Many different sources are announcing that Windows 7 will have 6 different SKU’s available, and many are touting the end of Windows, because they are making the same marketing mistakes as Windows Vista.  I have a different perspective on this that I will justify after the SKU breakdown.  Here are the SKU’s and features that everybody is reporting:

Windows 7 Starter

• Available worldwide to OEMs on new PCs
• Missing Aero UI tweaks
• Limited to 3 simultaneous applications

Windows 7 Home Basic (Vista equivalent: $200)

• Only available in emerging markets
• Missing Aero UI tweaks

Windows 7 Home Premium (Vista equivalent: $260)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes Aero UI tweaks
• Features multi-touch capabilities
• Adds “premium” games
• Adds media capabilities (Media Center, DVD playback, DVD creation, etc.)
• Can create home network groups

Windows 7 Professional (Vista equivalent: $300)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes all features of Premium
• Adds enhanced networking capabilities (Remote Desktop host, domain support, offline folders, etc.)
• Adds Mobility Center
• Adds Presentation Mode

Windows 7 Enterprise

• Available only in volume licenses
• Includes all features of Professional
• Adds Branch Cache
• Adds Direct Access
• Adds BitLocker

Windows 7 Ultimate (Vista equivalent: $320)

• Limited OEM and retail availability
• Includes all features of Enterprise

Lets Break It Down

I am going to break this down, for Personal and Business users, in a couple of different ways:

1. First by SKU.
2. Then by who the feature set is targeted.
3. Then by the different user segments.

The first one is based on SKU and who will likely use each SKU and the XP Equivalent of the SKU.

So as you can see there are only a couple options available to you based on if you are a Personal or Business user.   The second break down I want to show you is who each of the feature sets is targeted at:

Finally, if we are to break this down even farther in to obvious user segments, and split Personal in to Average Joe and Power User, and Business in to Small Business (Average User) and Enterprise (Power User) you will see that there is really only one option available to each type of user:

I actually think this is quite smart, because each market segment: Average Joe, Power User, Small Business, and Enterprise, hits a different set of criteria and a different set of requirements for each segment.  So given the above and how they will be distributed you are probably only going to see one of two different SKU’s on your favorite OEM’s site, which is pretty equivilent to the XP SKU’s that you are use to:

So all in all I am pretty happy with this. I still think the marketing department could have gone with out the Starter and Home Basic versions, and privately marketed the Enterprise to Volumn License customers.  But it is what it is, and if they can keep the OEM’s selling on the Home Premium and Professional version only, I think Microsoft will have a great Windows Operating System both in perception and technically.  And we can all forget about the last 2 years of Windows Vista, sort of like we have done for Windows ME.

Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista

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Recently I have been trying to squeak more speed out of my laptop by shutting down unnecessary services that seem to come with most every software and device driver.  To do this I started with a clean install of Windows Vista and installed the driver only option for my hardware and then got rid of many of the useless services that come with software like iTunes, VMware, and other stuff I find useful.

However with all that tweaking it still doesn’t create an optimal installation of Windows Vista, because Windows by default still runs a ton of unnessisary services.  For example, Microsoft thought it was nessisary to enabled Tablet PC Pen Input by default which I venture to say is useless to a vast majority of Windows Vista users.

Coincidentally while checking out the new HD feature available on YouTube I stubled across an interesting video describing a website called Speedy Vista.

Windows Vista has around 130 services. According many reports, Vista is very computer intensive, so it may take a couple tweaks to lighten it up a bit to suit your needs. The names are rather vague like ‘ReadyBoost’ and ‘SuperFetch’. How will you know which are safe to disable? Hopefully we can help. We have a full list of all Vista services and recommended settings for them. This site contains registry files for easily resetting your services settings back to factory in case you mess it up or just wish to have a good way to go back to factory.

The website offers a cheat sheet of services you can safely shut off, and if you are unsure what the service does, and don’t want to make a mistake, it has a description of what the services does.  But my favorite part of this website is that it provides a batch file and or a registry file that will shut off the unnessisary services automatically.

Windows Vista ‘Safe’ Settings reg bat - Use at your own risk. I’ve tried to weed out services that are obviously unnecessary to give you a good starting point to tweaking for your own needs/preference. Please e-mail me any problems, etc.

Windows Vista Tweaked Settings reg bat- Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Windows Vista Minimal Settings reg bat - Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Disclaimer: Use this site at your own risk. I am not responsible for damage to your computer, or anything else.

If none of these above options work for you, you can even use their wizard to turn on and off the services that you don’t want to use.  This allows you to create your own custom registry file to your own specifications.

I just wanted to post this interesting website since I haven’t posted in the past month, because of my book writing.  Which I am happy to say that I am starting my last chapter and I should be done by the end of the year so I can resume my normal posting schedule.

Tags: SpeedyVista, Tweaks, Windows Vista

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I just can’t take Windows Vista anymore so I am ditching it for Windows Mojave.  I have heard great things about it and anything must be better than Windows Vista.

Check it out for yourself:
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com

By the way, I am still alive, just very busy with some cool things that have been happening in my life.  I will share in the next couple of weeks.

Tags: Windows Mojave, Windows Vista

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Hi loyal readers,

I have to apologize, I have been a really bad blogger lately. I have neglected my blog because of a new job and a brand new Web 2.0 site that I am about to release. At the end of the month I will make an announcement about this project and all the new technologies that many of you have probably heard of but few have implemented. But until then please keep visiting and I really enjoy your comments on the following popular postings:

• Setting Up iTunes on Windows Vista 64-bit
• Apple wants Vista to Run Un-Secured to install iTunes

Thanks,
Nick

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Microsoft, Windows Vista

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Please note: These fixes break all current methods of bypassing driver singing requirements except the good old F8 during boot (that you have to do every single time you start vista)

If you are using Rivatuner, atitool and or Peerguardian on 64bit vista, you will have to use F8 every single time to disable driver signing requirements to use those two programs. x86 version is unaffected.

These updates should go official on the next patch Tuesday (in one weeks time). Please read more for the download links and information on these updates.

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Download: Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack for x64 or x86 version
Source: Neowin.net

Tags: Microsoft, Performance, Windows Vista

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One of the new features of Windows Vista was the Driver integrity Checks. In the x64 version of the product it is turned on by default, and is a great idea to prevent kernel level access to only drivers that have passed the Microsoft Testing for security and performance. However this feature can be rather annoying since Microsoft hasn’t even released signed drivers for all their products. (i.e. Streets & Trips GPS Device) So I have included the following steps in order to disable the driver signing integrity checks, so that you can install unsigned drivers.

Note: You should only do this if you are experiencing driver installs getting blocked and you use this driver on a daily basis. Because there is an F8 boot option that will temporarily disable driver signing for other needs and also this is a very good feature that helps prevent spyware and other nastys from gaining access to your OS.

1. Log in to Windows with a user name that has administrative access.
2. Right click on Start > Accessories > Command Prompt
3. Select Run as administrator
4. In the command prompt type bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on
5. Reboot.

To turn driver signing back on do the following:

1. Follow steps 1-4 from above.
2. In the command prompt type bcdedit /set nointegritychecks off
3. Reboot.

So it is that easy.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista

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Since my last article I have updated the OS on my cell phone to AKU 3 for Windows Mobile 5.0. This has been a huge productivity increase, since there is no longer a need to have a modem driver, and you can browse the internet and take calls on your cell phone at the same time.

Requirements:

1. A Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.0 device.
2. Active Sync 4.2 or greater for Windows XP or Windows Mobile Device Center for Windows Vista.

USB Internet Sharing:

1. Open the Internet Sharing application under Programs.
2. In the PC Connection drop down select USB.
3. In the Network Connection drop down select the network connection for your cell phone provider. (i.e. Verizon Wireless)
4. Press Connect in the bottom left.
5. Plug your device in to your computer using a USB cable.
6. You will then see your Status at the top change to Connected.

Bluetooth Internet Sharing:

I am going to assume that you already have your Bluetooth device paired to your computer. If you don’t know how to do this please check the manual for your specific phone.

1. Open the Internet Sharing application under Programs.
2. In the PC Connection drop down select Bluetooth PAN.
3. In the Network Connection drop down select the network connection for your cell phone provider. (i.e. Verizon Wireless)
4. Press Connect in the bottom left.
5. Plug your device in to your computer using a USB cable.
6. Setup a PAN (Personal Area Network) on your computer, again please search the internet or look through your manual on how to do this, because it varies from cell phone to cell phone and Windows XP and Windows Vista.
7. You will then see your Status at the top change to Connected.

This is a great new feature that the Windows Mobile Team has included in the Windows Mobile OS. Not only can you now use your phone while you are browsing the web, but you don’t have to go through the hassle of trying to find a modem driver and then setting up a dial up connection and typing #777 and on and on and … you get the idea. I hope you find this useful, and as always please leave a comment telling me if this works or doesn’t for you.

Tags: Active Sync, Microsoft, Phone, Verizon, Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile Device Center, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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Apple has just released a public beta of its Safari browser for Windows yesterday. And there have been already 6 zero day exploits and many, many crashes for the browser. You can read about them here here here and here. Which makes the following image from the Apple website, borrowed from aviv.raffon.net, all the more funny.

Also Apple has the following to say under the Security tab of their website:

Security

Now you can enjoy worry-free web browsing on any computer. Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.

For starters, Safari uses robust encryption to ensure that your private information stays that way. When you browse a secure site, Safari displays a lock icon in the upper-right corner of the browser. If you want to know more about the credentials of a secure site, click the lock icon and Safari displays detailed information about the site’s security certificate.

Safari supports SSL versions 2 and 3, as well as Transport Layer Security (TLS), the next generation of Internet security. Safari uses these technologies to provide a secure, encrypted channel that protects all your information from online eavesdroppers. And Safari lets you use standards-based authentication such as Kerberos single sign-on and X.509 personal certificates, or proprietary protocols like NTLMv2 to log in to secure sites.

Safari also supports a variety of proxy protocols — services that help firewalls control what flows in and out of the network — including Automatic Proxy configuration, FTP Proxy, Web Proxy (HTTP), Secure Web Proxy (HTTPS), Streaming Proxy (RTSP), SOCKS Proxy, and Gopher Proxy.

I don’t know about you, but it’s one thing to say that you have designed your browser to be secure from day one, but it’s another to actually prove it. Apple has fallen flat on its face with this release, and I know it is only a beta, but Fire Fox and IE have both been in beta before and haven’t nearly had this many problems.

All that I have to say is when you venture out in to the Windows world Apple, where the market share is at 90% you are not protected by your small margins anymore.

Tags: Apple, Internet Browser, Microsoft, Performance, Safari, Security, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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I am happy to announce that Apple iTunes 7.2 has been released and this is the first release since Windows Vista was released 6 months ago that worked through Apples normal install process with out any problems. I just wanted to keep everybody updated since I have talked about the problems of installing iTunes on Windows Vista x64 in the past.

If you want any more information about this release, please view Mac Rumors.

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Microsoft, Windows Vista

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You’ll see many posts out on the web talking about what a great thing it is that Dell is offering a Free OS on their hardware. And many stories talking about the Windows Tax. I was very disappointed to see the superficial overview that Jeff Atwood on his website, he has always done very in depth reviews in the past, however he slipped this time:

Whether you’re a fan of the latest open source operating systems, or just a fan of plain old-fashioned consumer choice, the end of the Microsoft tax is a win for customers. I was a little worried that Dell would charge extra for the privilege, but it looks like they played fair and square:

	Dell Dimension E520	Dell Dimension E520N
CPU	Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz	Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz
RAM	1 GB DDR2	1 GB DDR2
Hard Drive	250 GB	250 GB
Media	CD-RW/DVD	CD-RW/DVD
Video	Integrated Intel GMA X3000	Integrated Intel GMA 950
OS	Windows Vista Home Premium	Ubuntu Desktop Edition 7.04
	$679	$599

Because if you are just looking at the table above it looks like you are getting a real bargain, from any consumers point of view. You may think that you can save $80.00 by getting a PC with Linux on it and then using pirated software, free Microsoft Windows software from your university, or just taking your friends CD for a night. In all cases you will be screwed out of the Windows support that comes at a premium with Linux. I am not saying this is for everybody, because I imagine most of the readers of this website only call the support lines when they have already figured out they need their hardware replaced.

However there are a good 95% (totally made up number) that still use support for basic things such as printer installs, troubleshooting mouse problems, and other common tasks that we can do in our sleep.

So the price is no where near equal when you start looking at support options. In fact if I was to up my support plan to 3 years, I could still only get 1 year of support for $275.00, however if I was to up my support plan in for Windows I would get 3 years of support for Windows at no cost.

I know many of you are still rolling your eyes at the idea that you would need support for Windows, but you have to step back and look at a computer through a total novices eyes, and realize they still see a computer as performing, as my grandmother-in-law says, “magic”. That “magic” as she put it was just because she could chat in real time over GTalk to her grand-children through the computer.

As much as I love Ubuntu, and Linux in general, I have never liked the whining or group think mentality that comes with being an OSS zealot. I am sure they say the same about me and Windows, but at least I consciously choose Windows because I am more productive on it. I didn’t choose my operating system in order to “stick it to the man”, as one of my friends put it. I really think selling Ubuntu was a big PR move from Dell, had nothing to do with promoting free Open Source Software. Basically they just wanted some street creds, because their sales have been tumbling, and HP, has taken Dell’s place, and become the largest supplier of computers in the world. Getting a small group of users on their side, may help them meet Wall Street Estimates this new fiscal year.

I make these observation because you could always buy a PC from Dell with out an operating system, by going through the Small Business site and choosing FreeDOS as your operating system. This goes for all the major manufactures, including Dell, HP, and Lenovo to name a few. It is just that some very vocal Linux activist conveniently forget this when they are arrogantly talking about the “Microsoft Tax” and the strangle hold Microsoft has over these manufactures.

Tags: Dell, HP, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows Vista

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