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Why don’t you mosey on over to one of those locations?

At least they've posted an update to those eagerly waiting for the beta to become available:

www.microsoft.com/…/default.aspx

Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal—we're in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We're sorry for the delay and we'll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.

When can I download the beta?
Starting Friday, Jan. 9. Microsoft said today that it will open the download gates worldwide at noon, Pacific time, tomorrow.
If you subscribe to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) or TechNet, you can grab it today from here.

Where do I get it?
The public download will be posted to the Windows 7 site here, Microsoft said.

Once you've downloaded the monster, you must burn the image to a DVD to create the installation disk.

How big is the download?
2.44GB for the 32-bit version, 3.15GB for the 64-bit version

What edition of Windows 7 is the beta?
Microsoft said the beta is "roughly equivalent" to Vista Ultimate, which is a strong hint that the preview is actually Windows 7 Ultimate.

Anything else I need to know?
There is a Windows Media Player 12 bug that could damage MP3 files.  So don't go adding MP3 files to your library until you've applied a patch for the issue that is expected to be made available shortly after the beta is up.  A support document — designated as "KB961367" — has been assigned to the bug, but it's not yet available on Microsoft's Web site.

Also you can see the Wired "how to get" article for more info as well.

I'll be dropping in a back-up 160GB hard drive into my machine and installing a fresh copy of Win7beta 64bit on that hard drive.  This'll allow me to quickly switch to/from W7 without damaging my working XP install.

The Geeqs.net email server is hosted on my own dedicated home server using hMailserver, a free mail server (SMTP/POP/IMAP), and I also hosted my own DNS for Geeqs.net here as well.  This gives me a lot of control over how mail works on my own domain.  I appreciate having that control, but what if your control is limited by the tools you're using? 

For example, I noticed I was seeing lots of spam bots trying to brute-force password attack my mail server in an effort to use it as a spam mailer.  Monitoring the server logs is something I'd rather not have to do, but if I host my own server, it must be done by someone.  I also noticed that I got almost no spam on my Gmail account and I wondered if that was because Gmail has a better spam filter than hMailserver's block lists.  hMailserver was pretty good for a free application, but it wasn't great at identifying incoming mail as spam, so some got through.

I had just moved my desktop based email client and email archive up to Gmail.  I knew Google also had a free service available that would allow you to use Gmail as your own hosted email service for your domain.  This is done through the "Google Apps" service.  A few entries made to your DNS and your mail for your domain is now being sent to Google, and when you log into Gmail, you see your domains email from within the Gmail interface.  It goes through Google's spam filters and is automatically searchable using the Gmail interface.  Oh yea, and it's 100% FREE. 

I host my own DNS.  How's that for geek cred?

For quite a while now I've been hosting my own DNS, mail, and web servers for my Geeqs.net domain.  This has worked out quite well for me because it's no additional cost to me if I already have a server up and running and I was able to make additions or changes very quickly since the services were hosted a few feet from my primary home workstation.

I'd moved my domain registration over to GoDaddy a year or two ago due to better pricing and what looked like a good set of online tools available through GoDaddy with which I could manage my domain.  When I moved my registration over to GoDaddy, I didn't take advantage of any of the available services (hosted DNS, web hosting, etc…) since I already had a working DNS system.

In July there was a DNS exploit that came out and was causing some concern.  I immediately noticed a lot more incoming TCP connections to my DNS server.  Though I wasn't susceptible to the attack because I had taken measures to protect against it, it still raised some concern because the attacks were increasing load on my DNS server to a point of some concern.

Since I'd just taken the leap to using a web based email client, maybe I should take another look at the hosted DNS services available?  So I did.

GoDaddy provides a few free services with a domain you've registered through them.  One of those services is a common one provided by DNS registrars, and that's DNS hosting.  This is where the registrar also runs a number of DNS servers that you can use to host your newly registered domain.  Since someone else is hosting your DNS services, you'll need some method to maintain and update the DNS records.  This is normally provided though a web based interface such as Total DNS Control.

To set up GoDaddy to host my Geeqs.net domain I ran through a set of easy to use menus at the GoDaddy web site and within a few minutes I was set up to use their DNS servers.  I replicated a few key DNS entries from my home DNS server to GoDaddy's and bingo-bango, I'm done!  I waited an hour or so to run a few tests to see if the GoDaddy DNS server was serving and it was.  That was painless!  I then turned off my home DNS service and let the dust settle overnight.  When I got up in the morning everything was still working properly. 

I'd made the cut and am one more step closer to not needing a home server!

You know you're an Internet old-timer when…

… you're the only guy still using Outlook Express. 

I'm one of those guys you hear about that used Outlook Express 6 for, what…. forever?  I didn't want to use the full blown Outlook to manage my mail since I really only needed mail,and not calendar and all that jazz., and didn't like the idea of having to start up a pretty big application just to do a quick email check.  I have a number of active email addresses, a couple primary (Geeqs.net, and Hotmail), as well as a couple secondary (Shaw.ca and Gmail), and one I use as a placeholder (live.ca).

Within the last year I migrated to Outlook 2003 and imported all of my email and contacts.  I think the main reason I finally cut over to Outlook was because Microsoft announced they'd no longer support Outlook Express and wanted everyone still using it to move to Windows Live Mail. 

Windows Live Mail was released in November 2007. In the future, support for Outlook Express and Windows Mail will be discontinued in favor of Windows Live Mail.

I tried Windows Live Mail, but I just hated the UI.  In Outlook Express and Outlook 2003, I liked having mail from my multiple accounts appearing in a single inbox.  I did NOT like having to expand multiple tree nodes, one for each account, to read all of my email.  I gave it a chance, but I just couldn't live with it. So Live Mail was not an option. 

Outlook has a lot going for it.  it's a first class email, calendaring, contact, etc… program.  For work I'd use nothing other.  (Note to self:  I will likely regret saying that in a few years when everyone's then switched over to something like "Outlook On-line 2012"!)

The only remaining option seemed to be Outlook.  At home it really feels like I'm launching a big application just to read my home email on multiple accounts.  It takes significantly longer to load up Outlook than it does Outlook Express, and that's annoying.  It's especially annoying when you click on a mailto: link in a web page and it has to fire up all of Outlook to send a 1 line text email.

Use web based email client?  Are you crazy?

Outlook and incoming spam was annoying me while I was off on Christmas holidays, so I started looking into using Gmail's web based mail.  I've seen a lot of co-workers use it for their personal mail and I thought, "it can't be that bad if so many people are using it".  I had to give it another try.

Coming from Outlook Express and Outlook I was a "folders" kind of guy.  These "labels" metaphor I just didn't understand why I would want to do that rather than good old folders… Then it occurred to me that  I wasn't giving it a real chance.  The labels are a means to organize your email, just like folders are.  The main difference is that multiple labels can be assigned to a single email, whereas when using folders, the email can exist in only 1 folder.  Interesting…

I started to see some benefit to this so I ran a tool called the "Google email uploader".  What this tool does is take all of your email and contacts and pushes them up to a Gmail account you have set up.  I had a bunch of email from as far back as 1999 that I would like to keep, and if it didn't work out, I always had my local copy of email and mail client I could return to.  I ran the uploader and it took about 40 minutes I think to upload all of my contacts and emails.

The revelation!

The uploader automatically assigned labels to emails that were stored in folders.  It created label names using the folder names I had messages stored in and assigned those labels to those messages that were uploaded.  That was a good start for me, but here's where it finally clicked for me.  I started to organize my email by using the Gmail search to find emails of a certain type and assign a label to all of them.  The search was very effective at finding all emails such as DNS registrations, orders I've placed through NCIX, etc… and made it very easy to assign a given label to all of those emails. 

Once I started organizing my email like this, Gmail was seeming easier and easier to use.  I then clued in to what "archive" is good for in Gmail.  I ended up using it to move completed emails out of my inbox.  The mail is still accessible, but it's not up front demanding my attention.  All I have to do is search for it, or open a label other than Inbox, and I've got it.

The archive feature was what finally sealed the deal for me.  I now had a really good way of cleaning out my inbox.  I'm a big proponent of having no unread email.  This doesn't mean I answer all my email, it just means I read, or at least cursively scan all email sent to me.  I've seen some people with literally thousands of unread emails in their inboxes and I don't know how they can get anything done.  Anyway, my email habits may be a topic of another post…

That's it!  I'm now a Gmail convert!  The main benefits I've realized though my conversion to Gmail are:

1. Web based email is a very lightweight application that doesn't take long to start up.
2. Very good search functionality that doesn't require you to install some 3rd party search tool like Live Search, Google Desktop, Yahoo Desktop Search, etc…
3. Very good spam filtering built-in.
4. Very good rules based filtering capability.
5. "Labels" and "archiving" organization of email is easy to use and an efficient way to tidy up your inbox.
6. Easy to set up to pull mail from other accounts into a single Gmail account to rule them all!
7. Works extremely well with my iPhone. 

All of these tools I am still using because they are free, simple to use, and they just get the job done with no hassle.

I hope that by providing a list of these tools that others will discover them and be able to also get the job done!

Archiver: 7-Zip Blog Editor: Windows Live Writer iPod/iPhone Video Transcoder: Mediacoder for iPhone Internet Browser: Firefox 3.0x Image/Photo Editor: Paint.Net BitTorrent Client: uTorrent Source Control System: Perforce Recorded TV Video Transcoder: MCEBuddy Internet Radio Streaming: last.fm Home Video Editing: Windows Movie Maker Back-up Software: Cobian Backup 9 File Encryption: TrueCrypt PDF Writer: PrimoPDF PDF Reader: Foxit Reader Text Editor: Notepad2 Task Manager: Process Explorer Drive Usage Reporting:  WinDirStat File Synchronization: SyncToy Virtualization Software: Microsoft Virtual PC Hard Disk Defragmenter: Defrag (built into XP)