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Even before I’ve had a chance to write something about my Kindle, Amazon has launched a Kindle application for Microsoft Windows. The software is available as a free download and, once installed, enables existing content linked to an Amazon account to be read on the PC.

The application is no different to the application available on the iPhone/iPod Touch: leave off on page 10 of your book and switch your Kindle off and open the PC application – magically, the reader will start off showing you page 10 of that book. Read to page 27 and launch the iPhone application – WhisperSync ensures page 27 is shown. It works extremely well and makes reading on multiple platforms a no-brainer. The PC application may also encourage people without a Kindle to purchase content and slowly tie them into the platform long-term.

Logging in to an Amazon Kindle account displays all purchased and available content.

From the Archive section, individual books are selected and downloaded.

These are placed in the Home section of the application from which they may be opened and read.

Next up is the imminent release of this application for the Macintosh platform. For existing Kindle owners, this download is almost essential if any time at all is spent in front of a PC. For those interested in understanding what the Kindle is about, this may provide a hint of how useful that platform is.

If you don’t live in the USA, I strongly suggest you create an account pretending that you do. Be creative. It’s the only way to ensure you have access to the biggest selection of content in the Kindle Store.

After being a very happy user of both the Windows 7 Beta and then the Release Candidate for quite a number of months, I have made the switch to the release version of Microsoft‘s latest OS. Truth be told, this is probably the first time I’ve purchased a copy of a Microsoft OS outright, with all previous versions I’ve run being pre-installed on notebooks and desktops I’ve used.

The process was reasonable pain-free and assisted by a remarkably fast installation time: I started off with a dual backup of all my documents, downloads and other temporary rubbish a hard disk accumulates. The folder My Documents contains roughly 15GB of data – mainly PDF‘s, archived mail folders and many, many files I simply migrate from machine to machine to make sure I always have everything I need. The backup of that data quantity took quite some time and I dumped those files to both the Drobo and an external hard drive before proceeding. Each one of those backups ran for a long time – I left G2S on over night and let the job complete.

After having ensured that both copies looked similar to the original (and after opening one or two files just as a confirmation) I slotted the Windows 7 DVD into the drive and rebooted. The Windows 7 installation is blisteringly fast, compares favourably to modern Linux installations and requires virtually no information to proceed. My installation included a format of the existing hard drive and an installation of the 64-bit Ultimate edition. When I next looked at the machine less than 30 minutes later, everything was ready to roll. That included a driver for the wireless network card (which had already found and connected to my home network) and the audio drivers. From a hardware support perspective, the only driver I loaded was the latest NVidia driver that is already certified for Windows 7. Another reboot and the system was ready for use. I connected my external drive and copied My Documents and various bits and pieces back – oddly, the same data quantity copied in a fraction of the time it initially took to back up in the first place. Whether this is due to a complete disk defragmentation, I don’t know. Suffice to say that it was many orders of magnitude faster than the initial copy to exactly the same drive.

With the OS activated, I proceeded to install the remaining applications I needed to get going and started working. The experience promised with the beta and RC has been maintained: Windows 7 is, in my opinion, one of the best operating systems Microsoft has ever released. It’s modern, slick and speedy. Whilst it won’t replace Mac OS X as a current favourite of mine, it has proved crash resistant and pleasant to work with since I started using it. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, you should consider it – though XP was certainly robust and stable, Windows 7 improves tremendously on that platform.

Attempting to dupe Internet banking users out of their account numbers, PIN numbers and passwords seems to have become the latest hotbed of criminal activity. The attempt to catch unsuspecting FNB customers seemed amateurish – the fake website looked just that: fake, and unlikely to be taken seriously. The ABSA scam had me convinced after I had a look at the exact replica of the actual ABSA Internet banking site hosted at an obviously wrong location. In that case, the URL was the only giveaway.

Now, I’ve received a request to log on to a fake Nedbank Internet banking site. Scammers are taking advantage of the fact that Nedbank has indicated that some changes will be made to the official site and that additional services will be offered soon. The fake site lives at this URL: http://netbankonlinebanking.9hz.com and looks similar to the actual site.

Curiously, Nedbank refers to its own Internet banking service as Netbank, which I don’t fully understand. In any case, at first glance the fake website is quite convincing and mimics the style and layout of the actual site very well. All it takes is the entry of the Profile ID, PIN and password – don’t simply click on links and enter any details before you haven’t verified that you’re on the site you’re intending to be.

Call the institution if you suspect that something is awry and check the URL carefully before you do anything.  At the time of writing, Firefox doesn’t yet block the URL as one that is dubious.