Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Office 2010 Product Documentation
Download Windows 7 Documentation (i.e. Manual) from Microsoft
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 – A Little Info
It’s here, it’s now…well, sort of. The official news is that Windows 7 SP1 has leaked and is now available through the nets…it’s build 6.1.7601.16537. It’s an alpha release, so obviously this is not something you want to be installing on a work/production machine. However, in order to further review this update I’m installing it as we speak in a Virtual Machine, I’ll also install it on one of my test PCs. I’ll let you know what I find, if anything, later today or tomorrow.
Also of note is although this release doesn’t offer too many significant changes for Windows 7, it will offer some significant (sort of) changes for Windows Server 2008 R2…Which I’ll be looking into as soon as I put the two together (i.e. WS 2008 R2 + SP1). I’ll let you know what I find.
I’m currently also reading the documentation for this release (there’s actually quite a bit) and will hopefully get a little more information from there. Interesting stuff so far.
If I’m correct in remembering this, Service Pack 1 should be released about one year after Windows 7’s official release. That is, around October 22, 2010. Unlike some service packs in the past (Windows XP SP2 anyone?) this release won’t necessarily add new “features,” instead, it will fix any problems and include old security updates for Windows 7. In essence, it will be what a service pack is supposed to be.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Customize Windows 7 with Best of Bing 2
Back before Windows 7 even RTM’ed, Microsoft launched the Windows 7 version of its Personalization Gallery, in which users could download and install additional themepacks for their Windows 7 computers. This site is still alive going along very well, and lately they added a new theme, the Best of Bing 2. This new theme is a compilation of Bing.com’s background images that appear on the website every day. The theme comes with 21 pictures from Bing. It is also a continuation of Bing’s Best that Microsoft released a while back, and if you download both you can have a total of 40 different lively backgrounds. The only downside to these themes is you do have a Bing logo in the lower right corner of the screen, not too big of a deal, I think.
There are over 60 themes at the Microsoft Personalization Gallery that you can choose from. I’ve downloaded several of them and haven’t been unimpressed yet. Once you download the file you can simply double-click on it to open, it should automatically install itself. Additionally, you can only use themepacks with Windows 7, however, you can always extract the images from the themepack file by using a ZIP extraction utility, such as WinRAR or WinZIP, which then the images themselves can be used on any computer.