When Microsoft made it clear to users who wanted to use the Windows 7 beta and release candidate builds that there would be no upgrade path for them, it also announced that the release candidate would live for a few months past the official street date of Windows 7. That bill is coming due on Monday when the Windows 7 release candidate will start to automatically reboot every two hours. It turns out, though, that there is an unofficial upgrade path for adventurous users who aren't afraid to get their hands a little bit dirty.

It's important to note that because this is an in-place upgrade, the end system that you wind up with could potentially be less stable than just doing a clean install. There are also two ways to do it: one involves upgrading from the RC to Windows 7 Ultimate, the most expensive version. The other requires more tweaking but will support any version of Windows 7.

Before you begin, it's strongly recommended that you back up your data. Once you've done that, disconnect any USB peripherals that are not mission critical to prevent conflicts. They can be reconnected once you're finished.

Next, insert your Windows 7 DVD or USB key into your computer. Do not run the installer, but instead copy the entire contents to your hard drive. You'll need around 8 GB. If you only have access to a disk image of Windows 7, you can extract the contents of the ISO using 7-Zip or IZArc.

From there, you'll need to open in Notepad the file cversion.ini, located in the Sources folder. In Notepad, change the string "MinClient=7223.0" to "MinClient=7000.0" and then Save it and close Notepad. If you're using the RC, you could change it to 7100, but this way you're safe whether you've got the beta or the RC. (Note that the beta started auto-rebooting back in July 2009, so it's unlikely anybody's still using it.)

If you're updating from the RC to Windows 7 Ultimate, you can skip this next step. If you're updating to the Home Premium or Professional version, these next steps are essential. In terms of features, the RC is the same as Ultimate, and while you can upgrade Home Premium or Pro to Ultimate, you can't downgrade Ultimate to a lesser version.

Open the Registry on your installed version of the Release Candidate and open the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version folder. In the right-hand pane, you should see two Registry keys: EditionID and ProductName. If you're upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium, both keys should be changed to read "HOMEPREMIUM". Likewise, for Windows 7 Professional, the keys should be changed to "PROFESSIONAL".

From there, just run the installer from the Windows 7 directory you created when you copied the files to your hard drive. When you reach the Upgrade or Custom option, choose Upgrade and follow the instructions. Any programs that you have been running in Compatibility Mode will flag a warning, so you might want to consider uninstalling them until you've finished upgrading. However, this is nothing more than a speed bump, and won't derail the installation.

Although this upgrade path has been well-tested by others, it's important to stress that the process isn't supported by Microsoft.

(via Icrontic and the How-to Geek)

Originally posted at Windows 7 Insider

Critical security fixes and improvements to the upgrade path from Thunderbird 2 are the key changes in Thunderbird 3.0.2, released today for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Three security fixes, all listed as critical, address an integer overflow that caused crashes in the libtheora video library, a memory safety issue in the liboggplay media library, and crashes caused by memory corruption.

There were also changes made to the in-house upgrade from Thunderbird 2. Thunderbird 3 was released last December, but many users encountered problems including data loss and functionality bugs when upgrading. This fix released today addresses Mac users only, and prevents the e-mail client from deleting the contents of local trash sub-folders during the upgrade procedure.

The way that Thunderbird handles IMAP was also improved, as fixes were implemented for memory leaks and e-mails falsely marked as unread. The full change log can be read here.

We know, tax time is the pits, but if it makes you feel better, we did ours six times while researching the pros and cons of TurboTax (Windows|Mac|Online), Tax Act (Windows|Online), and H&R Block At Home (Windows|Mac|Online), formerly called H&R Block Tax Cut. So we know a thing or three about taxes. (And we hate them six times more than you do.)

Obligatory disclaimer: We tested both the online and desktop versions of the Deluxe version of TaxAct, TurboTax, and H&R Block At Home (called Ultimate Bundle in TaxAct, since it includes the State return). We prepared our Federal and California state taxes online and on a Windows 7 computer, using our real W-2s and tax forms, so our experience may not reflect your personal situation.

What you need to know about tax prep software

• Which one?: Most software comes in four levels of guidance covering simple returns (the 1040 EZ form) to the complex. Most people go with Deluxe, which walks you through deductions for things like home owners and renters, investment income, dependents, and charitable donations. Premier or Premium adds on home ownership, rental property, and more complicated investments and deductions; Business keeps an eye on small-business owners after going through personal investments and deductions.



• E-filing versus printing: E-filing can net you a refund in as few as 8 days, whereas refunds on tax forms you print and mail can take up to 6 weeks. Most programs include at least one free Federal e-file for one tax return, but additional e-filing costs rack up after that. Many packages charge extra to e-file State returns or returns for additional family members.


• Online and desktop: All three programs offer online and desktop versions. H&R Block At Home and TurboTax support Windows and Mac; TaxAct is Windows-only. Online versions mostly mirror desktop versions, but with minor differences. Desktop software is typically licensed for up to five free Federal e-files (you can print off as many as you'd like), while online tax prep usually includes one free Federal e-file. Online tax returns are encrypted and stored on the provider's Web servers. Desktop returns are stored locally on your computer.

TurboTax vs. TaxAct, vs. H&R Block At Home: What's the difference?

When it comes down to it, the actual content of the tax interview--the questions and sections that the tax apps guide you through--is nearly identical in these competing programs, including the online and desktop variations. Clarity in language, extra tools, and help and support features are key differentiators, not to mention the price. We sum these up below. See more pricing charts here. Read full reviews on TurboTax, TaxAct, and H&R Block At Home.

	TurboTax Deluxe 2009	H&R Block At Home Deluxe 2009	TaxAct Ultimate Bundle 2009
Good	Strong importing options for W-2 and investment income; robust help files and community forum; new bookmarking feature. Separate audit support apps.	Now imports investment information; improved interface is easier to navigate. Includes (some) live support and live audit support. "Personal Tax Guide" for select professions.	Significantly lower prices; decent calculation tools.
Bad	Tina, the useless online digital assistant; too many summary screen interrupt flow, especially online.	Investment importing list still small; some gaps in Help files.	Most legal jargon; least amount of help and support. Weak importing; won't import investment information. Stripped-down interface.
Bottom line	TurboTax isn't the cheapest option, but it's clearly worded and saves you the most time when importing data. Its bundled tools make it worth the extra cost for those who don't anticipate needing personalized help.	The included support features make H&R Block At Home a sound value for those who prefer extra guidance, though the software still plays catch-up to TurboTax.	If you're a tax prep whiz who just wants to fly through the return with the fewest distractions and limited guidance, TaxAct is the most affordable of the bunch and netted us the same final result as the others.

User e-mail addresses on Facebook have come a long way. For years, Facebook converted them into a static image to keep potential spammers and data thieves at bay. As a result, it made copying them a serious pain, as you'd need to have whatever e-mail tool you were using in one window, and that user's profile in another.

Earlier this month, Facebook changed it to plain text, which lets you copy and paste the address instead.

If you're too lazy to do that, or just find yourself doing it several times a week, you could save yourself some trouble by installing Facebook E-mail Links, a new Firefox extension that automatically converts these links into a mailto: URL. That means the next time you click on someone's e-mail address, it'll open up in whatever local or Web-based e-mail tool you use.

This is one of those great examples of a one-trick extension that you can install and forget about. And in case you're confused about how to tweak Firefox to use something other than Outlook (or whatever else the default e-mail client is on your computer), you can follow this how-to guide from 2008, which still works.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

Confession time: In the nearly five years since iTunes began selling TV shows, I've purchased exactly zero. Why? Because I think Apple's $1.99-per-episode price tag is too high.

Apple seems to think so, too, which is why the company is reportedly looking to drop show prices to 99 cents. Unfortunately, the networks aren't too keen on the idea, as indicated in last Sunday's New York Times story: "Networks Wary of Apple's Push to Cut Show Prices."

I'm not sure why Hollywood's number-crunchers fail to grasp basic economics, but I think we should help them get the message: lower your prices and more people will buy your product.

I mean, look, networks, your shows are already in the can. It's not like you're producing them exclusively for this medium. And Apple provides the bandwidth for delivery, so cutting prices costs you nothing--unless, of course, sales fail to increase accordingly, in which case you can go ahead and raise them again.

I know we're only talking about a buck difference here, but having been "raised" on 99-cent songs (which, incidentally, have a lot more replay value than last week's episode of "Parks and Recreation") and, increasingly, 99-cent apps, I cannot and will not spend $1.99 on a TV show.

But 99 cents? That's my magic number. And I'll wager plenty of other iPhone and iPod Touch owners feel the same. Take our latest poll:

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Read It Later's new trick is one that long-time users with little time to waste are likely to enjoy. The bookmarking service, which was designed to help people organize and view bookmarks from multiple computers, is launching (in beta) a "digest" that will convert a person's bookmarks into a news page that's sorted by category.

A few years ago this could have been considered a simple exercise in machine tagging. Where Digest does things a bit differently is to automatically create these categories based on what people are saving, so say you never bookmarked stories about business or world travel--they're just not going to show up as categories. However, if either of those things are topics you wish to turn into categories, the tool lets you create your own filters by keyword.

What this means for Read It Later users is that their bookmarks will go from list form to a news page that can be more easily parsed, depending on what kind of content that you feel like consuming. This includes videos, which get sorted out separately from written content. In the future, there will also be "smart templates" that will present content differently depending on where it's from and what it is, giving items like videos and images more prominence--the same way a news site would.

For users of the bookmarking service, both frequent and sporadic, this should be a welcome addition. As Read It Later creator Nate Weiner explained to me in an e-mail, "The order in which you saved things is not necessarily the order you want to read them." That issue continues to be one of the main weaknesses of personal bookmarking sites, which is where social bookmarking services like Delicious have seen success. When people save a bookmark to these places, they can see if--and how many--others have also saved it, which adds an extra element of filtering and promotion.

To that end, Weiner is adding sharing to digests that will let people open up their pages for others to view. Right now, there's not a way to subscribe to these pages like people can do on Twitter and Tumblr, but it's a big change from the standard version of Read It Later, which only lets readers share their bookmarks with a somewhat-vanilla RSS feed.

Digest is going to be a free feature to all Read It Later users while it's in beta. Weiner said he plans to make it into a more fully baked product within the next few weeks at a cost yet to be determined. In the meantime, those interested can sign up here to test out the feature.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

Video calling on Skype has been hit or miss over the years, but with some back-end changes in Skype for Windows 4.2, the company readies its VoIP client for high definition.

Without providing much detail, Skype noted in a blog post that when high-def Webcams pop onto the market, Skype's update "includes almost everything you'll need" to place HD video calls.

Longtime Skype fans will also be pleased to see the return of two features that have been absent since a significant update to Skype 4.0 just over a year ago. These are Skype Access, a pay-per-minute Wi-Fi hot-spot connector, and call transferring that kicks active calls to another Skype number, mobile phone, or land line. Although we saw Skype reincorporate call transfers and Skype Access in last December's beta release, Thursday's update to version 4.2 makes it official.

A year ago at the Intuit booth at MacWorld, Quicken founder Scott Cook pressed a CD into my hand. It contained a beta version of the company's long-overdue update of the Mac version of Quicken, called Quicken Financial Life. Eagerly awaiting its release were Mac users who needed a personal finance app with some meat on its bones. They were getting frustrated with Quicken's maker, Intuit. The ancient Quicken 2007, which was the last new version of Quicken for the Mac, was so unloved that you didn't have to look far to find people running Windows (inside Parallels or VMWare Fusion) on their Macs just so they could use one of the grown-up versions of Quicken that was available for the PC.

QFL never saw the light of day. It was unloved even inside Intuit. Before the product could make it out of beta, Intuit bought Mint.com, the upstart online personal financial information company. Mint's CEO, Aaron Patzer (interview), became the general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance Group, and took as one of his first jobs overseeing the re-creation of Quicken Financial Life into Quicken Essentials. Features were dropped from QFL, the interface was redesigned, and Patzer made sure new users could set up the product in 10 to 15 minutes.

Quicken Essentials, the first new version of Quicken for the Mac since 2007, finally ships Thursday, at a retail price of $59.99.

The app is a modern financial product. It's approachable instead of feature-laden, and in most areas it's very Mac-like. It's clearly not a Mac port of the Windows version of Quicken that old fogeys like me are accustomed to. It's missing features like bill payment, and it's no good at tracking investments.

In exchange for its limited feature set, Quicken Essentials gets ease of use. It is very easy to set up if you're starting from scratch. Once your accounts are hooked in, an Overview page gives you a super-clean Mint-like screen that shows you where your money is going to and coming from. Patzer says Quicken is very smart about automatically categorizing expenses so you can identify your habits accurately. It aggregates categorization corrections from other users to continuously improve its performance (the Windows version, by contrast, uses Yellow Pages lookups).

Like the now-departed Microsoft Money, Quicken Essentials will show you activity in individual accounts or in a combined ledger with everything. But its real benefit is its budgeting tools. Here again its smart categorization helps a lot: It does a good job of analyzing your spending habits to help you create realistic budgets, and it has a good, simple screen to keep track of them.

As I said, Quicken Essentials doesn't do bill payment for you. Patzer says that only 6 percent of Quicken Windows users use this feature; most people today pay bills either through their banks' online systems or at the site of the companies billing them. Quicken Essentials is also a miserable product if you want to keep track of investments. You can't even enter investment transactions manually. Quicken Essentials will download and record your transactions, but you can't see them. You can't get more detail than current values of your holdings, in fact. There are no historical charts or other forms of analysis. Patzer says that in 2011, a Deluxe version of Quicken for the Mac may include these features.

There's also no integration with Intuit's consumer tax product, TurboTax.

Quicken Essentials features "the mother of all file converters," Patzer told me. It will read data files from any version of Quicken as well as from Microsoft Money. But you do need to run old files through an external converter, which I did not receive in time to test.

The Mint aesthetic is clearly part of Quicken Essentials, and that's good. Patzer told me he's aware that Mint will never appeal to a large number of users who don't trust a company, even Intuit, to store all their financial passwords on computers outside of their control. For many of these people, Quicken Essentials is a very good solution. The app is simple, attractive, and useful. It doesn't overreach and it's not bloated. However, people with complex financial lives may run into walls with the product.

Related: Mint founder on branding: Keep it simple.

Originally posted at Rafe's Radar