Dave’s Answer:

This is a question in the class of “thanks, I didn’t know about that either” and I have to say that while I’d seen Briefcase referenced in the Windows interface, I had no idea it was a slick, well-designed folder synchronization tool that worked across two devices whether they’re on the same network (the ideal) or whether you have to use an intermediary removable device like a thumb drive. Neat.

What’s better is that it’s built right into Windows 7 so there’s no software to download, no special utility to install, nothing you need to grab from Windows Live, etc. No third party apps = more secure and malware-free system = good. Very good.

There’s no magic cloud feature involved, however, unlike something like, say, Microsoft’s SkyDrive system (or Dropbox, a popular third-party alternative). This means that at some level, you have to do the work, but once you have it set up, all that entails is selecting “Update All” when you’re ready to sync. I’ll show you…

First step is to create a Windows Briefcase, which is done by right-clicking on the Desktop then selecting “Briefcase” from the “New” menu:

Do that and you’ll see a cute little leather briefcase icon on your desktop:

As the tooltip explains, its purpose in life is to sync a folder across two computers. That’s good, that’s what we want. Now, just drag a file or two into the folder. Works just like a regular folder.

In fact, Microsoft explains the function of briefcase thusly the first time you open it up:

Okay. Sounds good!

Let’s use the feature to sync a folder between my PC desktop and my Kingston Elite 3.0 DataTraveler (32gb, USB 3.0. Rockin!) by dragging the folder onto it in the File Explorer:

Ah heck, that’s not right. We don’t want to move the folder, but copy it. How to do that? It’s a little Windows trick, actually: after you drag the folder, but before you actually let go of the mouse button, push the control key. Suddenly “Move” changes to “Copy”:

That’s the trick! Now you have a copy of the folder on the removable device. Done.

It took me a few minutes to figure this little trick out, btw, so don’t be dismayed if you didn’t know you could do that in Windows!

Make some changes, add some additional files, whatever. Now to sync the folders, right-click and choose “Update All”:

It’ll show you what’s changed:

Everything’s as we expect, so click “Update” and the two folders will resync up. Easy. Now repeat the process when you plug the thumb drive into your laptop or home PC and you’ll have everything magically in sync between the devices.

Not a zero-effort solution, but quite manageable and anything that helps keep data in sync across multiple computers is terrific, and the fact that it works even if they aren’t connected directly? Very useful.

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Microsoft announced via their Windows blog that there will only be two versions of Windows 8 for x86/x64 machines this time around, plus Windows 8 Enterprise. While Microsoft promises that both versions will offer a “no compromise experience,” there will of course be differences. These differences are manifested in Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro.

So what’s the difference? Well, regular Windows 8 is much nicer than previous versions of Windows in that regular consumers will finally be able to get their hands on features were previously only available on the Ultimate versions of Windows 7. These include an updated Windows Explorer, better Task Manager and better multi-monitor support.

Windows 8 Pro offers all of that, but is intended more for “tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals.” This means that Windows 8 Pro will offer all the features of regular Windows 8 alongside “features for encryption, virtualization, PC management and domain connectivity.”

As an aside, Windows 8 Enterprise is being offered only to “those enterprise customers with Software Assurance agreements.” It contains all the features of Windows 8 Pro plus features for IT organizations. It’s not available to regular consumers so only enterprise customers need worry about this.

On top of all of that, there is another version of Windows 8 coming out, but it’s vastly different from other versions of the operating system. Microsoft is calling it Windows RT and it’s the OS that was designed for ARM processors (i.e. tablets). Windows RT is only available as a pre-installed version of Windows 8 for tablets and PCs. It’s meant to be the low-cost/low-power alternative for touch screen devices and cheap PCs. The nice thing about Windows RT is that it comes pre-loaded with a Microsoft Office, a feature that is not available with the regular editions of Windows 8.

Check out the blog post for a full rundown of all the features that are specific to each version of Windows 8. What I can confirm is that there is less disparity between the different versions of Windows this time around. As was mentioned above, Windows 8 Pro only has the advantage of appealing to tech enthusiasts. I had to buy Windows 7 Ultimate just to get a complete version of Windows so it’s nice to see Windows 8 offering all the goods of Ultimate in its base package.

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OnLive Desktop allows users to connect their iPad or Android tablet to OnLive’s servers in order to run a virtual Window 7 desktop, complete with Microsoft Office and Adobe Flash. The service has been popular with users, but drew Microsoft’s ire. It seems that OnLive Desktop fell afoul of Microsoft’s complicated licensing rules. Not long after OnLive Desktop launched, Microsoft said that OnLive Desktop’s service was violating its rules, but that they were “actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario.”

This scenario, it seems, consisted of OnLive offering the same basic service with a slightly different version of Windows. Without making any announcements, OnLive made the switch from Windows 7 to Windows Server 2008 sometime over the weekend. Also, all references to Windows 7 have been removed from the OnLive website’s descriptions of OnLive Desktop.

The user experience appears to have changed little with the switch. OnLive Desktop still offers users the same range of tools they had before, just in a slightly different package. The OnLive Desktop App is available on the iOS App Store and on Google Play for free. OnLive Desktop offers two plans for users: the free plan provides access to Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader, while the Plus plan (which costs $4.99 per month) adds Flash, cloud storage access, web mail attachments, and faster speeds.
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Dave’s Answer:

I’ll concede that Microsoft really messed things up when it redid the search system in Windows Vista. Frankly, Vista broke a lot of things and was probably the weakest of Windows versions for the last decade, at least. In the industry, a lot of us referred to Windows 7 as “Vista, fixed”, though it’s of course a lot more and a lot better than that.

One area where Microsoft heard people loud and clear was with file and system search, but they still leave a lot of the necessary configuration to us users rather than having them all default to smart and logical settings. My theory is that it’s all you people with old clunkers running Windows 7: if they had all the options enabled by default, older computer users would complain that the search was slow. Speed vs accuracy and comprehensiveness. A classic trade-off.

Fortunately we can tweak the settings, including enabling something that makes the search system in Win7 way, way better: natural language search.

With it enabled, you can search for things like “music ella or holiday” and “author ricardo”. Without, you’d be suffering through insanely complex searches like “system.kind:document system.author(ricardo)”. It’s no wonder we don’t find search user friendly by default!

It’s easy to enable NLS, however. Start by going to the Appearance and Personalization portion of Control Panel off the GO menu. It’ll look like this:

Confusingly, you need to choose Folder Options to change your search settings. Somewhere there’s someone inside Microsoft that thinks that makes sense, but I don’t get it. Click it anyway and you’ll end up looking at your general folder options:

Almost there. Click on the “Search” tab (did I say it was easy to find? I shouldn’t have) and…

I’ve highlighted the option you want to check, “Use natural language search”, but while we’re here, have a look at some of the other options and ask yourself if they’d help you find the search system better. In particular, note that the very first option is the speed vs. comprehensive results switch, though it’s a bit hard to figure out their language.

Once you’re done, click “Apply” and visit this Microsoft link to learn more about natural language search in Windows 7: Advanced Win7 search with NLS.

Good luck!

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Thanks to Windows, Microsoft’s supremacy in the computing industry was virtually unassailable, and remained so for many years. Now, however, though Microsoft itself remains strong, there are indications that the Windows platform may be in decline. First, we have the fact that Windows revenue dropped 6% in the last quarter to $4.74 billion. During the same quarter Microsoft as a whole saw a revenue increase of 5% (to $20.89 billion). The Entertainment & Devices Division, responsible for the Xbox 360, grew 15% to $4.24 billion, and the Online Services Division (responsible for Bing) grew 10% to generate $784 million. So, in a quarter when Microsoft as a whole, and virtually every division within Microsoft, saw significant revenue growth, Windows declined.

Could Windows really be on the way out? Is Microsoft shifting its focus to other platforms at the expense of Windows? Have you noticed a decline in Windows use in your business? Let us know in the comments.

Meanwhile, Apple has seen enormous growth during the same time that Windows has declined. While Windows declined 5% in the last quarter, the revenue generated by OS X grew 5% during the same quarter, and grew an amazing 22% over the previous year. What’s more, Apple’s company-wide revenue in the last quarter was more than double that of Microsoft during the same period. While Microsoft generated $20.89 billion in revenue, Apple generated a staggering $46.33 billion.

That’s not all, though. A recent study by Chikita has found that the Windows operating system’s web browsing market share has dropped by nearly 7% in the last six months. In August of 2011 Microsoft’s web browsing market share was 78.3%. As of February it has dropped to 71.4%.

Check out Chitika’s study here.

Yet, the news for Windows may not be all bad. Windows 8 was unveiled in June of 2011. As more information has become available, impressions of the new operating system have been generally positive. In addition to a new logo, Windows 8 will be getting Microsoft’s slick new Metro user interface. The paned interface was designed to unify the user experience across Microsoft’s products – smartphone, tablet, Xbox 360, and PC. Xbox 360 users got a taste of what Metro will look like when the Xbox Live dashboard got an update in December. It’s entirely possible that a good showing from Windows 8 would reverse the apparent downward slide that Windows is suffering right now.

There may be more good news for Windows, of a sort. While Windows revenue is down, that may not be the only explanation for the decrease in web market. Another recent study by Chitika showed that Apple’s Mac OS X also lost web market share during the same period. What makes the study interesting is that it lost that market share not to another computer, but to Apple’s own iOS mobile platform. From August to February OS X and iOS almost perfectly mirrored each others’ changes in web market share, with iOS finishing just slightly higher than OS X.

Check out the second study here.

There is other evidence that the rise of mobile devices may be behind the decline of Windows. Recall from above that Apple made over twice as much in revenue as Microsoft in the last quarter. What is most remarkable is the role of Apple’s iPhone in that figure. Well over half of Apple’s $46.33 billion in revenue came from the iPhone. All by itself, the iPhone generated $24.4 billion in revenue, beating all the rest of Apple’s business combined by $2.47 billion, and beating all of Microsoft by over $3 billion. At the same time, it also came to light recently that Apple sold more iOS devices in the past year than Macs in the past 28 years.

Apple’s iOS platform is not the only mobile culprit. Google’s Android OS currently holds half of the global smartphone market, and recently overtook iOS to become the most popular smartphone platform in the UK. At the same time, Google appears to be eyeing a jump to the desktop/laptop market for its Android operating system and a possible convergence of the Android and Chrome operating systems. Making Google a potentially significant competitor for both Windows and Apple.

Yet Windows may not be on the way out quite yet, at least not in the way it might seem. While Windows revenue is down, and its web market share is down, it may be that the primary culprit is mobile devices. For many smartphone and tablet users, their mobile devices have nearly replaced their computers as their primary means of surfing the internet. So while Windows may be in a bit of a rut, it may not be as bad as things look at first glance.

What do you think? Is Windows slowly on its way out? Have you switched away from Windows? How do you spend most of your time on the web? Do you surf from your computer browser, or from your smartphone or tablet? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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Dave’s Answer:

This is pretty important stuff, actually, and good on your IT department for auditing all the computers in the office. It’s expensive to get Windows 7 on every single computer in a large office, but that’s how it works, that’s what the license requires, and that’s the law. Frankly, if you’re ripping off Microsoft by having illegal or unverified copies of Windows on your computers, or are avoiding activation because you know you have insufficient licenses for the number of computers in your facility, well, you’re performing a disservice because if they don’t get the revenue expected from their installed base, the company won’t be able to continue developing and improving the operating system.

Windows works with a fairly complicated verification system too, one that reflects the incredible ingenuity of companies that counterfeit their software in astonishingly large quantities. It also reflects that it’s easy to duplicate a CDROM or DVD of data, and given that you can now download a full, ready-to- copy of Windows 7, it’s ridiculously easy for the bad guys to disseminate that too.

That’s why you need a 25-character product key for your copy of Windows too, a key that’s generally only usable once for a single registration of Windows 7 on a single computer. You’ve probably seen these, they look like: D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYR9J (tip: that’s not a valid code).

Enter a valid code as part of the installation or activation phase the first time you run the operating system, and it’s first verified back at Microsoft, then stored as “used” in their registration key database. Try to use it again and it’ll say “already in use” and fail.

So I can understand companies buying dozens or hundreds of computers and thinking that maybe with just a few dozen valid, licensed Windows systems, they should be able to get away with having some unregistered or skip activation. It’s just not legal.

Instead, you can easily check a given computer to see if it’s a genuine copy of Windows and has been activated by going to the “System” Control Panel (on the “Start” menu, click on “Control Panels” and look for “System”). Like this:

Launch the “System” Control Panel and you’ll see this:

That doesn’t show if it’s genuine or activated, however. For that information, you need to scroll to the bottom of the window…

There ya go. This copy of Microsoft Windows 7 is genuine and has been activated. Phew.

Want to learn more about Windows Activation and why it’s important, btw? Then I recommend you go check out the Activate Genuine Windows 7 information center.

Dave’s Answer:

One of the best things about Win7 is that there are a ton of themes available from Microsoft, ranging from Angry Birds to gorgeous images of China, all one click away from being installed on your Windows 7 computer. There are also commercial themes available on DVD or otherwise available for download either free or for a small fee. Still, I’m always leery of getting anything like this from a third party because of the rampant problem of malware.

Anyway, let’s stay focused on installing themes in Windows 7, shall we?

The best place to start out is the Windows 7 personalization section of the microsoft.com Web site. Start by going here: Personalize Windows 7.

The site looks like this:

Yes, it’s darn attractive and there are lots of cool backgrounds, gadgets, themes, etc. For this, we’re interested in Windows 7 themes, so click on that first item.

Now you’ll find that there are literally hundreds of free themes available. Here’s just a small sampling of the most recently published themes:

Find the one that appeals to you and click on “Details”. I’m a huge World Cup soccer fan, so when I saw an EA Sports FIFA World Cup theme, I wanted to see more. I did so by clicking on ‘Details”, which produced the following info:

Looks great! To download and install it, simply click on the “Download” button on the lower left, which pops up one of those useful Win7 warning windows:

We do want to download this theme, so click on “Open” and…

Yup. We want to do this too, so a click on “Allow” lets you proceed with the download of the World Cup theme.

Once it’s done, the “Appearance and Personalization” control panel pops up and the theme’s displayed as an option:

More importantly, however, the theme is also now automatically installed and live on your computer>, as is immediately obvious when I zoom out a bit and show you the entire PC desktop:

That’s it. Easy enough, and since they’re both free and small, you really can download and switch between dozens of different themes based on your fancy. Have fun!

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Dave’s Answer:

It’s definitely smart to have automatic updates enabled in any operating system, whether it’s Windows or Mac. My suggestion is to have it automatically check for updates but have you manually decide when to apply them, so you don’t find you have to restart your system in the middle of an important work project, but that’s easily set.

The problem with these automated systems, however, is that they’re generally designed for computers that are on all the time. I know that on my Win7 system, for example, it’s set to check for updates at 3:00am every morning. Problem is, if my computer isn’t turned on, that time will come and go without the update utility ever launching. Result is that if I don’t use the computer for a while or only use it business hours and power it off at other times, I can go weeks — or longer — without applying important operating system updates. That’s a problem, and doubly so for Windows with all the nefarious code, spyware and malware floating about.

In this article, I’ll show you two easy ways to force a Windows Update and along the way we’ll also bump into the spot where you can change when the system checks for updates too. One possibility in that regard might be to set it to noon if it’s common that you leave for a lunch break.

But let’s start at the beginning. My favorite way to launch Windows Update is to do it through MS Internet Explorer. You probably have your system set up like mine, so it’s easy to launch MSIE from the taskbar:

A click on the “e” icon and Internet Explorer pops up, ready to go:

Notice on the right there’s a menu called “Safety”. If we look a bit more closely at it, you’ll see that the bottom option is “Windows Update”:

Choose “Windows Update” and it’ll open up a Control Panel that then checks and tells you what updates, if any, are available and ready for download:

27 important updates. Sheesh.

The other way to get here is to actually go through the “Control Panels” start menu option: one of the specific panels available is “Windows Update”, as you can see here:

However you get to here, notice on the left side of this Control Panel window that there’s an option for “Check for updates” (what we’ve been doing) and also an entry for “Change settings”:

Choose “Change settings” and you’ll see that this is where you can modify the time that Win7 checks for updates:

Click on “Check for updates” again, once you’re ready, then click on “Install updates” so you can start downloading and installing everything as needed:

Remember that once it’s downloaded all the updates you’ll need to restart so it can actually install things, but usually that’s just part of the process.

Hope this helps you tame the wild Win7 windows update jungle!

With e-mail being such a popular medium to communicate with, the more that you send and receive e-mail messages, the amount of free space decreases on your hard drive. To make sure that Outlook properly manages mail, a process called “compacting folders” will help you keep the e-mails you would like to save without compromising your hard drive’s free space. To compact the folders for the different sections of your Microsoft Outlook session, please follow the steps that I have provided below.

Compacting your personal folders:

1. From the File menu, click on the Data File Management option. This will load the “Outlook Data Files” window.
2. Under the Name, Filename, and Comment list, select the data file that you would like to compact, and then click on the Settings button.
3. Within the “Settings” window that will appear, click on the Compact button to automatically compact the data file that you have selected.

Compacting your offline folder:

1. After you have deleted any unwanted e-mails, empty the Deleted Items folder.
2. From the Tools menu, click on the Account Settings option. This will load the various account settings pertaining to the e-mail accounts that you have set up.
3. Within the list that will appear, select the “Microsoft Exchange Server” option, and then click on the Change button.
4. From the window that will appear, click on the More Settings button, and then select the “Advanced” tab.
5. Under the “Advanced” tab, click on the Offline Folder Settings and then Compact Now.

Always be sure to perform these tasks on a routinely basis so that you can savor as much free space as you can with the many e-mail messages that you receive and archive.

Up until Windows 2000 and XP, users could only run this command from an MS-DOS prompt; however, if you would like to use a more GUI-based application of this helpful tool, Windows 2000 (along with operating systems released after it) offers you a way that you can check the integrity of your hard drive without an MS-DOS prompt. To run chkdsk within Windows (called “Check Disk”), please follow the steps that I have provided below.

1. From the Start menu, click on the My Computer item. This will display the various drives and media that are connected to your computer.
2. From within My Computer window, right-click on your hard drive (most commonly classified as C / Local Disk) and select the “Properties” option. This will load the “Local Disk Properties” window.
3. With the “Local Disk Properties” window open, select the “Tools” tab (if it is not already selected).
4. Within the “Tools” section of the “Local Disk Properties” window, under the “Error Checking” section, click on the Check Now button.
5. After the Check Now button has been pressed, a prompt window will appear that asks you to select the following options:
• Automatically fix file system errors
• Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors
6. After you have selected one or both of the options listed above, click on the Start button, and the process of checking your hard drive’s integrity will commence.