I tried it again. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my laptop. I am not impressed.
I tried out Vista for about a week last year when it was first released. I liked the Windows Aero theme quite nicely, and the new desktop wallpapers of beautiful nature landscapes were a welcoming step up from XP’s tired set of backgrounds. However, there seems to be no real advantage over XP.
The core functions of the OS appear to be almost identical to XP. Microsoft has added a lot of new stuff “on top” of the OS, like a completely useless sidebar on the right-hand side. This sidebar features an analog clock, a photo slide-show window that rotates through my photos in the Pictures directory, and an RSS reader that is not big enough to display an entire headline. I understand that these widgets are customizable, but for standard widgets, they are a complete waste of time.
GoDaddy has a great deal on .TV domain names: only $19.99/yr! That’s right, they usually go for over $40! I expect that many of the great .TV domains are going to start disappearing fast with prices this low, so hurry up and register yours while they’re still available.
Private Registration is usually $8.99 per domain name, but if you register 5 or more, you get free Private Registration on all domains in your cart. I try to buy domain names 5 at a time to get the free Private Registration. It saves me nearly $50, and I can qualify for the discount by adding one or two cheap $2.99 .INFO domains to my cart.
www vs. Non-www?
The problem is that www is considered a sub-domain, just like: http://mail.yahoo.com or http://analytics.google.com.
Search engines consider subdomains to be a completely different web site. So, http://www.dauclair.com is a completely different site than http://dauclair.com in Google’s eyes.
This affects your SEO in two areas:
- If Google happens to index your site as both www and non-www, you may be penalized for duplicate content. Your site is essentially competing against itself.
- Google determines your PageRank, the importance of your site, by the number of inbound links your site has. So, if people are linking to www, but your site is indexed as non-www, you are missing out on all the inbound links pointing to your www site.
