Michael James - Developer

So I got the Windows 7 Beta as soon as it came out and installed it on my laptop to give it proper "real world" testing, not a VM or a machine I use rarely. I chose to do this as it means I can give Microsoft proper feedback and if it all goes wrong I can simply reinstall Vista clean and restore data from the previous night I have to say I really like windows 7, the UI changes do work for me, I like some of the new features and on the whole I'm happy with it. But this post isn't going to be about my last two weeks of running Windows 7, I'm already writing that post and need to finish it when I'm happy I've gave a real world usage. This post is about how since I've installed Windows 7 my battery life sucks. Now this isn't a rant, instead I want to highlight how I found out that something was wrong with my install. So when I started using Windows 7 I noticed that my system kept slowing down, I soon fired up Task Manager and found that AVG antivirus, ...

Today a colleague noticed that whilst he was debugging his web application random requests were being made to Microsoft, these requests were also returning a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently header, and apart from being annoying was causing him a few issues. From experience I soon realised that these requests were being made by the Visual Studio Welcome Screen. By default even if you don't use the welcome screen, Visual Studio keeps the Start Page News Channel RSS Feed up to date, the default in every 60 minutes. If you aren't using the welcome screen then its probably worth disabling the RSS feeds auto download content functionality, not only will this stop you seeing random requests, if you even notice them, but if you are working on a mobile and pay per KB save you some bandwidth. To disable the auto content update simply: goto Tools > Options, click the Show All Settings checkbox, then under the Environment leaf find Startup. Once here simply untick the "download cont...