Windows 7 – First Impressions

So a few days ago the Windows 7 beta went public. If you haven’t gone and dowloaded your copy I suggest you do it now even I’d you are not planning to install it right away. From what I hear there may be a limit to the number of keys microsoft is planning to give out.

I’ve installed it on both my laptop as a fresh install and on my media center of as an upgrade to vista ultimate. And at first glance it looks like miceosoft could box and ship it how it is, and they probably could. I am sure that a lot if the code is taken from vista and simply refined.

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Remove a stuck print job in Windows

I have often recived a call, or gone out to a site where there is a print job stuck in the print que on the server that is holing up everything. You can try to cancel the job at the printer, or at the server. You’ve tried to restart the server and restart the printer but the print job just sits there staring at you the whole time. While not quite as bad as upsetting as the famed “PC LOAD LETTER” error it can still make you want to chuck your printer and/or computer off the roof.

So how do you purge the vexing print que? Its actually easier than you might think. It only takes three lines typed in to your command prompt (you can do it through the Windows GUI too, but its easier this way).

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Vista on an Apple

In January of 2006 I first heard of the availability of getting Windows Mobile on the Palm Treo. Now it doesn’t seem that surprising, but at the time It took me aback. Part of that post, I jokingly said that someday Vista will be available on an Apple. While you can’t actually order an apple from their website with Vista, the newest version of Bootcamp (which didn’t even release in beta until April of 2006, if there were announcements earlier than that, I never heard them) supports running Windows Vista on any current Apple.

This Shrinking World

Take yourself back in time. (If you see cave-men or dinosaurs, you went to far)

1983: The Nintendo Entertainment System was released, Microsoft released the Microsoft Mouse for its very new DOS, JC Penny would soon start issuing its own credit card and the first TCP/IP WAN was functional when the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone.

In 1983 I could have booted my computer, and opened a document with a list of phone numbers, one of them being JC Penny. Called JC Penny and ordered a game to be mailed to me for the Nintendo, and I would have to wait probably a couple weeks before getting the game.

Now fast forward to today: You can log into Amazon.com, find a movie you like in their Unbox selection of titles and have it immediatly sent to your TiVo. Total transaction time (including time to download the movie), only a couple of hours.

Interconnected systems are here, they are what makes this world smaller and smaller every day and they will only continue to grow. Remember the old addage that your bathroom scale will one day tell your fridge how much you weigh? Expect it… soon.

Wait … What?

[fa:p:a=blog-images,id=523689871,j=l,s=s,l=p]Click on the image for a slightly larger view.

Next thing you know Windows Vista will be an option on the iBook.

2nd Annual Ghoulish Gathering

6828 I got to play around with creating an HTML email invite to a little halloween party that will get the holidays started for me and my friends. Click the image to the left to see the invite that I made up (minus the important details ). This will be our second time doing it, you can see the pictures from last year in the gallery below. I’m not completly sure of the best way to actually send out the invite. Although a quick google search turned up a promissing article titled “HTML Mail with Microsoft Outlook“. I’ll be sure to report back on what I find to be the easiest way to sent the already created HTML file out.

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