Dave’s Answer:

As Microsoft Windows has evolved over the years, the Start menu has become quite the jack-of-all-trades, able to leap tall buildings in a single bou- oh, uhm, well, maybe it can’t quite do that, but the Win7 Start menu sure has a lot of power and capabilities. And a lot more customization options that the majority of users realize.

Your question opens up this Pandora’s box and once we look at the settings and configuration options for the Start menu, you’ll see there are lots of ways to tweak and customize it.

Let’s have a starting point, though (no pun intended).

When I click on the shiny Windows logo on the lower left of my Windows 7 screen, here’s my default menu:

Turns out that just about every element on this menu can be customized or even hidden.

Look a bit closer, by going to “All Programs”, and you’ll see that my menu items aren’t sorted alphabetically, which makes it surprisingly hard to find programs after a while:

Let’s fix both of them. The trick is to Right-Click the Start button, at which point a configuration menu pops up, not the usual Start menu:

Choose “Properties” and a new window opens up with all sorts of neat options:

Make sure you’re on the “Start Menu” tab and click on the “Customize…” button. Now yet another window shows up, with many useful settings:

The first thing I’m going to customize is that I actually prefer having the Control Panel link show up as a sub-menu, so I can directly pick the specific Control Panel I desire directly from the Start menu. To do this, I click on ‘Display as a menu” immediately below the highlighted “Display as a link” option. It’s a bit tricky to see, I admit.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Customize Start Menu list and there’s still more to explore:

I like having the “Run…” menu option, retro though it may be, so I’ll enable it by clicking on the check box immediately next to “Run command” (as you can see I’ve done). Note also that you can determine what areas the file search system considers when looking for matching files. It’s an odd place for this setting, which is likely one reason people don’t know how to customize their Win7 search subsystem. This is also where you’ll find that your own Start menu has the search option disabled. Click the checkboxes, you’ll be good to go.

Notice you can also enable system administration tools, switch from large to smaller icons, and turn other menu items on and off.

More importantly, look at the very bottom, where it says “Number of recent programs to display”. I have it set to 10, but that’s one reason that my Start menu is so darn large, so I’m actually going to set it to 5 and see how it looks.

Click “Okay” to save the changes and now when I open up my Windows 7 Start menu, it’s different:

Obviously having 5 recent apps means I get a lot of blank space. Not so good. I’ll go set that to a bigger value to fit. Also note the little white triangle next to “Control Panel”. In a sec, you’ll see what that gives me, but for now also note the “Run…” option that’s shown up.

I’ll choose “All Programs” instead (because one of the settings I chose in the configuration was “Sort All Programs menu by name”, as was highlighted in an earlier image too) and, hurray, it’s all neatly sorted by name:

A huge improvement, for sure. Oh, and that Control Panel change? Look what happens now when I click on the Control Panels entry in the Start menu:

I encourage you to experiment with the many different settings and options you can alter in your Start menu. It’s one of the great strengths of Windows 7, that you really can tailor the experience to meet your own usage patterns.

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The Windows Azure platform appliance will allow Dell to offer private and public cloud services for Dell and its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers. Dell will also work with Microsoft to develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data centers.

“With the Microsoft partnership and the Windows Azure platform appliance, Dell is expanding its cloud services capabilities to help customers reduce their total costs and increase their ability to succeed,” said Peter Altabef, president, Dell Services.

“The addition of the Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance marks an important expansion of Dell’s leadership as a top provider of cloud computing infrastructure.”

Dell will work with Microsoft to develop a Windows Azure platform appliance for large enterprise, public and hosting customers to deploy in their own data centers. The appliance will leverage infrastructure from Dell combined with the Windows Azure platform.

“Microsoft and Dell have been building, implementing and operating massive cloud operations for years,” said Bob Muglia, president, Microsoft Server and Tools

“Now we are extending our longstanding partnership to help usher in the new era of cloud computing, by giving customers and partners the ability to deploy Windows Azure platform in their datacenters.”

Dave’s Answer:

The answer to your question about reseting your Windows Live password is directly related to whether you originally took the time to set up your account properly, specified a reasonable recovery question, your zip code, etc. If you didn’t and you don’t know your password, you might be out of luck, especially if the email address associated with the account is also on Windows Live and is inaccessible.

But let’s be optimistic and hope that you have the system pointing to a Yahoo or Gmail mailbox or something else that’s still accessible to you!

When you try to log in to any of your Microsoft online services, here’s what I expect you’re seeing right now:

Since you don’t remember your password - no worries - click on “Forgot your password?” as I have highlighted above.

It asks for your Windows Live ID again, and has what’s called a CAPTCHA, a simple visual recognition test that confirms you’re not a program trying to hack an account but a real human being:

Click “Continue” and it’ll offer two options for you to recover the password:

You can try with location information and your secret question and answer, but I find it easier to just have the system email me my lost password. Again, that’s completely pointless if you have also lost access to that mailbox.

If you haven’t, click on the button to the left of “Send password reset instructions to me in e-mail”:

That first email address is what I want to use and it’s still accessible even as I have spaced out on my Microsoft network password. I click on the little button next to the Gmail address and click on “Continue”:

Meanwhile, in my Gmail account, a message arrives with a scary URL and some simple instructions on how to reset my Windows live password:

Rather than click on the URL in the message, I actually copy and paste it (to ensure it’s not some slick phishing attempt, a fake message that shows one URL but takes me somewhere else in an attempt to steal my account info) and am again asked for my Windows Live ID:

I enter my account credential and a password I want to set for this account (one I’ll be able to remember better this time!) Note that the system shows you whether your password is “strong” (e.g. hard to guess) or “weak” (easy to guess).

Click on “Continue” and…

Success! You have just reset your Windows Live password! Now, while you’re here, go into settings and make sure that the geographic information about you is accurate and that you have a good alternative email address specified too, one that you’d be able to check even if you were locked out of your own account. You’ll thank me!

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Luckily we were able to visit them in their Tel Aviv offices and get a good look.

What do they do? They get rid of frustrations on Windows through a combination of awesome technology and crowd-sourcing.

This video is reposted from Rackspace’s building43 site.

They have a bunch of products in the pipeline, but the first one being released on stage right now at Techcrunch Disrupt conference is a boot manager that gives users control over what loads into memory and dramatically speeds up boot times.

But there’s more, I’ll let you watch the video.

Oh, and remember the company I saw earlier this year, Siri, and my reaction “this will get bought within months.”

I predict the same for Soluto, Microsoft should buy this company and bring its anti-frustration approach to Windows. To understand how good their approach is you’ve gotta watch the video.

Thank you to my producer Rocky Barbanica for the nice editing on this video.

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The company also made available the first public beta for BizTalk Server 2010, which supports Windows Server AppFabric and is scheduled to release to manufacturing in the third quarter of 2010.

“The role of application infrastructure has become a mission-critical function in all types of businesses today, which creates demand for high-performing, connected systems and applications,” said Abhay Parasnis, general manager, Business Platform Division at Microsoft.

“With Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk Server 2010, customers can use their existing skills to improve the scalability, connectivity, and performance of applications running on their current IT assets.”

Windows Server AppFabric provides improved speed, elastic scale and availability for Web applications through new, distributed caching capabilities. It also provides tools to simplify the development and management of composite applications built using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. Windows Server AppFabric will be available to customers with licenses for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard and Enterprise editions) at no additional cost.

While Microsoft is being active with their patching this month, one flaw which users have been clamoring for a fix over is being overlooked. There’s a major security vulnerability in both the Sharepoint Server, and Service which Microsoft has announced won’t be serviced with the upcoming patch.

Microsoft did address their knowledge of the problem, and released this statement:

“Concerning the recent Security Advisory for SharePoint, 983438, we will not be releasing an update for that with the May bulletins. Our teams are still working on an update for that issue. In the meantime, we recommend customers review the advisory and apply the workarounds.”

Jerry Bryant, Microsoft group manager also spoke of the absence of the SharePoint fixes, “Our teams are still working on an update for that issue.”

While there has been no official fix released as of yet, Microsoft has suggested ways to work around the issue.

May is looking like it will be a lot less of a hassle in terms of patches compared to April, when 20 patches were released.

For Windows 2000 and XP users, this latest announcement will be pretty sad. Jerry Bryant, Microsoft group manager informed users that Microsoft would stop supporting both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 beginning July 13th. It is suggested users upgrade to a new operating system, or if a service pack is available to update that as well.

If you have further inquiries regarding the patches, Microsoft is hosting a webcast on May 12th to address users’ concerns.

Brandon LeBlanc, a Windows communication manager, explained on the Windows Blog, “Until today, the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 was only available for OEMs to put on new Windows 7 PCs capable of Windows Touch.  Due to feedback and requests from both partners and customers, we are releasing the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 for anyone with Windows Touch capable devices to download.”

Of course, such devices are hardly omnipresent, and that problem will remain a major barrier to adoption.  We’ll need to see some breakthroughs in terms of availability and pricing before this Microsoft can expect this Windows tech to make its way into every home (or even a significant fraction of them).

The physical nuisance of keeping one’s arms up all day will also need to be addressed, perhaps along with a new way of dealing with fingerprints.

Still, this is a significant development, and it should earn Windows 7 more than a few headlines and television segments.

This capability is completely missing from the Windows world, whether you’re running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. It’s just not the same. This means that if you want to work with PDF files, you’re going to need to spend some money getting a commercial application that adds this set of features to your PC.

That’s why I was interested in learning more about Smart PDF Converter Pro when the company contacted me. I switch back and forth and quite often find that it’s very useful to send an unmodifiable document to a client or customer, a PDF rather than a Word file or HTML page. Testing Smart PDF Converter Pro? Sure!

The good news is that the application is fast, easy to use, and has a lot of useful features. To test it I dropped it into my HP laptop running Windows 7, and grabbed a sample PDF document off the net, a document entitled “China’s Video Game Industry Annual Review”.

What I wanted to do was use Smart PDF Converter Pro to extract all the text from the PDF file and convert it into a Microsoft Word document that I could then utilize as a source if I were working on a report on the same subject. In addition, I wanted to test whether you could add SPCP as a print device and access it from anywhere within the Windows system.

In both instances the application worked perfectly.

Once the program is installed, a few new options show up in the contextual menu when you’re looking at a PDF file, as shown:

I choose “Convert” and without any further clicks or action, it launches and converts the PDF document into a Word file:

How’d it do? Here’s that PDF as a Word doc, as converted by Smart PDF Converter Pro:

Not bad at all. Notice it retained font colors, typefaces, and styles rather than just a dumb text dump.

Wondering what other formats you can convert that PDF into with the app? Here’s a list:

The latest version of Smart PDF Converter Pro has a bunch of other PDF tools, if you need to do more interesting things with your PDF document, either as an extraction or editing or tweaking it:

Still, I have never found I needed those capabilities. What I do want, though, is the ability to print to PDF on Windows, just as I do on my Mac. Without it being an advertised feature, Smart PDF Converter Pro also installs itself as a printer driver, which means if you’re looking at a help page, say, you can print it to a PDF and use that as a reference document:

The wrinkle is price. The retail price of Smart PDF Converter Standard is $39.90, and the Pro version is $69.90. The main difference is that the Standard edition can do most everything shown, except it can’t save things back to PDF format. This might seem expensive until you look at the cost of Adobe’s Distller app, which is a cool $449 if you get the full package.

If you need to gain more control over your work with PDF files on a Windows machine and/or you want to be able to print documents to a PDF conversion utility, then Smart PDF Convert might just be a great solution for you.

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After playing with Windows Phone 7 we managed to secure a copy of the user agent string. The user agent for IE on Windows Phone 7 running on the Asus Galaxy device is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0) Asus;Galaxy6

Notice that it identifies the browser as IE7 and the operating system as Windows Phone OS 7. The IE team told us that the browser in Windows Phone 7 is a mobile version of IE7 with certain features ported from IE8. So it doesn’t use the full Trident 4 layout engine that IE8 uses, but instead Trident version 3.1 with a few extra capabilities.

The user agent was retrieved from server logs, so it is the actual user agent from the actual browser.

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The problem is not prone to desktops, but laptops and notebooks as well.  Even a brand new battery does not stand a chance with Windows 7 operating system.

There may be a class action suit taking place soon so be on the lookout if you have encountered this problem already.  Be sure to take necessary precautions, like making sure it is not your computer causing the problems.  Take your computer down to your local shop to get it inspected to see what the culprit is.  More than likely, it will be windows 7.

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