Dont Pay A Computer Guy 100’s Or 1000’s Of Dollars! A Top I.t. Pro Breaks His Silence & Reveals The Secret Techniques To Keep Your Home/office Computer Screaming Fast, Free Of Spyware, Viruses & Hackers, And 100% Backed Up!

Check it out now!

There are more and more people joining the ranks of FarmVille on Facebook every day. No one can get enough of this game and there are plenty of reasons why. In FarmVille, you can get away from the noise and stress of everyday life. Just relax, plant some seeds, harvest some crops – not a bad way to spend an evening. And as you do this, you’ll naturally advance in levels over time.

There may come a time, though, when you want to get a little more out of the game. Every time you move up a level, you unlock new seeds, decorations, and other discretionary items. This means that in order to get the most out of your FarmVille experience, you’ll have to level up quickly to unlock as many items and bonuses as you can. 

Don’t wait… Get started now!

The Basics

But how do you do this? There are several things to keep in mind if you want to level up quickly in FarmVille. You probably already know that in order to level up, you need to accumulate experience points. For example, each plot of land you plow gets you one experience point. In the early stages of game play, the number of experience points you get by plowing land and planting crops is plenty to allow you to advance at a reasonable pace. Once you get through the initial stages though, you start to need more and more experience points to level up.

Don’t wait… Get started now!

Focus on Experience

When you want to build up experience points quickly in FarmVille, you have to supplement what you gain from your normal harvests with other activities. Making improvements to your farm is a good way to gain some quick chunks of experience points. Buildings yield the most, but you can get experience from putting up just about any decoration or structure. You just have to pay close attention to the amounts of experience points each item will deliver.

You should also take experience points into consideration when deciding which crops to plant. Crops that take less than a day to grow only yield 1 experience point, while crops that take longer yield 2. That doesn’t mean you only want to plant crops that offer 2 experience points however. If you can get back and harvest them as soon as they’re ready, crops like strawberries will get you more than 2 experience points a day because you can harvest them every 4 hours.

You have to be on top of your harvesting and planting cycles in order to make progress this way though. Putting up buildings on your farm remains the best way to get big boosts in your experience quickly. Save up your cash for those, and you’ll be well on your way to unlocking all of the available items in FarmVille.
 

Don’t wait… Get started now!

Source: PCWorld

Microsoft took the wraps off of Windows Phone 7 Series (the official name for Windows Mobile 7) here Monday at Mobile World Congress. Slated to launch on handsets by holiday season 2010, Windows Phone 7 Series is a complete overhaul from previous versions of the OS.

Slick, Touch-Friendly User Interface

If you’re familiar with the Zune HD’s user interface, you’ll feel right at home with Windows 7. Microsoft hinted that the Zune and Windows Mobile teams were working closely and you can definitely see this relationship in Series 7. The menus and interface have the same fluid animations and clean typeface as the Zune HD’s.

The Quick Launch screen is a far-cry from the old Windows Mobile start screen. Large, colorful tiles serve as shortcuts to your most-used or favorite apps or Web sites. You can also place live tiles on the screen with links to your Facebook profile or friends.

These tiles are live, meaning if the content of the app or site is updated, the tile will update on your screen. So if you have a link to a friend’s Facebook profile on your Quick Launch screen, that tile will update when they change their picture. It is a bit creepy if you don’t know them very well, but cool nonetheless.

With a tap and drag, you can easily move them around in any order you like or press a broken heart icon to remove them from the screen. Swiping right takes you to a list of all of your apps. If you want to move one of your apps to your Quick Launch display, you simply press down on the app and select "add to quick launch." When you’re in an app, you’ll see a row of other menu options at the top of the display. Like the Zune, you can "pan" through these menu items with a flick of your finger. If you want to go back to the previous menu, you simply hit the arrow key at the top of the interface.

Social and Productivity Hubs

The People Hub aggregates you friends from all of your social networks in three screens: Recent, All, What’s New. Recent will show you friends who have just updated their profiles or statuses while All will show you all of your friends. What’s new quickly aggregates status updates all into a single feed. You can also quickly share your own status update.

The Pictures Hub lets you see all of the pictures on your hub, your most recent pictures and what’s new with all of your friends. The phone will pick the latest pictures you uploaded or have taken with your phone. And, like the People Hub, What’s New in pictures shows your friend’s most recent picture uploads. The Pictures Hub allows you to easily share your own photos with your social networks.

The Office Hub lets you easily sync your documents between your phone and your PC. Office Hub comes with OneNote, for notetaking, Documents, and Sharepoint for presentation collaboration. Users will also have access to an Outlook Mail application which gives similar features, like flagging important e-mail, that you’d find on the desktop version.

Zune Player and Xbox Live Come to Windows Phones

Despite the rumors leading up to the conference, there was no "Zune Phone" announcement, but all Windows 7 phones will ship with the same music and video features as the Zune HD. Users will also be able to manage their music with the Zune PC software. Does this mean the death of the standalone Zune HD player?

If you’re an Xbox owner and want to keep tabs on your friends’ achievements, Windows 7 phones will come with a mobile version of Xbox Xbox LIVE games, Spotlight feed and the ability to see a gamer’s avatar, Achievements and gamer profile. Users will also be able to purchase games and apps easily from the Windows Marketplace as well.

Windows 7 phones will also ship with Bing Maps, which has some unique features that are on par with Google Maps. Bing Maps dynamically update with street-view photos, 3D graphics and directions. It also shows you real-time traffic updates and reviews of local businesses via Yelp.

Microsoft: More Control Over Hardware Partners

According to Microsoft, hardware partners will not be able to replace the Windows 7 UI. So if you’re a fan of HTC’s TouchFLO user interface, which runs over older versions of HTC Windows Mobile phones, you’re out of luck. It is a bit surprising that Microsoft has locked in the Windows 7 interface because one draw of the platform was the number of different flavors you could get it in.

Microsoft is also taking further control over the hardware side. All Windows Series 7 phones will ship with three hardware buttons: Home, Search, and Back. They’ll also all be capacitive touch-enabled with multitouch.

Microsoft’s hardware partners include Dell, HTC, Garmin ASUS, LG, Samsung, SE, Toshiba, HP and Qualcomm. NVIDIA, which provided the Tegra chip in the Zune HD hardware, is noticeably absent. Microsoft had no comment.

Microsoft plans on bringing Windows 7 phones to all four major U.S. carriers, but are working with AT&T and Orange more closely to bring full lines of Windows 7 phones to the carriers. Microsoft plans to have Windows phones in the market by the end of this year for the 2010 holiday season.

By Tom Warren

A Microsoft project manager has posted and then removed a blog post regarding what he feels the next version of Windows will be like.

Entitled “What’s in store for the next Windows” the blog has now been removed but a
Google cached version is still available.  The Windows Club, who originally spotted the blog posting, speculate that the project manager is a member of the Windows Update team. The project manager doesn’t reveal anything specific but states:

“The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completly different from what folks usually expect of Windows – I am simply impressed with the process that Steven has setup to listen to our customers needs and wants and get a team together than can make it happen. To actually bring together dozens and dozens of teams across Microsoft to come up with a vision for Windows.next is a process that is surreal! The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs…”

The project manager reflects back at Windows 7’s success in the market and argues that Microsoft’s new approach to developing Windows has worked.  “The plan is to use a similar approach for the next version of Windows and till things are finalized you’re not going to get a “marketing” name from us” he states.

CIO interviewed Microsoft EMEA boss of consumer and online, John Mangelaars recently and quoted him as saying:

“[Apple is] doing well on the PC side but Windows 7 is a blockbuster. We got it really right.   For me, Windows 8 will be mind-blowing.”

Most company officials have been shy about talking Windows 8 or whatever the next version of Windows will be called. In January an ex-Microsoft employee predicted Windows 8 would be released in July 2011.

From our friends over at minasi.com:

With the new year comes the discovery of an undocumented-but-useful Windows feature that folks are calling the "god mode" console.   Sound a bit hyped?  Well, with that name, it is — but it’s still worth understanding.

The "God Mode" Easter Egg

A few days into the new year, word arrived about an interesting and newly-discovered Easter Egg in Windows 7 and 32-bit Vista that folks have named the "God Mode console" or "GMC."  God mode?  It’s touted as a windows app that many bloggers have described as a single, does-it-all window to let you control everything about your computer and, with a bit of a stretch, one could call it that — although you’d probably have to do Pilates every day before you could safely execute that stretch. 

More accurately, however, GMC is simply an Explorer window containing a single all-in-one-place listing of all control panel pages.  Even that, however, can be quite useful, as you can see from this screen shot.

In this picture, you can see a couple of things about the GMC.  First of all, is just a folder (albeit a special one, as we’ll see), viewed with Explorer.  Here, I’ve arranged the window so that the portion you can see — there are zillions of Control Panel settings, so there’s no way I could show you the whole thing — displays the items in the Network and Sharing Center.  Now, one of the places that I use the most in the Network and Sharing Center is the "View network connections" page.  It’s the place where you get a list of all of your NICs, where you can bring up their network properties, re-order network bindings (a once-again valuable tool in a world where we’ll soon all be doing both IPv4 and IPv6), and the like.  Normally it takes a few clicks to get to the "View network connections" page, but from the GMC, it’s just one click so hey, that ain’t bad.  What the GMC does not do, however, is show any "hidden" or "secret" features, as some Web pages have claimed. (Of course, the fastest way to get there is to just click Start and then type "ncpa.cpl" in the "Search programs and files" field, then press Enter.)

So how to get a GMC of your own?  Simple.

First, create a new folder.  You can do it anywhere on your computer — any drive, second-level folders, you name it.

Second, name it anything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} where anything can be, well, anything, any text.  Every Web page I’ve seen so far says that the anything text must be the phrase "godmode" but a look at my screen shot above shows that I named mine Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and it works just fine.

Now open up the folder, and voila, you’ve got a GMC.  But that’s not all that you can do with it; I was sort of surprised to find that

• Deleting it can be a problem.  In some experiments, I’ve been unable to delete the folder, and get an error that the folder’s in use elsewhere, no matter how careful I am to shut down other Explorer and Control Panel windows.  In those cases, just rebooting let me delete the GMC folder.
• You can do it on either an NTFS or FAT32 drive.
• You can put it on a removable drive and carry it around.  Whether on a CF card, a USB stick, or an SDHC card, a GMC folder works like a charm when plugged into a compatible computer.
• It responds to different views.  It comes up in Details view by default, but others work as well.  Try out List view, it’s more concise.

Finally, which operating systems support a GMC?  I’ve made it work on

• Windows 7 x64
• Windows 7 x86
• Vista x86
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
• Windows Server 2008 x86

It has not, however, worked on 64-bit Vista; trying to open an Explorer that contains one of the GMC folders causes Explorer to crash.  If that happens to you, just open up an elevated command prompt and type

rd /s /q

And then press "Tab" until the folder name like "Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" or whatever you named it to appears, then press the Enter key.  Also, you might do your experiments not with a folder at the root level, but instead a second-level folder — create Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} inside a folder named "c:\test" rather in c:\ so if you do end up with a system that doesn’t like GMCs, you can still open up Explorer on C: without crashing Explorer.

I hope I’ve offered a bit of insight and a few ideas on using what might better be called the "flat-mode Control Panel View."  I’d love to hear of your experiences with it!

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.

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!

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!