You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures. More »
If you spend a lot of time in text editors, you almost certainly use something other than Windows’ default Notepad. Weblog Online Tech Tips details how to set an alternative editor as your default to complete your Notepad replacement.
If you aren’t already using a better alternative to Notepad, a gander at our Hive Five Best Text Editors is a good place to start looking for a replacement (we’re particularly partial to Notepad++). Once you've got one, Online Tech Tips' step-by-step guide—which requires customizing and running a batch file the author was kind enough to put together to ease the process—should do the trick.
The post uses a Notepad alternative called Notepad2, but from what we can tell the same replacement technique could work for any alternative you choose—you'll just need to read through the instructions and make sure you replace Notepad2 references with your text editor of choice. The post also focuses on Windows 7, but the same basic method should in theory work on any recent version of Windows. Just give the instructions a good read-through before you get started to make sure you've got everything set up correctly for your system.
Done this before, or got an easier solution for replacing Notepad as the default Windows text editor? Let’s hear it in the comments.
Windows 7 officially launches today, but we’ve been testing, tweaking, customizing, fixing, and writing about this OS for a year now. We present here a guide to everything we’ve learned about the OS, from first install to final settings change.
Whether you’ve played around with Windows 7 during its beta or release candidate versions, launch day is finally here, and Windows 7 is finally ready for widespread, public consumption. This guide will take you straight through from system requirements and upgrading your PC to highlighting Windows 7′s best new features to helping you hit the ground running with all of the awesome tweaks Windows 7 has in store for you.
- 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
Figure Out Which Windows 7 Edition Has the Features You Need: Not everybody needs Windows 7 Ultimate, but what if there’s a certain feature you must have when you grab your upgrade this Thursday? CNET breaks down each Windows 7 edition feature by feature in a handy chart.
slmgr -rearm) that could be entered at the end of three different 30-day periods to give Vista 120 days without activation works just the same in Windows 7.
Windows 7 Transfers Your Wireless Settings Easily: To transfer the settings for yourself, head into the Network and Sharing Center, click on Manage Wireless Networks, and then in the properties for your wireless network you’ll find the link to open the wizard that will copy all your settings onto a flash drive.
Setup File and Printer Sharing From XP to Windows 7: This guide walks you through the process of enabling network discovery, sharing your folders and printers, and accessing your shared resources from either Windows 7 or XP.
Pin Any Item to the Windows 7 Taskbar: We already showed you how to pin specific folders, and this is just a slightly tweaked application of that method.
Windows 7 Beta’s Many Free and Legit Themes: Microsoft is offering 20 fresh themes (in Windows 7). Here’s a closer look.Activate Windows 7 Jumplists with the Left Mouse Button: You don't have to right-click on the taskbar buttons to activate Windows 7's Jumplists—you can hold the left mouse button and drag upwards.
Create and Share Custom Themes in Windows 7: Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 weblog details how to create, save, and share your own custom Windows 7 themes, complete with wallpaper, window color, and sounds.
Logon Changer Customizes the Windows 7 Login Screen: Tiny system customizing utility Logon Changer for Windows 7 swaps out the logon screen wallpaper easily. Using the utility is simple—just select a new wallpaper, test it, and you are done.
VistaSwitcher is an Absolutely Awesome Alt-Tab Replacement: It’s a little difficult to showcase how well this thing works with just a screenshot, but you can see the partially transparent Alt-Tab switcher window, complete with a massive preview window and the window titles easily readable.
Earlier today we showed you the practical steps you should take to prep your PC for Windows 7, but if you want to get all kinds of detailed, Microsoft’s free, 332-page ebook might be worth a download.
Called Deploying Windows 7: Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine, the two-part book draws from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine covering topics from planning your deployment and testing application compatibility to lists of common issues you may run into with Windows 7 and other things you should know.
The book is clearly written with IT folks in mind, but whether you’re looking to up your Windows 7 IQ or you actually are going to be the person helping everyone deploy Windows 7 to their machines, it’s at least worth a download.
When Windows 7 drops this Thursday, you can either spend many, many hours watching a progress bar, or you can boot into a clean, speedy system with that new-OS smell. Let’s get your system set up for a proper Windows 7 upgrade.
If you’re jumping into Windows 7 for the first time this Thursday, or soon after, you won’t find yourself facing an entirely new-looking, strange-acting Windows. Most of Windows 7′s features are refinements, tweaks, and speed-ups from Vista. Your Lifehacker editors have been using 7 ever since the Windows 7 Beta dropped in January, and we’ve found a few things worth noting and, in some cases, crowing about, like these 10 things to look forward to in Windows 7, or Windows 7′s underhyped features.
Considering that we know that 86% of you are upgrading to Windows 7, we thought it might be worth a little guidance for getting ready to do just that.
Are you running Windows XP? You can upgrade, but you’ll have to do a whole-cloth “custom” installation, which will either wipe out your current system or, if you’re planning on dual-booting, require some hard drive partitioning.
Running Windows Vista? You can do an in-place upgrade from a Vista edition (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate) to an equivalent or lower-scale edition of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate), assuming you’re not moving up from 32-bit to 64-bit. Yeah, it’s that simple. Ed Bott at ZDNet took a woefully confusing upgrade chart Microsoft prepared and made an easier-to-grasp, plain-English upgrade chart that’s definitely worth checking out.
Before you buy an upgrade disc, though, you’ll want to ensure your system meets the minimum specs for 7. Here they are in table form, stylishly cribbed from Wikipedia’s Windows 7 page:
Need to double-check one of your system’s stats against what Microsoft calls the bare minimum? They offer a free Upgrade Advisor download for Windows systems that will tell you whether your hardware and peripherals can live in the Windows 7 world.
Finally, if you’re planning on upgrading from the Release Candidate you’ve been testing out and running happily since what seems like forever, know that it takes a bit more than just popping in a disc. Microsoft doesn’t really want you to pay only an “upgrade” price to move up from a free system, but it can be done. Our own How-To Geek posted a detailed walkthrough of a Windows 7 RC to RTM upgrade at his home away from Lifehacker. Basically, you’ll need to edit a single file on the Windows 7 installation disc, which requires a disc-to-hard-drive copy and a free extraction tool. If that’s not your cup of tea, or you’d rather fulfill your licensing obligations, you’ve got until March 2010 before the Release Candidate starts nagging and auto-rebooting on you.
Even if things go swimmingly with your upgrade, you’ll want to have a fall-back copy of your music, pictures, documents, application data, and other important files. If you’re doing a “custom installation” from Windows XP or any system without a Windows license, it’s an absolute must. Our readers voted up tools like Cobian Backup, SyncBack, and Acronis True Image in our Hive Five for Windows backup tools, but also suggested online, auto-monitoring tools like Mozy Home and Carbonite—which aren't free for more than token amounts of data, and probably can't get you backed up in time if you must jump into 7 this Thursday.
For absolute security in knowing that you could completely revive your current Windows system if 7 turned into a disaster, do what Gina did by hot-imaging your PC’s hard drive with DriveImage XML.
This one is the easiest option, since all your data files stay in place, your just-as-you-like-them computer settings stay in place, and you don’t need to touch anything with the word “partition” involved.
The downside? Depending on how "clean" a user you are—in terms of removing unnecessary applications and keeping your media library trim and in one place—and the speed of your hardware, an upgrade to Windows 7 can take a seriously long time. Chris Hernandez charts his extensive testing and finds that a “super user” on mid-range hardware could wait more than 6 hours for a 32-bit upgrade to finish. That’s a worst-case scenario, but if you feel like you’ve got a lot of applications and data that might hold things up, there is a way to get tidy in a jiff.
First off, install Revo Uninstaller and kill off any applications, helpers, monitoring programs, and anything else that you’re not really using in Vista. (Won’t it feel nice to have a cleaner system when you start up Windows 7?) Next, read our step-by-step guide to separating your data from Windows on a stand-alone partition. You’ll benefit from doing this with any version of Windows, and especially if you’re planning to dual-boot any time soon.
Separating your music, pictures, movies, Office documents, and other non-application files from the stuff Windows needs to run means that Windows 7 only looks at your core C: drive for an upgrade. From a peace of mind perspective, that also means that if things don’t go well with your upgrade and you decide to run a clean install, you’re in a better position to do so. Best of all, Windows 7′s “Libraries” features makes it easy to access music, pictures, documents, and videos anywhere on your system, right from the Start menu.
Windows XP users can still get the Upgrade price discount, but there's no actual "upgrade"—you're doing a whole new install of Windows 7 on a blank hard drive, or at least a blank partition. If there's space enough on your drive, do as we suggest above and create a new partition for just your data, but you’ll also want to back up your application data in this case.
Microsoft has posted an official XP-to-Windows-7 migration video guide, and offers a User State Migration Tool that claims to capture desktop and system settings, user accounts, and the files you want and brings them over to your new Windows 7 system. The How-To Geek’s partner in blogging, mysticgeek, also details how to use Windows 7′s Easy Transfer tool with a USB drive to migrate files and settings. Obvious, but fair, warning: Be sure to run these transfer utilities in XP first, back up their file loads, and then run them in Windows 7, unless you’re planning on dual-booting (detailed just a bit down this page).
Concerned about your favorite programs’ compatibility in Windows 7? We’ve run down how to set up and use Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7. An official, final, and free download of XP Mode should arrive this week for Windows 7, possibly at this page.
Technically, you could use our guide to dual-booting Windows 7 with XP or Vista to set up a crazy schizo-system with all three Windows versions available, but we’re assuming that unless you’re a developer, you probably want to at least move on from Vista, given 7′s compatibility with, and improvements over, the much-maligned OS.
If you set up dual-booting, you can still use the User State Migration Tool or Windows 7's Easy Transfer tool to save time setting up your accounts over again in Windows 7—you just don't have to worry about putting the horse before the cart this way.
There’s nothing too new about installing Windows 7 on a Mac with Boot Camp that hasn’t already been done with XP and Vista. Stroll over to our Boot Camp how-to guide to read up on how to set up a Windows system right next to OS X, with extra pointers on getting devices like Mac keyboards working properly in Windows.
It's entirely possible to load Windows 7 onto netbooks that shipped with XP, Linux, or some other system—it's just not quite easy. If you’re up for a little ISO imaging, USB installing, and file compression, our sibling blog Gizmodo can walk you through installing Windows 7 on almost any netbook. You’ll need a minimum of 1GB of RAM and 8GB of hard drive space on your netbook, along with a 4GB thumb drive and a valid copy of Windows 7. PC World just posted a guide to getting Windows 7 on your netbook in a half-hour, but we’ve yet to try out their technique.
PC World was, like us, slightly amazed at how long a Windows 7 upgrade can take on a Vista system crammed with data. They recommend a good overall geek tip as a fix: creating a separate “data” partition.
Gina ran down the benefits and how-to steps of separating your data from Windows on a standalone partition back in May, but with Windows 7 just a little over a month away, it’s worth re-considering, especially if you’re on a lower-end system and have a whole lot of media stored away. As PC World points out, once your music, movies, and other stuff is stashed away on a separate partition, you can still make it easy to access with Libraries, one of Windows 7′s best underhyped features.
If you’re looking to buy a new Windows system starting today or plan to upgrade immediately, you’re in luck: Windows 7 will be a free upgrade for new Vista buyers, and upgrades are going for half-price.
Microsoft announced today the basic structures for Windows 7 pricing, and the big headline is that Windows 7 will be, at every level, the same price or cheaper than Windows Vista. Starting today, Vista Home Premium buyers (both pre-installed and retail) get a free upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium when it lands on Oct. 22, Vista Business owners can upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, and Ultimate users get Windows 7 Ultimate.
Those with Windows XP or Vista already installed can start pre-ordering Windows 7 upgrade discs, costing $50 for Home Premium and $100 for Professional. Those deals are for a “limited time,” with no specifics given, from Microsoft directly and most computer retailers, and Ultimate may or may not see an upgrade pre-order deal.
Hit the links below for a seriously thorough and slightly compacted read, respectively, on Windows 7 pricing at every level, and tell us what you think of 7′s pricing strategy in the comments.
Major announcements from Google, Microsoft, and Apple in the last few weeks have techies flipping out about the awesomeness coming to our browsers, pockets, and desktops in the very near future. Strap on your jetpacks; let’s take a look.
Google Wave is the one item on this list whose reading on the SQUEE-o-meter is off the charts. The ambitious new messaging platform sets out to reinvent email for the modern web. Google Wave rolls email, wikis, instant messaging, blog-style commenting, revision history and version control, collaborative document-editing, and a whole lot of Ajax magic into a single app that just might someday subsume email and other fragmented messaging and collaboration products.
Thanks to the new HTML 5 standard support in modern browsers, Wave offers live as-your-recipient-types updating to messages and documents in your browser, wave revision playback, live collaboration on a single wave (as in, you can watch the cursors of your co-workers typing away on your screen while you work), and smart contextual spellcheck that knows you meant “Iceland is an island” when you type “Icland is an icland.” If you haven’t already watched the hour-plus video demonstration of Google Wave (and don’t want to invest the time), check out the highlight reel.
Like Gmail and Google Maps did, Wave will set the bar for web applications even higher, and change our expectations about what’s possible in the browser on our desktop and on the handset. Since it’s not yet in the wild, it’s hard to say what Wave uptake and use will be like; likely early adopters will lead the way but that at first it will feel strange and almost too-powerful.
Google Wave is in an early, invite-only Preview now, but will be available to the public "later this year." Like Firefox, Chrome, and Android, Wave is open source and extensible. The Wave server you will use is also not necessarily hosted by Google—you or your organization could install a copy on your own server.
Windows is making a much-needed comeback from the flop that was Vista, and it’s called Windows 7. Sure it’s cool to knock Microsoft for past sins, and we’re not saying that Windows 7 is the end-all and be-all of all operating systems—but it's a marked improvement, and it's ready for the future.
Windows 7 adds visual features to your desktop that you need now as well as lays the groundwork for a tomorrow filled with multi-touch devices and tiny netbooks. Win7 is faster and smaller, able to run on a less powerful netbooks, and ready for your new touchscreen monitor or tablet. (We haven’t tried Win7′s multi-touch capabilities and for the record, some say that it’s only half-baked so far. The road to the future is a long one.) Current widescreen and dual monitor users will love Windows 7′s taskbar and Aero Peek features for multi-tasking, previewing, and managing several windows.
Windows 7 will be available in stores on October 22nd, but unlike any other item on this list, the release candidate is available as a free download right now for anyone to install and try out, no invites required. If you do, be sure to check out out our Guide to Upgrading to Windows 7 RC.
While it won’t offer the same “ooh shiny!” visual makeover that Windows 7 does, Apple is also battening down the hatches and getting Mac OS X future-ready. The next version of the operating system, 10.6, is a cheap $29, and is revamped, enhanced, and retuned. Snow Leopard takes up half the disk space of its predecessor, starts up and shuts down faster, and includes totally re-written default applications with 64-bit computing support which means your Mac can more efficiently address and use more memory.
Snow Leopard’s also making tracks into the corporation with Microsoft Exchange support and taking a page from the iPhone book with location awareness. And not to be left behind by Windows 7's new taskbar and Aero Peek, Snow Leopard adds Exposé to the Mac Dock to make managing and clearing away windows on your desktop as easy as possible. While Snow Leopard is light on the user-facing features, here's what you will notice when you upgrade this fall.
Is it irritating (and hard on the wallet) that every single year there’s a newer, better smartphone on the market to lust after? Yes, ma’am. Is stiff competition between companies to manufacture the tiny and powerful computer we walk around with in our pockets awesome? Yessiree. Apple still leads the smartphone pack with the iPhone (and the new iPhone 3GS unveiled this week), but the Palm Pre and HTC’s line of Android phones are also in the game, and that means better phones for all of us.
When you step back and think about all the devices a good smartphone can be to us: phones, email terminals, GPS devices, e-book readers, iPods, cameras, video capture and editing devices, and pretty much anything else an app can make them, it blows the mind. Like Snow Leopard, the iPhone 3GS is light on the features (save the better camera and compass) but heavy on the speed and performance increases. Expect this war to rage on, and spawn even more devices. (Mac tablet, anyone?)
The major trends across all these products is creating a faster and slicker cloud and local desktop experience. (New browsers like Chrome and Safari 4 also capitalize on the “faster leaner meaner” sell as well.) Evolved standards (like HTML 5), more powerful hardware support (64-bit architectures) as well as portable devices like netbooks and touchscreens are all signposts along the way. Location-awareness continues to show itself on desktops and smartphones, and extensibility (whether it’s a smartphone app store or open-source extension) all means we’re in for a super-fun ride in the next couple of years.
Lest I gush all over my keyboard any more, it’s time to find out what you think:
What upcoming tech are you most excited about?(answers)
What upcoming bits of hardware and software are the stuff of your dreams? Which ones are the yawners? Tell us about it in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, is wearing her “the future’s so bright” shades. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Windows only: The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor scans your PC to see if it can run Windows 7, and explains any potential compatibility issues.
Using the utility is about as easy as it gets—just launch it and go through the screens to scan your computer for compatibility with the newest version of Windows. At the end you'll receive a report letting you know if your system can run Windows 7, and whether each one of your system components will be compatible as well—the upgrade wizard advises you to make sure all your devices are connected so it can fully detect any potential issues.
Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta is a free download, Windows only. For more, make sure you’ve checked out our features on what’s new in the Windows 7 release candidate, how to upgrade to the RC, and how to enable XP Mode once you’ve upgraded.
Why Not to Buy a Mac (Now)
There’s nothing a Mac bought a year ago can’t do today, and nothing a Mac bought today won’t be able to do a year from now, just not as well.
That’s the problem for those seeking to maximize the value of their next purchase. If one believes the hype from none other than Steve Jobs himself, Macs are going to “take Apple to the next level” in 2010, and who doesn’t want to level up with Steve?
But even without the hype, there are three–well, really, two good reasons and one forlorn hope–to wait a while before purchasing your next Mac.
That’s the mobile CPU from Intel launched at CES under the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 variants. Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost technologies for improved parallelization and increased speed on demand have resulted in double-digit performance increases without a decrease in battery life.
Regarding performance, the desktop Core i5 and Core i7 can already be found in the high-end iMac, which admittedly are quad-core versus dual-core for the mobile versions. Nonetheless, Macworld found the that the “2.66GHz Core i5 iMac is the fastest standard configuration Mac we’ve ever tested,” and can be as fast as Xeon-based Mac Pros.
This is the kind of upgrade worth waiting for, and the wait shouldn’t be long. The MacBook Pros and the MacBook Air were last updated in June, meaning they are due for an update even without significant new technology. Keep in mind the MacBook, last updated in October, may continue to use a Core 2 Duo for market segmentation purposes. Since the iPad is set for launch in late March, and companies like HP are already selling Arrandale laptops, expect an update within weeks, possibly even sooner.
We can expect that USB 3 will be multiple times as fast as USB 2, which is the kind of benefit instantly recognizable to anyone downloading images from a camera or backing up to a USB drive. While there are very few USB 3 devices available today, that will change quickly this year.
As to when to expect USB 3 Macs, a recent rumor in DigiTimes suggested Genesys Logic is sampling device controllers for Apple now, a claim which the company denied. Whether there’s truth in the rumor or the denial, Apple is undoubtedly working on USB 3 for Macs. The new bus could conceivably be part of the next round of updates in the spring, but if not then expect USB 3 Macs in the fall.
According to market researcher In-Stat, that could be about 2013, if by “take off” one means exceeding sales of DVD players. Unfortunately, the predicted adoption rate for Blu-ray in PCs is even worse. Metrics firm iSuppli projects that by 2013 only 16 percent of PCs will come with Blu-ray drives.
If, like me, you are waiting for a Mac mini with Blu-ray, you probably won’t be buying this year. However, for those who plan on keeping their next Mac for one to three years, a Mac mini with Core i5 and USB 3 can likely be had this year.
The same can be said for every other Mac, too. While 2010 may or may not take Macs to the “next level,” both Intel’s new Core processors and USB 3 are significant upgrades. That’s why if you need a Mac today, buy one, but if not, tomorrow is definitely worth the wait.