There’s been a lot of talk about Windows 7 since it’s launch, most everything has been positive (which certainly wasn’t the case after Windows Vista launched).  In this tough economic client people are asking themselves, “Why should I upgrade and what benefits will I see if you do?”  I’ve been running Windows 7 since August with their Release Candidate and installed the full version as soon as Technet offered it and I’ve found many improvements over previous versions.

(Be warned, this is a long post.  I wanted to get as much information in as possible.  The short story is if you’re getting a new computer definitely get it with Windows 7, if your computer is less than 2 or 3 years old I would recommend the upgrade).

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One thing that I cant live without on every mac that I work on is a real clipboard. I copy and paste so much , it’s nice to be able to go back and find things that need to be inserted in multiple locations. I don’t want to leave out my windows compatriots so here is a list of apps that perform these functions.

OSX – PthPasteboard

quite honestly, its the best i’ve used in OSX, there are others, but this one takes the cake, oh and it’s free. If you pay for it, you can then share whatever you have in it’s memory with other machines running it. So yes, you can copy and paste from machine to machine, awesome! Add to the fact you can search for things and you get a thumbnail view of what is has saved.

Windows -

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If you are like me you have noticed that every website out there just loves to put flash on their site. Wether it’s actual content or just ads, it can be very distracting and annoying. Not to mention that it can hog your processor and kill your battery faster if its running on your laptop. I know my usage is not normal, and yes I can have 50 tabs open in safari at any given time ( my record is 145). That can really take its toll on your computer. There is something you can do about it. Install flashblock.

Download ClickToFlash 1.4.2 here

Install it and restart your safari, then you will get a blank screen where ever there is flash on a web page, if you want to see it, just click on it and it will load.

I thought while we were doing write ups on windows shortcuts, I might as well include some shortcuts from OSX. I will not bog down the post with all of them ( there are so many) , but I will add a link at the end of the post to apple’s site that has a lot more.

ctrl mouse scroll wheel ( zoom in and out) I put this in first cause I just love it.

Finder shortcut

Rename the selected file/folder                                                                       Press Return (or Enter)

Go into selected folder or open the selected file                                          Cmd-Down Arrow

Go to parent folder                                                                                              Cmd-Up Arrow

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Fragmentation deals with hard drives, more specifically the filesystem on hard drives. Almost all  filesystems fragment, but some are better than others. But what exactly is fragmentation?  Hard drives are composed of platters of magnetic media ( think of an old LP record) The files take up a block of space , if there is free space on the drive , the block are contiguous with each other. Perhaps a visual explanation would help here. And this is a basic explanation of the internals of a file system.

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