Archive for the ‘feature’ Category

7 Reasons to Stick with Windows XP [Windows]

Windows 7 is out today! Huzzah! But wait; if you’re still rocking Windows XP, you might want to think twice before upgrading. Here are some reasons to stick with an old OS.

1. Updating will be a huge pain

You do realize that you can’t just pop in the disc and install the OS, right? Coming from XP, you’re going to need to backup all of your data, format your hard drive, install a clean version of Windows 7, and then start from scratch, reinstalling all of your old programs—and that’s assuming Old Faithful even meets the system requirements. Sounds delightful!

2. Software investment

How many programs do you have installed? You’re going to have to reinstall all of them. Do you have all of your install discs handy? And I hope you haven’t lost any CD Keys! Do you still have all of your downloaded installer executables? Feel like finding them or redownloading them? Because that’s what you’re going to have to do. And as far as new programs go, you do realize that almost all new software is still compatible with XP, right?

3. Most of what you use your computer for doesn’t need an upgrade

What do you do on your computer? Surf the internet, maybe use some office programs? I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Windows XP has been handling such duties just fine for you. So why upgrade? For shiny new aesthetics? For a fancier taskbar? For juggling 22 devices? You don’t need that.

4. It’s expensive

Do you have $120+ to burn? Because that’s how much upgrading will cost you unless you use the $30 college-kid discount. Why not put that money in savings or use it to pay off a credit-card bill, like a grown up?

5. You can wait for SP1

Every OS has bugs when it’s first released, and even if 7 isn’t the shitshow that Vista was, it’ll surely need some patching up once the masses get their hands on it. You won’t get any bonus points for being an early-adopter. Why not play it safe and, if you do decide to upgrade, hold out for Service Pack 1?

6. Microsoft will keep supporting XP for a while

Tons of people (including you) still use XP, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Because of that, Microsoft has no choice but to continue supporting it, releasing security patches and the like. You don’t need to upgrade in order to get such benefits.

7. You’ll buy a new computer eventually

You won’t have your current computer forever, especially if you bought it long enough ago to come pre-loaded with XP. Since installing a new OS is one of the most risky and frustrating things you can do with your computer, you might as well just hold out until you buy a new one. It’ll have Windows 7 pre-installed on a clean drive, allowing you to start from scratch.

If you’re running Vista, however, you should by all means upgrade. What are you, crazy? Upgrade!

Microsoft’s First Retail Store Opens (Like Apple Store With More Colors) [Microsoft]

You’ve seen the mockup of the Microsoft Store, now step inside for a look around the real thing. We asked Phoenix-area stringer Dennis Tarwood to head over to the snooty mall and check things out. Here’s what he experienced:

I’m in Scottsdale today to visit the off-Broadway tryout of a Microsoft store. (MSFT goes to the big city next week when they open in Southern California. As you can see from the photos, it bears a haunting resemblance to Apple Stores. (Despite Microsoft’s desire to distance their retail outfit from that of Mr. Jobs, the fact is, they did hire one of the same designers as a consultant, among other things.)

Though Windows 7 starts belting out its big opening number today, we’re here to see the whole show from Xbox to Zune. Still, the chanting before the store opening—as brought to us by brightly-shirted store employees—told us what today was: “Windows! Seven! Windows! Seven!”

Among those waiting in line were John Hernandez, an unemployed south Phoenix gentleman who jumped in line around 6 pm Wednesday and found himself in 23rd place. “I’m not much of a computer person,” said John. However, he heard there might be free stuff, so he stuck out the night outside the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall, and says he received food and drink from helpful Microsoft staff.

Most of the line, however, showed up this morning, including George Nesbitt. An IT third-shifter, he headed over around 7:00 am for the 9:30 am opening and found himself #134. Breakfast had already been served by 8:30 as energy bars and water kept the hardy-ish line nourished.

At 9:30, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner came out to bow and cut the ribbon, while another exec, David Porter, contented himself to stay out with the crowd and provide exhuberant high-fives to the team when the store flew open.

The store was touted as a local shop, just your Mom-and-Pop monolith in a town run by a former Wal-Mart exec. Towards that end, comically large checks with serious donations of $25k to $50k were presented to well-known local charities and partnerships announced, complete with training and software. (You’ll hear $1 mil mentioned with one check, but most of that was software donation. Your charitable mileage may vary.)

Inside the store, though, a Southwest feel was curiously absent as sleek and stylish took the day. Entry into the left-hand side of the store greets you with one of a few Microsoft Surface tables scattered through the store, available to help you find the product you need or simply get your fingers virtually wet.

The only local touches that were visible were Arizona Cardinals-skinned hardware and Grand Canyon panoramas on the constantly-shifting screens lining the walls. These changing panoramas gave the store an unexpected sense of space and breathing room on a very hectic first day.

No product is left behind as laptops from numerous manufacturers always flank you from the right and Windows 7 and Media Center PCs cover the wall to your left. A kids section rests in the back left in front of the relatively few shelves of PC software (mostly games).

Center back yields to the Microsoft Answers Suite (not a bar), where Technical Advisors (not Geniuses—or Gurus) meet you to take your hardware in and make it well. One gentleman with a dead laptop and an Xbox in for its fourth replacement received more help from Microsoft today than most celebrities in a year.

Oh, don’t rely on the store employees to be color-coded for your convenience. Microsoft Store employees are empowered to wear one of four colored shirts as desired, so you’ll have to ask your Customer Advisor to direct you to your Product Advisor or your Technical Advisor. At least that’s my advice.

In the end, it is an awful lot like an Apple Store, albeit one with Surface tables, Xboxes and more employee t-shirt colors. There’s no shame in that to start with, though; there’s certainly something to be said for building a show similar to the one that’s doing gangbusters down the street before taking it out on the road.

How to Survive Boot Camp (and Run Win 7 on a Mac) [How To]

Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great. And cheap. Boot Camp’s the free, official way to run them both natively on one machine. It’s easy to setup, and just works, except when it doesn’t. Here’s how to survive Boot Camp.

Boot Camp, to be clear, is different from virtualization software like Parallels or VM Ware Fusion or Virtual Box, which you let you run Windows inside of OS X, almost like an application. Boot Camp runs Windows natively on a Mac—you power on, click the Windows icon at the boot manager, and it starts it up, just the same as if you’d powered on a Dell. Why Windows straight up on a Mac? To live a little. Or in my case, to play PC games.

What you’ll need

• A Windows 7 disc
• A Snow Leopard disc
• An Intel-based Mac
• Free disc space!

More on system requirements here.

It’s easy, probably

Boot Camp, and the process of installing Windows in most cases, couldn’t be more straightforward, at least as far as operating system installs usually go. After you’ve got your Mac up and running like normal, fire up an app called Boot Camp Assistant (just use Spotlight). It’ll warn you to back up your disk before installing Windows, which you should, since you are asking favors of the hard drive gods here.

Boot Camp Assistant will ask how much of your hard drive you wanna dedicate to Windows. You want more than the laughably small 5GB of space it suggests. Since I keep around 3-4 games on my Windows partition at a time, and I want some breathing room just in case, I stick with 40GB, but you probably really want no less than 20GB. Slide the bar toward the Finder face, granting Windows how much hard drive space you want it to have. After you click partition, Boot Camp Assistant will start getting your hard drive divvied up for some Windows action, which’ll take a few minutes. Once that’s done, you’ll need your Windows disk.

If everything went according to plan, skip this next section!

If something went wrong

It’s possible you’ll get an error that says Boot Camp Assistant wasn’t able to create the partition because some files couldn’t be moved, and you need to format the drive into a single partition. Basically, what’s happened here, most likely, is that your hard drive is fragmented like a mofo, and there’s not enough contiguous space for Boot Camp Assistant to create the Windows partition. Yeah, disk fragmentation. In OS X. Believe it. From here, there a couple possible solutions.

If you’re extraordinarily lucky, it’s possible you might be able to simply restart your computer and stuff will just work. Probably not! From there, you proceed to the free and easy solution. Using Disk Utility, resize your main OS X partition, reducing it by 40GB (or however much you plan on making your Windows partition). Hit apply, and pray. If that goes peachy, you’ll have 40GB of unused space on your disk. Go back to Disk Utility, and re-expand your OS X partition to reclaim the 40GB. After that’s all done, run Boot Camp Assistant again, and since the hard work of moving files around on the disk was done by Disk Utility, you should be golden.

If, on the other hand, Disk Utility also refused to change your drive’s partitions, you have two choices. The nuclear option is to back up, format your hard drive completely, then run Boot Camp and divide your hard drive into partitions from the Snow Leopard installation before restoring all of your OS X data via machine. Since my Snow Leopard install was practically virginal, as a totally clean (not restored) install that was only around 10 days old [ed. note—how the hell did your hard drive get so fragmented then?], I said screw that. Which led me to iDefrag.

It’s a $30 defragmenting program. I don’t know if my hard drive was really as disgustingly fragmented as it said, or if it’ll ultimately help my Mac’s performance, but it perfectly executed what I bought it for. Basically, you make a startup DVD (using your Snow Leopard install disc, so keep it handy), boot into it, and it shows you how gross and fragmented your hard drive is before going to work defragging it for a couple hours. Restart, you’re back in OS X, and Boot Camp Assistant won’t talk back to you again. At least, it didn’t to me.

The part where you actually install Windows, so grab some tea

Okay, welcome back, people without problems. After the partioning is successful, Boot Camp Assistant will ask you to pop in your Windows disc. If you’ve got one of these Macs and 4GB of RAM, you should install the 64-bit version. If not, go 32-bit. Now, all of the pains and glories of installing Windows will actually commence.

After you pick the language and accept the terms, it’ll ask you want kind of Windows installation you want. Pick custom, and you should get a list of hard drives to install Windows on. Make sure you highlight the correct partition and click format, which will transform it to Windows’ native NTFS file system, if you’re doing a partition that’s bigger than 32GB for Windows. Then tell Windows to install itself there. Go make a drink, and come back 20 minutes later.

Welcome to Windows land.

Now what?

To pick between booting into OS X or Windows when you turn on your Mac, start holding down the Alt key before the gray screen appears when you power on. (You gotta be fast.) It’ll give you the option to boot into Mac or Windows. Pick Windows, obviously. Once you’re totally in Windows, like with the desktop and everything, you need to pop in the Snow Leopard installation disc, and run the Boot Camp installer, which puts in place all the drivers Windows needs to actually run decent on your Mac.

After that, you should run Windows Update to grab the latest goods from Microsoft, and I’d suggest, especially if you’re running a unibody MacBook (or Pro) going to Nvidia’s site and downloading their latest Windows 7 drivers for your graphics card (the 9M series for unibody MacBook Pros, 8M for the previous, non-unibody generation).

Overall, Boot Camp 3.0 in Snow Leopard works way better and more smoothly than before: Multitouch trackpads on MacBooks feel way less janky; shortcut keys, like for brightness or volume, work exactly like in OS X (before, you pressed the function key); and you can read your OS X partition’s files from Windows now. (Back in OS X, you won’t be able to write to your Windows partition if it’s the NTFS format.) By the way, the command key, by default, is mapped as the Windows key, so you’re probably gonna annoyingly bring up the start menu a whole bunch. It’s natural.

Ten Really Dumb Old Inventions and Their Really Dumb Modern Counterparts [Wrongmodo]

Hookay. So, you think that this M3 sub-machine gun—with a shoot-first-and-ask-later curved barrel—is a really stupid, really dumb invention, right? I don’t blame you. But, trust me, you don’t know what really stupid, really dumb inventions are. Yet.

I just saw a selection of 30 dumb inventions in Life, and I couldn’t resist picking my favorite ten. These things are so damn stupid they became obsolete before even becoming real products. It was hard to choose. After all, how could I leave out scientology nutcase L. Ron Hubbard and his Hubbard Electrometer, which in 1968 made him reach the conclusion that tomatoes “scream when sliced”? See? Really hard.

Then I thought that these all looked weirdly familiar. I searched in Gizmodo, and instantly found their modern counterparts. Some of them make sense now, with current technology. Others, as you will see in the gallery, seem equally goofy. All of them, however, we can live without. Enjoy:

Clearly, humans are the only animals that trip twice over the same stone.

Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming [Ballmer Interview]

In the first segment of our exclusive Steve Ballmer interview series, the Microsoft CEO and I talk about Natal, the blurring of console generations, and the surprising assertion that “you’ll be able to get” Blu-ray add-on drives for Xbox 360.

When I asked Ballmer about adding Blu-ray to the Xbox, he said:

Well I don’t know if we need to put Blu-ray in there—you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories.

Though he says it with certitude, the timing of any kind of Blu-ray accessory is unclear. When I asked Xbox spokespeople about Ballmer’s revelation, they responded:

Our immediate solution for Blu-ray-quality video on an Xbox 360 is coming this fall with Zune Video and 1080p instant-on HD streaming. As far as our future plans are concerned, we’re not ready to comment.

Maybe something cooking for CES? Of course, his Blu-ray comment may not mean that Microsoft is coming out with an external drive—he may have just been shooting down the idea that the Xbox 360 will ever have an internal Blu-ray drive, by saying that any Blu-ray the Xbox gets would have to be external. On the other hand he did say, “You’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories.”

As you can see in our back-and-forth, Ballmer plays his cards close to the chest, but in my sit-down interview with him, he shared a lot. Prior to the Blu-ray business, Ballmer and I talked about Natal, and the excitement that Matt and Mark experienced when they stepped into the chamber back at E3. When I asked him if Natal was Microsoft’s attempt to do away with concept of game console generations (thereby prolonging the life of a given platform indefinitely), Ballmer smiled knowingly and said “We’ll see.”

Stay tuned for more exciting Ballmer moments (and facial expressions) over the next day, and then the full uncut interview video on Friday.

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