Just finished the February 2010 issue of PC World.  They had an article called “The State Of Windows 7 Satisfaction” about early adopters of Windows 7 and their general feedback about installation and features.  Information was gathered from 615 people at www.technologizer.com.

Something really jumped out at me: 64% rated themselves as Windows experts and 41.3% had to resolve driver issues.  To me any Windows expert would search out, verify and download all drivers for a new operating system before installing it.  That was certainly the case when I installed the …

Picked up a Super Micro P8SCT motherboard for practically nothing and had it sitting in my pile of spare components for a few years.  I recently decided to set up a new Windows Home Server and wanted to press this motherboard into service since it has four SATA ports: they’re only SATA 1.5 but since the storage will all be accessed over my network that’s not a concern.
It’s a low end ATX server board supporting one P4 CPU, four DDR2 DIMMs, two 10/100/1000 NICs  and one PCI-X slot.  The CPU …

Steam is a great service: log in on any PC and play the games you’ve paid for.  The only downside is the download; modern games are between one and five gigabytes, which makes for a long download.  Or after you reformat your system and go to start playing games but have to wait a day for Steam to download them all again.
Luckily steam has a backup feature: right click on your game in the Steam Games menu and select “backup games files”.

You’ll be prompted for a location: I’m saving my …

A friend recently had some PC issues so I volunteered to reload their PC.  They had Windows XP Home and used the PC for web surfing and email so I wiped the drive and installed XP Home with Service Pack 3, OpenOffice, Defraggler, Microsoft Security Essentials, Paint.NET, 7-Zip.  Basically an all around nice collection of free software that gets the job done.
They didn’t have a lot of peripherals: an HP inkjet and a webcam.  My problems began with trying to find drivers for the NexxTech 2516525 webcam; Windows Update didn’t …

Sometime in 2006 I started using Gmail.  I had been an ardent Outlook user until that point for two reasons: I knew the product and all the mail was kept in one PST file that could be easily moved around without worrying about losing everything.  The benefits of easy access anywhere, anytime swayed me to Gmail but I still liked the folder storage of Outlook: it was how I was used to storing and finding my emails.

Since I owned my domain and managed everything myself I set my email up …

I was working on a PC that had a multifunction printer: the user was scanning to email via Samsung’s MFP utility but it was opening Outlook Express instead of the default email client Thunderbird.  Since Outlook Express had never been used it started the new user wizard which was a pain.
Checked the Samsung application for settings but it wouldn’t let you pick which application opened when you selected “Scan to email”.  I then checked in Thunderbird that it was the default mail client, which it was.  This was further confirmed …

After working with FreeNAS as a free storage solution for small businesses I came across Lime Technologies unRAID, which takes a completely different approach to storage.  It’s a software RAID type solution that uses your largest disk as a parity drive that isn’t used for storage, and then all other drives of any size as storage.  You can lose the parity drive or one of the data drives and not crash the system, but two drive loss is bad.  unRAID splits data across your drives in a variety of ways, …

With my testing of free software storage solutions I’ve been looking hard at how much data a small business uses.  I’m helping out a small tradesman who has two desktop PCs, a laptop and two networked printers.  Actual business files consist of Simply Accounting and Microsoft Works invoices, totaling about 100 MB.  Windows XP on all PCs with software installed is under 5 GB each, so a conservative backup and file sharing solution for this shop would be 20 GB.  That would include an image of each PC done on …

Longest name ever for a one trick app.  Microsoft developed the Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool to allow people to write an ISO file to a bootable medium: DVD or USB storage.  When Windows 7 launched a lot of people through student discounts, free upgrades and such received the operating system as a downloaded ISO file.  It was simple enough to burn to a DVD, I use ImgBurn, but if your system doesn’t have an optical drive like all netbooks you had to figure out how to get it …

Backupify is a new online service that backs up your online services and is free to sign up until January 31st 2010.  They provide backup services built on Amazon’s Web Services and supports a range of services including WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs and many more.  Since you can never have too many backups and free is the magic price I signed up.

I was mostly interested in backing up WordPress since I have this site and art.ebabble.net.  It seemed simple enough: add a plug-in and validate the account.  …