Windows 7 (and Vista) have done pretty well in protecting people’s computers against viruses, malware and spyware. A lot of this is because of Windows Defender, Microsoft’s own tool to scan and remove threats. They have created a beta program for a new “offline” version of the tool, which will run via disk or usb stick. Worth a shot if you’re trying to solve these issues.

It’s currently in beta, so expect some problems and bugs while they continue to refine the software.

Windows 8 is coming sometime next year. For this version of Windows, Microsoft is being a lot less secretive about how it looks and how it performs. The MSDN blog by the Windows Development Team highlights many of the new interface and features of the upcoming operating system. With Windows 7 adoption being so high, it will be a tough sell to get many users to shell out more money to upgrade – it was hard enough convincing people to leave Windows XP.

One good thing about Windows 8: the system requirements remain the same as Windows 7. That means noone using Windows 7 will be required to upgrade their PC in order to use it. In fact, it may even be faster and use less memory than Windows 7.

When Windows 7 launched last year, they offered a special “Family Pack” that allowed 3 computers to share the same copy of Windows. It was only $149 USD but sold in limited quantities. This October this pack is coming back.

Have a spiffy Solid State Drive (SSD) in your computer. Take these steps to optimize it’s performance – and it all starts with Windows 7. This TweakTown guide offers 8 pages of advice on how to squeeze the most performance of these drives. Unfortunately, early adoptors probably have SSD’s that do not support the TRIM command that will prevent drive performance from degrading over time.

Did you just get Windows 7? Well head on over the Microsoft’s Personalization Gallery for some free themes to customize the look of your new OS. This includes free themes from sports car companies Ferrari and Porsche amoung others.

Laptop Magazine completed their annual survey of laptop vendors and evaluated their technical support. For the last few years, Apple has won and this year was no different. No wonder so many people are “thinking different”. Here are the 2009 grades, more detail about the web vs. phone support is in the article.

• Apple A
• Asus B-
• Dell C-
• Fujitsu B-
• Gateway B-
• HP C-
• Lenovo B+
• Sony B+
• Toshiba B

A lot of my friends have switched to Macs, mostly the notebooks. Given the smaller resources available on notebooks, it’s important to run software that efficient and doesn’t bog the computer down. When Mac owners want to run a Windows program they’ve had two commercial products available to them – Parallels and Fusion. MacTech did some pretty exhaustive tests and found out that Parallels is almost always faster.
Stick with Parallels.

A friend sent this to me today. Firefox uses a bunch of .sqlite files to manage it’s persistent data like your preferences in the “awesomebar”. These files can get quite big and cause a slow computer when using firefox; especially when using the awesomebar and closing the application.

OS X users can use this command to “compact” these files:

for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done

Windows users can make use of the SQLite addon to do the same thing. Install the addon, then go to %appdata%mozillafirefoxprofilesxxxxx and look for the .sqlite files.

Ok, admittedly Microsoft Vista is a failure. Noone “wants” Vista, everyone just gets it or upgrades it because they have to through Microsoft’s monopoly of offering it on every new computer built. I don’t even want to know what tactics they’ve used to get corporations to adopt it but considering they’ve been target of antitrust lawsuits in most of the G8 nations, it’s probably not very nice.

Windows 7 is the next version of Windows, and it’s coming next year. In the latest demo of their beta build, it shows that they’ve been paying attention to what matters most: the user interface. While Vista brought technical enhancements to customers without any visible benefits, Windows 7 trys to use the original enhancements as well as some new ones, in a way that people can see and visualize right away. Gee, it’s like they’re actually thinking about people using their software.

On Lifehacker, Get Window’s 7 Best Features Now, shows people how to enhance Vista to get many of these features right away, without waiting for the late and very expensive Windows 7. Many of the addons are really good and have a nice benefit.

In Vista, bootup is configured to only use one core. If you have a dual core (or more) machine, you can change it to take advantage of multiple cores:

• Go to the start menu find msconfig,
• click on boot tab
• click on advanced options
• number of processors select the number of cores
• when you exit msconfig it will prompt you to use selective startup if you haven’t used it before, confirm this.

I’ve tried it and it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference. Comment back if you find a different experience.