Putting the Windows 7 installation on a USB thumb drive has a few advantages—a small USB key is much more convenient for carrying around than a DVD, the OS will actually install much faster, and you can use a USB key to install Windows 7 on systems that do not have a DVD drive, such as a netbook. In fact, you can even install Windows 7 on netbooks that have fairly modest hardware. Dennis Chung, an IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft recently posted a video demonstrating how easy it is to prepare your thumb drive and use it to install Windows 7. Here’s a quick look at the process: Read more: USB Key to Install Windows 7

Update:  29 Sep 2009 – Microsoft Security Essentials is now available for download.

Testing of Microsoft Security Essentials is complete and will be released in the next few weeks as a downloaded application. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free antivirus program to combat spyware, viruses, trojans and rootkits on Windows machines.

Read more: Microsoft Security Essentials

It is important periodically to perform system maintenance in the Windows operating system.  These brief steps will clean out unnecessary temporary files no longer required and defragment your hard drive which will rearrange files stored to improve read/write access times.  These examples refer to Windows XP. Read more: Windows disk clean-up and defrag

Ever wanted a method to update your PC easily? There are so many applications that you have as your “Core set of Apps” which often you may overlook. For example:

Adobe Reader
Adobe Flash
Adobe Shockwave
Antivirus
Anti-Spyware
Java Runtime
Just to name a few…

Read more: How to update your PC software easily