The Blue Byte Blog

This is a article I wrote for the company (www.comtek.co.nz) I work for Newsletter, just thought I would share it.

What is Windows 7?
Since this is our first (of hopefully many) Newsletters we thought Windows 7 would be a good place to start. We aim to enlighten or even educate you on Microsoft’s newest and possible greatest Operating System.

First, I want to give you a brief background on Windows 7.

You are probably using Windows XP or Windows Vista, these are the previous version of Microsoft Windows, XP was released in October 2001 and Vista was released in January 2007. Vista was released with much fanfare to replace XP. It very quickly received a bad reputation, blamed for slowing computers down to a crawl, nobody’s software ever working, printers and scanners never installing…I could go on but you get the idea. This year Microsoft released Windows 7 to try and redeem its self.

In January I downloaded and installed the test version of Windows 7 on my laptop. I was using Windows XP before this, the laptop is a couple of years old not the most powerful but is pretty nippy for its age.
The first thing I noticed was how fast my laptop felt, I had no problems with setup and the new look was sharp and very snappy. I started installing software and everything ran smoothly with no problems, most importantly all of my games worked.
I even installed this on a 7 year old Windows XP desktop and found this computer had a new life breathed into it.

On October 22nd Microsoft released the Windows 7 to the General Public, the presales had out stripped XP and Vista put together, with good reason the test version of Windows 7 had been installed on 15 million computers.

Personally I’m very excited about Windows 7, that’s why Aaron asked me write this article, I can’t wait to start installing and showing everyone the cool new features Windows 7 brings to party.

Secondly, Microsoft came up with ‘Top 7 way to enhance your Windows 7 experience’ (thank you Mr. Paul Thurrott).

Please feel free ask questions about Windows 7, I’m interested to know of software you want to run and problems you may have come across.

Cheers

First off I try to restore the computer back a few days to see if this fixes the problem.  I’ve had a lot of success with restoring Vista computers, not so much XP but it’s always worth a try.  Also I always try to carry two programs around with me just in case I come across a friend/family member/client who has a spyware problem.

If I can get internet access I use Hijackthis, and then copy and paste the log file in a website called http://www.hijackthis.de/, allow the website to analyse the log and then I go through the list removing any unwanted programs.

If I can’t get internet access or the computer is particularly sick I will use Combofix, downloaded from here . Combfix does seem to remove most problems and fixes any strange settings on your desktop, it can take a while depending on the computer speed and how much spyware there is.

Both of this these programs are dangerous and they change registry settings and delete files, so be careful if possible backup all of your important files before you begin.