isorecorder successfully at home – both are great tools.

(A note on recovering your previous OS installation from Windows.old: Today there’s info on recovering a previous Windows build noted in Microsoft KB 933168, "How to restore a computer to a previous Windows installation after you install Windows Vista".)

My advice: before you do anything, back up your files from your current Windows 7 installation (preferably on to a volume different from where you’ve installed your Windows 7 OS, better if it’s removable media). I back up my files to an external hard disc (via USB2) as well as to a handy 4GB USB memory fob. Of course, there’s no better advice than this, offered in the E7 post:

"Since everyone reading is a well-versed and experienced beta tester you know ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR MACHINE before running any OS installation and NEVER TEST AN OS ON YOUR ONLY COPY OF ANY DATA. Testing a pre-release product means just that—it is testing and it is pre-release. Even though this is a Release Candidate, we are still testing the product. We have very high confidence but even if an error happens once in 1,000,000 we want to make sure everyone is taking the precautions normal for a pre-release product."

Tags: articles, blogs, Windows 7.

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