Yesterday I attended the “The New Efficiency” launch event for Windows 7 in Burbank. At the end of the event, Microsoft was generous enough to give away a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate to all of the registered attendees. Of course, even when something’s free, some people will find something to complain about. In this case it was the fact that the Windows installation media (read: DVDs) only contained the 32-bit version of the OS. This is actually a non-issue, likely something they did just to cut costs. I’ll explain why.

Here are some clues that should tell you that the CD Key provided with the 32-bit disc will work with any 64-bit retail DVD (or, if you unpack an ISO for installation from a USB drive)…

Note that the case was originally printed to say that both 32- and 64-bit discs were included.

It’s hard to see in this scan, but there are two sleeves for discs. Also note that the requirements mention both 32- and 64-bit systems.

…and here’s some proof that it will, in fact, work:

It’s already been confirmed, on this board and elsewhere, that the key provided with the launch event media is usable for either 32-bit or 64-bit installations, just like any other Windows 7 install key.

The remaining question is whether or not a retail disk will be compatible with your install key. I don’t have the launch event media available to me here to verify, but I’m guessing that it’s actually a ‘retail’ disk image with a ‘limited run’ special disk label printed on it. Checking and comparing the ei’cfgfile contents will verify the truth or otherwise of that assumption, because that file is the only thing which will differ within the disk contents.

There are 3 entries in that file. Most of the discussion to date has revolved around changing the image to a different ‘version’. That’s the first entry in the file. The second entry is “Channel” and if the launch event media differs from retail media that’s where the difference would be, I’m sure. (The third entry is simply a flag to indicate whether or not it is volume licensing media.)

As said, I suspect it’s a ‘retail’ disk you have, so the alternate install retail media should work fine.

Source

Since I do have a disc to confirm, here are the contents of the file in question:

This is the ei.cfg file from the “Sources” directory on the DVD

It confirms that the DVDs distributed at the launch event are the retail discs.

QED.

It started with a slew of religious folk re-tweeting the phrase “Know God… know peace. No God, no peace.” “No God” then became the #1 trending topic, overloading the site.

Twitter’s explanation didn’t seem to get through to many offended Christians who were left wondering how “No God” became such a hot topic.

UPDATE @ 4:15 PST: I wonder if the frequent site overloads are what led Twitter to remove “No God” from the trending topics list?

UPDATE @ 4:50 PST: I think Twitter answered it for me:

It appears that Twitter is practicing a little selective censorship. Not good.

Well, now that we’ve got our important data moved to a new partition in case of any OS crashes, re-installations or upgrades, let’s take a look at Microsoft Outlook. Some of us, for various reasons, haven’t switched to a webmail-only experience for e-mail, and Outlook, for all its criticisms, continues to be a popular application for email and appointment management.

So, how can we do for Outlook what we did for the rest of our personal files in the article linked above? The answer is obvious; store Outlook’s data files on a separate partition as well. Here’s how it’s done.

First, export your data.

It’s always wise to create a backup when working with important information. Outlook makes it easy:

Simply click on your “File” menu and choose “Import and Export.” Follow the steps in the images below to create a PST file that Outlook will be able to import in the future, if need be.

Be sure to select “Personal Folders” here. This will include your Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc. along with any other folders you may have created in Outlook.

Now, choose a location and filename and you’re set:

That’s it. Now a backup of all of Outlook’s Data exists. If you’ve created a set of rules for managing or filtering your email, you can export that, too. Simply click on the “Tools” menu and select “Rules and Alerts.” There’s an options button there that will allow you to import or export your Outlook Rules. I suggest saving the file to the same directory as the data folder exported in the steps above.

Great! Now we’ve backed up all of the important information minus the email account information, but that should be handled automatically in the steps on the next page (to be safe, I would recommend recording that information somewhere as there is unfortunately no export feature for this).