Stephen’s Untold Stories

It hasn’t been made available for automatic downloads yet, but you can manually download it at the following link.

• Windows XP Service pack 3 ( direct download for314 megabyte file)

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Great move by the software giant.

The Microsoft DreamSpark student program makes available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design software for download. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Broad global coverage, as well as an expansion of the program to high school students around the world, potentially reaching up to 1 billion students worldwide, will continue throughout the next year.

Link to article

Just in case you were wondering.

I’ve been using Google Documents for a while now, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Recently I tried Microsoft’s Office Live and I really like what I see so far. I could see both of these as quite useful for schools.  The following link will give you a good comparison.

• Office Live Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Very funny, and helpful!

| View | Upload your own

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I just got through doing two days of training with a school system on Microsoft SharePoint. Their staff was very eager to learn, and I have become a fast fan of the product since getting trained myself back in December. It seems like it has a lot of application for school districts with easy creation of collaborative sites like wikis and blogs. Also, the shared workspaces lend themselves to project-based learning.

How many of you out there are using SharePoint, or do you know of any school districts that are using it? Please leave me a comment or shoot me an E-Mail at stephenksu at gmail dot com.

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In case you’ve missed it, Apple just released a new operating system called Leopard. Here is a good comparison of Leopard and Windows Vista.

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I’ve been eagerly anticipating this one for a while. Mashable already has a good comparison between Google’s new application and PowerPoint. Of course you’re going to get more features with PowerPoint, but Google still has a nice offering.

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Now THIS is a great deal.

Office Ultimate 2007 includes the entire Microsoft Office toolset that students are accustomed to working with and more, including Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel(R) 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint(R) 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook(R) 2007 with Business Contact Manager, Microsoft Office Access(TM) 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath(R) 2007. Students can find program details and see if they’re eligible at http://www.theultimatesteal.com.

The Ultimate Steal

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This is really depressing. Autopatcher was a great site where you could download Windows updates. It was great because you could download an update file and then burn it to a CD or put it on a flash drive. If you needed to update multiple computers, this was an incredibly helpful tool. Well, Microsoft has ordered the site to be shut down after four great years. A sad day for techies, indeed.

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Here are some pretty good recent finds. I usually put these in my shared blog, so you might want to take a look there. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for my shared items. If you have your own shared blog, let me know and I’ll check it out!

• Firetune - Tweak your Firefox settings to try to speed things up.
• Differences Between Google and Yahoo - Just in case you couldn’t tell the difference.
• 6 Online Photo Editors Compared - I haven’t used online image editing very often, but it’s nice to know it’s there if I need it.
• Some good 3-column themes for WordPress - 3 columns is all the rage these days.
• Two solutions for copying songs off of your iPod to a Mac - not that any of you would really consider doing anything like that.
• Blog workflow tools wiki - For those of you who want to get things done and get them done quickly.
• Windows Desktop Search - Maybe the best way to search your own computer for files.
• Download Your Favorite YouTube Videos - This one’s straight from the folks at Google, so it must be okay, right?
• 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers - Because you want to be more productive, don’t you?
• Make eBooks, webpages, quizzes and other content iPod-mobile! - Trust me. You don’t have enough stuff to put on your iPod.
• 100 open source tools templates and resources - There might be one or two of you out there who actually use open source software. Enjoy!
• How to Do Email and RSS Just Once a Day … and Boost Productivity in the Process - This one made me laugh.
• Top 10 Unofficial Gmail Apps and Add-ons - Your Gmail is just waiting to be hacked. Why make it wait any longer?
• Download Published Documents and Spreadsheets - For times when you are really bored.
• The Best Free Blogging Tools for Power Bloggers - Just in case any of you consider yourselves to be “power bloggers.”
• How to Get Started with Google Reader - If you aren’t using it, you can’t sit with the cool kids at lunch.
• Useful Google Bookmarklets - Because “bookmarklets” is such a neat word.

There. That helped to clean out some of my starred items. Hopefully some of those will help you in your quest to conquer the world.

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Excel 2007 is an amazing piece of software, and a very good upgrade over the 2003 version. Here are some great charts to help you find your way in the new version.

• Excel 2007 Reference Charts

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I’m sure you’re all aware that Microsoft has discontinued its popular web page editing program FrontPage. The replacement product is called Expression Web, and I have used it for about a week or so. I am pleased to report that it works very well on both XP and Vista. FrontPage was causing all sorts of problems on Vista, so I am very glad that is not a problem with Expression. The interface is very much like FrontPage, so you won’t any trouble transitioning if you choose to start using it.

Here is a very helpful white paper from Microsoft about making the transition. (word doc)

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This is another one I’ve been waiting for! There is now a plugin which will let you play those wmv files and streams in FireFox.

Get it here!

Now this is something I’ve been meaning to do.

NewEgg had such great deals, I bought all my parts there. (As an aside, is it just me, or do they need to upgrade thir site to ASP.NET? I mean, it’s still petty fast, but they could stand to add some Ajax goodness.) Last Friday, my parts came. I was so excited, and after an hour, I had the (almost) perfect Windows Home Server. Here’s what I picked up (all prices current as of 18 March 2007):

• AOpen XC Cube Barebones PC - $149.00
• AMD Athlon 3400+ 2.2 GHz Processor - $50.99
• Kingston 1GB PC3200 RAM - $87.49
• Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive - $149.99
• LiteOn DVD Burner with LightScribe - $33.99

Grand Total: $471.46

Here is the complete article

A found a nice tech blog for those of you who have switched or are considering switching to Windows Vista.

Click here for Vista Rewired

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I realized that I hadn’t actually done a full reboot after installing the Intel drivers for the wireless card. I had only brought the laptop out of sleep mode a couple of times yesterday, but when I did a reboot this morning the wireless card was working perfectly.

I’m not having much difficulty at all finding things. If I need to find something I just try looking in the same place I did for XP, and even though it might have a different name I haven’t had any real problems.

I am waiting to install iTunes, however. As Rick noted in his comment in the previous entry, there are some issues with iTunes and Vista. I’m holding off on that until Apple releases the next version. The computer I use to sync now is still XP, so I’m in no rush to install iTunes on any other machine right now.

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I did go to the Intel website and I downloaded the latest Vista drivers for my wireless card, but still no luck. I’ll do some searching in the support forums in the next few days, but this is not a big deal since I can get the card working after a reboot after a couple of clicks. I’ll just call this a mild annoyance, but I do want to get it fixed because some of my colleagues have the same model laptop and I’ll need to be able to support them when they switch to Vista.

I am still impressed with how Vista looks on my laptop. It looks a lot like a Mac display, which is not a bad thing at all. I downloaded Firefox and it seems to work even faster on the laptop than it did on my XP machines.

I’m still enjoying this process, and I’ll post more in the next few days.

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Well, I finally got on board with Windows Vista. I installed it on my work laptop, and the install only took a little over 30 minutes. I did a clean install, not an upgrade. The only problem I’m having is with the wireless card. For some reason, after a reboot it won’t detect any wireless networks. If I disable and then re-enable it, it then detects the networks and allows me to connect. I did download the latest Vista driver from the Dell web site, but I might need to check with the manufacturer on this.

Other than that problem, everything else has worked just great. The laptop is a Latitude D820 with 1 gig of RAM. It seems to run just as fast as it did with XP. I don’t know when I’ll switch my other computers over, but I will say that my overall first day with Vista was pretty good.

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According to the MSBLOG. I don’t have all of these, but I will be trying out a few more.

Here is compiled a full list of software which must be downloaded. Yep, every one of them. All of these are brilliant in every way, shape and form and are just plain brilliance. OK you don’t have to download them, but all of these are free except where stated, and are just great. Download ahoy!

Here is the list.