UPDATE: Lifehacker recently covered an “Attach/Detach” program. Read it here.

Few know about a new feature that shipped with Windows 7. It’s called Disk Virtualization, and it allows you to natively create, use, and boot from virtual hard disks, or VHDs.  If you’re unfamiliar with anytime of computer virtualization, here’s some Bing results that you can go over, but for the rest of this post, I’ll assume you’re up to speed.  Using virtual disks is essentially putting your files in a file, that is, the virtual disk is a file that Windows 7 can recognize and mount to work as if it were a hard drive on your computer.  From there, you can proceed to drag and drop your files to that “hard drive.”  The advantage to this is being able to safely secure files that you don’t necessarily want on any of your local directories, or so you can create an advanced file hierarchy on the VHD, and attach it in other computers too.  Look at it as creating your own portable hard drive.  So how do you do this?  It’s advanced stuff that’s going on, but it’s a simple process.  Let’s get started:  (Disclaimer: I am using Windows 7 Ultimate, but VHDs work the same way, except for encryption, which I will cover, but is not necessary to use VHDs.  You also must be an administrator for this to work.)

First off, hit Start and right click “Computer,” and click “Manage.

Next, click on “Disk Management.”

Now go up to the “Action” drop-down menu and Click “Create VHD.”

From here it’s pretty straight forward. Simply browse for the location to which you want to save it, and choose between a fixed sized hard drive or dynamically expanding. You specify the size and there you have your drive. To attach it to use as a drive, simply go back up to the “Action” menu and “Attach VHD,” then browse to where you saved it.  On you disk table on the bottom of the window, you will now see what looks to be an unformatted drive. From here, you can right click it and create a “New Simple Volume.” (I recommend just formatting it as an NTFS drive.) You can give it a drive letter and custom label. That’s it! When' it’s done you have a virtual hard drive. ----For Windows 7 Ultimate users, you can treat this like any other hard drive, including encrypting it and requiring a password to unlock the drive whenever it is mounted in Windows.  IMPORTANT NOTE: Use the “Safely Remove Hardware” menu when you want to unmount the VHD. It will work as if any other external hard drive or thumb drive were inserted in your PC.

UPDATE: Download it now from the official website!

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft is releasing a totally free anti-virus/anti-spyware solution for Windows based PCs. (Windows XP 32 bit, Windows Vista/7 32 and 64 bit)  Microsoft has had MSE in beta testing for awhile now, and has only had one “upgrade” since, but it has had one and often more definition updates DAILY.  I’ve been using MSE on Windows 7 since the first day of beta and it’s honestly exactly what you would want in an AV solution.  Fast, light-weight, quiet, and proactive against threats both known and unknown; MSE is simple and effective.  I never get any sort of pop-ups telling you about information that you didn’t need to know.  MSE just stays on and protects.  When you do need to administer the program however, the tabbed interface make things clean and straight-forward.  

As the title suggests, MSE will be available for download on September 29th for free, in time for Windows 7.  No word on exactly where you will be able to download in from, but I will update this blog entry with the link when I know.

Okay so, I won’t even explain Conficker, since Lord knows it’s been in the news enough for you to pick up on, but why oh why was this worm blown so out of proportion?  We’ve definitely had worse, not to mention it wasn’t taking down massive network infastructures or causing mass identity theft like a normal, good-boy worm.  Let’s face it: It just sat on people’s computers, it was technically a virus, it caused a few annoying pop-ups, but no April fools big bang.  So what’s the deal?  Why do you think Conficker was taken so much more seriously than you average computer virus?  Am I wrong?  Is the big bang still to come?  Time will only tell, but as always people: Stay patched, and use good security software on you PC.  Most importantly, stay way from unusal website, e-mails, and other questionable activity.

So if you use Live Search a lot, particularly from the main Live.com page, you know that every day Microsoft uses a new picture for their search background.  Well, I thought it ironic today, when I fired up Internet Explorer (8 RC1 by the way) and this was today’s picture.

Yeah, that’s a Snow Leopard.  As in Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.  Now, as much as I’d love to believe Microsoft is doing this in some way to show people they are shrugging off the next Mac release, that’s probably not the case…………….is it?