Sorry, could not resist the post title.

It appears Gmail users are having a bad day.

Gmail has had mini outages before but this one is seems to have caught the big G off guard.

The Class A types soon headed over to twitter to see if their Gmail problems were isolated. However the flurry of tweets about Gmail arrived by the thousands.

Tips: Apparently Gmail’s  IMAP support is still operational and if you have an iPhone you can still access the service. Most typical users who access the service via a web browser will have to sit this one out.

Gmail has 113m users worldwide so I guess this is kind of a big problem and it is very unlike Google to be offline for this amount of time. Currently 3 hours and counting.

For updates see: http://mail.google.com/support/ or to check out the carnage in real time while it happens see: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail

In my quest to test/install on Windows 7 on various hardware I decided to try it on a Dell XPS M1530.

Secretly I am eradicating any in-house tech still running Windows Vista.

About the Install 

I chose Windows 7 x86 32 Bit as this machine only has 2gb of Ram.

I booted from the Windows 7 install DVD, deleted all existing partitions (my preference) and installed Windows 7.

Once logged into Windows 7 allow it to go to Windows update where it will grab about 3 or 4 drivers for unrecognised hardware.

In my case the final and last piece of hardware Windows 7 was unable to resolve was the Biometric Co-Processor.

So a quick visit to www.support.dell.com and I drilled down to the security section (pictured below).

The download highlighted in red was the missing driver required.

Windows 7 Tip: If you need a Windows 7 hardware driver chances are the equivalent Windows Vista will work.

So now with 100% hardware detected I went about testing some non business applications like Steam and iTunes.

No problems encountered and the machine is running like a dream.

The Windows 7 Windows Experience Index looks like this.

Note the XPS is running with an Intel X25-M so the hard disk performance is better than you would get from a shipping Dell.

Thoughts

I think Microsoft might actually do some upgrade business from Windows 7. Basically if you have a Windows Vista machine chances are it’s going to be a much better user experience on Windows 7.

I found myself on a computer that did not have any software installed capable of opening a PDF file.

The thought of installing Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Reader just to open this single page PDF file seemed like a lot of trouble.

In the back of my head I thought I remembered Google’s email service Gmail could natively read PDF’s.

So I e-mailed or g-mailed (if you will) the file to myself and low and behold I could open/read the PDF.

So simple and useful.

Other Tech Tips can be found here: View all posts in Tech Tips

Picture: Dell Diagnostics Error (sorry about the pic quality)

If you are the lucky recipient of a new Dell PC or Laptop there is something installed in the bios called the Pre Assessment Tool as well as a full set of Dell Diagnostics.

You can access both of these by pressing F12 when you see the Dell logo.

The Pre Assessment Tool does a battery of tests, the most important of these being a Memory test.

The Pre Assessment tool can take up to half an hour to run but its well worth spending the time up front ensuring  you wont be wasting more time later.

If something important fails in the Pre Assessment Tool for example Memory contact Dell Technical Support.

Once the Pre Assessment Tool has completed successfully you can boot into the Dell Diagnostics or reboot and carry on installing your Operating System.

Its not that I don’t trust Dell, but I personally run the  Pre Assessment Tool on every single new machine that passes through my hands.

There seems to be a few people having problems with this new Intel based laptop wireless card.

The problems include random disconnections from the wireless networks.

To complicate problem solving the card can still ping and communicate at a lower tcpip/level but you can’t browse the internet for example.

The following can help improve things.

1) Disable Power Management on the card.

Set the Power Management to Highest

Set the Roaming Aggressiveness to Lowest

I found this solution of the lenovo forums but the original topic has been deleted or moved.  It can only be found in the google cache (here)