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Windows 7 doesn’t come with Windows XP Mode, but you can download it for free from here.  Essentially, Windows XP Mode is virtual machine software (called Virtual PC) that can emulate a whole other computer even running a completely different operating system than what your computer booted up to.  AND, it can run this other operating system AT THE SAME TIME as your primary (called “host”) operating system.  Windows XP mode is Virtual PC running a Windows XP virtual machine.

Here’s a video demonstrating how it works:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNFczLYBtrA]

The purpose of this product is to allow you to go ahead and make the switch to Windows 7, but without losing compatibility with older software that may only work on Windows XP.

Windows Media Center is a program that provides a DVR like user interface to all of your videos, music, CDs, DVDs, photos, recorded TV, & FM Radio.  It, itself, is a DVR, if you have a TV Tuner card in your computer.  You can use it to schedule recordings for TV shows and movies.  Any computer hosting Windows Media Center can stream content to other computers AND to Windows Media Center compatible hardware like XBox and XBox 360 (called Windows Media Extenders).  In other words, you can stream content from your home PC to your big screen HDTV in the living room.  This works quite well, but getting the connection configured can be frustrating, especially if your computer is on a different floor in the house than your XBox and TV.  For streaming HD content, you’ll want a 100mb network connection or better.

Windows Media Center used to be an off-shoot version of Windows XP called Windows XP Media Center Edition.  With Windows Vista, Windows Media Center came with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.  With Windows 7, it comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate.

Windows Media Center is great for archiving all of your home movies and using a Windows Media Center Extender (Like XBox 360) to stream your movies to your living room TV.

“Home Group” is a new feature of Windows 7 that allows multiple Windows 7 machines on the same local area network to more easily share files, music, printers, and such.  Any Windows 7 computer on the network can create a home group and set a password.  Other Windows 7 computers on the network can easily find these home groups and connect to them with the same password.  Each computer can control what’s shared from it to the other computers.

Modern PCs have 1 CPU, but multiple cores.  Most people don’t really understand what that means.  Here’s an explanation:

First, until a couple of years ago, most computers had one CPU with one core.  A CPU is an acronym for “Central Processing Unit”.  It’s that big chip with a big fan mounted on it inside your computer.  It’s what Intel and AMD make.  It’s essentially the brain of your computer.  It’s where all the thinking occurs.  When you run a program, whether it’s a game, a word processor, a spreadsheet, or just booting up the computer to load and run the operating system (Like Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, etc…), what happens is the CPU activates the hard drive and starts it activating the motors to spin the disk, to move the read/write arm back and forth to read the magnetic bits on the surface of the disk, then translates those positive and negative recordings into bits or 1’s and 0’s and copies them into the computer’s memory, which it then looks at them, one byte at a time.  Each one is a specific instruction for the CPU to do, like copy a byte of data from one memory location to another, add 2 numbers, etc…  The CPU can do millions or billions of these instructions per second, but it can only do ONE at a time.

Newer CPUs now have what are essentially 2 or more CPUs on the same chip.  But, they don’t call these CPUs anymore.  They call them “cores”.  You can now have multiple cores on one chip.  The chip that contains all the cores is now called the “CPU”.

With a multi-core CPU chip, all of them run, independently, at the same time, all executing their own set of instructions, without waiting on the other cores to finish theirs.  So, if your CPU has 2 cores, your CPU can actually do 2 things at once,  If your CPU has 3, 4, 6, or 8 cores, your computer can execute that many instructions at once.  In general, the more cores you have, the more things your computer can run in parallel, and hence, is faster.

A multi-core CPU is not to be confused with a Multi-CPU computer.  A computer with 2 or more CPUs actually has 2 more actual CPU chips on the motherboard, with a big fan mounted on each one.  Each CPU may have 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 cores.  Generally an operating system recognizes all these cores as separate CPUs.  OS’s don’t generally care wither the cores are one per chip or multiple cores per chip.  The only time that really matters is if the operating system provider has implemented some bizarre licensing rules that says if you don’t pay up, then they’ll limit your installed operating system from using more than one physical CPU chip, but will allow multiple cores on that one chip.  Windows 7 Home Starter Edition is one of many examples that implements this simply for a licensing reason.

It actually gets much more complicated and involved in that and there are exceptions to these rules of speed, but for a simple explanation, this suffices.

In general, more cores = faster and better.

If you’re a Windows user, this year, more than at any time in the past, you’ll be presented with the dilemma of deciding whether or not you want to install a 32 bit version of Windows or a 64 bit version of Windows.  Here’s an explanation of what it means:

When a program is executed by the machine’s hardware, the hardware looks at instructions in the software that ask it to store or retrieve data to and from the computer’s memory.  How much data it can store and retrieve in one instruction is called its Data Bus Width.  Most modern PCs have a 64 bit data bus, so they can store or retrieve up to 64 bits in one instruction (or 8 bytes).  Generally, the more bits that can be stored or retrieved at once, the fewer instructions it takes to move a large chunk of data, so it’s generally faster.  This is not a hard rule though.  Sometimes it’s slower.

Additionally, the total amount of memory that the PC’s Central Processing Unit (CPU) chip can access is determined by its address bus width.  This doesn’t necessarily have to be the same size as the data bus width.  Most modern processors though, have a 64 bit address bus.  A 32 bit address bus can only access about 4GB of RAM, so even if you added more memory, your processor couldn’t use it.  A 64 bit address buss can access 2^64 bytes of memory (or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes).  That’s significantly more than any amount of memory you’ll have in a PC for a good long while.  So, with a 64bit address bus, your CPU can access as much memory as you can afford to install.

There are other, individual hardware architecture pieces that can be 32 or 64 bit, but I won’t get into them here.

In short, whenever you have an option, always go with 64 bit, unless, you know for sure, that a critical piece of software you need just won’t work in 64 bit.  But, in that case, I’d recommend still going with a 64 bit OS (Operating System) and using virtual machine software, like Windows XP Mode in Windows 7, or VMWare and install a 32 bit OS inside of the virtual machine, just for that old software that hasn’t been updated.

There’s been a lot of media hype about so called “netbooks” this past year.  All a netbook is, is a small notebook computer with a slow processor, a slow and low capacity hard drive, a small screen with a low resolution, and usually a scaled down version of Windows (like Windows Starter edition) or with Linux installed.

Netbooks are not generally considered “netbooks” unless they’re under $500.  Most of them are right around that price range, but with the severely limiting capabilities.  People get excited about them because they assume that since they’re so scaled back, capability wise, that they’re cheaper than more powerful notebooks.  The truth is, you can get a very nice notebook computer in the $300-$500 price range that will absolutely run circles around any netbook performance wise, storage wise, screen size wise, resolution wise, Windows version wise, etc… etc…

Although, people that have netbooks, seem to love them.  I wonder if they know that they can get a much more power computer at an equivalent (or lower) cost.

There is one legitimate reason I can see for getting one though:  Size.  They’re much smaller than a normal notebook.  So, if a smaller size is more important than all of the other capabilities, a netbook just might be right for you.

On 10/22/2009, Microsoft officially released Windows 7 to the general public, but did you know there are 6 different versions (and a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of each of those (except for Starter edition which is 32 bit only))?

So, which do you buy?  First, let’s list what versions are available, then we’ll describe each one:

1. Windows 7 Starter
2. Windows 7 Home Basic
3. Windows 7 Home Premium
4. Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Family Pack
5. Windows 7 Professional
6. Windows 7 Ultimate (also called “Enterprise”)

Now, the details of each:

This is the 3rd and most advanced set of anti-spam tips in my 3 part article serious.  The other two are here:

1. How to Stop SPAM: Basic Tips

2. How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips

If you want to stop spam… I mean really stop spam, it will take some set up effort and some mild, continuous effort (very mild), but in the long run, it will be WELL worth it.  You don’t have to be an expert computer user to do any of this, but you do need to follow directions and have patience.  The following expert tips are the 3rd and most advanced part in my 3 part series on putting an end to spam.  These 3 parts are NOT consecutive parts.  You can do any one of the 3, depending on how fortified you want to make your inbox.  The more fortified, the more work.  This part is the most work of the 3 and is also the most effective.  If you follow these steps, it will be a RARE occasion when (or IF) you ever receive another spam message.  I’ve been doing this for years and have only received a small handful (less than 10) spam messages in about 10 years!!!!  THIS REALLY WORKS!!!

Here we go:

1. Buy a domain name.  They’re only like $10/year.  If you register for more than a year, the price/year goes down.  I recommend doing so via godaddy.com.  They’ve got good pricing and lots of features.
   1. If you’re not familiar with what a domain name is, that’s the part of a web address that ends in .com or .net or .org (or several others).  For example:  google.com is a domain name.  You can register your own name (if it’s not already taken).  If the name you want is taken, there’s an infinite number of them to choose from.
2. Use Google hosted domains to set up GMail, but with YOUR OWN domain name (http://google.com/a), so say you registered JohnSmith.com, you can set up your GMail as me@JohnSmith.com, instead of JohnSmith12345@gmail.com.
   1. With your own domain, you still have all the cool, infinite aliases like you do with regular GMail (see How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips), plus you’ve got it on your own domain and plenty of other really cool features you DON’T get with regular GMail (did I mention this is all FREE??? except for the domain name registration, of course).

You can create up to 20 fully loaded E-Mail accounts on your free domain hosted account (each with their own inbox and each with their own log in and calendar, and Google docs, etc…).  If you need more, you can pay a nominal fee to Google.

Each of these 20 accounts can have up to 25 aliases (in addition to the infinite plus sign (+) on-the-fly addresses I described in How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips).  These 25 aliases do NOT have a + sign in them.  So, you could have aliases like me@JohnSmith.com, you@JohnSmith.com, SomeOneElse@JohnSmith.com, etc… all going to the same account.  Remember, each of the 20 real accounts can have 25 additional aliases, which gives 26 ways to reach an account (without using the on-the-fly address scheme).  That gives you 520 unique addresses without using the on-the-fly (+) address scheme.  You can also have any (or all) of these accounts automatically forward their received mail to one account, that way you only have to check ONE account and not 20.

Utilize the tips in How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips with these new addresses on your own domain.

You can also have a catch-all address for your domain, in case you want to catch e-mail sent to non-existent addresses on your domain.  This is good if you enter a non-existent address on some website and forget to create its alias on your own domain.  You can also set up filters on the catch all, looking for e-mail addressed to certain addresses, and forward it to a certain account.  This is good if you run out of aliases (all 520 available), or if you’d prefer to just set up filters on the catch all instead of setting up aliases.

One fun thing to do is to set up once you’ve busted one of the web sites as a spammer (and you will), is to set up a filter for the address they’re sending you spam on and have it forwarded to their sales or help e-mail address and automatically deleted from your inbox.  Then, they’re just spamming themselves!  I’ve done this with both BellSouth and Sears.  If you sign up for e-mail notifications through any company, then decide you want to unsubscribe, many of them will intentionally delay it for “7 to 10 days for processing”.  This is a bunch of BS, and they know it.  They get you signed up instantly, they can unsubscribe you instantly.  Set up a filter to their sales and help addresses too.  They’re only annoying themselves.  It might also be fun to have spammer A’s spam forwarded to spammer B’s address and vice versa.

If you find these tips helpful, please leave a comment and let me know.  Or, if you have tips of your own, let the rest of us know.