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Get Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 Free

Many customers will need the full-blown Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2007 version, but for the small, home-based or eBay-based businesses, Microsoft has released Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 as a free download:

Download URL:  http://www.ideawins.com
Download size: 338 MB
OS:  XP, 2003 & Vista
Cost:  FREE (this is not a trial or demo)

Product Information:

Save time on everyday tasks

  • Create quotes and invoices; track expenses and employee time.
  • Enter data once and share it seamlessly with other Microsoft Office system programs.
  • Manage payroll and taxes with ADP’s integrated payroll service.

Get a complete view of your business

  • Store and organize all your customer, vendor, employee, and financial information in one place including your emergency cash loans due to pay.
  • Get business insights with over 20 customizable reports.
  • Easily share your books with your accountant through Office Live and other tools like this one commonly used for showing your paystub on tax forms.

Grow your business online

  • List items on eBay, track sales activity, and download and process orders
  • Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
  • Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax

Links:

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Exam 71-260: TS: Microsoft Windows Vista, Configuring

Exam #: 71-260
Beta Exam Period: October 31 – November 13, 2006
Registration Opens: October 23, 2006
Test Time: 4 hours
Promotional Code: BTA620
Preparation Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/71-620.mspx

Audience Profile:

Candidates for this exam should have at least one year of experience in the IT field. They typically work as Tier 1 to Tier 2-level phone support in a wide range of environments, including retail stores and the upper MORG or enterprise environment.

Candidates should have experience resolving issues concerning network connectivity, desktop operating systems, security, and applications. They address logon problems, perform password resets, and resolve most issues with desktop applications.

To Register:

Source:  Terry Stein’s newsletter

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Get Vista Express Upgrade on Your Next PC

You can receive an Express Upgrade to Windows Vista when you buy a qualifying PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, or Windows XP Professional. 

If you’re in the market for a new computer, be sure to ask your retailer about the Express Upgrade to Windows Vista, being offered by participating PC manufacturers. When you buy a qualifying Windows Vista Capable PC between Thursday October 26, 2006 and Thursday March 15, 2007, you may be eligible for an Express Upgrade to Windows Vista.

Express Upgrade to Windows Vista offers from participating PC manufacturers include:

Note: Several of the manufacturers have only ‘coming soon’ pages since this program just launched this week, so check back often. Price, terms, and conditions may vary. Additional shipping, handling, and other fees may apply. See your PC manufacturer for availability and applicable offer details.

Source:  Microsoft Express Upgrade to Windows Vista

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Webcast – Managed Services Practice – Part 3

Webcast: The Recipe to Build a Successful Managed Services Practice from Scratch – Part 3 
Powered by: TS2 Wed on the Web 
Date: Wednesday November 29, 2006
Presenters: Ron Grattopp & Erick Simpson
Event Time: 3:00 PM Eastern, USA & Canada (DST) = GMT -05:00
Duration: 60 minutes

Registration URL:
http://www.msreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15004776
 
Description:  This is a follow-up to Erick’s June 30th and August 18th Managed Services Webcasts. This Seminar will focus on pricing, marketing and selling your Managed Services Deliverables, and will include a discussion of different pricing models and sales and marketing strategies. We will feature a live Q&A with Erick, which we did not have time for in the first Webcast.

Prerequisites:
Recipe to build a Successful Managed Services Practice from Scratch – Part 1:
http://www.msreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15004257

and Recipe to build a Successful Managed Services Practice from Scratch – Part 2:
http://www.msreadiness.com/WS_abstract.asp?eid=15004419.

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SMS Link for Microsoft Outlook 2007

SMS Link is definitely one of the coolest feature I’ve seen in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 so far.

With SMS Link, now you can set rules in Outlook 2007 that will forward important e-mails, tasks, ect. right to your cell phone via SMS text messages. You can also send SMS messages to other people from Outlook, even if you don’t know who their mobile carrier is.

Check out the Shockwave video demo of SMS Link for details.  The video is a quick download, and it gives an excellent overview of the capabilities of SMS Link. 

Once you’re done with the video, click the Getting Started link. They have a nice FAQ too.

Note:  SMS Link is a free download and a free service, but remember that not everyone has free incoming SMS text messsaging.  So be sure and touch base with your addressee before you run up their mobile phone bill.

Source:  http://www.microsoft.com/smslink

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Alienware Celebrates 10 Years

Sure, Acer has their Ferrari notebook and ASUS has their Lamborghini laptop, and both are pretty cool. 

But if you really need the fastest PC in the universe, any geek will tell you that there’s only one place to go…

Alienware
Alienware 

They are big, they are bad, and they totally & completely rock!  And we’re not just talking desktops. The notebooks kill too.  Mark Mulvany has one and I’m totally jealous! 

So, you don’t really need a $4,499 Assassin notebook rig with a 400 GB hard drive and a 19″ display?  That’s OK. They’ve got Core2 Duo notebooks too that start around $999.  And they’ll spank a MacBook Pro any day of the week. 

And here’s the cool part – for their 10-year Anniversary, Alienware is having 10 sales in 10 days! 
 

IMPORTANT – Each sale ends at 12:00 Noon Eastern (USA GMT -5).  So jump on over there before you miss out!!

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Outlook 2007 RAM Issues

I was experiencing the joys of IE7 tonight (multiple 404 errors trying to enter Passport sites after XP SP2 resumes from Standby Mode) and decided to give up and reboot.  After the reboot I hit to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and launched the Task Manager to watch the show.

So as I sit patiently watching, my 1.5 GB of RAM gets slowly eaten by the loading applications: Anti-Virus, MSN Messenger, ZoneAlarm & FolderShare, etc. And when the hard drive activity stops, I launch Outlook 2007 B2TR. 

Little-by-little, the RAM usage climbs slowly as Outlook 2007 connects to RPC over HTTPS, syncs with SBS, and then continues to climb as Outlook updates the RSS feeds.  Eventually, RAM usage for Outlook peaks at 110 MB (pictured below).   

But 110,428 K of RAM usage isn’t the odd part.  A few minutes later, Outlook 2007 drops down to 15 MB of RAM.  It stays there for 2 minutes, and then climbs back up to 49 MB and sits happily ever after (even as I type this). 

So my question is, ‘How in the world did Outlook go down to 15 MB of RAM, and why?’  As you can see from the screen shot above, even MSN Messenger uses 15 MB.  This isn’t one of the great mysteries of life – just a curious observation to which I haven’t been able to Google an answer.

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Internet Explorer 7 Available for Download

IE7 is finally out of Beta.  Like a lot of folks, I ran the Beta on test machines and have been waiting for the final version.  I took the plunge Friday and installed the final version of IE7 on my main production machine, and so far, it works great!

Tabbed browsing (as in Firefox) is sweet.  And I love the ability to simultaneously open multiple ‘home’ pages at the start of the day (http://companyweb, the blog, etc.).

The search box in the top right rocks.  All good things aside, there is still one ‘weirdism’ that has persisted.  IE7 still renders WordPress pages odd at times, specifically; bullets don’t show up half the time, if you need assistance to get this in your business network you first have to start by hiring an IT expert an a service similar to this UK Business broadband provider .  It does this on XP & Vista, but it’s only a minor annoyance.  Anyway, here’s the low-down:

Minimum Requirements:

  • Processor – 233 MHz or faster (Pentium recommended)
  • OS – Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) (32 or 64-bit)
    or Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
  • RAM – 87 MB (for IE, 168-218 for 64-bit systems)
  • Display – Super VGA 800×600 x 256 colors

(Nope, no Windows 98, ME or XP SP1 support because they are dead).

Download URLs:

Important Internet Explorer 7 info for the SBS space:

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Vista Step-by-Step Guides for IT Pros

Windows Vista logoMicrosoft has released 15 ‘Step-by-Step Guides for IT Professionals‘ to assist in deploying or migrating to Windows Vista.  Each whitepaper is available as an individual download in Microsoft Word 2003 .doc format, and WGA is not required to access the downloads.

Date Published: 9/11/2006
Document Format:  Microsoft Word
Download Size: 118 – 748 KB, or 4.1 MB for all 15
Download URL: Click here

  • Deploying Vista (19 pages, 195 KB) 
  • Managing Group Policy ADMX Files (13 pages, 150 KB) 
  • Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide (39 pages, 414 KB) 
  • Performance Monitoring and Tuning (23 pages, 209 KB) 
  • Print Management (25 pages, 260 KB) 
  • Controlling Device Installation and Usage with Group Policy (49 pages, 640 KB) 
  • Device Driver Signing and Staging (44 pages, 748 KB) 
  • Managing Multiple Local Group Policy (24 pages, 274 KB https://usabitcoincasino.io/)  
  • User Account Control (11 pages, 146 KB)  
  • Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption (16 pages, 169 KB)  
  • Windows Vista Beta 2 Migration (14 pages, 152 KB)  
  • Windows Vista Beta 2 Trusted Platform Module Services (14 pages, 157 KB)  
  • Windows Vista Multilingual User Interface (14 pages, 158 KB)  
  • Windows Vista Speech Recognition (9 pages, 118 KB) 
  • Windows Vista Windows Meeting Space (44 pages, 388 KB)

 

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Gone In 6,000 Seconds

Question:  What do you do when Vista RC2 (2.5 GB) is taking over 10 hours to download?

Answer: Download the ISO from an international server instead of a USA server and be done in about 90 minutes.

  • Log in to your https://connect.microsoft.com/ account
  • Navigate to the desired ISO and click on the download link
  • When the Microsoft File Transfer Manager opens, click Options
  • Change your local language to something other than English (for example, German), click OK
  • Close the Microsoft FTM and confirm that you want to abort the transfer
  • Now, click on the download link again, and this time the Microsoft FTM will launch in another language
  • Your download will proceed as normal but much faster if it’s the middle of the night in the country you’re downloading from
  • When your download is finished, switch the local language back to English (this is the tricky part since the buttons are no longer in English)
  • The next time you use the Microsoft FTM, your buttons will be back to normal

See, the “Windows Vista (v5744-16384) for X86 and X64 (English)” ISO on an international server is the same ISO that’s stored on the USA servers. And since it was 5:00 AM in Germany when I started my download, I’ll be done before Oliver even wakes up.

Danke schoen Olli! 😉

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