iTunes for Windows! iTunes for Windows! The new phonebook's here! The new phonebook's here!
posted by mathowie on Oct 16, 2003 - 113 comments

OldVersion.com bears the motto "newer is not always better." This virtual graveyard/archive of older windows programs lets you stick to versions of programs before they had advertising, before they had Digital Restrictions Management, and even those that no longer exist *sniff*. I can tell sites like this will be coming in handy as we enter a Matrix-like world of advertising, spy-ware, and DRM baked into everything, while a holdout of luddites stick with 0.9 betas of their favorite programs.
posted by mathowie on Mar 2, 2003 - 24 comments

Internet Explorer 6 final is out for windows. Hopefully they've worked all the bugs out from the public beta. They're claiming full 100% standards support for DOM level 1 and CSS 1 (it only took five years!), though time will tell how accurate that claim is.
posted by mathowie on Aug 27, 2001 - 64 comments

This is pretty damn cool: your bookmarks, napsterized. A new app (windows only, sorry) to let you share your favorite sites with everyone and allow others to search for them. If they add a hotlist, ala napster, this could be one killer app.
posted by mathowie on Jan 28, 2001 - 7 comments

Microsoft Windows for Linux^TM This site also features Microsoft Linux Certification. It's funny, laugh.
posted by mathowie on Mar 22, 2000 - 4 comments

Mark Hurst of Creatvie Good and GoodExperience noticed a video billboard near Times Square that was showing Windows errors around new years day. Here's a picture and a closeup. He brings up a good point: If an airline can't troubleshoot a billboard, how well can they keep their planes running?
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2000 - 0 comments

So I was checking out the Windows 2000 compatibility site, and the first step in determining if your system will be ok with the new OS is identifying your computer. When you go to the first upgrade page, you have to identify your computer by manufacturer, but the site only lists 10 different PC makers. Ten PC makers!?! I don't know if Microsoft knows this, but there are things called "clones" out there, and there are "millions" of different manufacturers of them. My computer's not in the list, even though it's from a prominent manufacturer, I guess the compatibility website isn't compatible with my computer.
posted by mathowie on Jan 18, 2000 - 3 comments

If you're using a non-windows computer right now, and you really miss that starfield simulation screensaver, don't fret, because someone has written one in DHTML and put it on the web. I like to imagine I'm a bored cubicle worker and stare at it for hours.
posted by mathowie on Jan 15, 2000 - 3 comments

This past summer, I bought a Microsoft Cordless Phone, which I fell in love with after seeing all its cool features. My friends snickered when I bought it and they made little jokes about my 'proprietary' phone that would 'crash' during calls, but I defended my MS phone. So now the time has come to upgrade my home win98 box to Win2k, but apparently MS has no intentions of making the phone compatible with Win2k, nor will they ever support it. This phone is less than a year old, and it's going to be useless soon (all the answering and caller ID is software based). Anyone want to buy this $150 paperweight I have sitting here on my desk?
posted by mathowie on Jan 13, 2000 - 1 comment

I don't think anyone would ever actually do this, but MS has released instructions on how to uninstall Linux and install WindowsNT/2000 over it.
posted by mathowie on Dec 22, 1999 - 0 comments

This is kind of funny: WinLinux 'the linux that runs like an application inside windows.'
posted by mathowie on Dec 14, 1999 - 0 comments

Got a windows box? Think your machine is secure? You're probably not. This is a nice free port scanner utility for wintel boxes, give it a test and make sure you don't have any weird services running.
posted by mathowie on Dec 7, 1999 - 0 comments

Finally! Microsoft released an add-on app for Word 2000 that allows cleaner HTML to be saved out. I've saved one line Word documents as HTML and had them turned into 10kb of bloated CSS markup. I generally avoid using Word at all costs, but most of the content I get for new sites are done in Word. Tools like this are indespensible.
posted by mathowie on Nov 15, 1999 - 0 comments

Microsoft has a pretty nice seminar site with dozens of old presentations of powerpoint slides sync'd with audio. The topics range from the simplest things like word processing to the most difficult ones like SQL server tuning. One title jumps out: 'Windows 2000 Active Directory Disaster Recovery.' Makes you want to run out and get Windows 2000, eh?
posted by mathowie on Nov 11, 1999 - 0 comments

Microsoft has finally figured out that sex sells. I wonder if they'll use Britney Spears to sell copies of Windows 2000?
posted by mathowie on Aug 17, 1999 - 0 comments