Marcus @ Microsoft

Starting earlier today, our Windows social media team announced a cool new program with ReverbNation to offer over 1,000 songs free of charge!  You can get all the details and start downloading right now on http://www.myspace.com/Windows.  Marty Collins and I recorded this brief video about the program that tells you more about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it:

We hope you enjoy the free music.  You can check out Marty’s blog post for even more information on this program, especially from a social media perspective. 

- Marcus, Windows Community Manager

I’m writing this in June.  It’s been hot and dry in the Seattle area.  But the recent news about Windows Live Messenger’s 10th Anniversary has me thinking of a cold and snowy winter – December 2008 to be exact.

We were scheduled to fly back to Iowa to visit my in-laws when one of the biggest snowstorms Seattle has ever scene decided to arrive.  We couldn’t even get out of our neighborhood, much less to the airport.  Not that there were that many flight leaving anyway.  We stayed at home, but we were still able to celebrate the holiday with our family thanks to Windows Live Messenger.

In a stroke of good luck, we had purchased our in-laws a new Microsoft LifeCam webcam and shipped it to them ahead of time.  We made sure that was the first gift that was opened, and they plugged it in and we connected up a video call using Messenger.  Now we could see them opening the rest of their gifts, talk to everyone, and even play with the cool special effects the LifeCam software includes.  It wasn’t quite like being there in person, but it made being snowed in that much more bearable.

Hopefully next time our good luck extends beyond just buying the right gift to getting the right weather for travelling!

What’s your best Messenger memory?  Join the Clubhouse and share your story as part of our Windows community.  The Clubhouse makes it easy to share just the blog entries you tag with other community members and with everyone else interested in Windows products.

- Marcus, Windows Community Manager

Gone are the days of father’s day gifts like neckties and golf accessories.  Say goodbye to giving a set of luggage or a microwave to the graduate in your family.  This year’s hottest “Dads and Grads” gift has to be a small notebook PC, often called netbooks.

What could be a more cool than a companion PC that is ultra-portable for the dad or student that is always on-the-go?  There are tons of different choices out there, but I’ve been researching the Dell Mini line and HP Mini line.  But Acer (pictured below) and Asus have some great products too.  I’ll have to spend more time checking them out, and even though I’m not a dad or a impending graduate, I think I might give one to myself!

From everything I hear and read, Windows 7 runs really well on these small notebooks, so that makes them even more compelling.  I really don’t want to use Windows XP if I don’t have to, and I don’t even want to try figuring out how to run Linux on one of these.  Brandon has a great blog post on this topic located here on the Windows Team Blog.

Do you have one of these little wonders?  What do you think of it?  Please leave me a comment below.

- Marcus, Windows Community Manager

One of our awesome community members, Technogran, suggested this idea for a community challenge recently: Show off your Windows 7 Desktop.  If you’re a member of our Windows Community, you can see the details of the challenge up on the Clubhouse site.  If you’re not already a member, we’d love to have you join in the fun!  Just visit the Clubhouse site for more details.

My Windows 7 desktop is a bit odd, as you’ll see by the image below:

I use multiple monitors like a lot of people do, but I rotate my main monitor into portrait mode.  I like it that way to view more e-mail, more of a website, and more of a document or spreadsheet.  If you want to try rotating your monitors like this, it’s built right in to the display  settings of Windows 7:

On my taskbar, you’ll see I have pinned Outlook, IE8, Windows Explorer, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Messenger, Writer, and Tweetdeck.  For gadgets, I’ve got the clock, calendar, weather, Live Search (now Bing) Maps (for traffic conditions), stocks, a performance gadget (from http://addgadget.com/), and Twadget for stealing glances at my Twitter feed. 

How’s your Windows 7 desktop configured?  Join our Windows Community at http://clubhouse.microsoft.com and share with Technogran, me, and hundreds of other Windows enthusiasts!

- Marcus, Windows Community Manager

Let’s say you’ve built up a big group of contacts in Windows Live Messenger, and now you want to move those folks over to a new account.  Messenger makes it easy!  Just click on the “Show menu” button, select Contacts, then select Save instant messaging contacts… as shown below:

You’ll be prompted to save the file somewhere on your PC.  Then sign out of Messenger and sign-in using your new account.  Click on the “Show menu” button again, select Contacts again, and this time select Import instant messaging contacts….  Then find the file you saved previously and you’ll be all set to start chatting with your friends with your new account.