When "System Restore" was added to Windows XP, it changed the life of a lot of computer geeks – and their clients. The ability to ‘roll-back’ a computer to a point in time prior to a virus/malware or just a bad install of a piece of software made for a MUCH easier and quicker solution than reformatting a hard drive. System Restore works 98% of the time. The other 2% is left to those really nasty viruses that have figured out how to corrupt or remove the restore …
My first job at Microsoft was working on Internet Explorer 4. Prior to that I had done technical support at Spry for their "Internet In A Box" product (before CompuServe bought them). Back then I used a flavor of the Mosaic browser (as did most everyone) and was pretty happy. IE4 was a dramatic change – and I say that as someone who was an expert at the time. It was faster, had more features and was an amazing piece of software. Since 1996 I have tried all …
Years ago when I worked at Bing.com, I got frustrated at Microsoft for not taking advantage of social marketing and not making it easy for their customers to find their products in the “social world”. Specifically, almost none of their product websites had social media icons that would allow consumers to find THE official pages for Microsoft’s various products. See my post titled “Zune on Facebook”. I see the same issue today with Disney. They have a TREMENDOUS following, with amazing potential for reaching out to fans (consumers, …
I finally noticed last night that a feature idea I proposed in an email on October 20, 2009 while I was working at Bing.com finally made it to the web on May 17, 2011. I had sent the email below to one of my ‘bosses’ at Bing as a feature idea to add a Facebook icon to the Bing.com homepage, since the background image changed daily. In October 2009, there was no “Like” button that could be put on external websites, so the Facebook icon was all that …
We all know about (and have probably used) Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Outlook. What about Microsoft OneNote? OneNote has been around since about 2003 – and it seems like a good idea; one file (notebook) that has several “tabs” where you can paste pictures, charts, other document, freehand draw (if you have a tablet PC), link to other content and generally just keep track of any bit of information for a specific subject. Especially useful is the ability to move chunks of information around …
I’ve recently helped a few friends get setup with "media centers" as their home entertainment systems. They’ve all been centered around using a small form-factor computer to ‘power’ things, and central to that is Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Media Center. I was lucky enough to be a software tester at Microsoft around 2001 testing the first version of Window Media Center Edition (MCE) and it was exciting back then. It’s now been 10 years – and it still hasn’t caught on. But, I’m confident that’s about to …
