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You’ve been brainwashed. Brainwashed by clever marketing and the classic underpromise-and-overdeliver strategy employed by Microsoft to fix the mistakes they made with Vista.

I know, I know, everyone told you Vista was bad. You maybe even used Vista pre-SP1, on a “Vista Capable” machine way back when it launched and concluded that it was horrible. Or, maybe you heard all the bad press and skipped on it altogether? Stuck with XP, then switched straight to 7. Is that what you did?

Well, regardless, I am convinced that Vista is the superior operating system. So vastly superior, that I am going out of my way to ensure that it replaces all the systems that I have been tricked into installing Windows 7 on. At work, at home, and for my clients. I am going to make an argument in this article as to why I believe that Vista remains superior.

I challenge someone to list 7 reasons why Windows 7 is better than Windows Vista. Actual reasons. “Features” like Aero Snap, Jump Lists, and the new taskbar do not necessitate an entirely new operating system, so they don’t really count. Those could easily be implemented into Vista, if it were not abandoned in the wake of Windows 7 by the new CEO, Steve Ballmer. So, we begin with a mini history lesson:

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I’ve used a lot of different software in a tireless effort to brute force a password out of a single PDF. So far, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery certainly helps to speed up the process dramatically, but is it enough to reasonably crack a standard 8 character password in a reasonable amount of time?

As it turns out, that depends on what type of file you are trying to recover the password on. For example, PDF files are unable to take advantage of GPU acceleration (such as NVIDIA’s CUDA), while WPA/WPA2 (.cap/.wph files) are supported. Either way, be prepared to wait a long time, or drop a lot of money on a lot of CPU/GPU power because once you get up to just a measily 8 characters, it can take years.

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I’ve got a lot of data. For me, storage is critical. As I mentioned in my previous article on how to archive large files on SkyDrive, sometimes I want to move files to the cloud for an extended duration of time or permanent archive.  It’s good practice to keep a copy of critical data off-site to prevent against theft, fire, earthquakes, human error, and whatever other paranoia you can come up with.

So, since you’re being cheap and searched for free online storage reviews, here are the current best 5 free five online storage services:

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I was compelled to set up a file server because my clients maxed out their Dropbox. Originally, they were only sharing about 100MB worth of documents, so, I figured Dropbox was the ideal solution for them. Of course as they got real comfortable, they started sharing folders and moving enormous PDFs, .wav files and videos into the Dropbox. Needless to say, they maxed it out pretty quickly. I could upgrade their Dropbox, but then I’d have to upgrade everybody’s Dropbox and at this point there are at least ten different clients accessing the data at any given time. So, a dedicated file server seemed like the logical choice.

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Update: See our Top 5 Free Online Storage Reviews (11/1/2010) for more cloud storage goodness.

I’ve been in search of truly unlimited online storage for quite some time. I don’t mind paying, as long as it’s really unlimited. In my quest, I’ve come across a wide variety of services that fall short of their claims because they require the use of a proprietary client to facilitate the backups, thereby effectively making an online RAID 1 mirror. The catch is that if you delete something on your local machine, it will be deleted (typically within thirty days). So, they’re obviously not too worried about you using too much space since it is unlikely that you’ll have 100TB of data on your machines.

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I have a lot of stuff on my hard drives. Not all of it is entirely necessary. I have dozens of old 3d studio max files and other projects that have long since been completed or abandoned over the years.

I like the idea of having an off-site backup of non-mission-critical data. When I heard that Microsoft increased their online storage capacity on SkyDrive to 25GB, I became very interested. They have a cap on the filesize, 50MB per file. To work around this, I elected to use my favorite archiver — WinRAR.

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