You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

What You’re In For

With all the hype around cloud computing and no-configuration-required hosted services, you don’t hear about the joys of running great software on your own server very much. The fact is, if you’re just a casual user who doesn’t know if you’ll stick to blogging over the long haul, or if you don’t want to spend a little time maintaining WordPress, you should sign up for a hosted blog at WordPress.com or Blogger or TypePad. (Also, this tutorial is not for you.)

But if you’re willing to keep WordPress updated religiously, you get access to a whole world of WP plug-ins that add features to your site, the opportunity to create and tweak custom WordPress themes, and a huge sense of accomplishment. In the most recent version of WordPress, keeping your installation up-to-date is a matter of clicking a link when you get notified to do so.

Everything you need to know about installing WordPress is right here. Got it up and running? Let’s get to customizing.

Initial configuration

The first thing you want to do on your WordPress blog is set up a new author with administrative access. Don’t use the default “admin” user to write your posts; create your custom username and give it admin privileges. Then, log out of WordPress and back in as your new username. For security reasons, some folks like to delete the admin user completely (as some WordPress attacks have used it to do bad things to your blog). Once you’ve got your administrative account working, add other authors to the list of users who might be posting to your blog.

Now it’s time to cruise through WP’s settings area and configure things just how you like ’em. First, set up your post permalinks to look prettier for both humans and search bots. WordPress’ default post permalink looks like http://example.com/?p=123. Instead, under Settings>Permalinks, select something like http://example.com/2009/09/welcome-to-my-blog.

Next up, configure how you want comments to work on your blog. Under Settings>Discussion, you can enable comments and set other advanced options, like whether or not users have to be logged into your site to comment, or if comments should automatically close on posts after a certain number of days, if user avatars show up, or what words in a comment should automatically mark it as spam.

Speaking of, spam comments is a ridiculously epic problem across the internet for all blogs, so how you set up comments will mean the difference between miserable hours spent gardening V14gRa and “check out my sexy webcam!!” comments or not. Coming from Lifehacker’s “must register to post here” model, I checked off “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” If you don’t want to put up the registration hurdle in front of your commenters, make sure you install the Akisment spam-killing plug-in (more on that below).

Must-have plug-ins

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. When you're logged into WordPress, click on Plugins, and search for the name of the plug-in you want to install (which you can do without involving your FTP client). You can also just search on keyword, too—to find Twitter related plug-ins, just enter Twitter. The plug-ins that you use will depend on how you want your site to work and look, but here are a few that every WP user can benefit from.

WordPress Database Backup (Backup): Running your own server and database means that if things go wrong, it’s up to you to have a backup. This plug-in can email a full backup of your WordPress database on a schedule to an address you specify. I’ve had great success building my WordPress site locally with the backup this plug-in created; however, the other resident WP expert here on staff, The How-To Geek, recommends using the old-school cron job for "mysqldump -uUser -pPassword databasename > filename.bak" approach. No matter how you do it, make sure you’re backing up both your blog’s database and files. It’s worth consulting with your blog hosting provider about the best way for you to do this, too.

FD Feedburner Plug-in (Feeds): Google-owned FeedBurner is a must-use for anyone who publishes RSS feeds, like your blog does. FeedBurner saves you bandwidth costs by hosting your blog’s feed and offers statistics about how many people are reading it; this plug-in will redirect your blog’s feed to FeedBurner for you.

WordPress.com Stats (Stats): See what posts are most popular using this up-to-the-minute statistics plug-in, right inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress.com stats doesn’t count visits to your own blog, and unlike the richer Google Analytics service, there’s no day-long delay to see what’s happening on your site. To run this plug-in, you have to get a WordPress.com API key (it’s free) and enter it into the plug-in’s settings.

Search Meter (Stats): If you have a search box on your site, you’ll want Search Meter, a plug-in which shows you what readers are looking for and finding (or not) on your site. Search meter also offers widgets you can add to your site which show readers what other readers are searching for.

WP SuperCache (Optimization): The first time a highly-trafficked site like Digg links to your blog, you’ll wish you had installed this plug-in, which maintains high-speed, database-call free “cached” copies of your WordPress pages on your server. Your site will run faster and won’t buckle under the strain of a lot of traffic if you’re caching it with this excellent plug-in.

Akismet (Comments Spam killer): Because comment spam can get so bad, WordPress now ships with the Akismet spam filtering plug-in. Since I’m requiring user registration to leave comments on my WordPress blog, I don’t have any experience with how good Akismet is (and haven’t had any spam at all), but word on the street is it’s absolutely essential for sites with open comments. Like WordPress.com stats, Akismet requires a WordPress.com API key.

Finally, to make your site as accessible to Google and other web search engines as possible, a few Search Engine Optimization SEO plug-ins help. I use All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.

Make Your WordPress Theme Yours

If you’ve got HTML and CSS chops, you can make your WordPress theme sing your tune. (For advanced stuff, some PHP skills come in handy, too.) First you want to start with a base theme. WordPress’ default theme is ok, but if you google “free WordPress themes” or take note of what themes sites you like already use, you’ll find an insane number of gorgeous and eye-catching site layouts. Picking your theme is one of the most fun (and most time-consuming) parts of setting up WordPress. It will be hard to choose!

Once you've installed the theme you want by downloading the .zip file and putting it in your WordPress themes folder, you can dig into the CSS and markup and make it your own. WordPress offers a theme editor in its interface which lets you update files on the fly (under Appearance>Editor). While this is convenient, it's also dangerous if you hit the wrong key, save the file, and don't have a backup. My recommendation is to set up WordPress and your theme of choice on your own computer, edit it in your favorite text editor, and upload it to your live server when it’s perfect. I started my WordPress blog with Lucian Marin’s Journalist theme, and made it mine by adding color to the header and tweaking how comments look.

If you’ve got patience and custom HTML you want to turn into a brand new WordPress theme, copy the default theme’s files into a new folder and get to hacking. The WordPress Codex is an invaluable resource for both starter reading and reference as you go. That is, when you get to the part where you’re thinking “WTF is wp_list_comments?”, Google it and you’ll find the function reference at the codex. It took me a full weekend of pretty intense theming work to get my first custom theme done and ready to go live, so give yourself some time, and most importantly, have fun with it. Here are some tips and links from my Twitter followers on creating a custom WordPress theme.

Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My!

The easiest way to customize your WordPress blog without digging into code or your FTP client is to do so with widgets. The latest versions of WordPress offer drag-and-drop custom modules you can add to and remove from your blog. When you’re logged into WordPress’ admin interface, under Appearance, click on “Widgets” to see what’s available and add and remove what you want on your site’s sidebar (or top bar or bottom bar, depending on where your theme puts it).

Advanced trickery

Here are a few more tips for advanced WordPress hackers who want to troubleshoot or try even more customization:

• Use multiple custom sidebars: WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. (For example, the sidebar that shows up on a post page can look different than the one on the front page.)
• Troubleshoot slowness and other problems with Firebug: Every web developer knows that the Firebug Firefox extension is absolutely essential when developing any site, and it’s true for WordPress, too. When my WP site went down because of multiple background 404’s doing resource-sucking searches, Firebug revealed the problem and so I knew how to fix it.
• Use tags to display content differently: You can use conditional tags to display different types of content on your blog in different ways, like a short link or big photograph. I use has_tag to display “quick links” with smaller inline headlines on my front page by assigning the tag “brief.”
• Set up a “staging” server: Once your blog’s up and running and live, you don’t want to make huge changes to it with the whole world watching. Set up WordPress on your local computer, hack away on your theme and/or plug-ins, then upload your changes when they’re complete and ready.

This post only scratches the surface of WordPress customization possibilities. The good news is WordPress' open nature and huge community means that you can find the answer to almost any WP question hitting up Google—or in worst case, asking the forums. Special thanks to the author of this CSS Tricks post who also writes the excellent Digging into WordPress blog, which I referenced for this post.

What did I miss? What are your favorite WordPress tricks, hacks, themes, plug-ins, security measures, and widgets? Shout ’em out in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, loves herself a little WordPress hacking. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Windows/Mac: Google’s free desktop photo organizer is stepping up to iPhoto’s killer feature by adding face recognition and syncing it with Picasa Web Albums, making it easy to send Uncle Bob every single photo you’ve got of Aunt Marla.

The new Picasa 3.5 contains a facial recognition feature similar to the one already present on Picasa Web Albums, but letting it run over your likely vast collection of assorted photos stashed on your hard drive is a lot more convenient. Picasa creates a new sidebar menu list of "People," and asks you to name the folks it finds in its main "Scanning" menu. If you're signed into Web Albums with a Google account stuffed with contacts, that's pretty easy, actually—just start typing a name, then select the contact that pops up as you type.

You'll probably have to leave Picasa running a long time to get through everything—after 20 minutes, it's about 9 percent through with 13.8GB of photos on my laptop. As you might guess, some of the facial matching is hit and miss, but you get to approve any of the picks Picasa isn't absolutely sure of, and if someone's in your photo library who you don't want to take the time to tag, you can send them to the "Ignored People" pile. All this is in service of a better search function, so you can more easily find photos of yourself and your spouse, your spouse and her friend, or any combination of people, dates, or other search parameters.

Here’s Google’s video demonstration of how name tagging works in Picasa 3.5:

As noted in the video, the other additions to Picasa 3.5 are a tool to use integrated Google Maps pickers to geo-tag photos, and an option to import photos from a camera card onto Picasa Web Albums directly. Neat features, but kind of underwhelming paired with something like facial recognition, no?

Read up on Picasa’s name tag features, grab it at the link, and tell us how well facial recognition is working, or not, with your own photos in the comments.

Windows 7 only: The latest DivX tech preview adds support for MKV video files to Windows 7, so you can use them in Media Center, Media Player, and even show thumbnails in Windows Explorer.

Windows 7 already includes native support for AVI/DivX files, but MKV files are quickly becoming the standard format for media files in HD—and while you can play them using everybody’s favorite, VLC Player, you won’t be able to use them in Media Center or stream to an extender device like the Xbox360, and the thumbnails will just show a generic icon. Installing the DivX Tech Preview enables MKV support, so the video files will work in any application that relies on Microsoft’s native media support, and even adds hardware acceleration for video decoding (if your video card supports it). Readers should note that you can continue to use VLC to actually play the files, but install this to get thumbnails working.

Hit the link for the free download (free registration required), and make sure to check out the CyberNet News post for the full explanation, including some extra links for additional filters to make sure all of your media works.

After three games in three different provinces on three consecutive nights, the Calgary Flames are taking the day off.

They charter to Edmonton from Vancouver this afternoon and then rest in anticipation of a pre-season clash Wednesday with Mike Comrie and the Oilers.

Darryl Sutter is still busy, though. The GM has assigned RW Riley Armstrong, C Garth Murray, LW Kyle Greentree, LW David Van der Gulik, RW Carsen Germyn, and LW Cam Cunning to the Abbotsford Heat.

That leaves the Flames with 32 players in training camp: three goaltenders, nine defencemen and 20 forwards.

One of those forwards, of course, is 41-year-old Theoren Fleury.

Google Sync, released earlier this year, keeps your calendar and contacts synced between your mobile phone and Google account. Now they’ve added that great, final bit of ultimate sync support by pushing Gmail to your phone.

If you’re sporting an iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile phone, or Nokia S60 phone, you can now set up Google Sync to actively push your email to your device, ensuring you’re never stuck waiting around for an update to see what’s new or wondering if various work-around alternatives will follow through. From the Official Google Mobile Blog:

Sync works with your phone’s native email application, so there’s no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.

Check out the full post at the link below to see how to get Google Sync if you’re not already a user and how to enable Gmail syncing if you’ve already got a Google Sync account.

The NHL has suspended New York Islanders forward Pascal Morency for the remainder of the pre-season and five regular-season games for leaving the bench to fight Calgary’s Dion Phaneuf.

A streak of hot weather in Saskatchewan broke temperature records across the province Saturday, Environment Canada said.

A wrinkle in semantics means Toronto’s CN Tower will retain its place in the Guinness Book of World Records – but not as the world’s tallest free standing structure.

New York Islanders rookie Pascal Morency was suspended indefinitely by the NHL on Friday for leaving the bench to go after Calgary defenceman Dion Phaneuf during Thursday’s pre-season game.

Theo Fleury, returning to hockey after being away for 6 years, scored the only goal of the shootout to lead the Calgary Flames to a 5-4 preseason victory over the New York Islanders on Thursday night. Olli Jokinen had two goals and an assist for the Flames, but it the 41-year-old Fleury who had the crowd chanting his name.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

This afternoon, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company is now beginning the process of notifying selected participants that they have been accepted for inclusion in the company’s Technical Preview program for Office Web Apps. But in another huge example of burying the lead, a blog post that went live minutes ago from Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall states that the complete Web Apps suite, once officially released, will be “available” to all Windows Live users.

As the spokesperson confirmed to Betanews, Hall’s implication is accurate: Everyday users of Windows Live services (which are already free) and who have SkyDrive storage on those services (the first 25 GB of which are free) will have the entire suite available for use from any modern Web browser. A video released today showed Excel Web App (that’s the formal name for it now) running on a Mozilla Firefox 3.5 browser, and on a Windows 7 platform. We’re still awaiting word on non-Windows browsers.

There will be no cost, the spokesperson told us this afternoon, for users of Windows Live SkyDrive. When the Web Apps suite is released, all of them will notice the addition of a Documents tab, from which they’ll be able to launch Office documents. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will be the first three in the suite, although Microsoft confirmed today that an online version of OneNote will be next.

Here’s the specific quote from Hall: “Over time, as the final version is released, the Office Web Apps will become available to all 500 million+ users of Hotmail, Messenger, and other Windows Live services.”

So how will Microsoft make money from this? Businesses will be able to subscribe to a version that the company spokesperson described as providing “more security and control.” Unlike Windows Live, this version will be hosted directly through Microsoft Online Services, where it’s presumed availability and uptime are guaranteed along with safety and stability.

For business users — especially those that are already hosting SharePoint sites — there will be the ability to host Office Web Apps on their own sites, for their own users, potentially as an alternative to deploying the physical software on users’ computers directly.

“All Office volume Licensing customers will have access to the Office Web Apps that they can run themselves on premises,” the spokesperson told Betanews. “This competitive differentiator is an example of the choice we are offering our customers. More than 90 million Office annuity customers will have access to Office Web Apps at launch.”

3:15 pm EDT September 17, 2009 · Betanews received some clarifications from Microsoft later in the day. First of all, additional storage space beyond the first 25 GB will not be available through Windows Live SkyDrive. That might have been a good extra source of revenue for the company for Office Web Apps users, but for now, the spokesperson told us Microsoft is merely considering leasing extra space in the future.

Businesses that are looking for more useful storage options, the spokesperson suggested, may consider investing in SharePoint Online. There, multiple subscribing users are entered into a collective “pool,” the size of which is 250 MB per user.

The spokesperson also confirmed information about platforms: The current build of Office Web Apps for the technical preview has been confirmed to run on Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8 (for Windows); Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac, and Linux; and Safari 4 for Mac (not for Windows). Google Chrome was not listed as a supported platform, perhaps for obvious reasons.

That doesn’t mean users can’t give it a shot, we’re told: “If customers prefer to use another browser they should still give the Web Apps a try. While we cannot officially support all browsers, customers will not be blocked from using them. It is a goal of the Web Apps to have broad compatibility and reach,” the spokesperson said.

The first public demonstrations of Office Web Apps reveals a few more items than we saw demonstrated last year at PDC, though not many. Most notably, we see the full set of ribbon controls for PowerPoint Web App, which was not ready for prime time last October. We also see evidence that some of the incomplete Excel functions such as conditional cell formatting have been worked out, along with evidence that the “BackStage” — the replacement for the Office button in Office 2007 — now has a functional counterpart. An abbreviated menu bar (or rather, a category bar for items collected together by the ribbon) now contains a brightly-colored “File” category, which both resembles the BackStage control and also represents the old-style menu bar functionality from Office 2003 and earlier.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

The spotlight will shine on Theoren Fleury when he makes his return to the Saddledome, as his bid to make the Flames begins Thursday when Calgary takes on the New York Islanders in pre-season action.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders football club is enjoying one of its most popular seasons ever with another sellout confirmed for the Sunday matchup against Edmonton in Regina.

As reported by Techworld, Snow Leopard, Apple's highly anticipated new operating system, lacks basic security features that are found in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 says Charlie Miller, a noted security researcher. Address Space Layout Randomization, commonly referred to as ASLR, randomly assigns data to the memory to make it more difficult for hackers to locate the critical operating system functions. Charlie Miller of Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators who many people may remember from when he successfully hacked a fully patched Macbook in seconds, was disappointed upon hearing that Apple did little to improve ASLR from Leopard to Snow Leopard. "Apple didn't change anything.

Read full story…

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Last week, I returned to using Windows 7 after spending the summer on a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple almost had me there for awhile, but I’m back where I belong and satisfied with the switch. Given that Apple released Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago, Windows 7 officially launches October 22nd and there is plenty of geek debate about which OS is better, it’s appropriate time to tell the story about how I went — in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien — “there and back again.”

First, some background. I am a longtime Mac and Windows user. I have used Windows pretty much since its release in the early 1990s and Macs since December 1998, when I carted a Bondi Blue iMac out of a CompUSA. Based on my reading comments, many Betanews readers are religious about their platform choices; I am not. Mac OS and Windows are just tools to me. I don’t dogmatically defend either platform. I’m neither Mac or Windows fanboy. My work requires using both operating systems, and for convenience one usually is primary. That said, I’ve flopped between platforms for more than a decade.

In April, I posted at my old work blog: “How I Came to Get a PC and Not a Mac.” There I explained how in January 2009, I forsook the Mac for the PC, mainly because of Windows 7. If someone asked me in November 2008 about buying a Windows PC, I would have laughed. It just wasn’t happening. But Windows 7 won me over, in beta and later release candidate.

Still, post switch, I struggled with a key product category: Digital media creation software suite. In a June blog post, I asked: “Why is there no iLife equivalent for Windows?” Windows Live Essentials isn’t it, although Microsoft’s digital media suite is lots closer since the final release of Windows Live Movie Maker. Ahead of Comic-Con 2009, where I planned video interviews and needed easy and efficient software to process them, I moved back into the Apple camp. My main machine became the then new 13-inch MacBook Pro. I also planned to test out the MacBook Pro’s new battery and later Snow Leopard.

The Mac portable’s battery life hugely satisfied (consistently 6 hours) but not Snow Leopard. I find Snow Leopard to be hugely disappointing, shockingly so. Apple promised no major, new features, so I didn’t expect much — and the $29 price ($100 less than Leopard) further lowered expectations. But, after using Snow Leopard, I think $29 is asking too much for what Microsoft would call a Service Pack and give away for free.

From an architectural perspective, however, Snow Leopard is Apple’s most important Mac OS X release since the dot-oh release in March 2001. I call Snow Leopard a fix-the-plumbing release, in preparation for moving the Mac install base forward to 64-bit. Performance tweaks are everywhere, and you can feel them in subtle but distinct ways. I predict that Mac OS X 10.7 will be a big release, jumping off Snow Leopard’s architectural remodeling. But for now, Snow Leopard offers few benefits where users can see them.

The Mac OS X user interface, once trendsetting, is now a tired motif overdue for overhaul. Worse, Apple hints at what the UI could and should be in a few places, with QuickTime being the most visible example. The QuickTime UI is refreshing and new — delightful. Something similar should skin much of Snow Leopard. Worse still, QuickTime’s more modern UI is jarring reminder when switching back to the Snow Leopard Finder about how old most of the rest of Mac OS X feels.

By comparison, Windows 7 feels surprisingly fresh. Microsoft is finally doing good user interface design. Around 2006, which coincidentally — or not — is about when Bill Buxton joined Microsoft Research as principal researcher, the company started making huge strides in UI and UX (user experience) design. Buxton is a well-know UX designer who professes mantra:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

I find myself to be way more productive using Windows 7 than any Mac OS X version, and that’s surprising to me. For years, the greater productivity claim belonged to Mac OS X. Consistently, I get about 30 percent to 40 percent more work done using Windows 7 than either Leopard or Snow Leopard. Windows Vista doesn’t rate. The combined usability flaws — everything from slow resume from sleep to nagging pop-ups to UI pauses or hangs — are too much for me to use Windows Vista any longer.

More importantly, I have loads more fun using Windows 7 than Mac OS X. I haven’t had this much fun using a Microsoft operating system since Windows 95. After more than three months running Mac OS X, I really missed Windows 7. By comparison, for the six months I primarily used Windows 7 test builds, I only missed Mac OS X for iLife.

There still is no iLife for Windows, but I decided to do without. Perhaps if Snow Leopard was more or Windows 7 much less, I would be using a Mac laptop today. I did briefly use Apple’s Boot Camp to install and run Windows 7 gold code on the MacBook Pro (Hey, the Windows Experience Index was 5.2 — not bad). But I wanted something more from a lightweight portable that Apple doesn’t offer, which I explain in a couple paragraphs. The MacBook Pro is gone now and replaced with a Sony VAIO.

I find the Sony VAIO, model Z720D/B, to be much better value than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Sony sells the VAIO for $1,849.99, but some dealers charge less. I got mine from PC Nation for $1,499.98 — or about $100 less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro sold direct from Apple ($75 less from some dealers). A friend bought the MacBook and digital camera, which more than covered cost of the VAIO.

Sony config: 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (1066MHz front-side bus), 13.1-inch LED backlit display with 1600-by-900 resolution, (dedicated) 256MB nVidia GeForce 9300M GS graphics (DDR3) and Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, 4GB of DDR3 memory, 320GB SATA hard drive (7,200 rpm), dual-layer DVD burner, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, fingerprint reader, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless, two USB ports, FireWire 400 port, HDMI port, Verizon EVDO modem and Windows Vista Business 64-bit.

MacBook config: 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (1066MHz front-side bus), 13.3-inch LED-backlit display with 1280-by-800 resolution, 4GB DDR3 memory, (shared) 256MB nVidia GeForce 9400M (DDR3) graphics, 250GB SATA hard drive (5,400 rpm), dual-layer DVD burner, 802.11n wireless, backlit keyboard, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, two USB ports, FireWire 800 port, one Mini DisplayPort and Mac OS X 10.5.

While the computers are fairly close in terms of base hardware, I find the VAIO’s higher screen resolution to be a highly appealing feature, and the major reason for my replacing the MacBook rather than installing Windows 7 via Boot Camp.

Since there has been so much unnecessary noise about 20-hour Windows 7 upgrades — which Scott Fulton appropriately addressed yesterday — I would briefly like to share my own expierence. After unboxing the Z720 and booting it up, I immediately made restore discs. After which, I removed unwanted software, such as Google Toolbar and Symantec anti-malware. I then installed Microsoft Security Essentials beta and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit gold code. The upgrade took about 45 minutes. The Windows installer warned of compatibility problems with four Sony utilities, but they all work just fine.

Windows 7 performance is excellent, and resume-from-sleep time is about as fast as Snow Leopard. I’ve no complaints and lots of satisfaction for the switch. For anyone holding back because of Vista, Windows 7 is for you. For anyone considering switching to a Mac, wait to see what new designs PC manufacturers release with Windows 7. You might be surprised just how cool they can be.

Gulp, here it comes. I’m a PC, and why aren’t you?

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Ford determined to keep SYNC’s technology, so competitors can’t get their claws on it