I’m sure most of you have heard about the Windows 7 RC release this week. I’ve heard a lot good things about Windows 7 so I though I’d install it on my laptop. The laptop came with Vista Home Premium which I switched to XP Pro because Vista had too much bugs and issues. At one point I had Ubuntu 8.10 installed but had to give it up because hibernation didn’t work properly.

Now Windows 7 is installed and I’m loving it. It works very well and is nice and slick to use. I’ve had no problems with it so far, except for the fact that Zone Alarm firewall doesn’t work in it (yet). There is also the Virtual XP mode which works nicely. Also I like the new task bar (or Super Bar as it’s called). Only problem is when trying to pin files in it. You need to use shortcuts to make it work properly.

I’m using the 64bit version and installed it from USB drive. Here’s good instructions how to do that. If you do the install from 32bit Windows (like I was), in step 6 you need to use bootsect from 32bit ISO because the 64bit version doesn’t work. If you don’t want to download the 32bit ISO (2.6GB), you can also find the 32bit bootsect.exe from google or you can use other 3rd party tool that do the same thing.

Windows 7 RC is available for anyone interested. The license is working until March 2010. After that Windows will reboot itself every two hours. In June 2010, it will switch into non-genuine mode (black wallpaper and constant nag screens).

Windows 7 RC
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

This is a really cool tip I found from Lifehacker. I’m sure many of you (including me) have at some point needed to copy the message from error box. The only way I knew how to do it was to write it manually. Who knew that since Windows 2000, all you need to do is to hit Ctrl+C, and the content of the message box is copied into the clipboard .

via Lifehacker.

I had this very annoying problem in Windows XP (SP2). When I hovered mouse over a tray icon to show it’s tooltip, the tooltip was showing behind taskbar. I don’t know if there is an official fix to this issue but the following worked for me:

1. Open regedit (Start–>Run–>regedit)
2. Go to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows
CurrentVersionExplorerVisualEffectsTooltipAnimation
3. Create (Right Click–>New–>String Value) or modify value:
   SetWindowPos=HwndInsertAfter, Hwnd_Top
4. Create (Right Click–>New–>DWORD Value) or modify value:
   SetForegroundWindow=1
5. Restart Windows