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

Automate your installation of Windows apps in XP/Vista/Win7

First off sign up for Plaxo, it’s a free service with a paid professional service which allows you backup your contacts and delete duplicates.

Once you have signed up go to the Plaxo main page login and then mouse over more and select calendar.  This should show you a picture of a calendar, select add sync point in the bottom right and select download.  This will start the download of PlaxoInstaller_EN and follow the prompts for installing.

I stole this from the Plaxo Help Center :

1. Go to www.plaxo.com/downloads/ and click “Download” next to Outlook and Outlook Express
2. Open the executable file (PlaxoInstall_en.exe)
3. Select Outlook or Outlook Express
4. Enter your sign in info and follow the steps to start synching
5. Enable a signature if you want to (you can always create one later)
6. Click “Finish”

Once you’re done, you’ll get a confirmation email. You’ll need to click on the link in this email to activate your account. After you’re done setting up your sync point with Windows, you’ll be directed to Plaxo.com to set up additional sync points if you want.

Back to me….

You should then see your Outlook sync up with Plaxo, if you go to the Plaxo website and select calendar, along the bottom of the calendar you will see a little picture of Outlook.  If you mouse over that it tells you the last time you synced (within the last five minutes hopefully).

Now you have a link to Outlook on the Plaxo calendar page add another link this time for your Google account, if you haven’t got a Google account….where have you been? sign up for one at www.gmail.com.  Now connect your Google account the same way you did with Outlook but this time select Google and enter your username and password.

Now all of your contacts and calendar entries in your Google account get pushed to Outlook and vice versa.

The final step is to install Google calendar on your blackberry.  I would put a link but it’s easier to do this through your Blackberry and search for Google Calendar.

Hopefully this is easyish to follow, feel free to ask me questions it’s my first stab at putting this in English.  I assure you it does works because I use it every day.

This does work in Windows 7 32Bit, not test in 64Bit…

I normally use Daemon Tools in XP and Vista, but I found that there are issues with it installing in Windows 7 and the installation getting stuck in a loop of wanting to restart the computer.  The Daemon Tools forum quite rightly says that windows 7 is beta so they are not planning on supporting it straight away.

Had a bit of a Google and found people talking about some different software, the simplest to install and use seems to be ISODisk.  Install ISODisk and everything worked great, except it doesn’t like drive b: to be mounted with an ISO.

Please don’t take this as the best way to mount a ISO, it’s just the way I found that works….If anyone has better software or a work around, I’m all ears…..

** Update ** 20/01/10

For a while now Daemon Tools has been able to work on Windows 7, I see people are still searching for how to mount ISO.  I would recommend Daemon Tools over most simply because it works and seems to work well.  ISODisk is fine but mounting drives is a bit fiddle compared to Daemon Tools.

Windows 7 Beta 32-bit Product Key

6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC
GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7

Windows 7 Beta 64-bit Product Key

7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9

Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit keys appear to be completely interchangeable.

Later