Yesterday the IE9 Beta was released so you may want to download it and start testing. However, if you’re still on XP, you’re out of luck:
According to The Register, Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE business and marketing, confirmed that "Microsoft would not put IE9 hardware acceleration features in the current version of its browser, IE8, or back port IE9 to older PCs running Windows XP."
The full story is on Read Write Web.
What little time I had at home this weekend I spent upgrading my Vista x64 system to Windows 7 Home Premium x64. A blog post on that experience is forthcoming. However, those of you still on XP might be interested in XP Quick Fix Plus.
There are a lot of excellent free Windows comprehensive repairing and fixing tools around the internet.
But there are times when you want just one quick fix for example when you are under a virus attack and you just want to enable the Task Manager or the Registry Editor so you can fight the virus back, or when some new installation changed your XP behavior and My Documents opens on every start up.
This is the right time to draw XP Quick Fix Plus with 40 common Windows XP problems fixes, only 0.58mb, portable, small and fast, a must have on every computer and with a small extra, a command line utility to fix 6 common problems directly from command line !
Oh, and they don’t require an install. So, feel free to unzip them onto a flash drive and run them on any XP machine you want.
Blake has put together the ultimate lists of free software from Microsoft. Choose either the XP list or the Vista list and download to your heart’s content. Watch for future posts in which I might get into detail on some of these offerings.
Did you know that there are scores of keyboard commands that you can use in Windows to do many of the tasks you keep reaching for the mouse to do? Ever wonder what that key with the Windows logo does? First check out Win-M which is my favorite. Need to leave your computer and don’t want anyone else getting into it while you’re gone, try Win-L. Once you get the hang of those head over to the Keyboard shortcuts for Windows page on the Microsoft Help and Support site for more.
If you’re one of those folks looking for a simple "tell me what’s wrong and just fix it" solution to common Windows problems try the free Microsoft PC Advisor. For a power user it doesn’t do much (at least it didn’t for me) but it did make some sensible recommendations and made the changes with just two clicks. Hey, it couldn’t hurt to try it.
