Month: June 2009

This was announced today that Windows 7 will be in stores beginning October 22nd.

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. I’ll be doing another blog post about this program with a date and more details when we get closer to availability.

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.

This is the first  of a series of blogs on Free software that you can use I will be reviewing the software and explain how you can use this software to save money and increase your productivity. In this series I will be covering both Applications and Utilities.

Belarc Advisor – the audit tool for your computer. This tool will look at your computer and tell you what hardware your computer has. This best part is then it looks at Software and shows the same. When it find software it will give you the Product keys that you used to install the products, this includes Windows, and Office. Run this program and print out the report, IF you ever need to reinstall your computer form scotch this is the report you will with you had.

Belarc Advisor can be found here at www.belarc.com

Gparted – This is a Linux boot manger that allows you to resized drives, and move part ions. You can do this in Vista or windows 7 but this tool gives you more flexibility. Gparted can be found here at gparted.sourceforge.net.

Format Factory is an all in one sound, and video converter. This one application will convert almost any video or audio file form one format to another. You pick the source file or director and you can convert to the file type you like. One powerful function is that ability to pick a directory and batch convert

Can be found here at www.formatoz.com

Process Explorer – This is the urber geek tool see what happing in you windows computer. This tool will tell you what running but goes into much more detail buy showing you how much memory, Network and CPU.

Process Explorer can be found here at technet.microsoft.com