If you have Windows 8 and want the Start menu back, the single best way is to use Start8 .   www.stardock.com/products/start8

So far is to run it via Parallels on the Mac.  In that setup, on a MacBook Pro with the way MacOS X Mountain Lion handles full screen it actually almost works.  Now if there was only  a way to make the charms bar less obnoxious.

Multiplicity 2 was released today. You can get it here: https://www.stardock.com/products/multiplicity/ Here’s a video of it in action: What makes Multiplicity special isn’t that it’s the first program ever that can enable users to use multiple computers at once. You can get a digital switch to do that and heck, there’s freeware out there that will let you use a keyboard and mouse to move back and forth between computers. Instead, what makes Multipl...

Anyone who has an SSD already know this. But there are still people out there who aren’t sure on this.  The performance difference of putting in an SSD is greater than any single upgrade I’ve ever seen since the days back in the early 90s of going from 4M to 8M in memory on Windows NT or OS/2.

October is going to be insanely good. I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon on order for my wife. A new Kindle white on order for me. And of course the iPhone 5 will be generally available. It does appear technological progress and innovation is accelerating.              

  http://www.systemcomic.com/2011/08/03/so-youre-mad-about-something-on-the-internet/ A great way to diffuse a raging Internet troll.

For the last few weeks, the poor IT team have been battling spam bots. Let’s give a shout out to all our hard working moderators who have been able to clean it up quickly and the IT team that’s been making it harder for them to do it.

It's no secret I'm not a fan of the way Microsoft is handling Windows 8.  So how could they have done it? First, simplify/unify the underlying platform in a way that developers can feel confident that they're not going to get screwed over again (That Silverlight knowledge in my brain is going to be stored right with my OS/2 SOM storage). That means .NET .NET .NET.  You make sure that if you write for .NET 4.5 that it'll work on any Windows 8 target.  I don...

Playing around with that this evening.  Trying to migrate from my 2010 Mac Pro. Taking a lot longer than I’d like. I also have a ThinkPad X1-carbon on the way. I’ll let you know how that goes when I get it.

I'm impressed. I can blog to the stardock ecosystem with the iPhone app Blog Writer. I just use my forum user Id and pw with the metaweblog URL: https://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

If you have Windows 8 and you’re finding it annoying to get around the desktop, you can download Tiles (it’s free). This has been a life saver for me as it lets me quickly get to the things I want to and manage them as such. It’s also completely compatible with the charms bar and the Metro (Modern UI) experience.  

If I knew then what I know now… Recently on my favorite non-Stardock site, Quarter to Three we celebrated its 10 year anniversary.  10 years ago was before Galactic Civilizations (for Windows), Sins of a Solar Empire, ObjectDock, Fences, Tiles, Demigod, etc. So what was my biggest internet activity 10 years ago and before? Moderating our forums.  I also was a moderator of Neowin.net’s forums when it started out. And let me tell you, nothing creates long-term animosity ...

  Freshly installed over my Windows 7 system.  Normally I would do a full rebuild but most people who are upgrading aren’t going to do that. Remembering the experience formerly known as Metro: First Impressions A lot of tools are now very difficult to find.  I can’t find the event viewer. Typing it in the search area brings up nothing.  In fact, uninstalling things is actually quite a pain because now you have to first go to control panel...

For those of you who have an MSDN subscription, Windows 8 (the RTM build) is now available.  Have you tried it? If so, what’s the verdict? I’ll have my thoughts later this week.

Let’s look at 3 web stats that tell us a little bit about the demographics of who visits us. First, we’ll use our homepage: Stardock.com. Then, we’ll look at our most popular game, SinsOfASolarEmpire.com And lastly, we’ll look at our most popular desktop utility, Fences. These stats are for the month of April, 2012. Who visit Stardock.com? By Browser: Firefox (34%), Chrome (32%), Internet Explorer (24%) By OS: Windows 7 (58%), XP (34%), Vista (6%) T...