Extensoft released their brand new product, Extensions for Windows only a few months ago after intensive beta testing for over two years, in fact I believe some leaked screenshots led people to think what they where seeing was Windows 7.

What is it?

Extensions for Windows is a set of tools and applications which are designed to ‘upgrade’ your Windows installation with new features and functionality, the kinds of things power users find themselves wanting on a regular basis.

I asked Eugene Zvyagintsev, Extensoft’s project manager a few questions,

You’ve been working on this project for about 2 years. Did the idea for this release come about from Windows Vista’s release and a perceived lack of ‘power user’ features?

[Eugene] Actually we came up with the idea 4 years ago.  Windows XP was a mature product then, but was still lacking sufficient features and flexibility. We started tinkering with some concepts and ideas and then accelerated the development since we felt more confident that we could provide a useful product at a great value. When Vista came along, we could see that it was still lacking in many areas while being quite confusing to some XP users.

How did you come up with the initial set of tools and applications? Any scouring of message boards involved? Or were these features which you constantly found yourself wanting when using Windows?

[Eugene] Probably the latter.  As Windows power users ourselves, we feel what the majority of Windows users feel. However, we validated many of our ideas by reading blogs and articles that often praised Windows, but also pointed out its flaws and issues.

Perhaps the biggest thing for many users is the fact that a lot of the features provided in this suite can be found for free in other products. Eugene thinks it’s not that simple,

[Eugene] The main question we asked ourselves was what someone would choose if Microsoft released a sensible and functional Windows upgrade at a reasonable price? Would Windows users choose to continue looking for and download a variety of free tools?; Or would they rather choose to install a better version of Windows with the same features?”

And what should less technical users do? There are those who don’t know how to look for, what to download, and how to use such software. Many of us, experienced users, act as technical support among friends and family. We often get phone calls from friends asking us how to resize an image, how to create a PDF document, another time how to open or convert a document.  This can go on and on. And we tell them: download this, install that, and then call me back so I can explain to you how to use it.  Wouldn’t it be much easier for everyone if Windows simply included more functionality that is immediately accessible and feels familiar?

Therefore, we wanted to create a single and standardized product that we could recommend to all our friends and families…then only to occasionally answer basic questions from them. The thing Extensions really does for them is it gives them peace of mind.

He has a good point, but it’s up to you to decide. The product is sold for $50 for a one year license, that license provides unlimited upgrades, support and access to new products over the year. The current plan is to “polish things up” before releasing an additional 3 products to bring the “total number to 15 by the end of the year”.

I’ve been using them myself now for a few months and my personal opinion is that these tools are still a little rough around the edges. Performance is very good normally, however a couple tools (such as the task manager extension) caused some CPU spikes when running in the background, hopefully things like this will be fixed with time.

Anyway, to win 1 of 5 free licenses simply comment below telling us what you would want if you could choose one feature to be added to Windows… just one.

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After a few days the author of Simple Tagging renamed it into Simple Tags making it fully compatible to Wordpress 2.3. I still hoped that it would be easy to import the 6500 tags that I added throughout the year. I did a test upgrade on a local version of Ghacks to make sure the upgrade would be without serious consequences.

It turned out that I only needed to change the tag related function calls in the Wordpress theme folder. Everything else was working as intended. I disabled the Simple Tagging plugin, made the upgrade to Wordpress 2.3, edited the function calls in single.php and index.php, upped the Simple Tags plugin and enabled it.

Importing tags was easier than thought as well. The import function is a little bit hidden in the Manage > Import tab. Simple Tagging as well as other major tagging plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior have their own import function there.

Not all tags were imported during the first import but the script started from where it stopped the previous run. So, with only minor issues that could be fixed in a couple of minutes I was able to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.

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The FileHippo Update Checker scans your computer for installed applications and compares their version to the latest version hosted at the FileHoppo servers.

It then displays a list of all updates that it found on a website divided into full and beta updates. The version on the local computer and the latest version are mentioned in the list and a link to download the update is next to every entry.

Downloads start immediately if you click on the green download icons next to each application. Great that you do not have to navigate through endless webpages to reach the download.

FileHippo does not scan applications that they do not have in their database or do not provide version information that FileHippo can access.

Many useful free applications are not processed but a test scan on my system found 9 updates for applications and 2 for beta applications. Most have been standard applications like Flash Player, Java Runtime Environment or Nero Burning Rom. Great for a quick lookup. Works on Windows 98+

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Let us talk about hardware first. You should check whether your devices are supported in Windows Vista or not before making the switch – nothing is more frustrating than to realize that a needed device is not working in Vista. The question if a device is working in Vista can be easily answered for hard drives and dvd drives for instance but how about card readers, scanners that use serial connections and the like ? Do they work in Vista ?

Microsoft created a “Is your computer ready for Vista” check program that checks your computer; Microsoft called this utility Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. You might need the Microsoft XML Core Services as well. The scan was running for about a minute, after that I was presented with a page that told me that my pc was ready for Vista. Below that message were information about system requirements, devices and software currently installed on my system.

System requirements told me that my C: drive had only 3 GB of space left and that this was not enough to install Vista. It also told me that my D: drive had only 500 MB of free space. I don’t know why the tool did not check drive E: (130 GB free) and F: (120 GB free). It nevertheless told me that I could install Vista on a different hard drive. Everything else that was checked was fine (CPU, RAM, DVD, Video Adapter).
Great information so far, let us see what it told me in the Device tab. It checked the devices that were connected to my computer and found no incompatibilities but one. The scanner was not able to find information about a device called Hamachi. The reason ? Hamachi is no device but a emulated device. You probably will run into troubles if you have old devices.

Finally the programs tab. The scanner found four programs of which three ( Anti-Vir, Ulead Videostudio and Tweak UI) were supposed to have minor problems and one ( The Godfather ) with major problems. Vista told me that I had to uninstall the last one before I made the upgrade to Vista. I’m not sure about all the other freeware that I have installed on my system, it kinda scares me that Vista found only those four programs out of more than a hundred. Something seems wrong here.

So, Microsoft says my pc will run Vista and I only need to uninstall one freeware utility for the dream to come true. What did it tell you and how are Linux and MAC users going to use the Vista Upgrade Advisor ?

Make sure you check back tomorrow for the second part of Things to check before switching to Vista which will take a closer look if the software that we use on a daily basis will run in Vista.

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