Cranking out news for the geeks, music buffs and gossip junkies, my way. -Greg

Windows 8 has been slowly surfacing more and more recently. Yesterday in the MSDN Blogs a Microsoft Employee wrote about the extremely fast boot times we will see in Windows 8. Basically its quick boot time comes down to hibernating the system’s initialization (drivers and services), so then when its time to boot they are already loaded. If you head over to the MSDN Blog you can read in more specific detail on how they have achieved this and even why. Watching the example video almost gives me the impression that POST is taking longer than Windows. -Greg

MSDN Blog

Windows Phone 7 is starting to show up and I’d have to say it looks promising. Microsoft has brought and entirely new approach to mobile OS, instead of “Apps” its more about the actual content of those apps. The more tile looking feel that flips in front of you is kinda neat, I’ll admit. The single biggest thing that Windows Phone 7 has to compete or maybe even push them in front of the rest, Xbox Live. They show how you’ll be able to use Xbox live to play games and share the experience with other phones, Xbox, and PC’s. This could really give them the niche they would need to jump into shark water with the likes of the iPhone and the Android OS. I would say they could take the mobile world by storm. However, the “Apps” are going to fail them I can see it already. iPhone has a gazillion apps, Google and the Android OS not only has a gazillion apps, they have a gazillion programmers creating them. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe Microsoft isn’t going to take the same route. I tell you there is no doubt that mobile media is just growing at an insane rate and I’m enjoying it. -Greg

Nothing worse than wasted space, especially on a newly upgraded computer. Well the guys at “How To Geek” have found a little over 1GB that you can safely recover after upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista. There are a couple folders that don’t get removed after the upgrade and here’s the easy and safest way to remove them. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! -Greg

These two folders are leftover folders created by Windows during the upgrade process, but unfortunately they don’t get deleted at the end of the setup process. You’ll only see them if you’ve got the option to show hidden files enabled under Organize –> Folder and Search Options.

The good news is that you can definitely get rid of them. Keep reading.

Use Disk Cleanup

The easiest way to remove them is to just run Disk Cleanup (type it into the start menu search box), and then click the button to “Clean up system files”, which will re-launch Disk Cleanup as administrator.

Why is this the easiest way instead of the delete key? Because the folders are normally system protected, and you should also use Disk Cleanup regularly, so stop whining and get to it!

Now that you’ve done that, find the option for “Files discarded by Windows upgrade” and make sure it’s checked, then click the OK button. We’d recommend using Disk Cleanup on a regular basis, of course, and checking most of the rest of the boxes.

Once you’re done, it’ll clean up the files.

And now, those folders will be gone.

This has been a magnificent end of the year for Microsoft. Windows 7 is proving to actually be the excellent OS they set out for and now they have AV too! OK so their AV is not so new, but I was reading an article today from LifeHacker.com, all about it and they have really impressed me and several of the leading AV websites. I was actually just talking to my Dad the other day about how it looks as if AVG (my personal fav.) is not making the cut for top performers. Microsoft Security Essentials is doing it and they are doing it big. It detects 98% of the major malware, its not a resource hog, in fact it actually has good marks for being less of a resource user than most. Best of all its FREE, as long as your Windows can pass the “Genuine Validation” you can get it for free from Microsoft. I’ve already uninstalled my AVG and am currently running it on my new Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, mmm mmm good! -Greg

Here’s more on it from lifehacker.com:

When it comes to keeping your Windows PC secure, all of the scare tactics and overblown virus stories out there make it hard to feel safe online. The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to pay for Windows security.From time to time we like to go on long, opinionated rants about subjects that bug us. This is one of those times. So let’s have a frank and honest discussion about Windows security, and leave the scare tactics and FUD for money-grubbing corporate marketers.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a Great Antivirus Application

The release of Microsoft Security Essentialshas changed the landscape of antivirus software. We’ve finally got a completely free application that protects against viruses, spyware, and other malware—without killing system performance like some of the “suites” tend to do. In my personal experience, it barely slows down the machine and rarely affects my work—and during a deliberate attempt to download some viruses (for testing purposes), it immediately found and blocked them from doing anything.You don’t have to take my word for it, however. Not only did AV-Test.org find that it detects 98%of their enormous malware database, but AV-Comparatives(a widely known anti-malware testing group) found that MSE was one of only three productsthat did well at both finding and removing malware, including the leftovers. It was also the only free product to grab their “Advanced+” rating—the top honor for an anti-malware solution.

The more tech-oriented readers will probably note that MSE does not do any fancy heuristics to detect viruses that aren’t in the database already, which is a feature offered by some paid solutions. In my opinion, this feature is usually unnecessary and a massive system drag if combined with a healthy dose of not installing questionable nonsense.

Here’s the rest of the story..

Honestly, I don’t want to know or even care how much this thing is going to cost. I want to know WHEN, when will this be in production and be available to the public, more importantly, me! There is no doubt in my mind that I will be first in line to get one. So, I simply ask, Mr. Gates don’t charge too much for this as I’d hate to be shot by my girlfriend because I spent $10k on this thing. -Greg

By The Paperboy, 7:30 PM on Tue Sep 22 2009, 220,969 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.

Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who’s spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that’s a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Over the next couple days we’ll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.

Story and video at GIZMODO..

Now I remember the first time I heard about a use for the “whitespaces” when the annoucement of end analog TV as we know it came about. The use was geared more towards using it for wireless internet service providers. This was followed by who should get it, who should decide who gets to use it, what regulations should be put in place, so on and so on. So, leave it to Microsoft to decide to take matters in their own hands and create another similar use. I would have to say though getting miles of range out of my wireless router, easily creating a strong and solid Wi-Fi hotspot for my home, entire neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods?  Sounds great to me, and with the support of DOCSIS 3.0, which brings the possibilty of  over 150 Mbit/s to my home, a good firewall with IP throttling, I could become a small townships ISP  <insert big evil grin here>

You can browse for miles and miles and miles.

While most of us are still tinkering with our home networks, perhaps slowly upgrading our machines and equipment to 802.11n draft hardware, researchers at Microsoft and HarvardUniversity are exploring a new type of Wi-Fi thinking.

Instead of operating at the same (or near) frequency range of existing Wi-Fi signals, Microsoft has been testing the transmission of signals over “whitespaces,” which is part of the radio spectrum that was formerly used by analog television stations.

Microsoft has published a paper that explains networking over UHF white spaces and how it differs from conventional Wi-Fi in spatial variation, temporal variation, and fragmentation of the UHF spectrum.

Dubbed “WhiteFi,” the researchers explain that the method “incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation.

Using a technique called SIFT, which the researchers say “reduces the time to detect transmissions in variable channel width systems by analyzing raw signals in the time domain.”

Basically, should this technology prove viable, we could be measuring Wi-Fi signal range in miles rather than in feet. You can read the paper here (PDF) or more technical summary of it at Dailywireless.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US