I stayed up entirely too late last night and I sure paid for that this morning!

Yesterday, a Facebook poll making the rounds riled me up and I could not ignore it, even though I didn’t take it. It showed up on my feed from a few other people. I won’t bother with the details here, but I commented and I suppose I was a bit harsh in my rebuke. Before heading to bed shortly before 11 I composed an apology and posted it, but tossed in another zing or two to make my point. By this time, I had already been removed from the target’s “friends” list. Apparently, the discussion ensued, so the entire string of comments and the original poll was deleted. No problems – except that I got less than 4 hours of sleep.

I also installed the latest version of MSN Explorer on one machine earlier in the evening and had an email dialog about it with my MSN contact. The upgrade is a bit stealth right now in that the new version is available from the member page, but no reference to its being a new version is made. Upgrades are being staged for a very limited window of time each day until they feel comfortable that there are no issues to deal with which were missed during the beta. The changes are mostly under the covers, but the new version fixes a bunch of defects.

I didn’t spend much time on the Office 2010 beta which I installed to one machine on Tuesday and fought with for a bit until I cold get it activated. The removal of the Technical Preview build from the machine seems to have left lots of junk behind and this caused headaches for me. I wasn’t asked for a key at install, and it designated itself as a MAK version on install. Since I don’t have an Activation Server, activation would fail, of course. I finally ended up resolving it by removing a bunch of TP registry keys and reinstalling the beta – twice. After the second try, I poked around to find the cached setup file and ran it again. This time, when it launched, it offered me choices – repair, remove, change, and change key. Finally! I entered the key, it chugged along for a few minutes and when I launched Word, I was able to activate. I would like to spend some time poking at the suite, but I haven’t had time for that yet. I should have poked at it rather than poking on Facebook.

Coffee does help overcome the lack of sleep, but I can’t stay up late again tonight or I’ll pay again tomorrow.

I was out the door at 8:30 this morning for my drive to Hoboken and then the short PATH train ride over to the Christopher Street station and a walk down Hudson Street for the Windows 7 Launch Event in NYC with Steve Ballmer giving the keynote. The first thing that surprised me on entering the hall was that it was such a small space. I immediately recognized some fellow MVPs and enthusiasts in the small crowd and managed to catch up with most of them during the event. The keynote began as scheduled at about 11 am. Introducing Steve Ballmer was Kylie, famous for her “I’m a PC and I’m 4-1/2” commercial. Steve presented her with a pink notebook PC before giving the first part of the keynote. After a demonstration of some of the Windows and Windows Live capabilities by Brad Brooks, Steve moved to the back of the room to an area that had been concealed by a curtain. The area was set up with lots of hardware to display Windows 7 and show of some of the PCs and devices that work with Windows 7. After the keynote, it was basically mingle time. I headed home at about 2 PM with my swag, which included a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, a T-Shirt and some of the same items that were sent to those hosting a Launch Party. It was an interesting day and I am grateful to have been on of the fairly small group in attendance today.

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The Windows Live Messenger team posted this on their blog early today:

7/22/2009

Today is the 10th Anniversary – It’s time to party.

10 years ago today, MSN Messenger v1.0 was released to the world and users all around the world began downloading it via their 28.8/56.6k dial-up modems. :p.

Over the past few weeks we received an overwhelming number of fascinating stories from all of you on topics ranging from “How to propose using Messenger” to “How to use Messenger as a security camera”, all of which reminds us about why we love working on this product.

Windows Live Messenger is where it is today because of YOU, our users.  We couldn’t have done it without you and in return, we thought about hosting a party, but with 330 million of you to invite, I couldn’t convince any of the team members to hold it at their place. :)  Instead, you’ll have to settle for the next best thing… a homemade celebration video (nicely pasted to the left for your viewing pleasure).

Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.  Thank you for all your support over the past 10 years, and here’s to another 10! :)

Read the rest of the post here:  Today is the 10th Anniversary – It’s time to party. - Windows Live

Back in October of 2008 Microsoft dropped the bombshell that Windows Live OneCare would be shelved. As I’ve mentioned many times here, I’ve been moderating the Windows Live OneCare forums since Windows Live OneCare version 1.0 went public as a beta. When the call went out for some help in a private newsgroup I answered, not really knowing what I was in for. As the forums got going I developed my relationship with members of the OneCare team in Redmond. Having participated in newsgroups and other discussion venues for many years, I decided that every question deserved an answer – even if that answer was that the person asking should contact support. My contacts in Microsoft who owned the forums agreed. I put a whole lot of time into moderating the forums – reading, replying, and doing the moderators job of tidying things up when needed. I am fortunate to have been joined by some excellent fellow moderators. Over the past several years OneCare was upgraded a few times, going through beta periods in the process. When a public beta was underway, the forums would be quite crazy since we had the production forums and the beta forums going at the same time. And there was considerable interest in the beta, so traffic was always high at these times. We provided feedback to Microsoft by summarizing what we saw in the forums, letting them know what the hot issues were. On a few occasions a problem cropped up in the forums and I sounded the alarm reaching out to our contacts to let them know about the issue. When it was due to a server problem or similar, this got all hands on deck much sooner to get the problem resolved. When it was a problem with OneCare itself, bringing that feedback to Microsoft helped improve the product. My years of working the OneCare forums have been mostly very enjoyable. I’ve received thanks from people in the forums and from Microsoft. I’ve only rarely had a complaint directed at me by an aggravated customer. So, when the end of OneCare was announced, I wasn’t sure where I would direct my attention to.

I became a moderator for the Live Mesh forums fairly recently, having been asked if I was interested by my first contact on the OneCare team. I continue to moderate there and also frequent quite a few of the Microsoft Public newsgroups for Windows Live and MSN offerings.

I will be moderating the forums for Microsoft Security Essentials, which was code named Morro, due for release later this year. The news leaked earlier this week that the beta would be available soon and then Microsoft apparently went public yesterday. There are a bunch of other articles and even early reviews out now, but this article by Gizmodo was the first that I saw with official details in it. I’m looking forward to this new chapter with some trepidation. The details of the forum have not been made public yet and I anticipate that traffic will be fairy heavy when the beta drops on Tuesday. I’ve had the opportunity to try out the new product and I like it, as do the reviewers so far, though I don’t have the latest build at this point.

Yesterday evening I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate on the 3rd PC and then used the Windows Easy Transfer program to bring back the files and settings from before the wipe and install. That went amazingly well. I reinstalled the Windows Live Essentials, Agent and Microsoft Office and all of the settings were already there. Excellent! Of course, the only issue was that I stayed up too late and didn’t get enough sleep. Since I’m doing my full workout this evening, which takes about an hour, I have the resist the urge to start the install on a 4th PC. I think I need to wait for the weekend on that.

The Gateway Media Center PC didn’t wake up from hibernation to do the backup last night to the Windows Home Server. When I tried to resume it early this morning, it wouldn’t resume and I had to cold boot to bring it back to life. If it happens again, I will need to file a bug report on it – that would be a “blocking” issue, though I suspect that it is simply a misbehaving driver.

Another project on the plate for the weekend is to get a laptop ready for Pennie to use for a few days next week. She’ll be dog-sitting, so she asked if we could install World of Warcraft on a laptop. That shouldn’t be a problem at all, other than the time it will take to download all the bits. The older Acer laptop has a nice sized screen and has discrete graphics, so the game should play well. I think that there’s plenty of free space on the drive. I’ll add her UserID to the machine for Windows so that she can have her own desktop experience.

Well, Microsoft made the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 available today to Technet and MSDN Subscribers, plus technical beta testers via Connect. Downloads are really pokey, unfortunately. As soon as I learned of the availability via MSDN, I popped over to try and download the image, but it failed repeatedly. Apparently there was a database issue that caused all downloads to be inaccessible, not just Windows 7. A little while later I found out that it was also on Connect, so I headed over there. Now, I’m on a corporate LAN. You would think that the download would be snappy. Nope. It started out well, but progressively dropped in speed so that it won’t be done before I leave the office today. That’s not a problem, actually, because the earliest that I will be able to install it will be tomorrow.

Once I leave the freezing cold office (What *do* they have the temperature set at, anyway?) and arrive home, I will be collecting the trash and putting it to the curb, opening my Series 17 Living Dead Dolls that are waiting for me <!> and get changed to work out in the attic for an hour. At 7 I will be on a conference call for up to an hour. Since I want to get to bed between 9:30 and 10:00 PM, there isn’t much time for testing a new install of Windows.

I have been getting more and more irritated with the screwy process that I developed to keep my Outlook data in Sync between multiple computers and my phone. In a recent newsgroup discussion, Jason Dunn mentioned www.sherweb.com for Hosted Exchange. I checked it out, but waffled for a bit until this morning when I took the plunge and signed up. I picked up a new domain and then signed up with Sherweb for a 3 Gigabyte account with a single mailbox for $8.95 per month. Once the domain propagates to DNS around the world, I can set up forwarding for my POP accounts and then create a new Outlook Profile on each computer to access the Exchange Server. The space offered for the price is excellent as I don’t use that much space now with my active pst file plus the archives that I’ve created over time. If I continue to archive locally and sync that data, the Outlook data can remain on the server and will sync automatically with any connected computer to an ost file. I will have plenty of space and I won’t have to deal with the stupid manual synchronization and file copy process I’ve been using for ages now! Geek fun!

I’ve been using Live Mesh for quite some time now, ever since it was made available as a tech preview. What ever happened to calling something a beta? I was also an early user of the Live Mesh forums, since it was a great place to learn about the application and to discuss it with members of the Live Mesh team. After the announcement of the end of Windows Live OneCare, my primary contact for the forums and the beta left Microsoft. Well, he was brought back on to help with the Live Mesh beta and he asked me if I was willing to assume a moderator role for the Live Mesh forums in addition to the OneCare forums. Of course I said that I would, so I’ve been helping out there for a month of so now.

Anyway, Live Mesh is a great program that offers some great functionality. I have the Live Mesh client installed on all of my PCs and also on my Windows Mobile phone. I set up several folders to be synchronized between the computers and one picture folder to be synchronized from the phone. It works great to keep files in sync on multiple PCs. Since it is a beta, I am careful to not go crazy and rely on Live Mesh to synchronize all of my files, lest a glitch cause them to be deleted from all devices! Live Mesh also allows for access to the folders from any computer by connecting to the Live Desktop that is associated with my account. The third item is even cooler. With the exception of a connection traversing an authenticated proxy server (like the corporate firewall at work), Live Mesh allows me to access any computer in my Live Mesh “ring” that is powered up and connected to the Internet. I can then take control of the PC using a Remote Desktop session. This can be initiated from another PC with the Live Mesh client installed or from a web browser. Very cool.

Several years back Microsoft purchased a program called FolderShare. This program has been updated and with the latest Wave3 release of Windows Live Essentials it has been renamed to be called Windows Live Sync. Of course, I have that installed, too. It has some of the same functionality of Live Mesh, but there is no online desktop folder. The synchronization of files is done strictly through peer to peer, meaning that the LiveSync client installed and running on multiple computers is configured to synchronize one or more folders to any or all computers using the same account. Currently I am only synchronizing my Favorites using LiveSync, but I’m considering adding my picture folder(s) to the mix, since Windows Live Photo Gallery can use LiveSync to keep the entire library in sync between computers using the same account. Before I do this, I do need to cleanup the folder structure I am currently using for pictures. LiveSync also offers Remote Desktop functionality, but I’ve not used it since the implementation in Live Mesh is so easy to use. With LiveSync, you first need to go to a browser and then you can connect to a PC that is on and available.

I’ve played with Office Groove which also synchronizes files, but this is designed more for multiple people in a workgroup, for example. It adds many other team functions to a workspace along with the shared folders. I don’t have a need for the additional functions, though.

There is a new service in beta that began this week. MyPhone. Currently, you need to apply to be in the beta or you can snag a code if you are lucky and fast. Codes are being distributed via twitter and other means. I applied on the day that it was announced and received approval overnight. Unfortunately, a bug was discovered by the team that affected @msn LiveIDs and certain other IDs, so I wasn’t able to use the service until yesterday evening after a new build was made available. The service is actually very cool. It synchronizes the contents of my Windows Mobile phone to the MyPhone web site. I have configured it to sync once per day, but you can choose to manually sync or sync on a weekly basis, too. Once the data has been synchronized, you can view it on the secure MyPhone web site and even make changes to the data which will sync back to the phone on the next sync connection. A major omission is the lack of integration with the Windows Live Calendar and Windows Live Contacts. I’m hoping that these will be forthcoming.

None of the above have anything to do with the Windows Live Skydrive service, which is a file storage solution that allows you to upload files manually to a secure space. The space is used by Windows Live Spaces for photo albums, but there is no sync capability. There is no integration with any of the various sync options above at all. You can, however, share folders on Skydrive with everyone, limited people, or keep them private and that’s pretty cool. Getting files to Skydrive or from Skydrive is completely manual, though.

What I’m waiting for is a solution to totally synchronize Outlook data between devices. What I do now is run Outlook on only one computer at a time and then use a 3rd party program called PSTSync to keep the data store in sync between computers. I have to run that manually when I want to get the computers synchronized. Where that solution falls down is when my primary Outlook data goes through the archive routine once per month. Older items are moved to the archive data files or get deleted, based on rules I’ve defined for each folder. PSTSync has an issue with this when synchronizing multiple data stores. After the archive process runs, I can run a sync with one other computer and it works perfectly, deleting the missing items from the second PCs data store. However, when I then sync with another PC, the items get restored back to the primary PC since they are “new” to the primary data store! The program has a 1 way sync capability in either direction, but that doesn’t work in this case as it does not delete the archived items from the destination data file. What I’m looking for is a true sync that happens between data stores and online. I’ve given some consideration to making all of my mail go through my primary Windows Live Hotmail account. Then I could use the Outlook Connector to access the account and not use the default Outlook data file any longer. Basically, the Outlook Connector would handle keeping the online folders and local folders in sync. I think I could then define my archive rules to take older data and send it to the archive data file or delete it and this will then be replicated for all computers accessing the account with the Outlook Connector. What I don’t want, though, is to use Windows Live Hotmail as the sending account for all email accounts as I want to keep certain things isolated. So, as far as I know, the Outlook Connector solution isn’t perfect either. I plan to keep looking.

To round out the connectivity and sharing options available to me I also use Windows Home Server. The primary function of Windows Home Server for me is to backup the computers at home every day (or weekly for some that I generally keep powered off when not in use). Windows Home Server does allow for remote access into the Home Network and allows me to access shared folders on the server from anywhere. If I wanted to I could also allow others to access one or more of the shared folders. The HP MediaSmart includes software for creating online albums for photos to share with people. With all of the other options available to me, I don’t use my Windows Home Server for sharing with others. The remote desktop functionality doesn’t allow connections to XP Home or Vista Home Premium machines, so Live Mesh is a better solution for me in many cases. However, it is an alternate path in when needed.

Isn’t technology wonderful when it works?

When I got home from work yesterday I plugged the laptop into the network and woke it from sleep. I woke up the desktop to start my sync ritual, which is another story for another day, and noticed that the Windows Home Server Connector system tray icon on the desktop PC was yellow. It reported that the laptop’s last backup had failed overnight. Interesting. I completed the sync and then initiated a manual backup of the laptop. Windows Home Server backup spends a few minutes churning through the hard drive, comparing it to the database of backup information on the server. At 5% the backup failed again and reported a problem with the Connector software, referring me to the system Event logs to get more information. Well, the event logs didn’t give me much of a clue at first. After rebooting, trying again, and failing at the same point, I decided that it might be a hardware problem on the drive of the laptop as the event log entry reported an I/O error with the device. I scheduled a boot time disk check and rebooted. It completed with a minor error, so I tried backup again. It failed one more time. By this time I was running a bit behind as I wanted to get upstairs to get changed and get my evening workout underway, so I put the problem aside.

I reflected on the problem while riding the exercise bike and decided that it might be a bad cluster or clusters on the disk itself. When I got back downstairs, I searched the Windows Home Server forums for the specific error code reported in the logs and found a number of hits that confirmed my suspicions. Most of the threads reporting this error were resolved by doing a full surface scan of the drive. I knew that would take some time, but hoped it would be complete before I went to bed since I wanted to see what the scan found and repaired before it rebooted the PC again. I ended up getting to bed a little later than I wanted, but I did see that there was a single bad cluster on the drive. It was for a memory dump that had been written for a recent crash. I suspect that the PC crashed hard and damaged the disk when it went down. I don’t recall, but I may have hit the power switch when the crash happened. In any event, this morning the laptop had successfully backed up to the server once again.

PCs can be so maddening at times!

The seller of the Living Dead Dolls who made the shipping blunder and sent me someone else’s item has responded to me and she will be contacting the other buyer. I am sending her incorrect item back and keeping my fingers crossed that all works out in the end eventually.  It really loused up my day.

However, I decided that a bad day couldn’t get much worse if I screwed up in upgrading the old Gateway 832GM Media Center PC. I’m not much for diving into PC hardware, though I can do it. I started by powering down and replacing the 1 Gig of RAM with the new Kingston DIMMs that brought the system up to 2 Gigs. Strangely enough there are 4 slots and the documentation indicated that there were only 2. I might pop the 512 Meg DIMMs back in to get up to 3 Gigs. Anyway, it powered up fine and recognized the new RAM. I powered back down and popped in a 400 Gig SATA drive that I had on the shelf. Powered it back up and the drive is seen with no problems. I powered back down and popped in the new video card, a Sapphire card that’s an ATI HD2400 device.  It was recognized just fine and the drivers installed from Windows Update. At the moment, I’m installing Windows 7 32 bit on the new drive for a Dual Boot system. We’ll see how that goes.

As is my usual routine, I was up early and sitting at my PC sipping coffee and having my 1/2 bagel at 4 this morning. All was well. At 4:30 the cable modem lost connectivity and the television picture turned very grainy. This is the same thing that happened back on January 19th. I called Cablevision tech support. Before getting to a tech I had to listen to a long list of towns and areas that were undergoing maintenance, indicating that service would be restored “shortly.” The tech I spoke to thought that my issue was likely to be the same and advised that I should call back to schedule a service call if connectivity wasn’t back within a few hours.

Off to work I went. When Pennie got up with the dogs a few hours later there was still no Internet, so I walked her through changing the TCP/IP settings on her PC to connect to the Internet through the DSL connection. Thankfully, I’ve got that alternate path, but it isn’t an automatic failover. Since it was possible that service would have been up shortly after I left for work I didn’t go through the hassle of switching the entire network over to the DSL connection. Besides, that requires a manual release/renew of the network adapter on each PC to get them to talk to the other gateway device after turning DHCP on for the DSL Modem/Router and off on the primary router. I called Cablevision from work after speaking with Pennie. All I could do was schedule a tech visit for tomorrow morning as support could not escalate to the level that deals with infrastructure outages until more customers called in to report a problem. The annoying part of this is that calling is a hassle since you need to navigate their phone system to get to tech support and deal with long wait time on the phone in most cases. I imagine that many people don’t bother calling until the problem goes on for a rather long time. Later in the morning I noticed that the PC that I leave on 24x7 upstairs was now showing as connected, so it appears that the Cablevision problem has been resolved without the tech visit.

As I reflected on the annoyance of losing the connection this morning, for the second time in under a month, it occurred to me how dependent I am on access to the Internet. I’m not so sure that this is a good thing. How many people have a variety of access methods available to them – cable, DSL, dial-up, and cellular data plan? I think I might be a bit crazy.

On Saturday I swapped out the hard drive in the HP laptop and rebooted with the Windows Home Server restore CD in place. Within about 2 hours, the PC was rebooted and back up and running. I shrank the single C: partition and made a new 100 Gig partition before installing Windows 7 in a dual boot. I used the 32 bit version since I’m testing the 64 bit version on another machine. The install went perfectly. All devices were detected and everything ran smoothly. On Sunday I installed a variety of software on the PC and that also went very well. I decided to “move” the various User folders which would normally exist on the D:\ drive within the Users folder. I pointed the User folders to the Vista folders for my ID on the C: drive so that I didn’t have to duplicate the data. That was a bit confusing, but not something that normal people would do. I only moved the pointers for Documents, Music, Pictures and Favorites rather than the whole profile since I wanted the application data to remain separate for each OS. Because of this, I haven’t yet installed Live Mesh because the folders that I Sync to are within the \Pictures folder. I have to consider what will happen if the exact same folders are being synchronized for each OS in the dual boot environment. It might not matter and it might be bad.

This laptop is the one that I use for working from home and the road. I use a Virtual Machine that runs XP Professional to connect via VPN to the office. That has been working out very well for me for some time now, though it is a pain to keep things synchronized, especially over the VPN connection. Whatever we are doing at work causes the connection to be considerably slower than the maximum bandwidth available. I assume that the VPN servers are throttling the bandwidth usage.

I synchronize the data in the VM with my work PC and also sync the data to a folder tree on the C: drive. The latter being done in case the VM goes down, I still have access to the data. This morning, I plugged the laptop into the office LAN and configured the network to be Work, which is the same thing that needs to be done under Vista to allow password protected file sharing to work. When I went to synchronize the data, it was unable to make the connection to the Share on the Windows 7 machine from my office machine. I tried a number of different things, but finally got it working again by rebooting the laptop. That didn’t last long. For some unknown reason, the ability to access the Shares drops after a few minutes and I can’t get it working again without a reboot. This affects sharing from the office machine to the Share and also from the VM to the Windows 7 Share, so I know that it has to be a firewall issue on the Windows 7 machine. The joys of beta testing! I guess that I’ll be bugging that behavior since everything *appears* to be set properly.

After I had another cup of coffee I decided that the way to go was to swap out the drive for the new larger one (250 swapped out, 320 swapped in). Then, using Acronis True Image 10, restore the backup of the old drive to the new one and reboot. This would leave me with free space on the new drive on which to install Windows 7 in a dual boot scenario. Assuming that this went well, I would restore the backup image once again in the future and perform an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. If anything went wrong, simply popping in the old drive would get me back in business quickly. I’d only need to sync the data over from another PC on the network or copy it from a backup.

Well, the plan sounded good and it still does. However, the restore from a USB drive to the new drive was horribly slow. It started out with a series of rather long estimates for the duration of the process, until it settled down to 7 hours. In under an hour it was reporting 6 hours to go, but checking in every once in a while didn’t make that jump further down, so I abandoned the restore. I swapped the old drive back in.

Since I will likely be home a bit early on Wednesday (I am taking my father back to Morristown for a CAT Scan and we need to be there by 11), I may repeat the drive swap, but then use Windows Home Server to restore the drive after the swap. That should go substantially quicker. Too bad that this PC isn’t running Vista Ultimate or I could have used the full PC backup and restore from within Windows. I know that this is faster. I have used it before and a drive with about 80 Gigs of data was restored in under an hour from an external USB drive. It would probably take about 3 hours to do it for the HP that way. That is still way better than 6 to 7 hours!

I just backed up the hard drive on the HP laptop. It is currently running 32 bit Windows Vista Home Premium and the hard drive is 50% free. There is a recovery partition from HP there, too, but I doubt that I will ever use it. The processor is a Core2 Duo 5250 and I have 4 gigs of RAM in it, but Vista can only use 3 gigs due to the limitations of 32 bit. I picked up another SATA laptop drive for cheap the other day with the intention of swapping out the one in the laptop and then restoring the image backup to the new drive before performing an upgrade install of Windows 7 on the OS. I might still do that, but I’m thinking that I might want to first try shrinking the primary partition and doing a dual boot of Windows 7 64 bit on the laptop. I’m sure that nothing will go wrong in that scenario, but if it does, I can always restore the backup image.

I think I need to have another cup of coffee before deciding what to do.

Well, the first glitch for Windows 7 on my test box. it refuses to stay asleep. I’ll have to see if I can figure out what is waking it up continually. I put it to sleep this morning before heading down to shower and it was awake on on when I came back up to get dressed. So, I put it back to sleep. it stayed asleep while I dressed, but now that I’m at the office, I can see that it is awake once again since it shares the same LiveID for Messenger as the machine that I am on right now.

Despite a slight detour today with clearing of snow (It snowed only a few inches yesterday, followed by a thin ice crust. This was much better than the 8 inches that had been predicted!), I was able to install Windows 7 to a test box. I’m using it right now and I think it is great! I’ve installed a few of my most used programs, such as Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Office 2007, and Forte Agent. The new taskbar is going to take getting used to, but I think that I like it. Originally, I set it to only combine icons when the taskbar was running out of room, but that was actually more confusing to me visually. So, I set it back to the default and it is working well. The only issue I encountered with a clean install was that the network drivers and the drivers for the infrared and the Ricoh SD reader were not installed during setup. I installed them from the OEM driver disc and all was well. I’m sure that there will be a learning curve moving forward, but so far so good.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I need to get myself off to bed now so that I can get up for work tomorrow. More testing will have to wait until tomorrow evening, I guess.

Sweet! The refresh of the beta for all of the Windows Live Essentials programs launched today. I’ve just upgraded and am posting this with the refresh of Windows Live Writer. I haven’t poked at all of the applications yet, but the ones I have poked at – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Sync, Windows Live Writer, and the refreshed Windows Live Toolbar look quite good. Messenger adds some more scenes and display icons to the suite from the visuals side. The functionality appears to be the same as it was in the last build. What I like most about the beta is the ability to use the same LiveID on multiple computers at the same time with Messenger. I’ve got oodles of LiveIDs for various purposes and had been using a different one on each PC to prevent one from knocking the other off when I was testing something. Now, if this functionality would be extended to Xbox Live and MSNTV2, that would be really good.

Writer has always been my favorite program in the Live Suite, making it very easy to post to my blog. I also use Windows Live Mail, which has also been refreshed, but I have yet to open it on this PC. Another favorite of mine is Windows Live Photo Gallery, which makes it dead easy to import pictures from my camera, add tags, add a description, and post to my blog and to Flickr. It also provides for some light editing capabilities and has a great library organizer that reminds me of Windows Media Player’s library.

I haven’t used the Windows Live Movie Maker program much at all during the beta, since I really don’t edit movies. As I understand it, this program is still in the very early stages of development.

Windows Live Family Safety is another program I don’t need, since it is meant to manage child accounts and access to web pages and the like. If you have a need for this, it is a pretty good program, but you’ll get more control with the Parental Controls in Vista.

All in all, the refresh looks great, coming on the heels of the Wave3 web service deployment. My home page, which provides a central location for all things in my “network” is home.live.com – it loads quickly and has some nice customization available for it.

The refresh is now available for the Essentials program at http://download.live.com – be sure to uncheck programs that you don’t want to install.

Yesterday morning Pennie called me because her PC was apparently infected with a virus that, unfortunately, made it past the defenses of Windows Live OneCare. Based on her description, it was the infamous Antivirus Pro 2009 or some variant. She hadn't clicked on the pop-up, but that malware still drops a payload that opens the door to more nasties. I was hit with a variant a few weeks back, myself. No antivirus product is perfect, so safe surfing is imperative, but even that may fail to keep the PC from infection. Anyway, I took a look at it when I got home and spent 2 hours eradicating traces of the malware manually and with Malwarebytes. It turned out that the primary infection was one of the Vundo variants, which are very difficult to remove. I finally vanquished it with the help of the Malwarebytes scanner. I also contacted someone on the Microsoft Antimalware team to express my concerns that OneCare still can't detect or remove either of these threats. We see reports of them both in the OneCare forums often and direct people to support. The problem, of course, is that malware is constantly evolving, making it difficult to code for the signatures in a timely manner. I was able to provide some data to my contact and hope that it will at least help track down the current variant that hit Pennie's computer.

It is finally Friday evening once again and I can sure use some rest this weekend! Today was a bit rough at work, but things were finally under control by lunchtime. I'm planning to do a full workout in a little bit and then relax for the balance of the evening.

I was going to post about the weather changes and how poorly I’m dealing with cold these days, apparently due to a lack of insulating fat that I’ve carried for years, but then I cam home to read about this bombshell.

I am hesitant to visit the Windows Live OneCare forums this evening as I’m sure there will be lots of questions. I will make a quick post there shortly, though, and plan to deal with the expected volume tomorrow.