Have you upgraded to Windows 7 yet? Do you want to? Do you have any questions about it?

Have you thought about the different options that you have to accomplish this task?

• If you currently have Vista, you can upgrade.
• If you currently have XP, you can do a clean install and move your data to the new installation.
• You can purchase a new PC that already has Windows 7 on it and copy your old data from 1 computer to another.

Do you know about the different Windows 7 versions that are available?

• There are a total of 4 versions, STARTER, HOME PREMIUM, PROFESSIONAL, and ULTIMATE.
• There are 3 upgrade versions, HOME PREMIUM, PROFESSIONAL, and ULTIMATE.

I’d like to alert you to a simple tool from Microsoft that will advice you on about your abilities of upgrading to Windows 7. The tool is called the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. To quote the Microsoft website… “It scans your hardware, devices, and installed programs for known compatibility issues, gives you guidance on how to resolve potential issues found, and recommends what to do before you upgrade.”

Though the way the software reports its findings on your system should be understandable, if you would like help in knowing which path would be best for you, Biden PC would be glad to help. And if you decide that you would like to take the leap to Windows 7, we can facilitate that in the manner that best fits your needs and budget.

I have personally been using Windows 7 since the beta version and I had the final release version 3 weeks before it was available to purchase. I can say with complete confidence that this is a solid and stable OS.

Thank you for reading,
Tim

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Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company and we now offer Online Computer Support.

I’m certain that we have all seen them, software programs that promise to have your PC “Running just Like New”. I’ve seen many people use them and most have to admit that the programs did little or nothing to speed up their computer. In some cases these programs have even crashed their computers.

What these programs typically do is remove orphaned or invalid registry entries. This will usually shrink the registry by 150-800 entries. Sounds good right? Well when you consider that the registry is made up of many thousands of entries, removing a few hundred really isn’t that impressive. After they remove the orphaned entries, they may compress or compact the registry, moving entries to make the file size smaller.

Will these processes speed up your computer? Yes, a little. What these programs all fail to take into consideration is how many programs are running on startup. The more programs you have running at once, the less processing power and memory your computer can give to the more important programs and processes.

Lets look at a computer as if it were a person… If you are trying to write a research paper, you need to put all of your attention into writing the paper, right? Well, lets add into the mix a stereo playing distracting music, a dog barking, a cluttered desk and your neighbor’s baby screaming. None of them are really requiring your attention but your mind has to bounce around a bit more than it should to work on your research paper. Just think about how much more you could accomplish if you removed the screaming baby, barking dog, cleaned up your desk and put on more soothing music. This is what you really need to do in order to speed up your computer. “So how do I speed up my slow Computer?” I’m glad you asked, here are a few simple steps!

• Make sure your computer has enough RAM (memory)
• For Windows 2000 and XP, you should have a minimum of 512MB.
• For Windows Vista and Windows 7 I recommend having a minimum of 2 GB.
• Remember, more is always better!

** Warning: Editing the registry can be dangerous and Biden PC does not warrant any changes that you make.**

**If you  do not feel comfortable doing this, Biden PC can do it for you for the small fee of $15.00**

• Download Autoruns from Microsoft. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
• Unzip the file and run autoruns.exe.
• Look at the bottom left corner of the window. Don’t do anything until is says “Ready”.
• Once it says “Ready”, click on the “Logon” tab. That is all we are going to concern ourselves with.
• Find the line below “Explorer.exe” and start unchecking boxes. DO NOT UNCHECK “Explorer.exe” OR ANYTHING ABOVE IT.
• Most things here can be disabled. Things like iTunes, QuickTime, Adobe, Google Update… These can all be disabled.
• Do not disable your Antivirus (Norton/Symantec, McAfee, Avira, AVG, CA…)
• Do not disable “cftmon.exe”

Once you have disabled what you feel comfortable disabling from the system startup, reboot your computer and enjoy how much faster it is. Feel free to share this information or like with your friends.

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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If you’re looking to buy a new PC, you might want to wait a little while. Microsoft is going to release its next Operating system, called Windows 7, on October 22nd and it is much better than Vista.

Windows 7 is what Vista was supposed to be. It has all the features that Windows Vista does but in a faster and superior way. Windows 7 is fast and lean where Vista was slow and fat. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes posted some preliminary benchmark scores in this article. These numbers are a bit old but I think they make the point.

If you have to purchase a PC before October 22nd, I would recommend checking out this Microsoft site because details how you can get a free upgrade from the Vista that comes with your PC to the new Windows 7.

In case you’re wondering why I am hyping this new version of Windows, I can tell you that I have had it on my laptop since the Beta first came out and I think it’s great. I even switched a client to it while it was still in Beta and she loved it. That requires confidence because as a rule, I don’t recommend using pre-release products. Using beta or release candidate software, you never know what bugs or problems you’ll run into. Windows 7 has been a dream and I’ve had no major issues with it. Try saying that about Vista…

So, wait to buy your next PC and upgrade your Vista computer to Windows 7. You’ll be glad you did.

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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Is your Microsoft Windows Vista computer booting up to a black screen with only a cursor? If so, you might want to check out what Mark has to say about it at his blog.  Windows Vista Black Screen with Mouse Cursor Only. He has a fix and believes he has gotten to the bottom of why the black screen is happening!

If the fix for this is beyond where you feel comfortable, call Biden PC at 909-992-2031. We can handle this for you.

Happy Computing,

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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Are You Waiting for Windows 7? So was I. But then I read the blog of an someone who has seen it and she (The SBS Diva) has his to say…

“Okay Bill sweetie I realize that you need to put a stake in Windows Vista because if you breathe the word Vista around some users they immediately go into a technology meltdown and refuse to acknowledge that they’ve been dealing with change around computers for the last 20 years, but saying that it’s not a service pack is stretching it.  As is pointed out in this post, Windows 2008 R2 is calling it what it is.  An R2 minor refresh.  Okay so it’s a bit like the Home and Garden decorating shows where you bring in the experts to redecorate the place but it’s the same house.”

“Granted the UAC now has a scrolly bar where you can throttle down the alerts.  And the gadget bar is undocked.  But this isn’t like the change from NT to 2000, nor from 2000 to XP.  It’s still Vista but fixed up and with a new name so that the marketing guys can start over and fix what they screwed up from before.”

“Be careful what you set as expectations as already I’ve had questions regarding if Windows 7 is so different if they should wait for this as they need a new computer.  My answer is no, don’t wait.  Vista sp1 is out.  Beta of sp2 is now out.  And Windows 7 is merely rearranging the furniture and throwing down a new area rug.  It’s not a remodel job.”

I don’t usually do beta releases but I think I might when I actually get it. I really am curious about Windows 7 but now I’m not as hopeful. I DO want to see if they placed the networking features in more logical places. I hate computer networking in Vista.

Happy Computing,

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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This problem is obviously still happening. If you can afford to be without your computer for a week or 2, I would be glad to work on it free of charge. If you are local to Los Angeles, I will pick up the PC and give you a receipt for proof that I have your PC. I will work on this issue until I have fixed it and post the answers here for everyone else. I will then drive back to you to drop off the PC. All of this will be free of charge. If you are not local to Los Angeles, all you will have to do is pay the FedEx shipping 1 way. I will fix your PC free of charge and return it to you via FedEx. Feel free to call me (Tim Biden) at 909-992-2031 or 877-243-3601.

I had previously written that I had a couple Windows Vista systems that stopped the mouse from clicking. Well, I seem to have found the answer. Meryl’s post “How to Make Microsoft Word Stop Ignoring Mouse” seems to have the answer.

1. While your mouse still works, close Word, Outlook and all other MS Office programs (ignore the pop up message by clicking X)
2. Start / Run and type regedit
3. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
4. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
5. On the Edit menu, click Delete, and then click Yes.
6. Exit Registry Editor.
7. Restart Word.
8. Thank David for the new info.

If you have never used a registry editor before or are uncomfortable wih it, please consult a professional computer technician. We do these edits all the time.

Happy Computing,

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

If you found this post to be informative, consider subscribing to our Biden PC’s RSS feed.

I have an appointment to install RAM (also called memory) in a client’s computer. It has Windows Vista Home Basic with only 512 MB of RAM and he wonders why it is so slow. I don’t care if it is ONLY Windows Vista Home Basic. it still needs 1 gig (1 gigabyte) or RAM. And any other version of Windows Vista needs 2 gigs because it is just too hardware intensive to run well on anything less, no matter what Microsoft says.

So if you have Windows Vista and you keep thinking “Why is my computer so slow” don’t hesitate to put more RAM in it. Your computer will thank you.

And if you are not comfortable installing the RAM, Biden PC is your local computer technician and we’re here to help.

Happy Computing,

Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

According to C-Net’s senior editor Matt Elliott, the expected life of a computer is 3-5 years. I believe that desktop computers last about 5 years before they are too old and laptops last about 3 years. That typically isn’t due to faulty parts as much as it is to computers getting old and software remaining new and always getting more sophisticated.

Because software continues getting more sophisticated, a straight computer repair isn’t always the best solution to the problem. Often a small upgrade can extend the life of a computer and make it well worth the price of the upgrade.

Consider for a moment that you have a computer that has a faulty stick on RAM on a computer that runs Windows XP. Now consider that you want to upgrade to Windows Vista. If you only have 256 MB of RAM, you can’t run Microsoft Windows Vista. It just won’t work. But, if you replace that faulty 256 MB of RAM with 2 GB of RAM, your old PC will probably be able to run Windows Vista. before deciding onWindows Vista, I would recommend checking Microsoft’s Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. This tool will tell you whether you are ready or not.

Always remember, a small upgrade now can often save a lot of money down the road.

Happy computing,
Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

Most people that I know are less than thrilled about the concept of switching to Microsoft Windows Vista. Unfortunately, Microsoft, as of today, has officially killed sales of XP on prebuilt computers. This means that if you call Dell, HP, Gateway or Acer all you can get as an Operating System is a version of Windows Vista or possibly Linux.

If you are in the market for a new computer and still want XP, call Biden PC. We still have Windows XP licenses in stock. We can sell Windows XP Professional for $160 and XP Home for $110.

We will even completely remove Windows Vista from your current computer and install either Windows XP Professional or XP Home with all drivers and updates installed.

If you would like to have Vista uninstalled on your computer and replace it with windows XP Pro, Home or Media Center Edition, please contact Biden PC. We will be glad to do that for you.

Biden PC is a computer networking, repair, and support company that is located in Pomona, California. We are central to San Dimas, Glendora, Diamond Bar, Monrovia, Chino, Chino Hills, Claremont, Montclair, Ontario, and Rancho Cucamonga.

Happy Computing,
Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

If you found this post to be informative, consider subscribing to our Biden PC’s RSS feed.

I’ve been running Windows Vista on my laptop for almost a year now and I have to say that it has its share of annoyances. That being said, I have high hopes for the latest version, Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1. You can download it either 1 of 2 ways.

You can turn on your “Automatic Updates”.

1. Click the “Start” button, point to “All Programs”, and then click “Windows Update”.

2. In the left pane, click “Change settings”.

3. Select “Install updates automatically (recommended)”.

4. Under “Recommended updates”, select the “Include recommended updates when downloading, installing, or notifying me about updates” check box, and then click “OK”. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

Or in the event that you have multiple Windows Vista computers to install it on:

1. You can download the standalone update yourself from this link.

I haven’t actually installed the update myself because I’m still downloading it. The standalone update is 434 Megabytes and the Windows update version is approximately 65 Megabytes. I don’t generally enjoy being one of Microsoft’s guinea pigs, which is why I haven’t installed one of the release candidates. If there are problems with the patch, I generally have the problems but not enough time to truly fix them. So I wait for the full version and it is finally available for download.

In general the list of changes looks very good. Admittedly, users may find the “Grace Timer exploit” change to be annoying, but that’s only if your version of Vista isn’t legitimate. In which case, you probably shouldn’t be downloading the update anyway.

As per Microsoft’s “Notable_Changes_in_Windows_Vista_Service_Pack_1.doc” these are some of the changes and enhancements with SP1 that I am looking forward to.

Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements

1. Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.

2. Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.

3. Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.

Reliability Improvements

1. SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.

2. Improves reliability by preventing data-loss while ejecting NTFS-formatted removable-media.

3. An improved SRT (Startup Repair Tool), which is part of the Windows Recovery environment (WinRE), can now fix PCs unbootable due to certain missing OS files.

Performance and Power Consumption Improvements

Performance improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, scenarios, and usage, so different customers will experience varying levels of benefits. About 20-25% of these improvements will be released separately via Windows update, prior to Windows Vista SP1.

1. Improves the performance of browsing network file shares by consuming less bandwidth.

2. Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing the processor to remain in its sleep state which consumes less energy.

3. Improves power consumption and battery life by addressing an issue that causes a hard disk to continue spinning when it should spin down, in certain circumstances.

4. Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.

5. Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath.

6. Improves performance while copying files using BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service).

7. Improves performance over Windows Vista’s current performance across the following scenarios:

o 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine

o 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system

o 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system

8. Improves the performance of the user login experience on corporate PCs outside of corporate environments (e.g., a corporate laptop taken home for the evening), making it comparable with PCs within the corporate environment.

Security Improvements

1. Improves security on wired networks by enabling single sign on (SSO) for authenticated wired networks. The single sign on experience presents the user with a single point of credential entry rather than being double prompted for local and network logon.

2. The cryptographic random number generation is improved to gather seed entropy from more sources, including a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) when available, and replaces the general purpose pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with an AES-256 counter mode PRNG for both user and kernel mode.

3. Improves BitLocker Drive Encryption by offering an additional multi-factor authentication method that combines a key protected by the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) with a Startup Key stored on a USB storage device and a user-generated Personal Identification Number (PIN).

4. Enhances the BitLocker encryption support to volumes other than bootable volumes in Windows Vista (for Enterprise and Ultimate SKUs).

5. Enables a standard user to invoke the CompletePC Backup application, provided that user can supply administrator credentials. Previously, only administrators could launch the application.

Support for New Technologies and Standards

1. Adds support for new strong cryptographic algorithms used in IPsec. SHA-256, AES-GCM, and AES-GMAC for ESP and AH, ECDSA, SHA-256, and SHA-384 for IKE and AuthIP.

2. Adds the NIST SP 800-90 Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to the list of available PRNG in Windows Vista.

3. Adds support for SSTP (Secure Sockets Tunnel Protocol), a remote access VPN tunneling protocol that will be part of Microsoft’s RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Service) platform. SSTP helps provide full-network VPN remote access connections over SSL, removing some of the VPN connectivity challenges that other VPN tunnels face traversing NAT, web proxies, and firewalls.

4. Adds full support for the latest IEEE draft of 802.11n wireless networking.

5. Enhances Windows Firewall and IPsec to use the new cryptographic algorithms that are Suite B compliant.

Desktop Administration and Management

1. Allows users and administrators to control which volumes the disk defragmenter runs on.

2. Allows users and administrators using Network Diagnostics to solve the most common file sharing problems, not just network connection problems.

3. Adds a WMI interface as a replacement for the MoveUser.exe tool which was removed from Windows Vista. This allows customers to remap an existing workgroup or domain user account profile to a new domain user account profile.

4. Allows an administrator to configure properties of a network, such as the name, and deploy it network-wide via a Group Policy snap-in.

Setup and Deployment Improvements

1. Enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or “patched”) while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot.

2. Improves patch deployment by retrying failed updates in cases where multiple updates are pending and the failure of one update causes other updates to fail as well.

3. Improves the uninstallation experience for OS updates by improving the uninstallation routines in custom OS installation code.

General Improvements and Enhancements

1. With SP1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4GB in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change.

2. SP1 reduces the number of UAC (User Account Control) prompts from 4 to 1 when creating or renaming a folder at a protected location.

3. Users are now required to enter a password hint during the initial setup of Windows Vista SP1. This change was made based on feedback from top PC manufactures that many customers frequently do not remember their password and because the administrator account is turned off by default on Windows Vista, these users do not have a way to access to their PCs. A password hint helps avoid this frustrating scenario.

4. Improves compatibility with 3rd party diagnostic tools that rely on raw sockets by applying the same delivery logic to control (ICMP v4 and v6) and regular packages.

General Annoyances

1. Users who did not opt-in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) will be prompted again to join after installing SP1. The experience will remain the same and the default will continue to be opt-out.

2. Improved instrumentation allows additional data to be sent to Microsoft via the CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) when enabled. This telemetry data led to the identification of numerous issues that are addressed in SP1 and resulted in improvement in the reliability of OS servicing. (CEIP is respectful of personally identifiable information and adheres to terms discussed in the EULA.)

Happy Computing,
Tim

Biden PC is a Computer Network Consulting Company.

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