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I have tried over the years to make my PC experience better. I have tried all those stupid or good little applets that will add ease and functionality but sadly I have never made my PC work as nice looking as Vista, I ma sure many may disagree.

I just found a page on the American Pai blog that show a few ways to make your computer look like a Mac. There are a few ways, changing browsers, adding a dock, adding Yahoo widgets and of course iTunes and a Leopard background.

One of the problems that I always have with a lot of these changes is that although they may prettify your desktop they are usually built with a sacrifice to performance and even productivity. I am at this very moment working on my trusty laptop that is slow as hell because of all the little and big apps that I have installed in the name of productivity. If I have to do it over, and I often do, then I just install Windows XP and add a few addons. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I am finally ready to go the next step with Wordpress. I have just seen the new release of Wordpress, version 2.6 has been released and I am holding my breath as I upgrade my biggest blog from version 2.3.3 up to 2.6.

I am looking at this as the second step, maybe the 2.0 version of Wordpress 2.5. I put 2.5 on a couple of my blogs including this one but did not like the look of the interface as much as I liked Wordpress 2.3 so I waited. I am now very happy with the release candidate of Wordpress 2.6 that I have been using throughout the day on one of my blogs so i am confident in my being an early adopter of the software.

Before I have done the upgrade though I did a full backup. I grabbed a Wordpress backup plugin and did a backup of the files to the server and also did a backup of my local files to my desktop.

Better safe than sorry I guess.

Firefox 3 as we all know is now super quick at loading pages. But there is always room ofr improvement and best of all since Firefox is open source software there is a lot of ways that you can mod the app.

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit enter. You will get a warning about changing settings but we are not doing anything too radical so it is OK. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 8. This means it will make 8 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

I have been testing the various betas of Firefox 3 and the release candidates as well but today at 10 AM Pacific time the Mozilla folks are going to try and open up the floodgates and release Firefox 3 with a strategy to try to make Firefox 3 the biggest 24 hour download of all time. I am not sure if I phrased that right but I think last I heard they were hoping that 60 million downloads would happen in the first 24 hours of release.

I remember back in 1999 or so when ICQ was so popular and they had 100 million downloads in a couple of years and that seemed amazing. 60 million downloads in a day would be fantastic and I would love to see how they count and scale the downloads in the background, perhpas someone smarter and more in the nknow then me could tell us.

So why would you want Firefox 3? Well the community is very active so there are a ton of extensions that make this more than just a browser and more like an active application that can collect and process content. Also with the latest release cnadidate I found it much quicker than the old version and many people say that it is much more stable as well.

Can’t wait until 10 o’clock to upgrade my machines. I expect the best link to watch for the upgrade release is the main Firefox page.

My wife just got a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525 and she had decided that she was going to move completely from our kitchen desktop to doing everything on this new laptop. This is a bit different then a normal migration when a computer goes bad as I had complete access to the old and new machines at the same time.

One of the real kickers her was that our old machine was running Windows XP and the new laptop came preloaded with Windows Vista Home

I of course was the one tasked with this job and I wanted to make sure that everything went smoothly in one step with just a bit of cleanup at the end. It did. Here is the process that I used to migrate all the files and settings.

Find out Scope

So first of all I had to figure out exactly what I was moving from one machine to the other. My wife for instance has her own folder, her accounts and mail in Outlook, favorites in Internet Explorer and her website files for Dreamweaver. Read the rest of this entry »

Just reading Robert Scoble and his fears of the internet becoming a closed entity by buying yahoo search and then Facebook. Not sure if I agree with his conclusions but here is how he lays it out.

Microsoft buys Yahoo search and has a big search engine, then walks down the street (they are both in Silicon Valley I am guessing) and buys Facebook. Facebook is closed to Google so Google can’t index any of the Facebook content and then the Facebook part of the internet is closed to only the Microsoft search engine Msnyahoolive! or whatever they end up calling it.

Scoble wants to start an online protest and start using friendfeed as a Facebook alternative.

OK, so there is the scenario as Robert puts it up there. I know that Robert knows way more than me about the search engine wars past and present and he knows all ofthe players at the tops of these companies so I have to think that he is not just paranoid. I am not sure though that this is the biggest problem to worry about. Read the rest of this entry »

I am always very slow at buying technology but I live with my wife and kids and my wife will make a purchase very quickly. My problem tends to be that I will overanalyze about anything for instance it took me a week of research to get a pair of home stereo headphones and I still have not upgraded my video card on my main home PC.

Anyway my wife a couple of weeks ago secided that she wanted a laptop for herself around the house, asked me what she should get and was on the phone with Dell in about 20 minutes. I was able to slow down the buying process to shop around a bit but that afternoon she was the proud owner of a Dell Inspriron 1525 laptop but still had to wait for it to be built.

We had tried ordering a Dell before, a desktop a couple of years ago and the customer service from India trying to get our 3% corporate discount killed the deal. They got our home address wrong in transit three times with three different addresses and we finally told them to shove it.

This time I hoped for better customer service and we did get it. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a packrat, I keep everythign or at least try to keep everything and that of course includes any computer stuff. I have a folder on my home computer called Bills Business and I dump anything to do with online marketing in there, it is sitting at 4.5 gigs Anyway at work I currently have 3371 read messaages in my inbox (not very GTD) and a ton more in my Outlook PST files. That backgrounder will kind of tell you why I care about indexing.

I have tried lots of apps to try to do quick searching of my Outlook because the built in search for Outlook is horribly slow. I have tried the built in Microsoft Search, Google Desktop Search and a couple of others but I always get performance issues. There never seems to ber a way to index stuff on my PC without it slowing down everything on my computer.

Xobni seems to have changed that. Xobni is a free plugin for Outlook that Microsoft is apparently trying to buy that will index all of your mail as well as data mining your people and conversations so that you can know more about your conversations and easily get a chance to have contact info related to your Outlook contacts / email.

Xobni is just in public beta right now but it seems to be really stable and is very unobtrusive, Xobni just sits as a compressed sidebar in the right side of your Outlook available by one mouse click. Xobni also has indexed all of my email really quickly and has not slowed down my computer at all and with a simple search window at the top of Xobni I am able to search quickly and instantly get results.

So Microsoft is nice and civil in saying that the deal is dead. There were talks this weekend between Steve Ballmer with Microsoft and Jerry Yang with Yahoo. There is apparently a difference of Microsoft willing to go to $33 per share and Yahoo only accepting $37 a share.

So they are close but not close enough. Steve Ballmer does not look like he will bother trying to steal Yahoo by buying up all the shares so I have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking.

Is Microsoft really just walking away? Are they looking at some other companies? Some people have said that Microsoft should go after Ask.com or AOL but they are not really in need of marketshare, what Microsoft really needs is online apps and the love of web users.

This next week should be interesting. If Steve Ballmer has some kind of deal in his back pocket I am sure we will see it soon. I feel bad for those stockholders of Yahoo, I would imagine the shares will plummet on Monday morning.

Stay tuned for all of the news. I know that I am watching Tech Crunch close as they broke this story before anyone.

Today is the day I have been waiting for for a few months now as Microsoft has released windows XP SP3.

You can get it now from Windows Update by clicking to this Microsoft Download Link

The latest service pack is really mostly a bunch of bug fixes all rolled up into one package but I have found on all of the PCs that I have installed it on that it seems to have sped them up, not a lot perhaps but still the operating system is a little faster. The other great thing about the new Windows XP Service Pack 3 is that now we can do installs of Windows XP a lot faster. The last few installs that I have done have taken about three hours because even with an install of Windows XP with Service pack 2 there are still about 92 updates as well as that huge Internet Explorer 7 change.

so I can rejoice to this Service Pack upgrade for Windows XP today but this will probably be that last one as Microsoft will now start pushing hard to get rid of Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.

By the way There is still some life left for support of Windows XP support will go on for a few years yet. Mainstream regular support will go until April 14, 2009, after that date Windows XP will begin its “Extended Support” period that will last for 5 years until April 8, 2014.