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Vol. 2, # 27 - Jul 8, 2010 - Issue # 43 |
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Windows Live Essentials Wave 4: Tube Ride or Closeout?
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- Editor's Corner
- Windows Live Essentials Wave 4: Tube Ride or Closeout?
- Follow-up: Encrypt it all?
- Quotes of the Week
- Cool Tools
- News, Hints, Tips and Tricks
- Wondering what's coming next from Microsoft?
- Windows 7 backwards compatibility update
- Will Windows 8 kill Windows 7 sales?
- Time to notify the next of KIN
- How to: Using the New Windows 7 Features
- How to keep Windows 7 from rebooting after installing updates
- Windows 7 and Vista Security
- Many third party applications fail to use Windows 7 security features
- Question Corner
- How to install Windows 7 on netbook
- Windows 7 Configuration and Troubleshooting
- File in the Public Desktop folder disappears after you rename it
- "Destination folder path is invalid" message when extracting a compressed file
- Fav Links
- This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff
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Editor's Corner |
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Windows Live Essentials Wave 4: Tube Ride or Closeout?
For surfers, the ultimate experience is to ride "in the tube," the hollow part
of a wave that's created when the top of the wave travels faster than the bottom
(also referred to as the "barrel"). A "closeout," on the other hand, is a wave
that breaks up all at once, resulting in a very short ride. Will Wave 4 of
Windows Live Essentials, just recently released to public beta, give Microsoft a
long smooth ride or a short and choppy one? Only time will tell, but this week
we'll take a look at what's new in the Windows Live family and help you decide
whether it's worth bothering to upgrade.
Windows Live Essentials is the set of online services that includes a number of
client applications that work with the Live online services. The best known are
the Windows Messenger IM client and the Windows Live Mail email client. Other
popular programs include Photo Gallery (photo editing and organizing), Movie
Maker (video editing), Writer (blogging), and Sync (synchronization). In
addition, there's Family Safety (which lets you block websites and control kids'
online activities), as well as the new Bing Bar, a browser toolbar that provides
quick access to news, weather, stocks, Hotmail and more.
You may already be using some or most of these programs, but Wave 4 brings some
pretty significant changes. For example, the old Live Sync has been combined
with Live Mesh and SkyDrive for a more comprehensive solution. Wave 4 works with
both Windows 7 and Vista, but doesn't support Windows XP. The final release is
expected around the same time as Windows 7 Service Pack 1. If you're interested
in trying it out as a beta tester, you can download the whole package at
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Live-Essentials
You don't have to install everything; the installation program lets you select
the applications you want. If you already have Windows Live programs installed,
though, you'll be informed that they will be updated, and there doesn't seem to
be a way to exclude any of them from the update. In addition to the programs
listed above, you also have the option to install Messenger Companion and (if
you have Microsoft Outlook installed) the Outlook Connector Pack. Messenger
Companion is for easily sharing and discussing social updates while surfing the
web in IE, and the Outlook Connector lets you manage your Hotmail inbox, Windows
Live calendar and contacts in Outlook. If you don't have Silverlight installed,
it will also be installed.
Installation only takes a few minutes (at least, on my Nehalem system) but
you'll be prompted to reboot after it finishes. When you log back into the OS,
you'll need to enter your credentials for Windows Live (even if you had
Messenger set to log you in automatically before). Then, if you have a webcam
attached to your computer, you can take a new photo for your profile or continue
to use your previous picture. Next, you'll be given the option to connect your
Facebook and/or MySpace account to Windows Live. This allows you to see the
friends from those social networks in Messenger. If you choose to connect the
accounts, there are a few options you can choose from for sharing between the
accounts. If you don't add your other social networking sites during setup, you
can add them later via the "Add" link in the bottom right of the Messenger
window. The new look of the Messenger interface is nice but the default view
takes up a lot more room than the old one (it's about twice as wide, to
accommodate showing friends' updates). Everything seems snappier and I like the
new tabbed conversations. The ability to leave a video message is cool, too, and
there's integration with Hotmail and sharing of web activities. You can read the
details of all the new Messenger features here:
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Live-Messenger
If you downloaded the Outlook Connector, when you open Outlook you'll be asked
if you want to connect to MSN Live. If you elect to do so, you'll see your Live
friends' updates in Outlook when you exchange email with them. You can also
connect Outlook to LinkedIn or MySpace but, annoyingly, not Facebook (yet).
Since I use Outlook, I don't really have a need for Windows Live Mail - except
to read newsgroups, since Microsoft still, after all this time, inexplicably
does not include that functionality in Outlook. I did set it up with my Hotmail
and Gmail accounts, and with my Exchange account via IMAP. It seemed to work
pretty well. The interface is similar to Outlook, it pulled my contacts (but not
my calendar information, for some reason) and I like having the calendar and
Today pane like in Outlook. All in all, Windows Mail seems to me much improved
over the previous versions. One thing I don't like it that it groups messages in
Conversation view, just like Outlook 2010. I want to like Conversation
view, but I always end up turning it off because I just can't find my mail as
easily.
I use Live Writer almost every day, to post to various blogs. I've loved it from
the beginning. I didn't find that much had changed with the Wave 4 version. It
has the now-familiar ribbon interface like Office 2007/2010 but all of the
functionality seems to be about the same. I'll be working more with the new
version and will report back on anything I discover in a blog post
(appropriately enough).
I did find some nice new features in Windows Live Photo Gallery. I have found
myself using Photo Gallery a lot for basic, "quick and dirty" photo editing when
I don't want to take the time to fire up Corel or PhotoShop. I especially like
the ability to quickly and easily adjust the exposure and especially the ease
with which you can bring up the shadows or tone down the highlights without
affecting the overall brightness of the photo.
It does take a while to load if you have a large number of photos. Once it's
loaded, right off the bat, you notice the prominent "Share" box in the ribbon's
Home tab that has icons for SkyDrive, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Windows
Live. The idea is obviously to allow you to publish your photos to those other
services directly from Photo Gallery, which is a great idea (you could publish
to YouTube and Flickr from the previous version but it was less prominently
featured and you had to add plug-ins to publish to other services). You select a
photo and click the Create tab, then click the button of the service to which
you want to publish the picture. You can also easily share the photo via email
or blog post (integrated with Live Writer), or even set it as your desktop
wallpaper from the Photo Gallery "Create" tab.
The editing tools in the right pane appear to be the same as in the previous
version, but now we have the Edit tab in the ribbon, which includes some new
tools I really like. The red eye zapper and black & white effects tools have
moved up there, but there's also now a Retouch tool that lets you remove minor
imperfections and an Adjust Time tool with which you can easily change the time
stamp on a photo.
The improved face detection in Photo Gallery is also nice, and it has become
easier to tag and find people in your photos. A new feature is location
information. No, it's not location awareness - that is, PG doesn't detect your
location via GPS and add it to the pictures. But it does let you add location
information to photos and filter by location, which can be very handy when
you're looking for pictures that you took in a particular place.
There's much more to say about Wave 4, but I've reached my word limit for this
week. I'll continue this mini-review next week, after I've had a bit more time
to work with the new Live Sync, the toolbar and Windows Movie Maker. Meanwhile,
if you're testing the new Live programs, let us know what you think. Have you
had any problems with the beta? What do you like - or not like - about the
changes to the interfaces? Are there new features you'd like to see that didn't
make it into this version? We invite you to discuss this topic in our forum at
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Forum-Discussion
Follow-up: Encrypt it all?
In last week's editorial, I continued my previous discussion about encryption
and wondered aloud: "Should we be encrypting our searches and our email - and
everything else?" Reader responses varied from those who don't encrypt anything
to those who encrypt "every item that might move ... specifically every hard
disk on every laptop, every thumb drive."
Some of you pointed out that encryption is going to become more important than
ever if/when we start storing most of our data in the cloud. One hopes the cloud
providers will bake that encryption into the service and it will be transparent
to users. A few others noted that they rarely encrypt, simply because it's too
much trouble. Public key cryptography is the real answer to the whole
authentication problem, but it seems few computer users - even IT pros - have
gone to the trouble of obtaining the digital certificates that are required to
use it.
Meanwhile, those of us who do use encryption need to remember that as computers
become more sophisticated and faster, encryption can be more easily broken. The
experts say that when quantum computing becomes a reality, today's best
encryption technologies will be made immediately obsolete by systems powerful
enough to crack in minutes what it would take today's computers thousands or
millions of years to decipher.
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Keeping-Encryption-Safe
As always, thank you to all those who participated in this discussion, in the
forums and by email.
 'Til next week,
Deb Shinder, Editor
feedback@win7news.net
PS: Did you know this newsletter has a sister publication for XP users called
WXPnews?
You can subscribe here, and tell your friends:
http://www.win7news.net/100513-WXPNews
And for IT pros, there's our "big sister," WServer News, at
http://www.win7news.net/100513-WserverNews
Look for the Win7News fan page on Facebook!
Quotes of the Week
"The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." -
Edward Gibbon
"Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat." - Robert
A. Heinlein
"Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has
incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it." - Neal
Stephenson ("Zodiac")
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Cool Tools |
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News, Hints, Tips and Tricks |
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Wondering what's coming next from Microsoft?
Microsoft is a big company and they're always working on many different
projects, some of which make it to production and others that don't (such as the
much-lamented Courier). Others get to market and then get the plug pulled almost
immediately (like the Kin). Nonetheless, it's always interesting to see what's
coming up, and Mary Jo Foley has put together a monthly "CodeTracker," which is
a downloadable PDF listing current projects under their code names. You can find
the latest version at
http://www.win7news.net/100708-CodeTracker
Windows 7 backwards compatibility update
Microsoft is offering a refresh of the backwards compatibility feature in
Windows 7 (and Server 2008 R2) to ensure that the operating systems work
properly with applications that were designed for Vista. It's a free download.
Find out more about it here:
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Backward-Compatibility
Will Windows 8 kill Windows 7 sales?
Uh-oh. According to some analysts, the recent leaks regarding features and
functionality of the next generation of Windows client (currently called Windows
8) just might cause some folks to put off the OS upgrade and thus slow the sales
of Windows 7. The leaked presentation suggests that Windows 8 will be more like
a Mac - at least in terms of "just working." And talk of facial recognition for
user authentication and proximity sensors for an "instant on" experience have
generated excitement for those who want the latest and greatest. Will more
companies and individuals hang onto XP a little while longer and wait for 8?
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Windows-8-Details
Time to notify the next of KIN
Microsoft's consumer phone that targeted the younger set lived a short life. The
KIN was released in May and laid to rest June 30th, prompting some pundits to
lament, "Kin, we barely knew ye." The phone got mixed reviews; some of its
social networking features were praised but there were numerous complaints that
the devices and data plans were not priced appropriately for the age group to
which they were targeted. The good news is that some of the KIN's technology is
likely to be incorporated into the Windows Phone 7 devices, which are rumored to
be coming out in September, a little earlier than expected.
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Kin-Phone
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How to: Using the New Windows 7 Features |
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How to keep Windows 7 from rebooting after installing updates
It can be frustrating to leave your computer running and come back to find that
it has rebooted itself after installing updates. It's better than it used to be;
Windows 7 will reopen Word documents and the like that you had open, but you may
lose your place if you had open web pages. Luckily, you can configure Windows 7
not to automatically reboot after installing updates. Here's how:
- As always, be sure to back up your registry before making changes.
- Log on with an administrative account.
- Open the registry editor and navigate to:
HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Policies \ Microsoft \ Windows
- Right click on the Windows node and select New | Key
- Name the new key WindowsUpdate
- Right click the new key and select New | Key
- Name the new key AU
- In the right pane, right click an empty space and select New | DWARD (32 bit)
Value
- Name the new value NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers
- Press Enter
- Right click the new value and select Modify
- In the value data field, type 1
- Click OK
- Close the registry editor
- Reboot the computer
Now you should no longer get automatic restarts after updates are installed.
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Windows 7 and Vista Security |
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Many third party applications fail to use Windows 7 security features
Microsoft has "baked in" many security mechanisms in Windows 7 that can prevent
common types of attacks, but Danish researchers are finding that many of the
most popular third party applications for Windows don't take advantage of them,
even though the security technologies are easy for developers to implement. Some
of the programs include Apple Quicktime, OpenOffice, Google Picasa, Winamp,
RealPlayer and more. Find out more details here:
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Third-Party-Apps
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Question Corner |
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How to install Windows 7 on netbook
QUESTION:
I have a netbook that I bought just before Windows 7 came out. I have upgraded
it to 2 GB of RAM and a 64 GB SSD drive. It runs Windows XP but I want to
install Windows 7 on it. It doesn't have a DVD drive and I want to know if there
is a way to install Windows 7 on it without buying a USB DVD drive. Thanks! -
Phillip J.
ANSWER:
Your netbook's memory and hard drive capacity will support Windows 7. There are
a couple of ways you can install the OS without going out and buying a USB DVD
drive for one-time use. If you buy Windows 7 from the Microsoft store, you can
use the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool. This allows you to download an ISO file
to create a bootable USB thumb drive from which you can install Windows 7. You
need a thumb drive with at least 4 GB of free space. Find out more about this
here:
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Download-Tool
Another option is to install using PXE (booting over the network). Here are
instructions for how to do this with Vista; the same procedure will work with
Windows 7:
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Installing-Vista
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Windows 7 Configuration and Troubleshooting |
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File in the Public Desktop folder disappears after you rename it
Here's an interesting situation: you create a file in the Public Desktop folder,
close open Explorer windows, and try to rename the file. After you rename it,
the file disappears from the desktop. This happens when you've disabled UAC on
the Windows 7 computer. There is a hotfix available to address this problem.
Find out how to get it by reading KB article 980120 at
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Public-Desktop
"Destination folder path is invalid" message when extracting a compressed file
If you try to right click a compressed (zip) file by right clicking and
selecting Extract All, you might get an error message that says Windows cannot
complete the extraction because the destination folder path is invalid. This
happens even though the path you specified is a valid path. It happens when you
have enabled the "Remove Run menu from Start Menu" Group Policy setting on the
computer. There is a hotfix available to address the problem. Read more about it
in KB article 981603 at
http://www.win7news.net/100708-Path-is-Invalid
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Fav Links |
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This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff
Disclaimer: VistaNews does not assume and cannot be
responsible for any liability related to you clicking any of
these linked Web sites.
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Copyright © 1996-2010 Sunbelt Media Services. All rights reserved.
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. Other products and companies
referred to herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or mark holders.
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