This is a good one. Today I checked my website statistics for the last year (May 9 2008 -May 9 2009) and among other things this came up: 

Which means that, at least the people who visits this site is more aware of the benefits of using Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Safer and faster are the words that describe Firefox against IE. If you want to try Firefox 3 and see for yourself, all you have to do is click here.

People are calling it the longest shareware trial period. Windows 7 Release Candidate will be available thru July 2009 and is set to expire in July 2010, but some sources are saying that Microsoft plans to have the final release  ready for this year’s holidays.

So, What is exactly this version of Windows 7 that is free to download from the Microsoft website? Like the name says it, it’s a release candidate which means that there’s only minor bugs and adjustments to make before its final release. Windows 7 RC, once installed sends information to Microsoft’s engineers about crashes, bugs and everything that needs to be looked at before it hits store shelves.

You will need some tech knowledge to try Windows 7 since this installation is not just an EXEcutable or MSI file. You have to download an ISO file, which is a CD image and you need to burn it on a CD. And before you install it, make sure you backup your data, because there’s no tech support. Microsoft itself recommends that you don’t install this release candidate on your primary or  business PC.

If you install it and still have it by March 2010, your computer will start to shut down by itself every two hours and you will be notified of this shutdowns 2 weeks before they start happening. So you don’t “forget” to buy it.

One of the controversial points of this new Windows is the XP compatibility. It seems that there’s an issue with some Intel processors which don’t support XP mode.

The minimum system requirements for this installation are:

  1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
  DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  Internet connection

Click here to download Windows 7 Release Candidate (and good luck!)

Hulu.com has been around for some time now. It’s not one of those sites where the users upload videos and they keep playing it until the owner complaints about copyright infringement.

This site is sponsored by some advertisers which shows their ads every 10 or 15 minutes during the shows. I never saw a commercial break longer than 30 seconds.

Now the good thing is that they have a lot of the most rated shows in TV right now. Some examples are Family Guy, House, 24, Rescue me, Fringe, American Dad, and a lot more. All of them are full episodes.

I can’t say the same about the movies. They are not known or well known. Mostly independent films, which most of them happens to be very good ones.

Very good quality in video and sound and a very intuitive player.

Click here to visit Hulu.com

I still don’t understand why Google needs to have a service running all the time in my computer using CPU and memory just to update their software, which I don’t use very often.

I think it will be better to make that application (Earth, Picasa, Desktop, etc) search for updates everytime it is started like normal applications do. Am I right?

If you want to uninstall this GoogleUpdater.exe and prevent it from loading in memory, follow one of these procedures. You may find that the first one worked fine. But if it didn’t try the others.

• Manual service disable
  Go to the Start menu, select Run and type: services.msc
  In the list of services (right panel) search for Google Updater.
  When you find it, double click on it. A dialog window will open
  In Startup type, select DISABLED.

  Check to see if there’s more than one service named Google updater or update and do the same with all of them.

• Uninstall from the Start Menu
  Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
  Select Programs
  Select Google Updater.
  Select Uninstall Google Updater.
  Restart your computer after you uninstall.
   
• Uninstall from the Control Panel
  Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
  Select Control Panel.
  Double-click Add or Remove Programs (on XP) or Programs and Features (on Vista).
  Select Google Updater in the list of programs.
  Click Remove.
  Restart your computer after you uninstall.
   
• Uninstall from the command line
  Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
  Select Run.
  Enter cmd to open a command prompt.
  Type cd C:\Program Files\Google\Google Updater to change directories.
  Type GoogleUpdater.exe -uninstall to uninstall.
  Restart your computer after you uninstall.

  If you don’t have a directory named Google Updater, you may have one named “update”. Inside it there’s an application named GoogleUpdate.exe. Use that application instead.

Hope you got rid of it.

This is a tool you may want to use everytime you need to free some space in your hard disk, because it shows you each folder represented as squares and the size of each one is proportional to the amount of bytes contained in that folder.
You can also click on each square and see the content of that folder and subfolders.

System requirements: Windows XP or Vista.

Click here to download SpaceSniffer.