Category Archives: Win7View

Notes on Windows 7, Win7 compatible software and hardware, reviews, tips and more.

Help yourself to cool shortcuts!

If you’ve run Vista for a while, you probably know you can get to many programs by looking them up in Help and Support. This typically produces a list of help pages, among which you can usually find a link to launch the program you want. Take this infrequent but common Windows task, for instance: partitioning and formatting a new hard disk.

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Interesting Notebook Upgrade Shenanigans

Ed TittelI’m in the process of upgrading my 14-month-old Dell D620 Latitude notebook. As shipped from the factory, it included 1.0 GB of RAM (2 x 512 MB DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs), a 40 GB HD, and a T2300E 1.66 GHz Mobile Core Duo CPU. This was adequate for running Windows XP, but I quickly upgraded the SO-DIMM slot underneath the machine to 1.0 GB, increasing memory to a more workable 1.5 GB total.

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System Builder’s Blog for June 24, 2008

From time to time, I want to share experiences building Vista systems with our readers. In the last month, I’ve built (and rebuilt) at least three Vista systems, one an upgrade on my Dell Latitude D620 notebook from Windows XP SP3 to Vista Business SP1, another a brand-new build on a QX9650 quad-core system in a very nice Antec 900 case (they call it a gaming case, but I still like it anyway), and another in imaging (then re-imaging) an HP tx2000z tablet PC.

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TJmax: it’s more than just a clothing outlet!

TJ stands for thermal junction, and represents a measure of the temperature of a circuit or electronic package at the point where the part radiates the most heat (usually from the top surface). TJmax stands for the maximum temperature that such an integrated circuit, or more correctly a chip or chipset in its socketable package (a usable electronic part, in other words), can sustain before it fails.

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Vista Reliability Monitor

One of the more interesting features built into Windows Vista is the Reliability monitor that appears as part of performance monitoring. Though you can launch this tool by working your way through this menu sequence: Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Reliability and Performance Monitor, I find it’s a heck of a lot easier to just type “perfmon” in the search window immediately above the Start button.

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Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate: Upgrade to Vista!

The gibberish in the title of this blog is from Dante’s Inferno, and is usually translated as “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Like many others, until I looked this up I was under the misapprehension that the Inferno was written in Latin. It’s not: It’s in Tuscan which, at the time it was written (between 1308 and 1321 AD), was a more or less separate dialect of the modern language we today call Italian. But this phrase conveys the fear and trepidation inherent to going certain places where we’ve all been told, often many times, that it’s best to stay away from.

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