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Sorry to be a bit late on the news, but finally the long wait is over. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is out!

you've been waiting since after October 22nd, 2009 for Service Pack 1?

Well, your 1 year and 4 months of wait is over! Windows 7 Service Pack 1 has gone live!

If you've been waiting since you've upgraded from XP or Vista, then your wait is also over!

If you've bought your PCs on say, February 19th, 2011 or February 21st, 2011 then you might have Service Pack 1 pre-installed!

You can get it from Microsoft download center or by Windows update. If you have it set to automatic, you'll probably get it anyway because you might remember around February 22nd, 2011, your computer restarted once and start up with the text 'Configuring Service Pack' text on the log in screen. The 'Configuring Service Pack' text is the sign that Service Pack 1 is installing! So hope that the power won't go down or your laptop battery won't die off during the installation!

For me it installed fine, even from a mounted CD image downloaded from Microsoft.

So for those that are still waiting, go and get it now!

Never use a Mac, but from what I've heard on the net I think I can tell that Windows 7 taskbar is way better than Mac OSX dock.

The new taskbar in Windows 7 is the biggest revolution in the Windows UI since Windows 95. With the new taskbar, you can pin your favorite programs to the taskbar, just like in a Dock in Mac OSX. The good thing about this is that; if there are lots of icons, the buttons is divided into pages; whereas in OSX the icon is resized to fit on the screen; which is not good if you have too many icons then the icons is too small to be useful.

On the other hand, both Windows 7 taskbar and the Mac OSX dock shares the same shortcoming. Both has no labels for the icons at all, unless the user hovers the mouse over the icon. Also, not many program make use of these new UI properly.

For example, only control panel, Internet Explorer, Windows Live Messenger, Google Chrome, and Windows Virtual PC make use of the Windows 7 taskbar, and only iTunes, Safari, and some other specially coded Mac apps make use of the dock.

So, neither of these is the ultimate winner because both of these UI shares some problems, but Windows 7 taskbar is certainly better than the Mac OSX dock in some ways.

Second post in a day...

Did you know that libraries in Windows 7 are very useful? You can store your school/college works, games, links to your website/blog/forum, and etc.

In the image below, you can see that I have some custom libraries: games, for storing games that I played, disk images, for storing disk images I use in virtual machine, myvms, for storing my virtual machines, and mysite, for storing links to my blog, website, website control panel, forum, and survey.

Note the custom libraries in the image isn't there by default, you'll have to create it. You can do that within just a right-click or in a file menu.

Libraries are useful because 1) you have a lot of school/college works that scattered everywhere and you don't want to browse to various folders, and for storing your virtual machines you've created, games you've played the most and links to your website, blog and forum.

If you're coming from say Windows XP like me, you've probably will not realize the power of libraries until you've used Windows 7 for months. This is true for folks that comes from Windows 9x land. Libraries is my favorite feature of Windows 7 because it simplifies the searching of files in my computer.