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Yes I know that Adove Acrobat 8 is out but today I was working with a slow rendering Adobe Acrobat 7 and tried to figure out how to disable plugins in Adobe Acrobat 7 when I ran across this blog post

How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster

Not only is there some hacks for the application that should speedup your Adobe Acrobat 7 but also there is a link to a great speedup utility that you can download from Acropdf which gives you a bunch of tools to get rid of some of those background problems with Adobe Acrobat

I am not going to be writing much about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007. I am pretty happy with Office 2003 and am sure that I will move over to Microsoft Office 2007 early in the new year but I am not as enthralled with it as I was when I first go to see Microsoft Office 2000 even so many years ago.

Having said that I will be interested in Microsoft Windows Vista as I think that there are going to be a lot of cahnges that tech guys will love and operating systems tend to be more interesting anyway. Don’t worry, I am sure that the Miscrosoft hype machine will start really pushing Office and Microsoft Vista for their January launch right after the new year has dawned anyway.

Here is some info from IT World Canada about early testing of Microsoft Office 2007.

Much has been said about the potential difficulties that Microsoft’s Office 2007 revamped user interface has in store for computer users.

However, some organizations that have had time to tinker with the software that will supplant Office 2003, report positive user experience and improved productivity.

It seems the initial shock of realizing the File menu has disappeared (replaced by the colourful Office button) has worn off.

Some early Canadian corporate users – at least those present at the application’s business launch in Toronto, Thursday - found much to like in the new Office software.

Surprise was a common reaction among users that found Office 2007 revealed functions previously hidden in Office 2003, according to Steve Driz, director of enterprise solutions and chief privacy officer (CPO) at Ontario March of Dimes, Canada (OMOD), a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a society inclusive of people with physical disabilities.

Driz, who attended yesterday’s launch of Office 2007 and the Windows Vista 2007 operating system in Toronto, said OMOD “employees were surprised to find the functions right in front of them.”

The province’s largest non-profit rehabilitation organization, OMOD has been using a portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for nearly a year now.

It was developed for them by Bell Business Solutions Inc. and Internet software developer Envision IT of Mississauga, Ont.

Computer users at Mt. Sinai Hospital (MSH) in Toronto liked the easy access to information and greater control over data that Office 2007 provided, said Susan Walsh, director of quality and performance measurement, MSH.

“The newer spreadsheet program in Office 2007 has some built-in business intelligence (BI) functions, that allow users to drill down into data,” said Walsh.

Read the rest of the article at IT World Canada

Do you RDP? The remote desktop protocol is a way for you to access remote machines that are running Windows 2000 and newer. There is a client that you can use by going to start to run and typing mstsc and enter. This opens up the Terminal Services Client.

I use this app a lot to access individual server on the network as well as remoting on to my home computer. There are bigger apps that will save your setting for RDP connections such as the great piece of freeware Visionapp, but Microsoft just released a new client with a few new features that you can get by installing this update.

Do you want to know the new features? First of all there is some fixing that was done to the user experience, this makes it faster or slower to update to the screen. Here is the user experience tab as it is now

The other thing that has changed is that there are a couple of new options for selecting if you want to bring the clipboard or printers into that remote session as you can see below:

Release to manufacturing is always and exciting time for IT guys. I have not had any experience yet with Windows Vista but I am sure that will change very soon as I have just heard that Windows Vista has now been released to manufacturing which means that it is now available on MSDN…if you have an MSDN account which I do not.

microsoft this time around is going to release Windows Vista at the same time as Microsoft Office 2007. Both Office and the new version of Windows ar going to be released to the public on January 30th 2007 but businesses and IT can start testing now to be sure that everthig is REALLY good for that January 30th release day.

I am not sure how much I have mentioned this in the past but I have a real problem with any product with the name Norton or Symantec in the name. There use to be a time long ago when Norton was looked at as a name that housed great desktop computer utilities but that time has long since past when Peter Norton sold out his line of products to Symantec and Symantec in turn thought that they should create products that took over Windows.

I am a big fan of utilities that integrate over top of the Windows operating system and there is a large market that Microsoft has left alone to either create theri own products or have third parties create products. The line of protection that Symantec makes is not at all integrated over top of Windows instead it is ingrained and conflicts or overwrites Windows settings and that means that when you uninstall the products quite often the computer is in worse shape than the crippled machine you had before the uninstall.

A few months ago I spent and evening uninstalling Norton Antivirus, Norton Anti Spam, Norton Antispyware and Norton Internet protection and it was touch and go as to whether I would have to reinstall Windows XP to complete the process, thankfully everything worked out and once I installed AVG Antivirus the machine was much faster then it was before I showed up (always a good thing when helping relatives).

Today I got a call from a family friend who had changed the supervisor password to Norton Internet Protection and then lost access to the product. There is not very good information at the Symantec site but eventually she found a very good uninstall program that I believe is much safer than trying to remove Norton or Symantec products using the add and remove programs part of the Windows XP control panel..

Do you want to uninstall the Norton products on a new computer? Here is the Norton uninstall Utility.

There is a tools that system administrators use on networks known as UPHclean. Although I believe this tool was designed for administration of user profiles on domains it will do a lot of good cleaning up the profile on your Windows XP box at home.

The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is “Access is denied”. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.

You can download UPHclean directoly from Microsoft.

Windows XP is good for a few months before a reinstall is really needed, especially for me. This is intended to be a quick guide to the process of reloading the Windows XP operating system. Before trying to do your first Windows reload read through all of the instructions.

If you have been running Windows XP for a couple of years or more you may find that it is not running quite as quickly and smoothly as it was when you did your first install. I am constantly ‘evaluating’ software and uninstalling and reinstalling beta software on my computer and have always gradually become more and more disappointed after nine months to a year with the performance of my PC. So I regularly do a backup and reinstall all my software, including Windows.

Please note that this is completely different than doing the standard things to troubleshoot and fix individual problems such as system errors or application errors. These things are better fixed by using a system Restore which is a great new feature to Windows XP.

For anyone that has reinstalled their operating system a few times the process seems pretty straightforward as they have found all of the gotchas the first few times. I have lost mail and contacts but not much else over the years by following (or not following) a system to reload my operating system and software. This purpose of this guide is to give you a checklist to follow so that a reloading of Windows goes smoothly the first time. The steps are as follows:

1. Backup all data

2. Document your current system drivers and software

3. Delete the Windows and profile directories

4. Reload Windows

5. Reload software and data.

6. Get some sleep
Read the rest of this entry »

One problem that seems to happen sometimes to a Windows XP Box is that it will start really slowing down and be ready for a reimage. There is a way around this and it involves the repair tool on the Windows XP CD. Here are some steps.

1. Boot up with a Windows XP CD with XP 2
2. after the initial startup, wait until it asks you if you want to do an install or repair, choose a new install
3. Windows XP checks through your drives and finds your current install. NOW choose the repair option.
4. Windows will reload itself and prompt for some of the stuff you would have in a regular install including your CD Key, regional settings and maybe some drivers.
5. After a restart your computer will boot up just as it was before. Even your desktop should be there.

This non repair repair install is good for refreshing the operating system but it does not delete your profile in the same way that doing a repair or a new install would delete your profile and settings.

After doing this process today I found that my Windows XP was a lot more responsive but all of my applications and settings were still good. See if this works and if not try reinstalling Windows from scratch as I have documented on another site but will put here on another post

Well there seems to be a leak of the location of the download for Firefox 2.0.

One of the problems that I have had over the last couple of months with Firefox 2.0 is the fact that my extensions were not always working but that seems to be fixed in the last release candidates and now with the final release.

One of the nice new features is that every time you spell a word incorrectly Firefox does a little underline so that you can correct it, with a decent drop down spell checker….I think Google has just been beat for one feature.

Well finally Microsoft has tried to come up with a Firefox killer by releasing Internet Explorer 7 and later this month pushing it out through Windows Update.

I have installed the final release of Internet Explorer 7 and I have found that there is no new changes from the last release candidate but the install was a little irritating. After downloading the first bit I had the quick experience of accepting a check of my machine to make sure that I had a valid copy of Windows, a question of wether I wanted the malicious code checking software (no) and then of the current browser, Internet Explorer 6 was uninstalled and then there was a reboot and some installing and then another reboot and now I am back up.

One of the features that is a little irritating is the anti-Phishing bar and the wanting to reset web settings every launch but I am sure that shoiuld settle down soon enough. The one feature that I would like to see here is the support of extensions like Firefox and the ability to launch a whole folder of favorites in tabs like Maxthon still does and like Firefox does as well.

Time will see if this is enough to stop the erosion of market share going to Firefox and Opera.

Oh, and I just found out that IE7 has broken my Google Toolbar Spell Checker.

EDIT:

Looks like there was already a Google Toolbar push that fixed the spell checker. Also I just found in the tools button of the Internet Explorer 7 toolbars that allows you to get more “add ons” these are the same thing as extensions but I have no idea yet how open or closed the development of these addons is.