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Those of us who have MSDN and TechNet subscriptions used to enjoy downloading the latest and greatest from Microsoft before it ever reached the consumer.  Those days are seemingly long gone now.

At the time of writing this article the next release of Windows 7, Release Candidate 1, is still not available for download from Microsoft.  That seems to be irrelevant though – the masses are already putting it to the test after downloading it from popular torrent sites.

While there is no official confirmation that the leaked build is definitely RC1, the build appears to match the number provided to OEMs and testers earlier this week (7100.0.090421-1700).

If you aren’t that adventurous, You don’t have a very long wait, Microsoft is expected to distribute RC1 on May 5.

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Popularity: 46%

Eager Windows 7 fans will get their taste of the first and only public release candidate of the highly anticipated operating system starting on May 5.  The download is expected to be available through June 2009, with an activation lasting until June 2010.

Also expected on the same day is a release candidate for Windows 7 Server (Windows Server 2008 R2 actually).

The other rumour on the street is that the final and official Windows 7 release is being targeted for October 2009.

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This one isn’t showing up on the FreeNAS main site yet (FreeNAS.org), but it is available for download at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=151951&package_id=168081&release_id=676839

Major changes:

• Upgrade Samba to 3.0.34.
• Upgrade ProFTPD to 1.3.2.
• Upgrade mDNSResponder to 1.08.6.
• Upgrade lighttpd to 1.4.22.
• Upgrade cdialog to 1.1.20080819.
• Upgrade e2fsprogs to 1.41.4.
• Upgrade nut to 2.4.1. Thanks to Joerg Pulz for the core dump patch. This
  version uses TCP wrappers instead of the internal ACL mechanism. Because of
  that all client can listen the UPS. If you want to prevent this you have to
  use the FreeNAS client firewall to block specific IP ranges. See
  http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/nut-upsuser/2009-February/004862.html
  for a detailed explanation.
• Upgrade transmission to 1.51.
• Upgrade fusefs-ntfs/ntfs-3g to 2009.2.1.
• Upgrade 3Ware serial ATA RAID controller driver to 9.5.1.
• Upgrade bash to 4.0.10.

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Popularity: 52%

Users of Microsoft Office 2007 can rejoice – Service Pack 2 will be here in just over a week! That’s right everyone, we’re finally getting a new set of fixes and functionality.  It’s about time too!

Expect to see some great new features in your favorite products such as the ability to export reports to Excel from Access, Save As PDF or XPS is now a standard feature, and increased compatibility with a broader range of browsers.

Also expect to see some fixes to the Office suite like improved start-up, shutdown, view rendering and folder switch in Outlook.  You’ll also see reliability improvements to Outlook’s calendar updates, search and RSS feeds. 

My personal favorite is the improved compatibility of Visio with the other Microsoft Office products.

As far as supported platforms with SP2:

The 2007 Office Suite SP2 has been tested and is supported for Internet Explorer 8. Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7 and Windows Server R2 will all be supported upon their release.

And a first for Microsoft, as part of the SP2 launch, Microsoft will be updating their knowledge base (KB) documentation to be more informative and more user-friendly.  Follow the READ link for a more extensive list of changes.

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If you’ve ever upgraded your own PC, then you probably needed to know some crucial information about your existing hardware.  Things like motherboard model, memory type, processor socket type, video card memory and many more come to mind easily.

Well, you’ll be happy to know that there are two very simple applications that can bring you a lot of complex information about your computer.  The apps are named CPU-Z and GPU-Z and although they are similarly named and styled, they were created by two different groups.  Both apps are Windows only and free to download.

CPU-Z provides a ton of information about system specs such as

• mainboard
• CPU
• cache
• memory

Check out the example screenshots below:

GPU-Z from Tech Powerup on the other hand provides loads of information about your video card setup.  The list is quite extensive and includes things like:

• Graphics Card Name
• GPU and Revision
• BIOS Version
• Bus Interface
• Clock and Memory Frequencies
• GPU and PCB Temperature Sensors
• Fan Speeds

All of this in an easy to use interface.  Check out the screen shots below:

I strongly recommend both applications for anyone who wants to know more about their computer setup.  These great tools can save your hours of work and case opening.

Download CPU-Z from CPUID

Download GPU-Z from Tech PowerUp

Popularity: 72%

About two weeks ago my FreeNAS-based NAS died.  To be more specific, it started throwing errors about incompatible files that I was trying to play on my media center.  When investigated, I discovered that the emails I had been receiving for months about S.M.A.R.T. errors on one of the drives was actually legitimate.  The drive was now unrecoverable.

Realizing that this was an IDE drive and that my current setup did not support SATA, I started to cost out building a new NAS.  Sufficed to say that this got very expensive, very quick.  I began investigating some commercial NAS devices and took the advice of a colleague on the D-Link DNS-323.

This little bundle of joy, with dual 1TB Western Digital Green drives installed, cost me about $400.  That includes taxes, shipping and installation (I bill myself by the hour).  It’s a decent network storage device for the home users and does offer many of the options available in FreeNAS.  I’ll provide a complete review in another post.

Meanwhile, I wanted to point out this very exciting Windows Vista Sidebar gadget that helps you monitor your DNS-323.  Written by Phil Wigglesworth and available from his blog, this gadget provides a plethora of information in an easy to use package.  There are three main tabs, depicted below, that show things like temperature, capacity, status, properties and other sweet info.

You can even restart and shutdown the device right from the sidebar.

If you have one of these devices, I encourage you to head on over to Phil’s blog and grab a download of this gadget.  You will not be disappointed.

3/3/2009 Update:  It works with Windows 7 too!

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Popularity: 100%

A while back I wrote an article for MakeTechEasier about a free partition management application called Easeus Partition Manager. 

It would seem that the post got the attention of Partition-Tool, the development team behind this and other great tools.  They collaborated with MakeTechEasier to bring you Easeus Partition Master, the full-featured commercial version of Partition Manager.  Don’t wait though, this is a 24 hour only offer.  It expires at midnight!

In the EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition, you get powerful features like:

• Disk copy wizard, partition copy wizard to protect data
• 1.5TB hard disk supported
• Resize and Move partitions
• Copy Partition
• Copy Disk to protect data
• Create, Delete and Format partitions
• Hide and Unhide partitions
• Create a bootable CD/DVD
• and much more.

In addition, it works well with hardware RAID and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 (32 bit and 64 bit).

Here is the link to download:

http://maketecheasier.com/a/easeus-partition-master/

Username: easeus
Password:  8lE.ty#X

The above link will expire on 27 Feb 2009, 11.59pm.

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Popularity: 95%

A dark homage to cubicle workers everywhere:

Cubicle Slave Manifesto

I am an office worker.  I live a cookie cutter life where I punch in and punch out at the same time every day.  Eight of my sixteen waking hours in a day are spent in my cubicle?  What’s a cubicle you ask?

Similar to a jail cell, the cubicle is a confined space where I must spend my days toiling away.  The cubicle is normally decorated in drab colours like grey or 70’s brown.  There is a florescent light affixed below my hanging storage shelf, which casts an eerie glow like the fluorescent lamps of an abandoned hospital, made popular by many a horror flick.

I’m given the tools to do my job.  I have a computer with a keyboard, mouse and monitor.  The company has supplied an office calendar, but like all office supplies from the catalogue it has neither style or grace.  It’s bland.  That’s what they want the atmosphere to be.  Bland.

No items are allowed in the cubicle warehouse that might provoke creative thought or independence.  Let me explain.  The cubicle warehouse is the inside of my office building.  Floor after floor, row after row, the cubicles are neatly organized for optimum efficiency.  The simplicity of the program is one that allows for maximum cubicles in minimum space.  Navigating the cubicles is like that of a maze, random pathways reveal themselves as the corridors are traversed.  I question whether they are in the same location from day to day.

A spaghetti bowl of wires navigates its way through the office.  Sometimes in the floor, sometimes in the ceiling.  It connects the cubicles to the bare necessities of office life.  Power, telephone, and network.

I’m part of a system, a system that’s designed to generate revenue to line the pockets of some people that I will never meet.  I work for a minimum wage so that I can provide a roof over my family and food on our table.  I will never know the luxury of the fat cats who run the system.  I’m merely a pawn, a slave to their cubicle containment system.  They are my prison, and the cubicle my cell.

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Popularity: 81%

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, a huge competitor for Adobe’s Flash, is making the rounds beyond the Microsoft realm. 

The first milestone is the official release of Moonlight 1.0 – an open-source implementation of Silverlight 1.0 that allows Silverlight-based applications and websites to run in the Linux environment using Firefox 2 or 3.  The good news is that Moonlight 2.0, the port of Silverlight 2.0 is in the works.

With that also comes the news that the Silverlight script has been updated to accommodate for Linux-based User Agents. 

The third great revelation is about a bit of a dirty hack that allows Silverlight to work in Chrome.  While Chrome is not officially supported, most Silverlight applications will still run. 

In the Silverlight.suppordUserAgent,js file, insert the following on line 93:

else if (ua.indexOf('Chrome') >= 0) {
slua.Browser = 'Chrome';
}


It’s important to place the Chrome check before the Safari check because Chrome’s user agent reports itself as Safari as well – allowing the browser to fool Hotmail into thinking that it is Safari so that Chrome users can access their mail.

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Popularity: 87%

On Thursday Microsoft announced plans to offer a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in the creation of the Conficker worm.

The Conficker worm has yet to reveal its true purpose, however infected machines become part of an increasingly growing botnet.  Once exploited, the controlling parties behind the botnet could harness the power of millions of compromised machines. 

For more information on Conficker, and to protect your computer, visit http://www.microsoft.com/conficker.

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Popularity: 86%