Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips Microsoft’s new Metro interface maybe good news for users with Touch Screens but what about those stuck with their mouse and keyboard?

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips Microsoft’s SkyDrive service has been with us for some time now and it’s been tweaked here and there, and integrated with Hotmail, Live Mesh and the company’s Office Web Apps.  As a technology though it’s still fairly immature.  Part of the reason for this is that Microsoft are currently  unwilling to open up the entire storage space to people for free via Live Mesh, so that entire documents, pictures and music libraries can be stored and backed up in the cloud for free.  The reason that Live Mesh can only use 5Gb of the 25Gb on offer is because once files are uploaded to the cloud Microsoft will have to maintain theme there, even if people never access them again.  Many people would try the service out and then decide not to use it any more, this is perfectly normal and a scenario that every cloud services company faces.  With Microsoft’s enormous user-base however the problem would be tens if not hundreds times worse than it is for Dropbox or Mozy. SkyDrive remains a fairly limited service however as, while Microsoft will be building Live Mesh support into Windows 8, they won’t be giving people more storage space than the 5Gb already available.  For access to the remaining 20Gb of free space users will still need to go to the clunky SkyDrive web interface and drop individual files in one at a time; this is hardly an incentive to use the service and perhaps this is the entire point. But what other uses could this 20Gb of free space be put to?  Anybody who has used the Outlook Connector to synchronise their Hotmail account with the desktop software will know that it can take many hours for the software to synchronise fully.  The problem is caused by ever-expanding volumes of sent and received email and the addition of ever-larger attachments.  I believe that Hotmail should have a switch that will automatically archive all email attachments for messages older than, say, six months into SkyDrive, replacing them in the email with a link to the file.  Not only would this give people a central location for all attachments; sorted automatically into folders perhaps named after the sender, but it will prevent an already frustrating problem from getting any worse in the future

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips I’m currently planning a ‘Christmas Special’ for my ongoing webcast series.  On Tuesday December 13th I’ll be helping people in “Setting up and Configuring a New PC” because Christmas is, traditionally, a good time for the purchasing and giving of high-tech electronics.  Let’s face it, if the three wise men could have delivered unto Jesus an iPad, an all-in-one PC and an Android Smartphone they probably would have done.  But religious flippancies aside this Christmas could be a very interesting time for PC sales because it is the last chance to get a Christmas PC with Windows 7 on board. The word about Windows 8 is now beginning to get out and setting aside the fact that January will bring a great many new features with the beta, people who are thinking about Windows 8 will have to make up their mind based on what they’ve seen in the current Developer Preview.  The fact remains here that much of what we have seen, the touch OS, the Metro interface and the one app per screen approach isn’t going to change much and some people might decide they simply don’t want to go that way. Human beings are, after all, resistant to change.  It makes us uncomfortable which is one of the reasons why Microsoft have now had to shove the Ribbon interface into just about everything to get people to use it.  They’ve been steadily doing the same with Metro, there are references of it tracing back to Windows 7 Media Centre for example.

Just like everyone else, developers are beginning to hop onto the Windows 7 bandwagon.

With the development of OfficeLive and GoogleDocs, Cloud Computing is now within everyone’s grasp. Both applications allow you to: Create basic documents from scratch or use a template.

I recently published a post about how well Windows 7 was selling.