Stephen’s Untold Stories

April 28th, 2008

Service Pack 3 for Windows XP

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

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April 22nd, 2008

Microsoft Gives Students Access to Technical Software at No Charge

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

April 13th, 2008

What is SharePoint?

Just in case you were wondering.

March 4th, 2008

Google Documents vs. Microsoft Office Live

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.

February 16th, 2008

Death by PowerPoint

Very funny, and helpful!

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January 29th, 2008

SharePoint for School Districts

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.

sharepoint_logo

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October 27th, 2007

Leopard vs. Vista: feature chart showdown

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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September 18th, 2007

Google Presentations are here!

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.

powerpointheader

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September 12th, 2007

Office 2007 for $60 (College Students Only)

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.

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The Ultimate Steal

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August 29th, 2007

Microsoft shuts down Autopatcher

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.

autopatcher1

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August 3rd, 2007

A few techie things

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!

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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August 2nd, 2007

Excel 2007 Cheat Sheet: Quick reference charts

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.

Microsoft Excel 2007 Black

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May 8th, 2007

Goodbye FrontPage, Hello Expression Web

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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April 18th, 2007

At last! Stream Windows Media Player files in Firefox

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!

March 19th, 2007

Build a Windows Home Server for $500

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):

Grand Total: $471.46

Here is the complete article

February 17th, 2007

Vista Rewired

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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February 4th, 2007

Vista Day 3 - Problem Solved

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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February 3rd, 2007

Day 2 of Vista

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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February 2nd, 2007

My First Windows Vista Install

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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December 21st, 2006

50 (free) Essential Software Titles

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.