And apparerntly not at first effort with my laptop, but after HOURS and HOURS I finally got everything installed!!  And it works!!  But it took a lot of time and effort for it to work, it also took some technical skill to fix problems that I could see might cause the average user fits of rage.

First of all, I installed Windows 7 via a Vista upgrade onto a Dell 32 bit quad core desktop 4 GB RAM (finished installing 5 hours later) and I did a clean install replacing XP on my HP Intel core 2 duo laptop with 2 gb of memory and a 256k dedicated graphics card.

So 2 different computers.  And the results?

Don’t believe the hype for laptops. If your laptop system XP or Vista is working just fine, then I DO NOT RECOMMEND UPGRADING TO WINDOWS 7, unless you are totally bored and have some serious time on your hands.

Why?

Well for starters, the boot time for Windows 7 on my laptop is 10 minutes.  That means from the time I turn on my computer to the time I can actually start browsing the web, the time that takes to get going is 10 minutes.  Seems a bit long to me, but call me crazy. 

>> UPDATE! 10-27 – After a few days of using Windows 7, I found that unplugging my backup USB harddrive dramatically improved boot up time to under 2 minutes.  So that’s helpful.

My performance score for my laptop is a 4.4 out of 7.9.My graphics card is a GeForce GO 7600 256kb dedicated. No drivers were found initally which had me worried, but somehow it worked itself around that after the first reboot.  And it’s been fine ever since.  Even have it hooked back up to the BIG 46″ LCD TV with a remote keyboard and mouse so I can recline and surf at the same time.

The worse problem I had was that I couldn’t get Adobe Web Premium CS 4 to install correctly onto Windows 7 after a clean install.  This is not good for a web designer like me, who uses Adobe for a living.

>> UPDATE!! As a side note: After several hours, I finally did get Adobe CS 4 installed and working on my laptop – had to run a cleaeer from Adobe first, then reboot, then ran the install – it worked….finally!

But really, I can’t see at the moment why anyone would upgrade to Windows 7 at this point especially if your laptop is somewhat slower like mine apparently is.  But at least I now have both PC’s on Windows 7.

>>UPDATE! Oct 27 – After a few days of using the new Windows on both PC’s – I like it.  No crashes, it seems faster than vista and XP and all in all I am getting used to it.

Now, as far as the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 on my Dell quad core desktop – IT ACTUALLY WORKED!! And on the first try too!!!  It’s a miracle!!!  It took 5 hours to install, but it actually did it.  Amazing, really.

And the boot up time for my quad core is easily under 2 minutes.  Much better than Vista.  And things seem quicker in Windows 7.  Adobe works, the upgrade didn’t mess with anything, and I didn’t lose any data even.  An added bonus.

So if you have a slow laptop with only a gig or 2 of RAM and a slower processor, you might want to hold off on Windows 7 or get a better laptop.  However, if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit desktop with 4 – 12 GB of RAM and a speedy quad core, then go for Windows 7.

The only 2 complications I ran into were having a hard time completely uninstalling McAfee Protection on the desktop and not being able to easily install Adobe CS4 on the laptop.  That and about 14 hours of messing with it.

Anyway, as for now I have to play with the new features of Windows 7.  But so far, I like what I see and feel.  It took ALL day (backups, removing McAfee, reinstalling software, etc.) but I think it will be worth it in the long run.  I guess time will tell

UPDATE!! After playing with Windows 7 for a while, I have to give it 2 thumbs up for both my laptop and my desktop.  My friend has an i7 with an SSD drive and it truly smokes on that system.  All in al, worth upgrading from Vista and XP.

Why am I dropping Godaddy??

Because they suspended one of my websites that I have had hosted at Godaddy for the last 6 years because of a billing screw up on their part!! I had been getting my monthly account billed to my paypal account and have for the last several years. And this month, it didn’t bill my paypal account and Godaddy suspended my account. The account rep said I must have done something. Which is BS cause I haven’t touched my billing settings in YEARS!

What does that mean exactly?

That means they shut down my site. And so when people clicking on my links found on the FIRST PAGE of Google for my website, they got an ERROR page and were redirected to secureserver.net instead of reaching my site. This account was apparently 8 days overdue and their automatic billing process wasn’t billing my paypal account like it had been for the last several years, so they suspended my account??

This is just horrific. I lost sales. I lost customers. I lost ad revenue. And this is just plain unacceptable.

I did get an email from Godaddy stating the billing had failed, but they had already turned off my account and God only knows how long it was off. I hadn’t had sales in days (which is highly unusual).

So over the next several months I will be switching ALL of my sites from Godaddy to my new favorite hosting company, bluehost

They rock, they have great service, cost about as much as Godaddy deluxe except bluehost gives you unlimited bandwidth (unlike Godaddy which charges for over usage). Godaddy also has strange limits on the scripts you can run and other issues. Bluehost doesn’t have those limitations.

In short, it’s a shame that Godaddy can’t provide a better service. In my opinion they have gotten worse, not better, over the years and they are going to lose me as a customer. Bye Bye Godaddy!!!

Hello…bluehost, better tech support, faster download and simple scripts….Yeah!!!

My brief use with Bing so far as a search engine is actually pretty good. I like the graphics and the info boxes you can hover over to get more information about the daily background image which is usually a collage of different facts related to the image.

As far as search goes, it offers the standard images, videos, shopping, news, maps, and a travel section. However several new features have been added to make searching faster. For example, when there are videos available for a particular search keyword, you can just mouse over each video thumbnail and it will play samples of that movie without you having to click through. This seems to make it faster to go through several videos real quick to find what you are looking for.

Also there is another mouse over orange dot with a vertical bar at the right hand side of each description that you can mouse over and it will show the beginning text on the page as well as other links on that page. That could definitely come in handy.

On the left hand side Bing shows search history and related searches. Which ought to prove to be helpful as well.

So that’s it for now, we will have to wait and see how Bing does. I will keep using it to see how relevant the search actually is and whether or not it’s going to be a serious contender in my book. However, so far, so good.

This was a major strategy of some affiliates. Although Amazon commissions weren’t the best to begin with, now, you’ll have to have a ton of traffic to your site naturally to make any money through Amazon. Although I wonder if you could buy the traffic, send it to your site first and then an affiliate link to Amazon.com.

What some people were doing were buying ads and sending them directly to Amazon.com for those products.

I never did the paid traffic approach for Amazon’s affiliate program, so it doesn’t affect me. But 99% of the marketing info out there promotes the use of paid traffic to the affiliate site directly to generate commissions.

For those of you unfamiliar with affililiate programs, they are a way to make money by sending traffic to a company with an affiliate program (like Amazon) and you’d get 4 – 5% of the sale if they buy something from that site. So you could recommend a product, assign an affiliate link to it, and if someone bought that product, then you’d get part of the sale.

In fact, the first money I ever made was from Amzon back in the early 2000’s. It was because I had suggested some books on one of my websites and about a month later I got a check from Amazon for like $30. That kinda got me hooked on marketing online, as I recall.

Still though, if you got enough traffic/visitors to your site, then Amazon should still be an ok way to go with the higher priced items. Just don’t expect to make a living from it unless you had millions of people to your site each month.

My very first affiliate program that I joined was back in 2002 or so. And it was Amazon.com. I put up some books from Amazon.com onto my website (they even provide the code that you simply cut and paste onto your site) and I made like $30 my first paycheck.

A light bulb went off in my head. I realized that if I could get more traffic to my site and offered more products then I could make more money. And so began the quest, which eventually led to my current self employed life style.

I have since expanded beyond affiliate marketing (I still use it for passive income) and gone into ecommerce stores, and carrying and promoting my own products, but I still make thousands each year from affiliate marketing from various sites. It’s easy, and it’s pretty much passive income, which you gotta love.

What is a bit more complicated is how to make money with affiliate marketing. Most people these days selling “How to make money online” are usually selling the exact same recipe. Which is:

• 1. Find affiliate products to sell and make a webpage for it
• 2. Take out ads in Google Adwords and send to your affiliate page
• 3. Rinse and repeat

Now, there are several variations to this process, for example, some people send them first to a squeeze pages (to capture email addresses) and so on, but in general that is gist of the “How to make money” methods on the web.

For most people, that whole process doesn’t really work too well. I have seen people lost serious $$ because they tried this and if a product fails to convert (meaning people don’t buy that product) you can lost a lot of money fast. Because you are buying traffic from Google and will owe Google for that traffic even if no one is buying that product. And depending on your budget, Google can send you tons of traffic in just a few short hours and if you’re not careful you can lose a lot $$ quick.

So there’s got to be a better way…and of course there is. Budgeting your money, rigid testing and experience in general will help. But more than that there are different techniques out there that can help minimize risk and improve profit margins.

This video from Internet Marketing guru John Reese is a free glimpse into one of those techniques. I highly recommend you watch it. It’s free and contains some very good info on affiliate marketing.

John even helped me on one of my sites a few years ago and helped me increase my profit margin about 30%. He’s an internet millionaire, drives a Lamborghini, but all in all is still a pretty good guy. I can’t blame him for being rich! At least he knows what he’s talking about

So check out this internet marketing video when you get a chance, it’s worth every penny!

Pretty much everything I know about what I have learned over the last 9 years will be included somehow in the course. People can sign up and take the course on their own time schedule and learn at their rate and pace. But we will be covering everything from the very basics to some pretty advanced stuff, like SEO and CSS and everything in between.

There will also be a special focus on utitilizing your new found web design skills to make money online. Either as a freelance web designer or making your own sites for the dozen or so ways of making money online. We’ll go over each in depth and as thoroughly as possible.

Considering I have made sites that made anywhere from 10k to 2 MILLION Dollars just in the last couple years, this course is going to be worth every penny I am going to charge (which in the scope of starting a new business and getting personalized training is actually cheap).

There will be a limited number of spots. If you ever wanted to learn web design, how to customize your blog, how to get traffic to your site, or how actually make money online, then this course is for you.

Checkout UpStart Network today and sign up for our early notification list.

Microsoft also has new operating system on the horizon, Windows 7. Considering the problems I had with installing Vista originally, I think I will wait a year or two before installing Windows 7. Let them work out the bugs. You would think that with each new version, they would have LESS problems. But apparently not the case.

Anyway, I am happy to report that as of late, I haven’t had any significant issues with Vista on either of my machines. In fact, I recently upgraded to a quad core with 4 gb and this thing smokes compared to my Pentium D. If you’re on a system that isn’t at least duo 2 core, then it’s time to start thinking about upgrading. I am SOOOO glad I did. The speed of the quad core is awesome.

A word of caution, however. For those of you upgrading memory and Vista. Since I use a lot of graphics design software and run many programs at the same time, I thought I would upgrade to at least 4 GB of RAM. Well that’s the max Vista can handle. And in fact, Vista can’t even handle ALL of the 4 GB because of the graphics card. So if you do upgrade go with a least 3 GB, anything more is pretty much a waste of time and money. Keep that in mind.

Good luck XP users, the end is near…

Certainly worth looking into. I found the mouse on mine somewhat harder to control, but with a graphics tablet it was easier to draw. But that again depends on your comfort level with your graphics tablet. If you are interested in graphics design and you don’t have a graphics tablet, then I would recommend an Intuos by Wacom. Go with a bigger one if at all possible. At least a 6×8, but preferably even larger. Your graphics tablet would obviously work for other programs as well, like Photoshop.

But Sketchcast is cool, cranks out the video for you, you can then paste that your site and you got instant video. Give it some playtime!

There is no cost for the service, it is an easy way to generate traffic to your site. It’s based on a credit system and I can’t see a downside to using it. In fact, I have found a few good blogs just in the last hour I have been playing around with it.

To sign up for BlogRush, you can click this link. Then your posts will be automatically added to other people’s blog. It’s that easy. There is also a video that explains all this stuff, and a good help section if you ever get stuck. But it quickly worked the first time I tried it and literally took me 2 minutes to set the thing up. Definitely recommended.

Kudos John!

Now I know in earlier posts that I implied that I am not a big fan of CSS. And that’s not entirely true. What I said was that the biggest problem with CSS is that it’s not a visual, drag and drop sort of thing. You still have to code and know some code. But Dreamweaver CS3 at least is moving in the right direction.

Also I noticed that Eric Meyers has launched a new CSS plugin for Dreamweaver called CSS SCulptor and is released by webassist. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looked interesting.

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