Gobble D Geek

Some surprise news this week in that I was re-awarded for a 3rd time a Microsoft MVP award in the area of Windows Desktop Experience, which in basic terms is all things to do with the Windows operating systems. This award is a yearly thing and not for life, so each year you would have to show your commitment in the technical communities or also assisting Microsoft make their products better through active feedback.

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

MVPs represent a broad spectrum of Microsoft product users. They occupy many different professions including accountants, teachers, artists, engineers and technologists. MVPs reside in over 90 countries, represent 30 different languages, and cover more than 90 Microsoft technologies.

MVPs tend to be early adopters of new technology and actively communicate their experiences to millions of other technology users. Through their extensive community activity, MVPs help others solve problems and discover new capabilities, helping people get the maximum value from their technology.

More information on the Microsoft MVP Program can be found clicking the link below.

Microsoft Security Essentials is the latest venture from Microsoft into Antivirus applications and this free one takes over from where OneCare started, its in early beta and the downloads are limited but you can read up and even try it here if still available.

Microsoft's free security software passed a preliminary antivirus exam with flying colors, an independent testing company said today.

AV-Test GmbH tested Microsoft Security Essentials, the free software Microsoft launched yesterday in beta, on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, putting it up against nearly 3,200 common viruses, bot Trojans and worms, said Andreas Marx, one of the firm's two managers. The malware was culled from the most recent WildList, a list of threats actually actively attacking computers.

"All files were properly detected and treated by the product," said Marx in an e-mail. "That's good, as several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet."

Full article at ComputerWorld here

Real Temp is a great way to monitor your Intel CPUs temp, works with multi core CPUs as in my i7 as in below screenshot (running F@H hence higher temps than normal)

RealTemp is a temperature monitoring program designed for all Intel single Core, dual Core and quad Core processors. Each core on these processors has a digital thermal sensor (DTS) that reports temperature data relative to TjMax which is the safe maximum operating core temperature for the CPU. As your CPU heats up, your Distance to TjMax will decrease. If it reaches zero your processor will start to throttle or slow down so obviously maximizing your distance away from TjMax will help your computer to run at full speed and more reliably too.

Download

Today Microsoft revealed the pricing structure of their next version of Windows as in Windows 7 which will be released on October 22nd 2009.

There will be some early pre-ordering opportunities to get Windows 7 at a 50% reduction, I don't off hand know all of the countries this will be applicable to as this info is more geared from what I can see to USA and Canada, so in my case I’d need to see UK pricing and offers.

I do still think that Microsoft have missed a trick in not as far as I can see offering multi-licences with Windows as they do with Office as many users these days have at least one Desktop and a Laptop, so upgrading both will be expensive if you don't take full use of the pre-ordering offer, especially as many are cutting back on luxury purchases in this credit crunch period.

I would stress that do before ordering Windows 7 that you know that your PC will run it and to check on this a rough guide can be gotten from using the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

A quote from the windowsteamblog

So here’s the low-down on pricing for Windows 7. The estimated retail prices for upgrade packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $119.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $199.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade): $219.99

And the estimated retail prices for full packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): $199.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Full): $299.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Full): $319.99

This means that Windows 7 Home Premium full retail product is $40.00 less than Windows Vista Home Premium today.

To read the full text please visit the Windows Team Blog HERE

I will be upgrading to Windows 7 when its released as I’m now running the Release Candidate version and have been on the techbeta for this since last November and really think this version of Windows is superb, very easy to setup and install, with many great updates to common applications, with really easy setup of home networking.

I will start covering many of the updated applications and their options as well as home networking soon.

I do love the fact that its really easy to change the logon screen in Windows 7 and for me this allows users to customise their Windows to their personality, this Logon Screen Rotator takes this a step further and allows you to rotate up to 10 different backgrounds for your logon screen.

I only added a few while testing this app earlier, but works well and I’m likely to add a full ten to make the daily logon a bit different.

Read about this app first at AskVG (fellow MVP Vishal Guptas site) and credits goto the creator of this app luke_smily_face over at Neowin

Download at either of the links above.

Here is a great small application to allow you to download the wallpapers that are the background images to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Or manually you can do this by opening Bing and clicking the choosing a country then in the bottom right hand side of the image could be (dependent on country) a left and right arrow box to scroll through the images, choose one and right click and Save background As (see below screenshot)

Test your broadband speed with DownTester, with this free application from NirSoft you can add your own list of websites you use to check download speeds.

Description

DownTester allows you to easily test your Internet download speed in multiple locations around the world. It automatically test the download speed of the URLs that you choose, one after another. It moves to the next download URL after the specified number of seconds has been elapsed or after it downloads the specified amount of KB - just according to your preferences.

After the download test is finished, you can easily save the result into text/html/xml/csv file, or copy it to the clipboard and paste it into Excel and other applications.

Sys Req: 

Windows 98,Me,2000,XP,2003,2008,Vista, and Windows 7

This is a neat little application that is still in development phase but works well to stop any of your external HDDs dropping off to sleep, then causing you to wait a while, while they spin up again.

*note that I didn't have any USB or Firewire drives plugged in at the time so listed the internal drives as an example in above image.

Project Description
Keeps up to four USB/Firewire external hard disk drive(s) from going into sleep mode.
Eliminates the annoying lag waiting for your external drives to spool up.
Inspired by NoSleepHD, improved upon for my own needs.
Includes an 8 hour customisable working day timer

Works in XP, Vista and Windows 7 RC (both 32bit and 64bit)

BleachBit while not going to in full take over from the likes of CCleaner in cleaning many areas that junk and temp files reside on your PC, but it will help clean specific areas as below.

BleachBit deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. Rid your system of old clutter including cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean Adobe Reader, APT, Bash, Beagle, Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Internet Explorer, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, Safari, Second Life viewer, Skype, VIM, XChat, Yum, and more.

http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net/

Free and works in both Windows (32bit and 64bit) and Linux

Troubleshooting internet issues is not that easy at times so this free online test from Netzlyzr comes in handy to see what maybe causing the issue, at the end of the scan and tests you will gain a report like the below sample.

Note: You will need to have Java installed to run this online application.