40Tech

Although I’m now primarily a Mac user at home, that had nothing to do with a dislike for Windows. In fact, I loved Windows 7. Shortly after its release, I installed it on both of my personal machines, and I was one of the early adopters at the office. In years past, I would have been eager to install Windows 8 on my remaining Windows machine and on my Windows 7 partition on my Mac, given my affliction with G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). I haven’t felt that urge for Windows 8, and it appears that most other users have felt the same way. Based on some recent data, it seems that Windows 8 is a flop. Why?

Earlier this year, I asked you to let us know how many items you had on your desktop. Answers ranged from 0 to 79 desktop items. In a late reply to that same post, one of the commenters mentioned Rainmeter, a desktop customization tool for Windows. I actually started using Rainmeter a few months ago on the one Windows machine available to me, and it is pretty cool if you really want to geek out your desktop.

As a follow up to my recent post on the World’s Most Awesome Automated Filing System, I intended to write a post on how to get your Windows-only ScanSnap Scanner working on your Mac. This would have been important to those of you who switched from Windows to Mac, and wanted to use your old scanners. Until recently, Fujitsu, the maker of the ScanSnap, created an artificial distinction between their Mac and Windows scanners. The hardware was identical, which should have meant that as long as you had the correct driver for your system, either scanner should have worked on your machine. Unfortunately, Fujitsu built a check into their drivers, so that a Mac would see that you had the Windows-branded version of the ScanSnap, and not be able to use the scanner. This was an incompatibly cooked up out of thin air by Fujitsu. As much as I’m a huge fan of the ScanSnap line, this had the stench of an attempt to create more sales. Fortunately, those days appear to be over.

OmniFocus is a fantastic GTD application, boasting many great features. One of my favorite features is the quick entry box. This allows you to tap a key combination to call up a task entry box. That entry box will hover over whatever app you’re using and then disappear after you enter your task and hit the Return key. The big problem is that OmniFocus is a Mac-only app. I’ve liked it enough as I tested alternatives to Toodledo, that I looked for a way to make it easier to implement in a world dominated by Windows. I found a very slick free app called Win2GTD that brings an OmniFocus quick entry box to Windows.

In my recent kick to clean up and customize my desktop, I discovered one problem- in Windows, no matter what you use for your desktop, you’re stuck with the same boring logon screen whenever you lock your computer or are booting your computer. There are some hacks around this, such as tweaking the registry and the background image file, but I wanted an easier process. Enter LogonStudio, which lets you customize your Windows logon screen.

Every once in a while you try to download or install something, only to be told by your impertinent machine that you don’t have enough space. You try and try to resolve the issue, but, for the life of you, can’t find the files that are hogging up your hard drive. Everything seems accounted for. You’ve even emptied your Recycle Bin and cleared your temp folder, but all you get from your computer is some digitized, maniacal laughter — or maybe that’s just me.

Potential crazy aside, there is an easy and very handy free tool that you can use to smack some sense into your Windows PC. It’s called SpaceSniffer, and it will help you find and destroy what’s eating your computer’s storage space. You’ll probably be surprised by what you find.

Producteev, one of our favourite  — and one of the best — to-do apps, has released a massive upgrade that includes some long-awaited features and platform updates. The web and iPhone apps have gotten a makeover, the much clamoured-for Android app has finally arrived, and there is now a Windows 7 desktop app to balance out the Mac version. Even the logo has been updated (bye bye Tasky the beaver)!

To top it all off, Producteev has added a few new features into the mix — and yes (drumroll), that does include sub-tasks…

If you want to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your browsing experience, then check out the latest browser speed tests at Tom’s Hardware. The site takes a look at several browsers on both the PC and on a Mac, and offers results in several different categories. The site then crowned a winner on each platform, as well as overall.

Ask any computer expert, and she will stress the need for not only local backups, but offsite backups as well. One option to get offsite backups is to use an online service. For many years, I was a happy subscriber to Carbonite. As the number of computers in my household grew, however, I needed a more economical solution. My wife and I each had a desktop and laptop, and I also ran a Windows virtual machine on one of my Macs. That made five systems that I needed to backup. After a bit of research, I settled on CrashPlan, and haven’t looked back. Not only is the CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan a good choice for a family with many computers, but CrashPlan might also be a good choice for you if you don’t want to pay anything at all.

Telnet is an old outdated protocol that is used for remote command line administration on various devices such as Cisco routers. I would recommend the use of SSH over Telnet in any circumstance; however I still find the Telnet command useful for testing mail servers and for checking open TCP ports.

Follow these instructions to enable Telnet on Windows 7.