Good-Bye XP. Hello Windows 7

 

Microsoft has wanted to kill Windows XP for years. There was only one problem. The users refused to let it die. Now, that Windows 7 is almost ready to go, Microsoft is, once more, trying to ax XP.

Microsoft did this to themselves. Vista was a flop. Even now, according to Net Applications’ Market Share, Vista has only a lousy 23% of the desktop market. For a while, Microsoft ignored the fact that even their own executives were horrified by just how bad Vista was. But, then the Linux-powered netbook came along, and Microsoft was frightened enough by its early successes that it un-retired Windows XP Home.

Now, Microsoft wants to kill off XP again. Step one will be bringing free support for XP to a close on April 14th. Step two is letting anyone and their uncle get a free copy of the Windows 7 release candidate sometime in May. The timing is by design.

Windows 7 Upgrade Program shifts to June 26, 2009

   

TechARP has come up with a new revised schedule of Microsoft’s Windows7 Upgrade Program. The Upgrade Program shifts to an early date from June 28, 2009 to June 26, 2009 now.

According to the new schedule, end users who purchase PCs pre-installed with Vista between the dates June 26, 2009 to January 31, 2010 are eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade. According to TechARP, this slight adjustment was done at the request of many OEMs to allow for better sales over the first weekend of the Program.

Floola 5.0 Final，copy songs to iPod

                                                    

Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes except iPhone and iPod touch). It’s a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux (any GTK2 distro), Mac OS X (10.3.9 or newer!) andWindows (98 or newer, including Vista).Manage Music, Videos, Podcast and Photos all in one simple app, anywhere on any computer.

Features

Floola supports almost all features offered by iPods including photos, artwork,podcasts and smart playlists!

It automatically converts any incompatible audio or video file so that you can copy almost any file to it. It allows adding youtube and myspace videos with a single click. Now it even makes it possible to keep your Google calendars synched!  

Take a look at the feature list to find out what it can do and feel free to suggest anything that might be missing.

Cross plattform
Works on any Windows (98 and above), any Mac and any linux distribution with GTK installed.

 Portable
Put the application on iPod and launch it on any PC, immediately.

 Copy
add and extract songs to and from iPod.

 

 Playlists
Easily manage, import and export (m3u, pls) playlists.

 Last.fm
Join the social music revolution.

 Podcasts
Join the social music revolution.

 

 Web videos
add files to iPod just copying the page url

 Localization
Available in different languages.

 Lyrics
Lyric support even on older iPods (3G and above).

 Search for duplicates
Easily find duplicated songs on iPod.

 

 Search lost files
Easily find songs lost in your iPod.

 Artwork
Add artwork to your songs easily.

 Videos
Videos can be added to iPod.

 Convert
Convert audio and video incompatible formats

 Google Calendars
Synchronize them easily 

 Export to HTML
Create HTML files containing list of your iPod files

 Fix iPod
Did a software mess up your iPod? Fix it!

 Notes
Manage notes.

 Growl support
(Mac version only) Get beautiful system notifications.

 Snarl support
(Windows version only) Get beautiful system notifications.

 Music
Play iPod’s music.

 Photos
Freedom to simply add photos to iPod.

 

Download Now 

Floola v5.0 for Windows

Floola v5.0 for Linux

Floola v5.0 for Mac

 

 

 

 

First looks&Download: Windows 7 Beta

       

At a Microsoft blogger’s event last week, Techgoondu and several local bloggers walked home with copies of Windows 7 beta. I decided to give the newly-minted OS a test-run on my 2-year-old Macbook and the results were much better than I thought.

First impressions were favorable: Windows 7 beta installs much faster than Vista. Installation time was approximately 20 minutes, compared to roughly 45 minutes when I first installed Vista Ultimate on my Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz machine with 4GB of RAM. The installation process has also been streamlined into five steps. The only problem I had was with the license key which the Microsoft folks presumably forgot to provide. There is a simple workaround for this, thanks to this Lifehacker tip.