It’s been just over a month since we’ve launched the Windows Experts community, a home for enthusiasts and hobbyists who create amazing experiences in and around their lives with Windows and other tech products. This is the place to go if you’re pulling together a home theater and want to use Windows Media Center to power it, or are building a collection of your favorite movies, music and photos and want to serve them up around your network. Here you’ll find like minded Experts helping each other out, sharing their projects, their challenges and their successes. It’s the kind of place you can go and post up about a specific components you’re thinking of adding to your PC, and get a good deal of helpful feedback from folks who have done the same.
Perhaps the brightest spot in Windows Experts in the first month is the Windows Experts Community Wiki – where experts can capture their unique experiences into short articles so that the knowledge is easily found and shared again. More than another type of consumer, enthusiasts turn to their communities to flesh out best practices and how-to’s for the coolest tech scenarios you can imagine. A few sample articles: How to add multiple guide listings to Windows 7 Media Center, How to Boot Windows 7 Like a DVR, or How to control your Mouse Cursor with a Logitech Harmony Remote Control.
There’s a lot of great articles on there, and we’re just getting started! If you’ve got a scenario or best practice you’ve honed that you’d like to share, please head on over and do so. Any community member can add or edit Wiki entries on Windows Experts, and this June, you may even win a great prize for doing so!
That’s right – in honor of the current promotion for the college bound (Buy a Windows PC for $699/Get an Xbox 360 for FREE), we’ve started a stub article in the wiki on Things You Can Do with a Windows 7 PC and an Xbox 360. While many of our enthusiasts know all about experiences you can create with a PC and a Xbox 360 thanks to features like PlayTo and MCX, we’re hoping to educate the college-bound with Wiki articles that show them the kind of cool scenarios they can create with their new found tech. If you’ve got a good idea in mind, pop on over now before someone else calls dibs.
Did you say prizes?
I did. We’re picking some of our favorite Wiki articles this month and sending them the kind of gift that only a true enthusiast can love: the Soon-to-be-infamous Windows Experts Mystery Bag O’ Stuff, or as we’re calling it around the office, the STBIWEMBO’S. As the name implies, it’s a bag o’ stuff gathered from around the company and our world of partners, tossed together with little rhyme nor reason, and shipped to your door. I hear there’s some good tech in there this time around, and we do hope that our winners will post up an unboxing (er, unbagging) of the first STBIWEBO’Ss that we send out. You can check out all the details on this contest, here, or get hoppin’ on a wiki entry for it, here.