I was recently reading PC Magazine which had 501 tips for computing and I ran across a little gem about Google Maps on your phone. I had been looking at TeleNav because a link came on my Motorola Q, but after downloading and installing it, using it proved difficult, and this was some kind a free thing. If you want voice instructions you have to pay a monthly fee.

So I saw the tip about Google Maps and downloaded and installed it on my phone. The first thing I did is navigate the menu which has an option for GPS location. You have to be outside (although I tried it inside my car and it worked) but Google located me on its maps where I could zoom in and out and save it as a location. If I leave the GPS locator running, it shows my movements as I drive – totally cool and totally free.

There are a lot more options – including the standard directions to/from a location, but so far I really like this app. Go to Google Maps Mobile from your phone or computer and click the Get Started Now blue button to download the app to your computer for transfer or send a link to your phone to download straight to your phone.

Now in my 9th year in the consulting business, I find that my choice of software (and software recommendations) changes, but in a good way. At one time, I used Easy CD Creator for CD/DVD burning because it’s what I had experience with and had always used. A few years ago I started using Nero and have never looked back. But the software I use weekly to clean up PCs is anti-virus and anti-spyware software. And in this category, I’ve been using and recommending AVG.

This choice of AVG started because I would often encounter users with no or expired anti-virus software. Thus, they would have viruses and spyware slowing down their PCs. Since AVG has a free edition that can be easily downloaded, it was a good way to clean up these PCs without having to contact the users and see about obtaining AV software.

In using AVG, I found it also worked very well. Before I would use Windows Defender and Spybot Search and Destroy (which I still use along with AVG) because they were free and could remove a lot of malware. But Windows Defender only works on newer versions of Windows with the latest Windows Installer application installed. Spybot is limited on how much it can remove since it targets mainly spyware. So AVG provided a third crucial method of scanning PCs and removing malware.

My old choice for AV was Norton products before all their activation and registration junk (which is why I never used to recommend McAfee, since you couldn’t get updates until you created a login for a McAfee account). Also, I now believe the talk that Norton has become bloated and slows systems down. My recent experiences with Norton first include a user who had a perfectly good working copy of Norton 360 1.0, but who made the mistake of upgrading to 2.0. Nothing I tried could get 2.0 installed on his PC, even 1.0 could not be reinstalled. So instead of reloading his PC just to get Norton installed, I set him up with AVG, which installed with no hassles. Even Norton’s small business products have become needlessly complex to setup; they also take up gigabytes of space for storage.

With that in mind, I have now started installing AVG File Server edition for small business servers. It’s not too expensive (cost is based on the number of clients connecting to the server) and you can purchase a 2 year license and save some money. The only hiccup I recently encountered was a client who was running Windows 2000 Server with SP3. Once I updated his servers to SP4 and other updates, AVG installed easily.

Someone who just bought a new PC and had their brother I think setting it up said the brother didn’t like AVG but used something else (unfortunately I don’t know what), but I haven’t found a reason yet not to use it or recommend it. If you need a change or just don’t feel like paying to protect your home PC every year with bloated products, check out AVG Free Edition and Grisoft’s other products at www.grisoft.com.

First let me say that I think System Restore is pretty worthless. In the numerous instances I have tried this tool, only once did it ever do anything to help me. Most of the time it does nothing, and occasionally it makes things worse. It is also a haven for viruses and malware, and I typically temporarily shutdown System Restore in Windows XP when I am cleaning up a PC.

Ever since I started using Vista, it has bugged me that not only could I not disable System Restore on my system, but also there were no options to control the amount of hard drive space it is using. By luck, I happened upon the answers to these annoyances. I was reading an email from Microsoft, part of which was pushing Vista, giving reasons why it’s better than XP or tips to make it run better. On the 3rd or 4th article I checked out, 12 Windows Vista Tweaks To Boost Your PC’s Performance from InformationWeek.com, there was a tweak “Tune System Restore.” In the tweak description there was information about changing the size of the System Restore repository. Of course this had to be done from the command line (in typical Microsoft fashion of continuing the dummying down of Windows for the masses – let’s hide stuff we don’t want people to change in command line commands), so I fired up my command prompt and went to work.

As I read abut the command to run, the article mentioned that the Shadow Copy storage space (where System Restore now stores its data) on a volume uses 15% of the volume’s free space by default. In this new era of hundreds of gigabyte and terabyte drives, this is ridiculous. In my case, 15% of my 500GB drive is about 75GB. So for kicks I checked my free space before shrinking the Shadow Copy storage space: 365GB.

Before we get to the stunning finale, let me show you the command you need to use to change your Shadow Copy storage space. The article actually has it wrong. When I ran their command, I was given an error and an example of the correct command usage. Here the example: vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=D: /MaxSize=900MB and here’s the command I used on my drive: vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=10GB The article forgot the /On option and I missed the colon after the drive letter (I originally put C instead of C:).

Now for the moment you’ve been waiting for: my drive space went from 365GB free to 414GB free, a net gain of 49GB! I was relieved to get the space back but majorly ticked off that it was being used in the first place. So if you want to get some quick free space back, try the command mentioned above – you may be as surprised as I was.

I recently read a blurp by Dvorak in PC Magazine mentioning an open source version of Windows XP called ReactOS. According to the website (www.reactos.org), “ReactOS® is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.”

The website provides much more information including screen shots of React running Windows apps and games and downloadable copies of the OS. The current version of the OS as of this writing is 0.3.4 and is still in alpha. There was an iso image of an install CD for the OS as well as a VMware virtual machine. I downloaded both, but fired up the virtual machine for a quick look at React. The VM only allocates 128MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive, but the OS booted up very quickly. It is not feature complete, although it had a Start button, system tray with clock, basic Control Panel, and My Computer, etc icons on the desktop. This is definitely alpha as there were very few programs with the OS, the explorer app would leave grey shadows of closed windows behind and acted quirky. But I do see great potential for this project and hope the developers can reach there goal of a fully-functional OS. React is definitely worth checking out.

I just received an email tonight anoouncing VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 public availability! I have been using VMware Fusion since it was in beta before the 1.0 release and I have loved it. I like it more than VMware Workstation because I get to run Mac OS X plus whatever flavors of Windows, Linux, etc. that I want. Hopefully 2.0 will add support for multiple snapshots.

Another cool thing is Vmware says 1.x customers will receive a free upgrade to 2.0 when it is released! Fusion 2.0 also allows you to import Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac VMs or Boot Camp partitions straight into Fusion. Forget Parallels! I know a lot of people use it because they never heard of VMware and Parallels had a Mac version first, but VMware Fusion is the superior product – here’s why you should switch.

I have used VMware products since Workstation 3.0 (a nod again to my buddy Chris for showing me the light) and I have found VMware’s products to be a great way to try new OS’s or run apps under one OS while having a different host OS. If you have a Mac and need to run Windows (or another OS, even server OS’s like Windows Server or NetWare) check out the Fusion 2.0 beta.

A recent, rare, Internet outage at my house made me think about a backup Internet option. Since my Moto Q has Internet capabilities, I thought it would be possible to use it as a connection device if connected to a PC.

I first tried using the phone with Motorola Phone Tools software. Unfortunately, the software did not recognize the phone. So I did a search for Moto Q software and found the site everythingq.com. On the site was a program called pdanet which purported to do exactly what I was looking for – using the phone as an Internet connection device.

After unsuccesfully trying to download the software from this site (pdanet has a 7 day trial period), I found the author’s site and was able to download from there along with installation instructions and an FAQ.

The only requirement was Microsoft ActiveSync. After installing both to a laptop, I connected the phone to the laptop so pdanet could install on the phone. The only hiccup I encountered was because I had the USB connection on the phone set to Mass Storage instead of ActiveSync RNDIS.

Connecting with pdanet is simply a matter of connecting the phone to the PC (via USB in this case, although Bluetooth is supported), then clicking pdanet in the system tray and clicking connect. With my connection in a moving car driving on the highway far from any cities, I was able to achieve 213Kbps download / 88Kbps upload on AT&Ts Edge network. When I could get 3G connection, the speed increased to 871 Kbps download / 225Kbps upload.

The software works very well, but I’ve had problems with it seeing my phone or connecting. I think this is more of a problem with the phone, USB connection, and location than the software itself (I had to restart the phone, I am using a VM of Windows XP for this, and driving on highways that are sometimes out in the boonies). I recommend this software – it’s a lot cheaper than buying a dedicated data connector and a data plan.

This is the first time I tried writing a blog from my Moto Q. It’s not too bad for straight text, but anything fancy might take a little extra effort

What I really want to talk about here is Firefox 3 Beta 5. I’ve been waiting for Firefox 3 to come out ever since I discovered the memory leak problem in version 2 and read that they wouldn’t fix this problem until version 3. I decided to jump the gun and try the latest beta version on my Mac. During the install, Firefox scans your existing plug ins, checks if they are compatible, and if not tries to download versions that are compatible. Only 2 of my 6 or 7 plug ins have compatible versions, so I was immediately stuck without some functionality that I was used to. This is one of the reasons I decided to install Firefox on my Mac – I don’t use it much for web browsing, so any problems would be manageable.

After the install, I noticed that Firefox 3 looks just like a Mac application in form and function. I read that the developers did this for the Windows and Linux versions as well. The version I tested was very stable and only crashed after I installed the logmein plug in for Firefox and attempted to connect to a computer. I imagine this was because the plug in is not compatible with version 3. The other thing I noticed was when you type in a web address and Firefox gives you a list of previously typed in addresses, it now includes the web page name above the typed url. This made finding the correct url easier and just looked cool.

That’s about all I saw from a couple of days of using Firefox 3. The beta definitely makes me excited about the new version and I’m sure many plug in issues will be fixed when the final version 3 browser is released or shortly thereafter.

I had my first experience with Windows Movie Maker tonight helping my son do a movie for a school project. My impressions of it were that it is a very basic program for easy or quick movie making. One thing that was annoying was that the program was very slow to open an existing project. We ended up with 2 projects because of another annoying thing – I couldn’t put both audio files (sound effects) and a music track in the movie. There is a place for audio, but I think it’s for narration or any voice recording because it wouldn’t let me drop my audio files there. The files went to an area called audio/music. Unfortunately I wanted to do both. But we ended up with only music (Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, nice gun and cannon effects to go with my son’s Civil War project). The movie turned out nice, being made with pictures of claymation (don’t know if I spelled that correctly). It took us a while to get the animation speed down, but my son was happy with the end product.

In short, don’t expect much from Windows Movie Maker, but it is free (with Windows) and does alright on simple projects. Just go make some dinner if you have to open an existing project or switch between projects.