Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Remember the gold old days when you could get a free computer as long as you agreed to pay a monthly dial-up provider like AOL $30 a month for slow, overpriced Internet access?

Well grab your credit cards and put on your bifocals! The deal has returned courtesy of Best Buy and Sprint, but this time the screen is a bit smaller.

ZDNet is reporting that the two companies are partnering to offer a Compaq-branded HP Mini 110c netbook for only 99 cents when you sign a two-year 3G Internet contract.

These free computer offers are REALLY tempting because consumers in a recession-battered economy get what they want right now – a new computer – by signing a promise to give more money later.

Breaking Down the Numbers

Under this deal, you get the $389 retail value netbook for only $.99. The contract costs about $60 a month, so if you multiply that by 24 months, you would find that the contract will cost you $1,441 over its two year term.

Obviously the Sprint 3G connection is portable, so you are paying a price premium on your Internet connection to be able to take it with you anywhere you go. Additionally, there are limits to how much Internet connectivity you can use before additional charges get lumped in.

For the sake of comparison, the cost for you to buy this netbook and use it on a budget cable modem or DSL connection would be much, much less expensive.

Try $20 a month for the DSL Internet connection and $389 for the netbook. The total cost over 2 years is only $869 – a savings of $572 over two years (nearly $24 a month).

Microsoft announced a special Windows 7 pre-order program today that offers the company’s newest operating system at a DEEPLY discounted price. But is your computer ready for Windows 7?

There are two basic camps of people who will be upgrading to Windows 7 – Vista users and XP users (Windows 2000 users can also technically upgrade, but in many cases their hardware is so old that ot will be incompatible).

Testing Windows Vista PCs for an Upgrade to Windows 7

Vista users will have a pretty easy time upgrading to Windows 7. Microsoft is promising that everything that works with Vista will work with Windows 7.

When you run the upgrade disk, Windows 7 moves all of your documents, settings, registry, and programs to a holding directory. It then installs a clean copy of Windows 7 and copies all of your information back over. This eliminates many of the layered operating system problems that plagued XP and older upgrades.

In theory, everything should just work after the installation, but if you want that extra measure of comfort, you can run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to check for any issues.

Testing Windows XP PCs for an Upgrade to Windows 7

Windows XP users will have a bit of a tougher time upgrading.

It is HIGHLY recommended that you ru the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. There is a good chance that some of your hardware and/or software will not be compatible with Windows 7.

As a rule of thumb, if your software is not compatible with Vista, it will not be compatible with Windows 7.

With that said, the business and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 have a special feature that allows you to download and run a virtualized copy of Windows XP from within Windows 7.

Think of it like running Windows XP as if it was a program, and then opening up other programs from within it. This will allow business users who rely on older software (and lazier IT staffs) to still run many of their old XP programs in a limited form. There is no additional charge for the virtualized XP download.

Before you get blind sided by a huge automatic update next week, you should know that Microsoft’s latest major update will not install on your computer without some additional preparation.

This morning Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 2 for manual download. It should start automatically downloading to your PC within the next 10 days. You need to prepare your computer for this BEFORE it happens.

If you do not do these things, your computer will not be able to successfully install Vista Service Pack 2.

BEFORE you allow Service Pack 2 to install you must do the following:

* Install Windows Vista Service Pack 1. You can’t install Service Pack 2 without first installing SP1. If you try, the installation will fail and could damage your Windows Vista installation.
* Install the Microsoft Servicing Stack Update. This is the most complicated Service Pack that Microsoft has ever released. For it to even install properly a patch has to be downloaded and installed first!
* Backup your data. If something goes wrong during the installation process, you don’t want to lose everything.

At any rate, if you are going to buy a baby sling or anything else form www.lucky-baby.com, use coupon code lucky17 to score a 10% off savings!

Every week I try to bring you some neat piece of free software that is just plain neat. One thing that everyone appreciates is an unobtrusive and accurate weather widget for Windows XP!

Since the dawn of online weather, people have always been excited by a weather widget on their computers. Unfortunately, most of the widgets out there that provide accurate forecasts are also packed full of spyware and other nastiness.

Last night I found a new weather widget that was pretty unique. It actually changes the text on your Start button (Windows XP only) to be the current temperature and conditions outside. Everyone knows what the Start button is for, so why not make use of the space, right?

I ran a complete scan of my PC after installing the widget and I have confirmed that the installation is spyware free.

The only marginal aspect of this widget is the search bar it ads to your Internet Explorer browser. If you use FireFox, you will not notice anything different, AND you will get the awesome widget in your start button.

Go ahead and give it a try and let me know what you think. It does have an uninstaller, so if you don’t like it, just open Add/Remove programs and remove it.

If you know of any cool free software you would like to have featured on this blog, let me know and I will test it out!

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