Category: Geek

Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive

EDIT 2009/12/11: Microsoft Provides a tool to do this for you – Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. See the Microsoft Store Help on the ISO-Tool (http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool).

It surprised me to find that there are very few dead-simple guides to creating a bootable USB thumb/pen/flash drive for a Vista and/or Windows 7 installation.  I cobbled together the following from VistaPCGuy and another source I don’t remember right now.

This will walk through the steps to create a bootable USB flash drive for the purpose of installing a Vista or Windows 7 OS.  These instructions assume that you have a computer with Windows Vista installed on it.

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Outlook in a Google World

I’m an Outlook user, at home and at work, and I have been for the last 10 years. It syncs with my phone, so all of my contacts stay up to date, as well as my notes, calendar, and email. I can use it with any account, including my Google GMail account.  However, times they are a change’n and I’m willing to let more of my data live in the Cloud.  How do I keep using Outlook and have all my data on my laptop and phone in sync in that world?

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Dell XPS M1330: unboxing

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Christmas came early this year in the form of a brand new Dell M1330 XPS laptop. Being a staunch IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad devotee, switching to a Dell is a big jump for me.  So far I’ve been nothing but impressed.  The build quality is superb, it runs Vista like a champ, and the battery life has been good despite having the smaller of the two battery options.  Most surprising is the minimal amount of bundled crapware installed when it came out of the box.

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