Smarter Geek

Its good to know that the well known work around to allow Windows Vista to allow it to work for up to 120 days without a serial key will still work on Windows 7. If you happened to forget what the trick was on Windows Vista I have listed the steps required:

First wait for the first 30 days grace period to time out before running this command for the first time.

• Open the start menu
• Type “CMD”
• Right click on the “CMD.exe” and click on “Run As Administrator”
• Type “slmgr –rearm” and press “Enter”
• Reboot

Now you have another 30 days up your sleeve until you have to do your next

Well all the different versions (started,home basic,home premium,professional,ultimate,enterprise) of Windows 7 has now been released on MSDN and TechNet. But having to download every single version just so you can pick what version you want to install will take forever not to mention its a real pain to keep all these different versions on hand. However, you can easily make a USB memory stick that is slightly modified so it to ask you what version of the OS you want to install just like Windows Vista days. Below are the instruction:

• Go over to Jeff Alexanders blog entry Windows 7: Setting up a USB bootable device for installs and make yourself a Bootable USB memory stick for installing Windows 7.
• Now delete the “\sources\ei.cfg” file from the USB memory stick
• Done!

Now you can install Windows 7 using the Windows 7 USB memory stick you just made and you will now see the following screen (figure 1) during the install of Windows 7 that lets you choose what version you want to install. This however only works for the retail version of Windows 7 and you will still need to download the Enterprise version separately if you want to install that version.

Figure 1. Windows 7 OS version install chooser

Microsoft new search engine Bing has been making some very interesting in roads into the the search market over the past few months with over 10% of the North American market share. What is interesting is that when ever Bing has in increase in market share it is always at the expense of Google and not Yahoo. This show that Yahoo’s users are very loyal and are not easily swayed which might away from their preferred search engine. Which seem to make the deal they made with Yahoo even more sense as it would have taken a lot of work to get the Yahoo user to change teams. Google users seems to be not so loyal to the brand and are willing to try a new search engine which could work to Microsoft advantage. Either way just with the browser wars it will be interesting to see if many people change their default browser search engine back to Google when Windows 7 is released to the market in the next few months.

Figured 1. Google = Red, Yahoo = Yellow, Bing = Blue.

Graph has been modified. See original at http://bit.ly/12m6ls

NASA has now finished (see figure 1) the Ares 1-X test rocket which is due to be launched in a sub-orbital flight in October 31st. However a recent article on the guardian web site suggest that without a cash injection this may be the only Ares 1 rocket we will see. It will not be practical for them to get to the Moon by 2020 as Bush directed them to do back in 2004 due to lack of budget. Back in the 60’s NASA had about 5% of the GDP of the USA to design and build the Apollo rocket to get them to the Moon by the end of the decade but now NASA is trying to do the same thing with less than 1% of the GDP. Weather the Constellation program is cancelled or just delayed is still not decided but with the USA in the middle of the economic melt down I doubt that Obama will be sending them any more money.

Figure 1. Ares 1-X finished

Source: Houston, we have a cashflow problem: return to the moon in doubt | Science | guardian.co.uk

Just watched the STS-128 Flight Day 7 highlights video and i noticed that the computer in the background is showing the Windows XP screensaver…

@ 32min 47sec

Maybe I could convince NASA to fly me up to do a Windows 7 upgrade on all their computers…

And I noticed they still use IBM Thinkpad’s…