Ditch Paint for Paint.NET

After many, many years, Microsoft finally updated their native MS Paint application. The good news? It looks better. The bad news? It’s still as feature-poor as it was in Windows Vista.

There’s no reason to bother with this application when the free Paint.NET gives you everything that Paint has – and more. Paint.NET not only offers a great interface, but a great set of features.

Paint.NET supports all the basic features you’d want from a photo and graphics editor, such as crop, resize, flip,and rotate. It supports a basic array of tools (paint, pencil, eraser, shapes), and a layering system for building a single image out of several layered photos and drawings. There are 32 basic effects filters available, including the Photo effects Red-Eye Removal and Soften Portrait.If the built-in effects don’t supply what you need, you can download any number of effects plugins designed to work inside Paint.NET.

Built using Microsoft’s ClickOnce application update technology, Paint.NET detects when a new version is available, and asks if you want it installed. Once you download this application, it’ll keep itself up to date.

Ditch Notepad for Notepad++

Sometimes, you don’t need the power of Microsoft Word or an online document system like Google Docs; a plain old text file will do. Microsoft’s Notepad, however, takes “plain” to ridiculous extremes. The tiny app supports word wrap, a basic find/replace, and…well, that’s about it. Enter Notepad++, a free “programmer’s text editor” by Don Ho. Notepad++ has a multiple document interface, so you can have several text files open in the same app (what a concept!). If you write text files in HTML, XML, or any other programming language, Notepad++ uses syntax highlighting to identify programmatic objects such as element names and attributes, making your files easier to read.

Notepad++ can be placed in “Post-It” mode, so that it resembles a tabbed version of Windows’ Sticky Notes. If you’re working with large text files, you can jump quickly around the document with user-defined bookmarks.

The best feature of Notepad++ for ordinary mortals is its Find/Replace, which is closer to Word’s Find feature than Notepad’s. You can find and replace using ordinary characters, special characters, or regular expressions. Notepad++ supports replacing text not only in the current file, but in all open files.

If you work frequently with plain text files, you need this application in your Start menu.

Ditch Sound Recorder for Audacity

Poor, poor Sound Recorder. The Microsoft utility for capturing voice recordings is a bare window with three basic functions: Start Recording, Stop Recording, and Help. If you want to record audio for a blog podcast, you’ll need something a little more powerful than this.

Enter Audacity, an open-source audio editor that not only supports recording your voice, but editing down the results, applying effects such as Fade, Echo, and Noise Removal. You can record your own sound, or editing existing sound files. The latest beta version offers “provisional” support for Windows 7, but seems to work as well as its predecessor does on Vista.

Audacity saves all recordings and sound edits in its native file format. You can export to a range of audio formats, including WAV and M4A (AAC). You can open and edit MP3 files natively; saving to MP3 format requires downloading the (free) LAME MP3 Encoder.

Source: Windows7update.com

Wouldn’t it be great to have this feature for your Gmail account – i.e., have a Jump List that support composing a new email, and viewing your most recent messages? You can! Neowin.net member daty2k1, a software developer from France, has written Gmail Notifier Plus, a super-charged Gmail notifier with a handy Jump list available by right-clicking on its icon in the Taskbar. Gmail  Notifier Plus provides a jump display of your 10 most recent unread e-mails. Any message can be pinned to this list by clicking the pin icon that displays when your mouse hovers over an item. In addition, the Jump List has commands for composing a new message, checking for new messages immediately, and opening Gmail in your default browser.

New mail notifications are more subtle than with Gmail Chat: you’ll hear a sound (default is the Microsoft Outlook “New Mail” sound), but won’t see a pop-up. Place your mouse over Gmail Notifier Plus in the Taskbar, and you’ll see your most recent message, along with navigation controls that support browsing the first 20 messages in your Gmail Inbox without opening your browser.

A lot of thought and dedication has gone into this little app. Unlike its Google counterpart, Gmail Notifier Plus can monitor multiple Gmail accounts. daty2k1 has enlisted a team of volunteers to translate Gmail Notifier Plus into dozens of languages, so odds are it works for your native tongue whatever your locale.

Gmail Notifier Plus downloads as a bare executable file without a signed certificate. You’ll need to create a folder for it in your Program Files directory, and grant it permission to execute on your system. Download it today, and see how an ambitious application developer leverages one of Windows 7′s best new features.

Source: Windows7update.com

Windows 7 Backup

Windows 7 does not provide a remote backup service. Instead, you back up your files to a secondary internal hard drive, an external hard drive, or another machine on your home or office network. To access Windows 7 Backup, select  Start ->Computer. Right-click your disk drive (usually C:), and select Properties. On the Tools tab, click Back up now….

The device most used for Windows-based backups is an external hard drive. Once a pricey commodity, external drives like the Western Digital WD Elements and the Seagate Elements now offer up to 1TB of storage for around $100.

(It’s possible to write your backups to DVD if you have a DVD-RW. The downside is that you can only store 4.7GB of data on a single DVD. Also, Windows 7 doesn’t retain file permission information when it archives to DVD.)

Winodws 7 Backup can be used to backup your personal data – your documents, pictures, music, and videos. It can also backup a system image, which is a full snapshot of your PC, including the Windows 7 operating system itself. System images are the fastest way to restore Windows 7 and all your installed applications to a new hard drive should your current drive fail.

Remote Backup Services

Despite being much improved over Vista, Windows 7 Backup still has limitations. Many users have reported that Windows 7 Backup is slow to the point of unusable. Microsoft itself has acknowledged that Backup is very sluggish if users have over 400GB of data. System image backups are not incremental: taking a new system snapshot requires saving a completely new system image to your backup location.

Instead of wrestling with Windows 7 Backup, many home users would be better served sticking with one of the many remote backup service providers that support backing up your files to a secure location over the Internet. For a small monthly fee, companies like Mozy and Carbonite provide small Windows applications that back up all of your personal files on a regular schedule. After a large initial backup, backups are incremental – only new or modified files are sent to the remote server.

Mozy Home for Windows

You can restore your files from the Internet should your drive fail, or port an old computer’s files to a new PC or laptop. Plus, you can easily restore individual files that you accidentally deleted.

Remote backup provides a level of data security that you won’t get from a single external hard drive sitting on your desktop. Companies like Mozy and Carbonite make redundant copies of all of your files, guaranteeing that they’ll never lose any of your data due to a single hardware or electrical failure.

While remote backup services are great for personal data, they don’t work well for system images, which take up tens or hundreds of gigabytes of space. If you use a remote backup service, it’s still a good idea to have a second computer or external hard drive on which to save a system image in case of a catastrophic hard drive failure. One option is to use remote backup services for your personal files, and Windows 7 Backup for a monthly system image. Or you can skip Windows 7 Backup entirely and use an all-in-one solution like Acronis True Image, which supports both local snapshots and remote backup over the Internet.

The verdict is in on Windows 7…and it’s all good news for Microsoft. After taking a beating when it released the buggy Microsoft Vista, the software giant has made giant strides one year after 7′s release.

Web analytics firm NetApplications says that Windows 7 installations have (slightly) eclipsed Windows Vista. Since we can assume that Vista will only be installed by people who’ve been living in caves for the past year, this trend will undoubtedly continue. Corporate adoption is on the rise, too: a major IT metrics firm recently found that 31 percent of companies surveyed have budgeted to migrate their users to Windows 7.

That doesn’t mean Microsoft’s work is done, however. If there’s one arena in which the Redmond behemoth has to make inroads, it’s tablet computing. It’s already lost substantial ground to Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) in the cell phone market. The announced feature set for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s slated new mobile platform, has earned derision from commentators for being several years behind the times.

That leaves tablets as a natural platform the revamped Windows. The success of the iPad is sparking a revolution in this space. It’s pushed down the price of eBook readers like the Nook and the Kindle, and spurred a series of imitators running Google’s Android OS. Windows 7, which sports a new slate of features specifically for tablets, is well poised to win a chunk of this market. Indeed, many current tablet users report that Windows 7 runs like a dream on their existing hardware. Vendors such as Archos have jumped the gun, and already released tablets preloaded with 7.

Microsoft’s killed its ambitious foray into the tablet space, Courier, back in April. But recently, Steve Ballmer swore that the company was going to do what it does best: get its software on as many hardware platforms as possible. The company is working with Intel and other hardware vendors to release a series of branded tablets tuned for the latest release of Windows.

Microsoft engineers are committing that the first generation of Windows tablets will support  a “personal cloud” – a set of networked information (documents, email, music, etc.) that is accessible across a range of computing devices, and tied together through your Windows Live account. The services are already there: Messenger, Hotmail, SkyDrive. If Microsoft can couple this with a compelling Windows 7-based interface and 3G connectivity, it stands a chance of scoring a piece of the tablet market before Apple and Google divide it between themselves.

Source: Windows7update.com

The good news is that the advanced search functionality is there – you just need to know how to access it. Windows Search supports a rich set of search commands called the Advanced Query Syntax. AQS, which is fully documented on Microsoft’s TechNet site, supports restricting your search result to different kinds of files, including videos, Favorites, photos, meeting notices, emails and Outlook contacts, among many others.

Windows 7 will even assist you in filling out AQS queries. Put your mouse in a search box in Windows 7, and type “kind:”. Windows will supply a drop-down list of the different types of files you can search.

Besides AQS, Windows Search sports a little-known feature called Natural Language Search. Click the Organize button on your folder, and select Folder and Search Options. Then select the Search tab.

After checking Use natural language search and clicking OK, go back to the search box in the upper right hand corner of your folder. Type in “documents modified today.” Presto! You’ll see every document you touched throughout the calendar day.

This functionality is also available for searching e-mail, if you use Microsoft Outlook. Let’s say you received emails from your friend Ted yesterday. Click the Start button, and write “email from ted sent yesterday.” Ted’s emails from the previous day will be returned in the Start window search results.

Natural Language Search for email is a fast way to combine a name and a date in order to narrow down the exact email you need. Be warned that it can be a little finicky. It doesn’t do well with relative dates; “email from ted sent on monday” won’t yield any fruit. It doesn’t handle long dates, either: “email from ted sent on july 24th 2010″ is a dud, but “email from ted sent on 07/24/2010″ brings it home. Once you learn what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be able to find messages and files in record time.

Source: Windows7update.com

It used to be that you could use the Telnet application on Windows to log in to a Unix shell on a web host. But if you press WIN+R and typing in telnet to the Run command box on Windows 7, you may be in for a shock: Windows no longer includes a Telnet client by default. To enable it, you have to open the Programs and Features control panel, click Turn Windows features on and off, and check Telnet client.

After selecting this option and pressing OK, you can bring up the Windows Telnet client.

Not very impressive, huh? The Telnet client is old, and unimproved for Windows 7. What’s more, many Web hosting companies don’t even support it! Sites such as HostGator insist that you use SSH (Secure SHell) access instead, which is much safer than Telnet.

Never to fear: others have picked up Microsoft’s slack. PuTTY is a great substitute for the Windows Telnet client. It not only supports both Telnet and SSH, it comes with a better interface to boot.

PuTTY can be downloaded as a raw Windows Executable file (.exe). You can put the .exe anywhere on your system, but my favorite location is C:\Windows\system32. Once PuTTY is in the system directory, you can open it by clicking WIN+R and typing putty into the Run dialog.

PuTTY defaults to SSH, so if your host supports a secure shell, you can type the address into the Host name box, click Open, and login to your Web hosting account. I guarantee you’ll find the PuTTY terminal window superior to the Windows Telnet interface.

(A final note to hosting account owners on Windows 7: don’t use the native Windows FTP client, either! Pressing WIN+R and typing ftp will get you access to the command line FTP interface on Windows, but you’ll be much happier if you download the free, GUI-based Filezilla.)

Source: Windows7update.com

IE8 on Windows 7 makes vast improvements in page load time; Microsoft’s browser, in most cases, feels as snappy as Chrome. The IE team at Microsoft aims to continue that trend with  Internet Explorer 9, which is now available for public preview. This pre-release of IE9 is touted as a “developer preview,” and for good reason – there’s not much to it. It installs as a separate application in your system without replacing your current installation of IE8. Open it up, and you’re treated to the world’s most spartan browser interface. You’ll have to click the Page menu and click Open to navigate to a new site.

As Microsoft discusses on its IE blog, most of the current changes in IE9  are under the hood. IE9 uses hardware acceleration to speed the performance of HTML5, a new version of the Internet’s lingua franca that enables developers to build Flash-like applications in the browser. The IE team has also rewritten the JavaScript engine so that it runs natively inside of the browser, instead of running inside of a complex scripting architecture that supports various scripting languages.

Unfortunately, even these performance improvements might not be enough. According to the benchmarks released by Microsoft back in March, IE9′s performance still lags behind Firefox and Chrome.

If you’re an end user looking for new features, there’s nothing here for you (yet). A leaked version of the full IE9 browser gives us a small hint of what’s to come when Microsoft releases IE9 Beta in September: features include a new download manager, a Chrome-imitating Start tab, and better add-on management. Those are necessary improvements, but not enough to pull me away from Chrome.

It feels like IE9 isn’t meant for PC end users at all, but is paving the way for fast HTML5 applications on Windows 7 tablet PCs. Unless the IE team unveils some new features it’s been keeping tucked under its hat come September, it appears that the best Web browsers for Windows 7 will continue to come from outside of Microsoft.

Source: Windows7update.com

Now you can wait till tuesday to get your OTA version and not have to go through the steps below, or you can get your update 4 days early!

I went through the update without any error and I am not responsible for any problems, especially because its literally like 11 easy steps. Enjoy!

ONLY FOR USERS WHO WANT TO LIVE ON THE EDGE!

Link to download Froyo: Click Here

• Download the above Froyo image and rename it to update (leaving the .zip file type intact)
• Attach the phone to the computer via USB and mount the SD card
• Drag the downloaded image (.zip file) to the root of the SD card, dont unzip it or anything.
• Unplug your Evo and Turn it off
• Hold down the Volume Up button and power on your Evo at the same time. This should bring up the boot select window.
• Select Bootloader (power button selects)
• Select Recovery (use the volume up/down buttons to scroll through the options)
• The phone will reboot again, dont worry, its going into the recovery menu
• At the screen with the red exclamation mark, hold the Volume Up and Power button again for a few seconds, until some blue text appears.
• Select “Apply sdcard:update.zip” from the options
• Give it 15 to 20 minutes and let it do its thing. It will reboot a couple times and bam, Froyo on the Evo 4 days early!

Note** At the very end, there is an HTC update that may take a little while. Relax and let it do it’s thing!

Update: moving from screen to screen feels very very fast and nimble…

Leave a comment and let me know how it went for you…

Too many applications booting at startup can not only increase your computer’s startup time, but decrease overall system performance. Windows 7 comes with the Microsoft System Configuration Utility, which provides a listing of all software configured for startup. From the Start menu, click Run…, type msconfig, and click Enter. Click the Startup tab on System Configuration for a rather dry list of your startup apps.

For a richer interface with more options, download EnhanceMySe7en Free by seriousbit. EnhanceMySe7en brings a large array of Windows 7 performance and interface tweaks under the aegis of a single application. The Startup menu (Tools -> Startup Items) lists all running applications, and gives you the option of either disabling them or removing them from the Windows Registry altogether.

EnhanceMySe7en Free contains additional startup performance tweaks under its Optimizations -> Startup, Shutdown menu. Here, you can disable group policy on startup, turn off Last Known Good Configuration generation, and disable IDE auto-detection.

EnhanceMySe7en Free also integrates well over a hundred options for disk cleaning, Registry cleanup, Process and Service inspection, CPU caching, Aero features, desktop and Start menu management, and Internet and media applications.

On a side note, you can download the Pro version for a 15-day free trial, which contains enhanced system optimization options, a disk de-fragmentation interface, and a menu of network tools and tweaks. After 15 days, the Pro version costs $30. A caveat, though: when I enabled some of the advanced hard drive optimizations, namely Enable Boot Defrag and Optimize Hard Drives Behavior on Idle, Windows 7 on my HP 6730b crashed hard. As in, Black Screen of Death hard. Everything’s been smooth since that forced reboot, but be safe and create a System Restore point before turbo-tweaking your OS with EnhanceMySe7en.

Until now, I’ve been watching my Netflix shows through Netflix.com using Google Chrome. If you’re making the same mistake, then stop immediately. Windows 7 has integrated Netflix support into Windows Media Center, creating an experience that stands head and shoulders above the browser-based interface.

To start Netflix, select Start, All Programs, Windows Media Center. When prompted by WMC for setup options, select Express. Within WMC, select Movies, and then select Netflix.

From here, the interface for finding and viewing movies is intuitive. What’s not so obvious is that Netflix in WMC supports watching while browsing. Once you start playing a movie, put your mouse in the upper left hand screen and click the blue Back arrow, without pausing or stopping the film. The film will continue playing in a small window in the lower left hand corner of the screen while you browse additional films!

The best benefit of watching Netflix through WMC, however, is the video quality. While the pixelation is about the same, both the video and audio play more smoothly than in the Web browser. I’ve grown accustomed to the video and audio streams on Netflix being slightly out of sync. I didn’t experience this once in three hours of Netflix viewing in WMC. Nor did I experience any artifacting or frozen frames, two other common experiences in browser-based viewing.

As Microsoft itself notes, the major limitation of Netflix on Windows 7 is that it doesn’t support Extenders, so you can’t stream Netflix from your PC onto your Xbox 360. That aside, Netflix on WMC is a must for anyone using their PC as a media device.