Get ready for the fanfare. Today is the launch date for Windows 7. after all of the hype and all of the disappointment of Windows Vista I ma sure the great marketing machine of Microsoft is eagerly awaiting this morning and a chance to tour a great new Operating System.

Even though Vista is not the most installed Operating System in the world, that would still be Windows XP, today everyone will still be comparing Windows Vista with Windows 7.

As many people know I am still running Windows XP and although I really want to test out Windows 7 the problem that I have is that none of my four computers are good enough for the minimum specs for Windows 7.

Windows 7 wants at least 2 gigs of ram and more realistically six or eight gigs to run well while I seem to be limping along on 500 megs and 1 gig on all of my home machines and my work laptop. And I have to admit that they seem to run great on Windows XP anyway.

So we will see today. Is this the future or will we look back still at Windows XP being the last great OS from Microsoft. I remember the release day for Windows 95 and lineups at midnight to the new OS and back then I had it installed by 3 am and was really excited to test out all the new features that a 32 bit OS offered, that is not happening today becuase most people are still stuck in the past (like me) without the hardware to run Windows 7. Microsoft will have to hope that new laptop and computer sales increase to get a big install base this time around, something that failed during the Windows Vista launch.

Wow I ran into this problem on my Windows XP machine iwth Outlook 2007 and had never seen it.

Found a simple fix. I just opened the run command (Start–>Run) and typed in outlook.exe  /resetnavpane

I hit enter and Outlook opened correctly

Well another new Firefox release and this one is supposed to be good. I have not done any beta testing with the new Firefox as it tends to be hard to regress to an older version so today I just installed the newly released Firefox 3.5.

I like the new Firefox so far except for one crappy niggly problem with any new release and that is that most of my Firefox extensions, also known as Firefox Add-ons are not working. There is a fix though and it is the same with the older versions as well.

To reset the compatibility for Firefox Extensions go to the address bar and type about:config and hit enter.

Now that you are in the configuration portion of Firefox just right click anywhere in the first comumn and select new–>Boolean

the boolean has to be called extensions.checkCompatibility and when you hit enter it will ask you if you want this to be set to True or False, choose False.

Now after a restart all of your extensions should work fine and be active.

Let me know what you are finding. Do you like the new Firefox 3.5?

Well I am slowly upgrading all of my sites to Wordpress 2.8 and damn it seems good. One big site that I have was having trouble though. I was getting 500 internal server error after doing an upgrade on a rather large blog and this is what I now do to troubleshoot all Wordpress errors.

1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to plugins2 this will disable all plugins since the system will not find them

2. If this works and my blog works (It was kinda better but still slow and partially broke) then you can copy that folder to a drive on your machine and then delete all the plugins in that plugins2 folder, delete all the plugins, rename the folder back to plugins, and then add one at a time and see if everything is good. This can help you troubleshoot a bad or memory intensive plugin.

3. Inm my case I found that the blog was still sluggish so I used that hack for getting PHP 5 to work on 1 and 1 internet. I added AddType x-mapp-php5 .php as a line in my .htaccess and this fixed the 500 internal server errors.

Does this work for you? Do you like the new Wordpress? Here are the main new features:

Wordpress 2.8 New Features

That is a crapload of change. The interface though is very similar to 2.7 though which is nice. There are also apparently 100s of bug fixes as well and everyhting just feels more stable.

I was using a new plugin today with one of my Wordpress blogs and it seems I am running PHP4 and the plugin needed PHP5. What to do?

Well in looking at the help stuff for my web host 1 and 1 internet I found that I just needed to add a line to my .htaccess file for the blog.

I added the following line to the top of the .htaccess file nad everything worked perfectly:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

It seems that the default PHP version at 1and1  internet is version 4 but just by adding the above line the default for that folder/domain will then become PHP5

This tip requires a change to the Windows Registry. Please see the MSFN Guide “Backup Your Registry” if you are new to the Windows Registry.

Windows Media Player (WMP) is a built-in application that allows you to play multimedia files. Like many other applications, WMP remembers the most recently played files and displays them in the Recent File List under the File menu. This feature is useful if you regularly play certain files, but you may want to clear the list if you share the computer and a user account or create archives and CDs.

There are two ways you can clear the list:

I. The ClearMRU.exe Utility is available for free in the Windows Media Player Bonus Pack from Microsoft, but Microsoft does not support this tool.

II. You can also manually delete the list through the Windows Registry:

1. Start the Windows Registry Editor, regedit.exe, by typing regedit in the Windows Run Command Line.

2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftMediaPlayerPlayerRecentFileList.

3. Delete the RecentFileList subkey.

4. If you’ve also streamed content from the Internet, you can delete the RecentURLList subkey.

5. Exit the Registry Editor.

6. Restart the computer.

To keep certain files in the list, don’t delete the entire key. Deleting individual entries within the key will get rid of the files that you no longer want in the Recent File List.

I just caught onto a race that is really interesting. As you may know, or not, I am on Twitter and just love the interactivity that is possible in the whole medium of Microblogging.

A few months ago there was a story that Lance Armstrong may have 1 million Twitter followers by the beginning of the Tour de France and although that may in fact be possible it seems that there is a better race.

The race to a million followers is between CNN (with an account that CNN does not even own), Ashton Kutcher, and Britney Spears. You know full well that when you have to celebrities and a news network in a race for a million of anything that Microblogging, Twitter, and mobile tech have really hit the mainstream.

Ashton Kutcher is saying that if he hits a million Twitter followers first than he will donate 10,000 beds to help combat malaria in 3rd world countries and EA games say they will put the 1 millionth follower of Ashton Kutchers into a video game. The helping the world thing is a great reason to follow Ashton, as well as the fact that he tends to have interesting tweets (which should be the most importnt thing).

With only 1300+ followers I am very behind all three of them.

Over the years I have reinstalled Windows on many machines and when I have I have had trouble the most with drivers for two components more than any other, Video cards and sound cards.

If you have a chance to see the drivers on a Windows XP machine before you reload Windows it is always a good idea to make sure that you right click on the “My Computer” go to manage and to device manager and take a look and probably write down each of those components. This way if Windows can not find the component when you reload Windows at least you can go and try to find it yourself.

If you are stuck now though and have a computer with a build in Sound cards and you would like to try to find a sound card driver than you can do what I tried successfully tonight, download an AC97 sound card driver and try that. If you can find the driver than it is just a case of running the install or setup.exe file and then after you are done you can reboot the computer and you will hopefully have sound again.

If this does not work then one of the things that you can do is to do a Google search for the computer model that you have and add sound driver to the query or you can actually open up the case and see if there is any reference to the motherboards or, if you have a sound card that is plugged into a slot look for the type of card that it is.

Windows XP will pass another milestone on the road to retirement next week when Microsoft withdraws mainstream support for the operating system..

While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay for additional support.

Mainstream support for XP will end on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the operating system originally shipped.

However, the passing of the deadline will place Microsoft in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP accounts for about 63 per cent of all internet connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 per cent.
Windows XP also continues to be sold with low-cost mini laptops, otherwise known as netbooks, as Vista is too heavy on system resources for this level of hardware.

The key message, according to Microsoft, is that the company will continue to provide security support for XP users.

“We will provide critical security fixes via Windows Update for all editions of XP until 2014,” said Laurence Painell, Windows marketing manager at Microsoft UK.

Microsoft’s mainstream support includes problem resolution over the phone, and covers fixes for security and non-security related issues such as bugs and requests for changes.

Once Windows XP moves out of the mainstream support phase, customers will need an extended support contract with Microsoft or one of its channel partners to address any issues not related to security.

With a platform as mature as XP, this is unlikely to prove an issue, according to Microsoft.

“XP has been out a long time, so we would hope that there are not many issues that would require that level of support,” said Painell.

Gartner analyst Michael Silver agreed, adding that he had not spoken to any companies planning to pay for extended support.

“The only thing extended support buys you is creation of new non-security fixes, at a hefty fee for each one. After all these years, most people figure that most of the functional bugs [in XP] are already worked out,” he said.

In the past, most customers would already have moved to a newer platform before this deadline arrived. But because there was such a long gap between XP and Vista, customers have had only a couple of years to make the transition.

Many customers have also chosen to skip Vista and go straight to Windows 7, once this becomes available. Microsoft said that companies now have an opportunity to look at their options for a transition away from XP.

“Windows 7 is built on the same core architecture as Vista, and we provide a number of tools and applications to help companies understand any problems they might face,” said Painell. He reiterated that customers can use Vista or the Windows 7 beta as test platforms for planning a migration to the forthcoming platform.

Meanwhile, Microsoft revealed that, while Windows 7 users will be able to downgrade to Windows XP, the reverse will not be true.

Microsoft said in its Engineering Windows 7 blog that XP users will have to perform a full install.

“There are simply too many changes in how PCs have been configured (applets, hardware support, driver model etc) that having all of that support carry forth to Windows 7 would not be nearly as high quality as a clean install,” the blog entry said.

There is one constant with computers. They Crash. I support lots of computers and can tell you that one thing that is very very important is doing backups in one way or another for your computer and data. There are two kinds of software that you can look at for your backups. Software that will backup files and folders.  and software that will create a disk image of your computer.

Backing up files and folders
There are several pices of software that will backup the files on your computer. Windows has backup software and there are many others including the one that I use which is called Sync Back. The most important thing when using software like this is to know what you want to backup. Ususally what you want is your desktop and profile and your My Documents folder. If you have lots of digital pictues then you will want to make sure that the location that your pictures are in is definitly being backed up.

Imaging your computer
Imaging your computer is a process where you backup your computer completly to another hard drive or disk (usually a hard drive nowadays). The software that is used for this is either Ghost or Acronis True Image although I am sure there are many more. The best way to do a disk image is that after you clean out your recycle bin and clean out your temporary internet files is that you run the software. Both software will ask you what drives you want to backup and where you want the data, it is nice here to have a portable hard drive so that you can put the disk image on something that you can keep away from the computer in a safe place. After you have done the backup you can usually shoose individual files to restore or restore everthing and replace what is on your drive (especially good if your drive crashes).

Between these two backup strategies I am a big fan of the disk image process and what I have done in the past is make an image of the computer right away when I set it up. A clean computer is very fast. I create the image and then do file backups to another computer. If my computer crashes I have just a couple of steps.

1. Restore the image to a new hard drive
2. Reinstall the software that I use
3. Copy back the files from my daily or weekly backup.

I hope that just a few people are helped by this info. I know that in the past I have seen a lot of people lose years of pictures or tax info or word and email documents and it is fairly low cost to avoid this completely.