It's a Family Affair

Last month, Microsoft announced that the Windows 7 Family Pack would be back in time to celebrate Windows 7's first birthday. Well, that delicious 3-licenses-for-$150 package has returned to the Microsoft Store and various US retailers. It will be available outside the US starting on October 22nd.

With the Family Pack, you get three Windows 7 Home Premium licenses, which includes Microsoft's home networking software, HomeGroup. You also get Windows Live Essentials, now with the addition of the Windows Live Mesh syncing app. Basically, this is the cheapest way to go if your household has more than one Windows machine. The only catch is that it's a limited run, so you have to get it while supplies last.

Space Cadet

Most dental offices tend to leave very little space for the dentist's private office, which is surprising since we often spend so much time there. Having a well designed and uncluttered space can have an effect on your day. Here are the Top 10 Ways To Organize and Streamline Your Workspace.

Form and Function

Most PC designs are...well, god awful boring. Design-focused PC makers are launching laptops, netbooks, and displays—and upgrading some existing models—to show off Windows 7, which launched on Oct. 22. Many of these products are thinner or lighter than their predecessors while some introduce multitouch capabilities. Here are 20 of the coolest new designs, from pricey to more afford

Rest and Relaxation

Dealing with constant Internet Explorer issues? Why not get it back to it's original state. IE Restorator can reset Internet Explorer to its default settings, re-register both 32 and 64-bit version of IE, and perform Winsock resets and flush the DNS cache.

Time Sync

Insync is a new syncing and backup service similar to Dropbox , but comes with a bunch of great additional features, like syncing your Google Docs and Gmail contacts.

Insync creates an always-in-sync folder on your computer that copies files to the cloud and to other machines running Insync. It also syncs your Google Docs to this folder as well, which is pretty great. If anyone shares a Google Doc with you it'll show up in your Insync folder, on your Insync page, and (of course) in Google Docs

Silence is Golden

System Silencer provides you with a long list of actions you can have your computer do once you leave it idle for a while. You can set it to do things like mute the sound (and then unmute it for you when you come back), minimize all windows, hide certain windows, kill certain processes, run programs, and of course – lock the workstation altogether.

Each operation can have its own timeout. So, you can have your desktop computer mute the sound once you leave it for three minutes, and then it can lock the workstation if you don't come back for 10 minutes.

I think it's handy for desktop computers more than laptops (leaving your laptop to fend for itself is not such a great idea under most circumstances), but it does have "Battery mode" and "Desktop mode" checkboxes for each operation. That means you can have your laptop automatically lock itself within one minute of idle time when it's running on battery power (for example). It's pretty fine-grained.

System Silencer is fully portable and resides within a single EXE file. It does create a silence.cfg file when you first start it up, though, so don't put it on your desktop (unless you enjoy having extra icons that don't do anything).

Tweak Tweak

In the past, I've talked about tweaking apps for Windows 7. One more worth knowing about is AeroTweak, a fully-portable Windows tweaking app which allows you to modify and disable a wide range of features.

AeroTweak lets you painless flip the switch on things like AeroShake, taskbar thumbnails, and low disk space notifications. It also provides one-click disabling of autoruns on all your drives, which is a nice way to enhance your system's security (what with all those worms spreading from infected USB flash drives).

It's also a bit like a gpedit.msc (the policy editor included in professional versions) replacement for Windows 7 home edition systems -- which means those of you who want to quickly lock down things like Task Manager, Control Panel, and registry editing can use AeroTweak to do it quickly via a neatly-organized gui.