Author: Soumen Halder

The biggest problem after a fresh Windows installation is obvious – you have to start installing all the softwares from scratch. This includes installing your browsers, office programs, media players and so on. Most of the applications come free these days but there are some applications which are not (e.g Microsoft Office, Microsoft frontpage etc). And to install them, you have to find the old product keys which came with the CD or DVD pack you bought years ago.

Now, if you have lost the CD case (high chances that you would), the product keys can be extracted from Windows registry. Wouldn’t it be wise to first extract all the product keys of software and keep them at a safe location? This ensures full installation of programs after a system format. This article shows you ways to extract the serial and product keys of application software in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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You must be looking for a good password manager for Windows 7 since there is no such build-in tool. I have been using Secure Password Storage for a few weeks, but the functionality is limited, the choices too are limited, and the app as a whole is sometimes quite slow and buggy.

Today, I stumbled on Password Provider, a secure desktop password manager with tons of functionalities packed into a simple-to-use app. You can create, store, and access unlimited number of logon/passwords and other important information.

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Windows 7 is currently only a beta version, but it’s much better than the latest version of Windows Vista and it comes with a lot of new features. Unfortunately, some of them aren’t so easy to figure out, so I created a list of the most important tips and tricks and a step-by-step guide that will help you apply all of these great tips and tricks.

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Last week, Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 arrived on MSDN, TechNet, and Connect. We noted that testers would not be getting slipstreamed ISOs of the operating systems but that MSDN and TechNet subscribers would be getting them soon enough. This week, Microsoft started putting up the downloads, and it looks like they’re pretty much all there. If you’re a subscriber, head over to the corresponding download page on MSDN or TechNet and put that bandwidth to good use. Below is a list of the SP2 downloads that Microsoft is now offering.

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The new Windows 7 beta release just like Vista preview releases before it incorporate some additional UI elements meant for testers to submit feedback back to Microsoft.

Now considering you may be running this Beta 1 release as your main OS for some reason (I admit it, I have given in to the temptation many times before), one of those elements in particular can become annoying and obtrusive to your otherwise neat configured desktop. 

Windows 7 Beta Send Feedback link 

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In case you haven’t downloaded your copy of Windows 7 Beta yet, you can get it now in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. You can read further instructions and get your installation key from Microsoft’s website.

Once you obtain your copy of Windows 7 (the official release is an .ISO file), you will need to burn it to a blank DVD to continue.

There are countless applications out there which will burn image files, to name a few popular free ones: Burn4Free CD and DVD, CDBurnerXP, ImgBurn and Ashampoo Burning Studio Free. I used CDBurnerXP.

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The strongest critique we received about our recent guide on dual booting Windows 7 with XP/Vista was that we should’ve included information covering the likely event of you wanting to kick the beta OS to the curb, sooner or later.

Well, we couldn’t agree more, so as a follow up to that guide we’re going to look at the reverse process; deleting your Windows 7 partition and reallocating its hard drive space to another partition.

If you recall, in the dual boot guide we looked at two separate approaches for creating a new partition depending if you are running Windows Vista or Windows XP, and we intend to do the same here.

Before we get started, if you prefer to use the GParted tool for any reason, feel free to do so, though it’s not altogether necessary. Be sure to have your Vista DVD on-hand to repair potential boot loader complications.

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