The PC Report

According to the latest report from Tech ARP, the first service pack for Windows 7 could be hitting us sometime in Q4 of this year. Originally Microsoft had planned for a 22 month development period for SP1, longer than the dev times for Vista and XP’s SP1s. According to the report though, MS has pushed this date forward to the last quarter of 2010 due to new bugs that need to be fixed.

For those of you using Windows Update frequently, don’t worry because these bugs will no doubt will be patched via an update. However, for businesses that may only update to a new Service Pack, they will need a release sooner rather than later. Many businesses also don’t adopt new operating systems until a Service Pack has been released to ensue that all the bugs have been squashed before they update their systems.

Have you heard people talking about Linux but had no idea what it was? Are you a full time Windows XP, Vista, or 7 user and can’t understand why anyone would want to use anything besides Windows? Or perhaps you are getting tired of dealing with the hassle that can come with Windows but you don’t know what to do about it? If you answered yes to any of these questions then this is something you should probably read. There is a lot to Linux. I will probably leave a lot out of  this article but, then again, this is not a comprehensive guide. This is just to give you a peek at Linux so you can decide if you want to try it out.

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If you’re still running the Release Candidate (RC) version of Windows 7 then your machine will begin shutting down every 2 hours. This is an intentional annoyance placed by Microsoft to encourage you to upgrade to the fully fledged version of Windows 7. On June 1 of this year the RC will be completely phased out so we urge you that if you’re still using the RC you really should upgrade to the full version right away.

I was personally sick of my huge right-click context menu that has been getting larger and larger with every program I install. So I endeavoured to clear out all the crap from my right-click menu by some simple registry editing. It’s not difficult to do and it works like a breeze.

The following trick should work and has been tested on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

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Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is only in the Alpha stage of testing at this moment. It doesn’t look extremely different from the current version of Ubuntu but there are a few noticeable differences.

I installed Lucid Lynx using VirtualBox OSE. Before I installed, I booted up from the LiveCD just to get a look at it to see if anything looked different. After a quick glance it looked just like most other recent Ubuntu releases. The background is a brown/orange color, the UI is gray, and everything is still set up the same.

It only took around 20 minutes to install on a virtual machine with just over 700 MB of RAM and a 2.16 GHz processor. I haven’t timed any of my other installations but this one seemed to be the fastest of them all. I decided to dig a little to find out what has been changed. The first things I checked were the applications.

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It’s been a while since I last decided to test the early builds of Chrome OS and it looks like a lot has happened since then. A guy by the name of Hexxeh is releasing new builds of Chromium OS here and there before the OS is actually finished by Google, and his latest edition packs some nice features. Known by the build name “Flow”, the new build features Nvidia GPU support (including ION), auto-updates, user customisable menus, webcam support and much more.

If you’re up for testing the latest build, you can download it from Hexxeh’s page right now. If you’re confused about the difference between Google Chrome OS and Chromium OS (they’re almost the same), check out this blog post from Google.

Another Windows 8 related rumour has hit the streets today via a roadmap from past Microsoft employee Chris Green. While a previous roadmap put Windows 8 in 2012, this new, and very detailed roadmap places Windows 8’s release in July of 2011, with mainstream support lasting until July 2016.

The roadmap also details the release of Office 15 (or Office 2012 as the roadmap shows) in July of 2012 and Windows Server 2012, the next iteration of Windows Server, is placed also for a July 2012 release. We’re not entirely sure about the credibility of the roadmap, however we do know that it was created while Green was still an employee at Microsoft. We’re also sure that this is just one of many Windows 8 rumours to come.

Microsoft Office 2010, the next big revision of the Office line-up that in recent times we’ve been able to test thanks to the beta, has finally got it’s pricing information released. There will be two options: one is to buy the boxed set which comes with an installation CD and a product key that will work on 2 computers, and the other option is to buy just the product key on a card, that is cheaper and only works with one computer only.

The prices are as follows:

• Professional - $499 boxed, $349 for product key
• Professional Academic - $99 boxed only (only available at academic resellers)
• Home and Student - $149 boxed, $119 for product key
• Home and Business - $279 boxed, $199 for product key

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Don’t you just love it when someone discovers thing such as God Mode for your every day operating system? God Mode for Windows 7 is actually pretty useful; it’s a folder than when opened, gives you all the possible settings for Windows that are accessible as a search string. Not only does it show the settings, it categorises them and shows you what application they came from and all the keywords that ,when searched, direct you to them. There are roughly 265 settings in 50 categories (it varies depending on the OS), very handy if you need to change lots of settings in multiple locations.

All you have to do is create a folder and name it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} – however as we’ve discovered it’s only the hex string that follows GodMode that actually matters. You could call the folder SettingsList.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and it would still function the same, just some person thought that God Mode would suit the feature well as a name.

Apparently you can create this folder in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, as well as the 32-bit version of Vista. 64-bit users of Vista luck out; if you create the folder it will send Explorer into a crash loop that you can recover by entering Safe Mode command prompt, navigating to the parent folder of the god mode folder and executing rd /s God[Tab] – so don’t attempt it.

Consumer helpdesk firm iYogi decided it was about time to get some solid feedback on the issues with Windows 7, so they surveyed 100,000 customers about what issues they were experiencing in Windows 7. The top offender was installation issues, which 31% of people having issues with Windows 7 reported as experiencing. However, as 95% of people moved to Windows 7 by buying a new computer, this isn’t as bad as it may seem.

Second to this was people’s confusion over where applications such as Windows Mail, Movie Maker and Photo Gallery went, which 26% of people experiencing issues reported. Of course, these apps were replaced with the Windows Live Essentials, which can be downloaded in Windows 7 via the link that appears if you search for any of the old programs.

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