Hasta La Gadget!

Jul 07

WrapUp: Windows 7 Family Pack Pricing, Disabling Backstage View in Office 2010, and More

This article was written on July 14, 2009 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Windows 7 Family Pack Pricing
We’ve heard rumors that Microsoft would be offering a family pack for Windows 7, and more details appear to have been leaked. From the looks of it the family pack will be for 3 licenses of Windows 7 Home Premium (upgrade version), and will cost around $140.

Apple App Store: 1 Year Later
It’s been one year since Apple launched its App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In that year they’ve had over a billion downloads, and accumulated nearly 60,000 apps. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Pandora Can Afford New Streaming Rates
Up until now we’ve been hearing a lot of news about Pandora possibly shutting down because they couldn’t afford the rates required for streaming tunes to your computer. Good news for you Internet streamers… they have apparently struck up a deal that they’ll be able to afford.

Google Removes Beta Label from Gmail and Others
It was a long time coming, but Google has finally dropped the Beta label from Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk. They are obviously doing this because they don’t want to give businesses the impression that their services aren’t stable. If you’re sad about the removal of the Beta label (like me) you can always enable the Gmail Labs “Back to Beta” that puts the old logo back.

Sprint Offers Netbook for $0.01
We knew this was bound to happen eventually. Sprint has started to offer a netbook for a mere penny when you sign up for a two-year contract. With that contract you’re also tied in to a $60 per month plan.

How Large is a Petabyte?
One company is predicting that we’ll be at 1 petabyte drives in the next 2-5 years. That’s equal to 1,000 terabyte drives, or in other terms it’s equal to 13.3 years of HD video. Is that the sound of file sharers rejoicing?

Hulu Starts Serving Up ABC Shows
Hulu is expanding its content to include shows from the ABC television network. To start out it will have episodes from Grey’s Anatomy, and it will move on to some others later on.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Get the Classic Start Menu in Windows 7
Microsoft doesn’t offer a way to revert back to that classic Windows Start Menu, but some third-party solutions are starting to popup such as this one.

Better Gmail 2 Updated
Lifehacker has updated their Better Gmail 2 extension to work with the new label system that Gmail launched. More specifically you can once again nest labels inside of each other as if they were folders.

Quickly Resize an Image
Resizing an image can sometimes be a pain in the butt. This handy little tool, however, integrates itself into the Windows Explorer context menu for quick resizing. It’s also portable, which is always welcomed.

Opening Obscure File Types
Ever come across one of those files you have no idea how to open? This app will tell you what program you need to open any particular file, and also provides download links in case you don’t already have it installed.

Disabling Office 2010 “Backstage View”
In Microsoft Office 2010 clicking on the Office button (what was previously an orb) will take you to a place called Backstage View (codenamed Outspace) instead of showing the menu we were used to in Office 2007. A simple registry hack, however, will revert back to the old method of doing things.