I’m certainly a fan of Windows and the Office suit in general, but during the beta testing of Windows 7 I reinstalled the OS 3 times, twice for the beta and once for the release candidate. When Windows 7 came out, I installed it on our two laptops and desktop, plus on a couple of family member’s computers. The process went pretty smoothly and the only real annoyance was backing up and restoring Outlook emails, contacts, filters, and account settings. With the advent of Gears, allowing offline access to Gmail, I ditched Outlook. [Incidentally, Outlook 2010 is pretty slick. With the integration of Windows Live, I may end up giving outlook another try.]

One of the annoyances I found with using an online solution like Gmail is that none of the system links to the default mail program work. Word 2007 – 2010 allows one to save and email a doc, but it can’t pull up a browser and open Gmail for me. Likewise for shell links like right-clicking a file and selecting the “send to” option.

Enter Affixa.

This free program links Gmail with the operating system. It’s pretty easy to set up, too. It’s not perfectly integrated, but it will put an email in your drafts with the file attached. I’m not complaining, it’s way better than no link at all. It will also dump large attachments that Gmail refuses into a drop.io account and place a link to them in the email. I wish it could integrate with Dropbox, though.

Here’s a screenshot of the control panel. The program normally runs in the background via a system tray icon.

I’ve ordered a 160 gig, 2.5” 5400 rpm drive for Christina’s laptop. It’s 20% faster, has 4x the cache, and 2x the space. I’ll put her old 80 gig XP drive in my external enclosure and use a hack to do a clean install. This way, I don’t have to worry about losing her data, and if she’s not happy with the Windows 7 experience, I can just pop her old HD back in.

Well, I found this really nifty free software called “Any Video Converter.” The neat thing about it that it converts to just about any format. There’s a pro version that’s the most comprehensive, it will even convert to .3gp, which a lot of cell phones use, but the free version does everything I need. Hey JC, there’s a MAC version too.

Screenshot:

I tried to put Linux on it at one point but it was really flaky, even though I tried three different distro’s. I never even got it to boot reliably.

So I found a good use for it, one that doesn’t require handling.

I use it as an audio bridge for the sound system.

I have an older Logitech Z-680 surround sound system hooked up to the DVD player in the living room, it sounds great and I love to listen to it. I wanted to be able to play music from my laptop over it, because it can convert stereo into something that sounds like surround sound. My only way to do this was to run a cable from my laptop to the control box’s analog input. That was cumbersome, so this is what I did:

I took the Thinkpad and got it on the wireless network with a 20 dollar Trendnet wireless PCMCIA card from Newegg. After I got it going (no hang-ups there), I downloaded and installed Winamp 5.5 and UltraVNC. I use Winamp as my music library and UltraVNC allows me to remotely control the Thinkpad’s desktop from another PC. Both programs are free. The newest version of VNC (1.0.5) gave me some problems on Vista, so I used 1.0.2 and it works fine. This is what it looks like from my tablet laptop:

The window in the center is the Thinkpad’s desktop, which is running Winamp at full screen. I set up an icon with the VNC username and password on my desktop so all I have to do is click the icon and I get a connection.

Here’s the setup:

The cable going into the left of the laptop is the USB connector for the external hard drive. On the right top is the green audio connector that goes from the headphone jack to the surround sound control pod. You can see the wireless card sticking out on the right, too. On the far right of the picture is an external 100 gig hard drive and the Z-680 control pod. All this except for the pod goes behind the gas fireplace and next to the subwoofer.

This is what it looks like from the couch:

Only the control pod is visible. It’s remote controlled, so I can switch between digital and analog inputs and control volume, though I usually use Winamp’s volume for that.

Here’s a (blurry)  picture of me using it on the tablet, no wires attached:

So far, so good. It’s turned out to be even cooler than I thought, because created a share on the external drive and I now I back up files to it across the network.

Music: mp3.amazon.com 
This site is great. All music tracks are 89-99 cents, most albums are around 9 dollars. All tracks are encoded at the very high quality of 320kbps. Most important: NO DRM. If you buy from iTunes, you’re getting stuck with files chained to Apple’s software. Amazon’s files have no such restriction. I’ve found that buying a track or album off of Amazon is a satisfying experience. It’s easy to find the files, purchase is one-click, you can preview anything you buy, the file quality is always good, and you don’t have to worry about cooties or getting sued.

Operations System: Windows Vista Home Premium (Upgrade)
For 95% of the users, this version of Vista will do anything you need. The upgrade is easily obtainable for less than 70 dollars. The only caveat is that you have to use this trick to upgrade if you are coming from a pirated version of XP. Don’t scoff either, I tried using a PC with XP after 3 months with Vista, and for all the gripes I think Vista is the better OS. Just don’t run it on PC with 512MB of RAM.

Productivity Apps: Office Ultimate Steal
The Home and Student Edition of MS Office 2007 has Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Onenote. It’s going to cost at least 70 dollars. But for students, at least until the end of Spring semester 2008, you can get Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal deal for 60 dollars. It’s Microsoft Office Ultimate, which has every piece of software in the Office suite. It retails around 620 dollars. If you can’t swing for Office, try Open Office 3. It’s a decent substitute, for free.

Everything else has a free or open source version. The only problematic areas for me were web site design and a good photo/art app. Dreamweaver is unbeatable (130.00 Student), and for a decent art/photo app that’s free, Gimp is ok. I’d rather have Paint Shop Pro though, and you can get it for around 60 dollars.

Well, that’s about it. In today’s software world it may seem like all the good stuff is really expensive, but you can usually shop around and find good deals or alternative packages. Good luck!

But Live Writer is pretty nifty. I’m still experimenting with it, sticking some plugins into the program, etc. My biggest need right now is for flash implementation, since sermons.albanygospelchapel.com used imbedded flash audio in every post. My work-around is a plugin called “Text Template” that allows me to dump in saved snippets of html and javascript.

So far live writing is working out well, and it’s a HUGE improvement over the built in editor that comes with the
Wordpress suit.