Several months back, we realized that we go through WAY too much paper here in the GetOffTheComputer.com office complex. Being the high-tech geeks that we are, we set out on a mission to move our office into the 21st century and eliminate as much paper as possible. How’d we do it you ask? I’ll spare you the boring technical details and give you a much easier solution, Win2PDF. Win2PDF is a shareware program that installs a faux printer driver on your Windows computer, allowing you to print to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file instead of paper. This may seem like a foreign idea or even somewhat silly, but there are huge advantages. This obviously won’t work if you need to turn in a term paper to your 95-year old German professor or if you’re printing out directions to your hotel in Vegas for your next family vacation, but if you’re printing a ton of pages each day for archival purposes, STOP! There is no loss in quality of the documents when you print to PDF and the cost is actually amazingly less than it’s paper counterpart. Once you have the file in PDF form, you can print only selected pages if you need them. A common occurence here is needing to print a document that spans 200 pages so that we can pick out any of the pages that have the phrase “u R 1337″ or “w3 0wnz u!” on them. Open up the PDF, search for these pages, and print only the ones you need.

Win2PDF is only one of many utilities out there that do the same thing. Win2PDF is shareware so we strongly encourage you to purchase and register a full version so you can stay legal.

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A couple of days ago I got my hands on a copy of Rome: Total War from Creative Assembly. Being a strategy game of conquering the world, it appealed to my political nature. Rome: Total War follows in a series of games from Shogun and Medieval: Total War. I never played the first two in the series, and from what I was told, it’s a daunting task to take on this one without having played the first two. Nonetheless, excepting the learning curve (which is steep), it’s a fun game.
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There are several variations of Windows XP available on the market. When you go to purchase Windows from a brick and mortar store, chances are your choices will be limited to Full version of Windows XP Home or Professional. However, if you’re shopping at an online retailer or have another alternative source, such as a university bookstore you may be able to purchase an upgrade license or even an OEM version if you’re also purchasing hardware. The good news it that the upgrade and OEM versions are nearly identical to the full versions which typically average around $50 more. The upgrade editions of Windows XP Home and Professional are nearly identical to the full retail versions. In the past, upgrade versions of Windows required you to provide an install disc from the older version which you are upgrading from, but that is not the case with Windows XP. However, to be in compliance with Microsoft’s licensing, you must still own a prior copy of Windows. The only difference with the OEM and full versions are that the OEM licenses are issued by Microsoft and require that the copy of Windows XP be purchased with some sort of hardware. So now that you are well informed of all the options, you can head out and upgrade to Windows XP if you haven’t already.