That said, Microsoft haven’t left us totally in the lurch and they do provide an email client (Windows Live Mail) as part of the ‘Windows Live Essentials’ suite. This is available as a free download and also includes :

• Windows Live call
• Windows Live messenger
• Windows Live Movie Maker
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Writer

You can find this download by going to the Start Menu and typing essentials in the search field. It will then give you the option ‘Go online to get Windows Live Essentials’.

Just follow the instructions and select the items you would like to download an install.

When you launch the program you will be asked for your email account credentials. Once these have been entered just sit back and watch Live Mail go off and retrieve all your email.

So in summary, it’s slightly odd that Microsoft wouldn’t include it in the OS but at least they have made the solution simple and painless.

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The buzz around Windows 7 is undeniable. From tech pundits singing its praises, Amazon releasing record pre-order figures and Microsoft staff ‘wooping’ and ‘high fiving’ people in its newly opened stores, there is a genuine feeling that people are genuinely excited about the new operating system (OS).

This kind of hype is fairly standard for a large product release from Microsoft but the difference is an overwhelming sense that this is what people have been waiting for. However, this demand (although good for Windows 7) unfortunately stems from major consumer dissatisfaction with its predecessor Windows Vista.

Having supported Windows Vista for a couple of years, witnessed its issues and had to listen to home users tell me endless stories of frustration, i was celebrating October 22^nd as the day Vista died. So what happened ?. Why did a new OS with more lines of code, more features and enhanced security fail to move the masses from Windows XP ?

Here are the answers …….

THE SUCCESS OF WINDOWS XP

Windows XP was hardly hailed as a masterpiece when it joined the fray in 2001 and at the time there were 600 million computers in use worldwide and 80% of them were running Windows 95/98 or Windows NT/2000. These were very separate products with different code bases and the objective of XP was to unite these into one solid platform. At this point we can safely say that Windows XP has accomplished this.

Regular updates and strategic deployment of service packs meant that XP received the compatibility and performance tweaks it needed whilst at the same time patching any security flaws, this made it a quick and reliable ‘work horse’ that won favour with home and business users alike.

To put XPs entrenchment into perspective, in 2008 there were 1.1 billion PCs in use and 70% of these were running XP. This makes it the most widely installed OS of all time and with IT departments continuing to base its deployments and applications around XP and the increase in momentum behind the sales of low cost netbooks. Windows XP is not only popular but it is set to continue its market share in the future.

LAUNCH DELAY

Microsoft took people on a pre-launch rollercoaster for Vista where they would make every effort to get people excited and then not deliver when expected. This was fun for the first couple of times but soon after, people lost interest and eventually Vista news was greeted with either a ‘heard that one before’ or a more worrying ‘who cares’. 5 years after XP, Vista finally arrived under a cloud of disappointment and embarrassment. Having missed a final deadline it hit the market in the worst month possible for an OS debut, January 2007.

THE HYPE WROTE CHEQUES THE OS COULDN’T CASH

Microsoft over hyped Vista in pre-release with promises of new features such as WinFS, desktop search, Gadgets and better photo features. Add to this an amazing new user interface (UI) in the form of Aero and you have a product worthy of their marketing slogan ‘The Wow starts now’.

The reality was that they didn’t implement WinFS; desktop search, Gadgets and programs like Picasa were available from third parties as free downloads and Aero was a one trick pony with its Flip3D task switching. As I’m writing this I recall showing my boss the new ‘Flip 3D task switching’ on my test machine. Disappointingly for Microsoft my flipping through the open windows in glorious 3D only earned a raised eye brow and a sarcastic “Woop dee do”. Doesn’t sound like much in isolation but he was an example of those IT directors considering whether they should roll vista out across their business.

VISTA DIDN’T APPEAL TO TECHNO PHOBES OR TECHIES

Part of Microsoft’s downfall was that it failed to appeal to two distinct customer groups i.e. the people that don’t really care about technology and advanced Windows users. The former were happy with what they had (XP) and wanted to cling onto it for dear life and the latter had tried Vista and were far from impressed. Unfortunately, when the masses looked to the advanced windows users for guidance regarding a decision to upgrade, they inevitably were met with a lukewarm response.

THE RISE OF THE NETBOOK

OK, I really can’t blame Microsoft for this one. I don’t think anyone in 2004 could have predicted that the most sought after PC item in 2009 would be cheap, basic laptops called Netbooks. This is just another nail in the coffin for Vista which requires twice the processing power of a standard Netbook and guarantees it will never be a part of this market. But it’s not all bad news for Microsoft – Windows XP is now the defacto OS for Netbooks.

HOW DO YOU LIKE THOSE APPLES

Apple could have sat back and let Vista unravel in the eyes of the public all by itself, however, never one to miss an opportunity they released their ‘I’m a Mac’ adverts which portrayed Vista as difficult to use, slow, boring and buggy. Microsoft did respond with its ‘Im a PC’ campaign but the damage was already done and Vista was perceived as a flop.

Apple also brought out two very respectable OSs in the same period namely 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 leopard. Don’t get me wrong these were far from perfect but they simply caused less problems for their users and included the features that most wanted to see.

SLOW

At the time of Vista’s release very few people had the hardware capable of running the new OS and subsequently had to go and buy more powerful systems or components. Despite being on these more capable hardware platforms Vista still suffered from a slow install and once this was complete the user had to contend with constant UAC prompts, driver issues and performance that felt laboured and sluggish.

XP was developed using 35 million lines of code whereas Vista was completed with 50 million lines of code. This software bloat means that the latest version of Windows XP easily outperforms the latest version of Vista. The real question here is ‘why would you want a new computer that is slower than your old one’.

COMPATIBILITY

Did you honestly think I was going to complete this post without mentioning compatibility ?. This is by far the biggest complaint I have seen around the net and the biggest headache that has been reported by the users I support. I recently watched a video of Steve Ballmer saying that with Vista they sacrificed some compatibility to increase security in the OS. I think when they made this decision they had no idea of the impact this would have on the end user and what a ‘show stopper’ it would be for IT departments considering migration.

Unfortunately, for Microsoft they had overlooked the fact that Windows XP found success because it had hardware, software and compatibility with the previous versions of windows 9x and also brought the stability of Windows NT. Security was an issue for XP too in the early days but the deployment of simple service packs e.g SP2 helped to patch those holes and cover all the bases that are important to it’s users. Vista implements UAC (User access control) to enhance its security by issuing a complicated set of security prompts for very basic tasks and compatibility issues. Do I really need to confirm every time I want to rename or create a folder ?.

But hey, I guess I should just be thankful that my keyboard and mouse drivers are working.

SUMMARY

I believe Vista was doomed from the start and I think Microsoft realised this early on in the development process. To onlookers, the whole thing seemed abit scrappy with components being added and taken away, deadlines being missed and excuses/spin being delivered rather than features.

With XP there were clear reasons to upgrade for home and business users as it consolidated all that was good in other Windows versions and brought new things to the table. In the end Vista could only offer one compelling feature in the form of the Aero interface which had the ‘Wow’ duration of about 5 minutes. A thought to ponder is : If it wasn’t compulsory to buy a PC with Vista pre-installed and it was just on the shelf as an upgrade or a full install, how many copies would have been sold ?. Judging from the feedback I’ve had from users that were forced to buy Vista with their new PC and then frantically tried to find a way to rollback to XP – not many !.

The bottom line is Windows XP does everything that Vista does but faster and without the hassle.

With all that said, it seems that Microsoft have finally answered our prayers and have given us a worthy successor to XP. Initial reviews of Windows 7 (including my own) are positive and there is common agreement that it is genuinely the best version of Windows so far. I think you’ll agree that this is good news for XP and Vista owners alike

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SYMPTOMS OF A VIRUS

• Slow startup
• System crashes and reboots
• Printing failures
• Freezing
• Unexplained high processor and memory usage
• Errors
• Internet explorer homepage has changed or is taking you to the same website when you click different links
• Last but not least – your anti-virus or anti-malware program tells you, you have a virus !!

So lets assume your PC is doing one or more of the above, what are the next steps ?.

Anti-virus : If you haven’t already got this installed, get it as soon as possible. Once installed, get the latest updates and then run a full system scan. The software should identify the virus and remove it for you or provide you with information for manual removal. See software recommendations at the end of this post.

Anti-Malware : Anti-virus doesn’t always pick up Malware so it would be worth while downloading a separate program, installing, getting the updates and running a full scan. Once again, the program should remove it for you. See recommendations at the end of this post.

THE THREE OUTCOMES

Software removed the virus : Excellent. The software did it’s job and is money well spent. If you are using a free program – even better !!

Software found the virus but couldn’t remove it : The software should provide you with information on the virus and give you the steps you need to follow to remove it manually. Once you have completed these steps re-scan your pc.

Software has removed the virus, you’ve rebooted your pc and it comes back !! : Don’t worry this is actually quite common. Many computer viruses are designed to self replicate and spread themselves through-out your system. For example a virus may contain 100 files that it distributes among the directories and settings of your pc. Your anti-virus may find the main 80 files and does a perfect job of removing them, however, when the PC reboots the virus is able to rebuild itself using the 20 remaining files. The solution is to research the virus and find some manual steps or a tool to remove all of the files. Once you have done this make sure you re-scan the PC to verify it’s removal.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

Anti-virus

AVG Free Edition
Avira Personal Free
Norton Anti-Virus

Anti-Malware

Malwarebytes Free edition

Your operating system works best when all of the files on the hard disk are organised into one (or a few) large blocks. When files are added/deleted, settings changed and programs are installed and uninstalled, files on the hard disk become fragmented and move on the disk. Therefore, when these files are requested by the user, the operating system must work harder to find the information which slows down the whole process. The more fragmentation the slower the machine.

Windows Disk Defragmenter reorganises these files and thus improves performance.

To use Disk Defragmenter: Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter

In the Disk Defragmenter dialog box, click the drives that you want to defragment, and then click the Analyze button. After the disk is analyzed, a dialog box appears, letting you know whether you should defragment the analyzed drives.

To defragment the selected drive or drives, click the Defragment button.

After the defragmentation is complete, Disk Defragmenter displays the results.

To display detailed information about the defragmented disk or partition, click View Report.

To close the View Report dialog box, click Close

To close the Disk Defragmenter utility, click the Close button on the title bar of the window.

So this concludes our mission to speed up XP and hopefully you have found some good tips for maintaining your PC aswell.

I’m always happy to have some feedback so please feel free to post a comment

Time for one last big push on cleaning up XP. This time we are going to use a tool built into XP called ‘Disk Cleanup Utility’. By using the ‘Disk Cleanup Utility’ we can free up space on the hard drive and improve performance.

Disk Cleanup allows you to :

• Remove temporary Internet files
• Remove downloaded program files (such as Microsoft ActiveX controls
  and Java applets).
• Empty the Recycle Bin
• Remove Windows temporary files
• Remove optional Windows components that you don’t use
• Remove installed programs that you no longer use

To use Disk Cleanup

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, click Disk Cleanup and then click OK.

2. In the Disk Cleanup for dialog box, scroll through the content of the Files to delete list

3. Choose the files that you want to delete

4. Clear the check boxes for files that you don’t want to delete, and then click OK

5. When prompted to confirm that you want to delete the specified files, click Yes

This process will take a few minutes to complete but it will free up a lot of useful space.

See you tomorrow for the final day of speeding up XP

Now that you have ‘de-cluttered’and scanned your pc, you should now ensure that your operating system is up to date and secure. You achieve this using by Windows update.

Click on ‘Express’ for the latest security updates. Click on Custom for all updates available for your PC.

Come back tomorrow and i’ll show you how to do a big clean up of XP

I would hope that today’s item is already happening regularly on your PC but if not then this posting should act as a welcome reminder.

My request is simply this “Get the latest updates for your Anti-virus/Anti-Malware software and run a full system scan to remove any malicious programs.”

Simple

Windows XP has Visual effects activated by default to give it the appearance you are no doubt familiar with. These effects do have a performance overhead and may contribute to any slowness you are encountering.

The following steps will take you through how to optimise these settings to match your performance requirements.

Click on Control Panel in the Start menu (Ensure you are in Classic View)

Click the System icon

Click the Advanced tab and then click Settings under the performance option

The Visual Effects tab provides an easy way to set your preferences. You can select the ‘Adjust for best peformance’ or you can customise which features are applied.

Take some time to play around with these settings, you may like the results

Yesterday we looked at removing unwanted applications from your PC and today we are going to stop the valid programs from slowing us down when we don’t need them. A good place to tackle these programs is at system start up.  Programs that launch themselves at startup not only delay the PC from booting up but they will continue to run in the background and act as a drain on other system resources.

There are several ways to stop an application from running when Windows loads, I will address the two that can be easily carried out without the risk of intefering with critical startup processes.

1. Open up the application and check the settings for an auto-start option that you can disable.

2. Check the startup folder for shortcuts to applications you do not want to start when the PC boots up. The startup folder can be found by clicking on Start and All programs.

Right click the shortcut in the startup folder for the appropriate application and press delete on the keyboard. By doing this you will only delete the shortcut and not the application itself.

Well done, another step completed. See you tomorrow for step 4 

If you’re anything like me then you like to install programs, try them out and if you like them they become a regular part of your tool set. Other times, a program might not do exactly what you would hope and if you fail to remove it, it will take up resources and impair your PC’s performance.

Follow these steps to remove your unwanted programs :

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel

2. Click Add or Remove Programs

3. Untick the ‘Show updates’ option at the top

4. Scroll down through the list and examine each program and remove as appropriate.

* Do not Uninstall any program labeled as Update or Hotfix as these will be Windows Security additions from Microsoft.

Congratulations, you have started the clean up process. See you tomorrow for more improvements