Posted by: Brandon LeBlanc of Windowsteamblog.com:

This is one of those posts where I’m truly excited to be writing. I get to tell you when Windows 7 will be on store shelves! According to input from customers and partners we’ve made a lot of progress with Windows 7.

Our milestone-to-milestone approach for Windows 7 is built on a great deal of feedback from customers and testers. This has been pivotal to the development of Windows 7.

I blogged a few weeks ago that it’s looking like we’ll have Windows 7 ready in time for the holidays.

Since then we’ve made enough progress to feel really good about announcing today that Windows 7 will be in stores beginning October 22nd.

I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to see Windows 7 sitting on store shelves!

Some people may not be able to wait for Windows 7 to arrive before having to order a new PC (like parents who are sending their sons or daughters off to school who need of a PC to take with them). Fortunately, there is no need to wait.

Soon, customers will be able to take advantage of the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program. This program enables participating retailers and OEMs to offer a special deal to upgrade to Windows 7 for customers purchasing a qualifying PC.

Obviously, Release To Manufacturing (RTM) is an important milestone on the path to GA. We anticipate that we’ll be able to make the RTM code for Windows 7 available to our partners sometime in the 2^nd half of July. We also expect to be able to make RTM code for Windows Server 2008 R2 available to our partners in this time frame as well.

I took advantage of the free download from Microsoft for Windows 7 Release Candidate 1.  If you want to download and evaluate it as well, the link is http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx.

As you read in previous posts, I am one of the few individuals out there who has actually been rather happy with Vista.  I like it’s features.  Performance is so-so, but ok as long as you have adequate memory. It ran all the programs I needed it to, as well as games, etc.  So, I really didn’t see what all the hate was about.

I noticed a lot of Vista-haters were super excited with Windows 7, so thought I better see what the fuss was about.

I have to say that I am extremely impressed.  The completely redesigned taskbar makes switching between programs, opening recent documents, etc, extremely user friendly.  Other snazzy features such as a hover spot on the taskbar which makes all windows transparent, allowing you to see your desktop (clicking the spot minimizes all windows), and “wiggling” a window to minimize everything other than that one, are pretty handy.

Driver installation & compatibility was not even a remote issue so far, except for older hardware, which didn’t work on Vista either.

Some software vendors need to step up and make sure their products are compatible.  For example, installing Symantec Antivirus produced a blue screen of death.  I’m sure they’ll be up to snuff by the time of release, and granted I didn’t try Norton Antivirus 2009 or the latest version of McAfee.

One thing I do notice that’s slighly annoying is that whenever I resume from standby, Windows thinks I want to look at Outlook right away, regardless of whether or not I had it open when I entered standby.  I’m going to assume this is a bug, but it’s very strange.  Outlook isn’t in any of my startup folders or registry locations.

Performance is much improved from Vista.  I’m quite impressed at how much snappier my computer seems to be.

For some of the productivity enhancements, check out this video:

Bottom line:  I will definitely be upgrading to Windows 7 upon final release.  It’s enhancements are a definite improvement over XP, and takes all the good from Vista and makes it better.

One pet-peeve I’ve found with Vista (generally, despite the public hate, I like it) is that hibernation feature tends to disappear… usually due to a disk cleanup.  Essentially, when the hibernation save file is deleted, Vista removes the hibernation ability.

Luckily, turning it back on is very easy.

Click the “Start” button, and type cmd… then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open in administrator mode. You can also right-click the item “Command Prompt” in the menu and choose Run as Administrator.

From the command prompt, type in the following command:

powercfg /hibernate on

You may have to restart your computer before it will take effect, however I’ve found that it enables hibernation immediately in most cases.

If this doesn’t work for you, there are some alternative methods, but this should work in 98% of the cases.  If it doesn’t, feel free to comment here, and we can shoot you some other ideas.

Enjoy your hibernation!

I haven’t been a fan of Norton products for awhile due to them highly bloating their product and reducing performance.  Well, this has all turned around as they’ve begun a strategic look to performance, and have improved it significantly, while pretty much all the other products out there continue to add bloat.  I’ve changed my tune and am now, once again, recommending Norton products for protecting your computer from threats.

Here is a review from PC Magazine, which I highly agree with:

Norton Internet Security 2009

Most users have a love-hate relationship with their security
software. They love the protection from online and other threats, but they hate the way the software drags down their daily activities. This past spring, Symantec Senior Vice President Rowan Trollope detailed Symantec’s all-out effort to reduce the Norton suite’s impact on performance. And, what do you know—it worked! Norton Internet Security 2009 ($69.99 direct for three licenses) affects performance less than any suite I’ve tested.

		SLIDESHOW (50)
		Slideshow | All Shots

And there’s more good news: The user interface is streamlined and simplified. Most security tasks happen in the background during idle time, entirely without user intervention. Even the installation process is streamlined. The only thing you need do is click one big button that says you agree to the license—after that, the software is fast and completely automatic. From that click to the installed product launching took a minute and a half when I timed it; activation took another minute; and the initial LiveUpdate of malware definitions required one more minute. From zero to 100 percent ready in under 4 minutes? That’s amazing!

Performance Features

As noted, this edition of the suite is all about performance. The utility is designed from the bottom up both to stay out of your way and to demonstrate that it’s staying out of your way. The main window includes a big CPU usage meter that separately tracks system-wide usage and usage specific to Norton. When the system seems bogged down, you can see at a glance what’s to blame.

Tasks like downloading new virus definitions or scanning for malware can take processing power away from user applications, so the product performs these duties only when the system has been idle for a while—10 minutes, by default. A link above the CPU meter opens a huge chart of CPU and memory usage over the last 90 minutes. Typically you’ll see a spike in Norton-specific CPU use during times marked on the chart as idle. The software also supplies a table showing when various background tasks last ran.

Norton Special Promotions

A link below the CPU meter launches another performance tool, Norton Insight, which speeds malware scanning by identifying files that don’t have to be scanned. It checks all executables on the computer against a database of trusted programs and displays a big meter showing just how many files it has exempted—about 90 percent on my test systems. A full scan was proportionally faster after Insight completed its analysis. If you don’t force this full system check by actively launching the tool, it will complete its analysis during idle time.

Norton’s LiveUpdate runs every 8 hours to get new malware definitions and any other needed updates. But in the fight against rogue software, 8 hours is a long time—a modern threat can spread worldwide in that time. So Norton’s “pulse updates” feature checks for new malware signatures every few minutes and streams in any that are available.

This is definitely the slimmest, most unobtrusive Norton ever, yet its protection is top-notch where it counts. Certainly, there are plenty of crusty old users out there who will refuse to believe that Norton can be a quick, speedy suite. Don’t listen to them—they’re living in the past. That’s not to say the suite doesn’t have its problems. The antispam is useless, and the parental controls are rudimentary. But this is definitely the best all-around security suite I’ve ever seen; I’ll be installing it on my own systems. I’ve still got several suites left to review this year, and any one of them has the chance to dethrone Symantec’s, but, for now, Norton Internet Security 2009 is our new Editors’ Choice for security suites. I’ll keep testing, but Symantec has set a dauntingly high bar.

Sub-Ratings:

Firewall:
Antivirus:
Antispyware:
Performance:
Antispam:
Privacy:
Parental Control:

SPECIAL OFFERS!

Norton Special Promotions

Read Full Review

When it comes to memory, a computer can’t have too much.  These days, I recommend, at the very least, 1GB of memory to run Windows XP or Vista.  I recommend 2GB for regular use, and more than that if you are doing intensive stuff.   Memory is currently quite inexpensive, and if you only have 256MB or 512MB you will definitely see a performance boost by upgrading.

One thing to keep in mind, and where people get confused, is when they upgrade their computer to 4GB memory, but the computer reports only 3.5GB.  Most computers have a 32-bit edition of Windows, regardless of what the hardware is capable of.  32-bit operating systems are unable to read over 4GB memory TOTAL — which includes any “invisible” cache memory, etc… thus only a portion of your new memory is available.  64-bit operating systems can see much more, so you shouldn’t have a problem… however there are other issues with 64-bit such as driver & application incompatibilities that you may have to check out.

If you would like to attempt to upgrade memory on your own, it’s fairly simple, but you need to ensure you get the right kind.  All forms of DDR memory are interchangable (ie. PC3200 memory will work in a system requesting PC2700)… but are not compatible with DDR2.  DDR & DDR2 are completely different, and have a different pinout so you can’t accidentally put the wrong chip in a slot.

With that said, here is a nice video which shows how to upgrade your memory:

Here at computerdumb.com, I would like to post relevant information for folks who need genuine help with their computer problems.  Please feel free to comment here or post to our forum with ideas of topics or articles you would like to see.

Thoughts for the future:  how to upgrade hard drive/memory, how to clean up spyware/viruses, how to optimize your computer, etc.  I’d love to hear from you.  Let’s get this party started!

Don’t you just hate it when you delete something from your Outlook inbox, and then you delete it from your Deleted Items folder, and then you figure out two days later that you actually needed that email?

If you are on a corporate network with Exchange, and they have it enabled, you can use “Recover Deleted Items!”  — Go to the folder where you deleted the item (if it was permanently deleted from “Deleted Items,” you’ll need to go there) … Then go to Tools->Recover Deleted Items … If it’s not showing up, then likely your system administrator hasn’t enabled that feature.

You should now see a list of all the things you’ve deleted in the last 30 days, and you can individually select them and recover them by the icon on the toolbar.

What is “RecoverDeleted Items” is Greyed out and Unslectable?

All may not be lost.  Despite appearances, it may just be disabled locally, but can be re-enabled via a registry key.

If “Recover Deleted Items” is greyed out in the tools menu, there is a way to enable it, to see if it’s working on your corporate network, but this requires editing your registry.  If you don’t have any experience editing your registry, I wouldn’t recommend doing this, as it can get hairy in there, and you could cause some serious damage if deleting the wrong things.

1. Open the registry, by clicking start->run, and typing “regedit”
   and pressing ENTER.
2. Navigate to
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options.
3. Add a DWORD value named DumpsterAlwaysOn and set it to 1.
4. Restart Microsoft Outlook to make the change take effect

Now, as long as the feature is enabled in Exchange, you should have “Recover Deleted Items” lit up, and selectable.

Please comment below if this worked or didn’t work for you… or if you know of other ideas that work better.

Have fun recovering your deleted stuff!

Welcome to

Does that box in the corner of your room growl and look menacingly at you, perhaps even mocking your inability to do certain tasks?  Well, if that’s the case, you might need professional help.  But…

Would you like to be able to do things such as systems opimization, virus removal, hardware installations, etc, on your own, without having to pay an expensive technician to come out and do it for you?

ComputerDUMB.com was created for you!

We are building you an informational & community site specifically catered to those who claim to be lacking in PC abilities.  This site is just starting out, so I would love to hear from you if you have ideas of topics we should cover!  Please reply to this post and let me know your thoughts!

Welcome to the first article on ComputerDumb.com … I thought I’d start with a very important topic that has the possibility of touching the lives of many: Computer backup.

Oh, everyone knows that you are supposed to backup the data on your hard drive every day… and of course everyone actually does it!

Wait a second… you haven’t backed up your hard drive in weeks? … months? … years??

I can’t tell you how many customers have come to me wondering if their accidentally deleted files could be recovered somehow, while sheepishly telling me they don’t have a recent backup. Or worse yet, the customers who have a complete hard drive failure, and the only way we could recover their data is to send it in to a service that dismantles the drive in a cleanroom environment and pulls the data off the platters sector by sector. That option is freakishly expensive! (to the tune of $500-1500!)

Now that we’ve established you should backup, the first thing I want to mention is that I highly recommend making sure you have an OFFSITE backup. If you use backup media, make sure you rotate them, and keep a copy outside of the building your computer is in. This ensures that if something happens to your home (ie. fire or theft), you still have a current copy of your data that you could restore to a new computer.

So, how do we backup our data? There are a number of options available. For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume you are a home user or small business with only a few PC’s.

Manual Options

1. CD/DVD burner - This is probably the most common method. Just about every computer sold today has a DVD burner, or at least a CD burner, and the disks are cheap. The trouble with this method is that its terribly tedious, and takes a long time, depending on how much data you have. If you are lucky, your computer came with software to assist you in actually backing up, rather than simple “add your data files and go” … likely it didn’t, so this process becomes a tedious game of finding the files you want to backup, and dragging them into the software and burning. If you have a lot of data, you may also be stuck having to swap out several disks.
2. USB Flash Drive - This can be just as tedious as the CD option, but requires manually copying any files you want to backup to your flash drive on a regular basis.
3. Tape/ZIP/Jazz Drive - This option isn’t very common for the small office & home enironments, but most of the time tape drives will come with backup software automating your backup scenario. This still requires swapping out the tapes so you have something offsite.
4. External Hard Drive - One of the more common solutions is the external hard drive. Many drive manufacturers are including backup software with their drives now, which makes this a nice option, as long as they do, indeed, do that. External hard drives are nice in the fact that they are inexpensive, and come in very large capacities. The downside is that they are usually inconvenient to disconnect, and usually don’t leave the computer’s side.

Automated Options

1. Backup Software - As mentioned above, some hardware comes with backup software, but most do not. You can, however, buy off-the-shelf software to make your media-based backups more automatic. However, these are not foolproof, and still require some amount of manual intervention.
2. Remote Data Backups - Backup your data via a a small software
   utility over the internet to a remote datacenter.  This is the most
   reliable and user-intensive option, and also allows for instant restores to
   multiple previous versions of your data.

Recommendation

Remote Data Backups - By far, the most trustworthy, secure & efficent method of backing up is remote data backups. This is an online service that, through an automatic process will continuously record and backup your system to two offsite mirrored secure datacenters. There are a number of services out there, but we have only come across one with the professionalism and infrastructure in place to make it a trustworthy backup solution. Support is top notch, and backups & restores couldn’t be easier. If you want to roll back a file to yesterday’s version after you made a stupid mistake… no problem! Need to roll back your entire system to a week ago? No problem!

These powerful, easy to use data management tools
help you work more efficiently and effectively, providing you a
significant return on investment (ROI).

Get more information about this solution, and try a 30-day free trial at
http://startech.databu.com.