Last week was an exciting week for Windows and blogging.  Senior Vice Presidents Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan launched a brand new blog called Engineering Windows 7 (or E7 for short). In case you don't know who these guys are, Jon DeVaan manages the engineering team responsible for creating the central (or "core") components and architecture of Windows and Steven Sinofsky manages the group responsible for the user experiences in both Windows and Windows Live. The Engineering Windows 7 blog is designed to create an open discussion about how we're making the next version of Windows - currently codenamed Windows 7 - and to create a background of understanding for the engineering decisions made in order to ship Windows 7.

Engineering the next version of the most used operating system to-date is a very complex software project. Why? Because Windows has a very large user base and that user base is very diverse.  Planning the next version of Windows (and ultimately developing it) is a huge under-taking as it requires Microsoft to learn and understand the needs for all types of customers that use Windows today. On the Engineering Windows 7 Blog, you can

...

Firstly, let me thank everyone who submitted an article for inclusion on this carnival. I received forty-eight submissions and I am sorry that I could not include them all.

Getting us started this month, Ashutosh Mishra presents an article containing fourteen tips for making Windows run faster in Speed Up Your Computer at PC TON!C. In a similar vein Jose DeJesus MD gives advice for Tuning up Windows on his Physician Entrepreneur blog. Jose also identifies a common problem and a software solution for it in his article, Renaming All those Files Your Camera Makes.

While we are on the subject of software, “Here’s a very useful free pdf download for you” says Andrew Edgington of Learn Photoshop Now with reference to Getting Started With Photoshop - Volume 1 and Volume 2. Nesher at Freeware Reviews wrote two excellent freeware round-up articles: the first a list of 18 Free Password Managers, the second 17 Free Utilities for …

If you have a large collection of MP3s, WMAs and other audio files, you probably have quite a few where the tag information isn’t set up properly. In other words, they don’t come up with the correct track name or artist in your media player.

Editing these tags manually can be a laborious task, but fear not, the contributers at MusicBrainz offer a solution to your problem. As they say themselves:
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

The website has a number of applications that you can download which access the database. The one I found most useful was Picard, which provides an interface to search the…

I have decided to start a blog carnival to provide a monthly digest of the best blog articles that offer computer help and advice, preferably those that are written in novice-friendly language.

This carnival will be published on the 27th of each month.

The submission deadline for new articles is the 20th of each month.

Like all blog carnivals, this is a community effort. If you wish to host a carnival you can leave a comment on this article or click here, and if you wish to submit an article for inclusion please click here. The carnival’s website can be found here.

[Edit 03/02/08]
As with other blog carnivals the host each month will choose which articles to include.

To be clear, this is not a general technology blog carnival, nor is it a carnival of blogging tips. It is a collection of articles offering help and advice for using computers, which may include articles about free applications but not commercial software.
[End edit]

So without further ado, may I present…

The First Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

To get the ball rolling I have trawled the…

Last week, Colin at Free PC Security gave me the Community Blogger Award. This prize was recently created by Cellobella at Red Sultana, to celebrate those that reach out to the wider community.

I am honoured to receive this award, because it comes from fellow bloggers, and because the ethos of the award is for winners to pass on the award to worthy recipients. As such, I am also honoured to present the award to the following three bloggers:

Etienne Teo - for good advice for bloggers wishing to monetise and develop their sites.

Mark R. Stoneman - for efforts in promoting the historian blogger community.

Shirley Gibson - for the variety of blogs she writes, and for blogging community work.