The installation of Vista didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped. Actually, most of it went well with one big notable exception. I have a widescreen laptop with a native resolution of 1280×800. The ATI driver that’s bundled with the latest build of Vista is accelerated for the 9600, which is what I have, but it only supports 800×600 and 1024×768. So, despite Aero working very nicely, the screen just looked like crap.
I’ve reverted back to XP but I’ve left 20gb for a later version of Vista. Hopefully they can get around to fixing this big problem in a world where laptops rule the day.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
Yes, it’s that time again to rebuild my laptop and expunge the cruft that I’ve accumulated. Yes, that’s a word, look it up! 
I was going to wait until Macworld to see if the x86 iBook was announced but a number of things are coming together to make it happen now. This thing is getting slow, especially on bootup. More importantly, I discovered that MSFT released a new version of Vista in December and the reviews are very positive, especially in regards to stability. So, I’m going to be dual booting Vista and XP with the intention of Vista being the main OS for a while. If it turns out to be really horrible I’ll just go back to XP and make the Vista partition a data drive.
So, I’m making this list of “things” I need to do to a fresh install so I don’t forget anything important. Those of you that are not me can use this as a list of how to properly set up a laptop! Har!
Office
Visio
Firefox, With Extensions:Adblock w/blocklist, Bookmarks Synchronizer, Performancing, Spellbound Development
Adobe Acrobat
Trillian
Putty, wconsd
Tera Term Pro Web
3com’s 3CDaemon
iTunes
Ultraedit
TightVNC
DaemonTools
VirtualPC
Azureus
Cisco VPN Client, migrate .pcf files
DVD Decoder
Ethereal
Google Earth
Nero
UltraISO
VLC Media Player
WinRAR
PhotoShop
NetStumbler
Angry Ip Scanner
ActiveSync
Antivirus
GoogleTalk
That’s all of the apps I can think of at the moment. There are some other things that I tweak though.
Save the rasphone.pbk file from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk
Pick through “My Documents” and move the Virtual Machines
Put Putty in the path statement
Transfer Putty settings from the registry
Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into it. Several of the programs listed here require some level of configuration. For
instance, the Bookmark Sync. I’ll come back to this and edit it if I can think of anything else.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
I have the Urge…the Urge to pick on Microsoft again. What a lame name for a music service. I can just imagine the marketing genius that came up with that name is related to the one that designed the overly cluttered Windows commercials they’re running now. “I have the Urge to download music”…”I have the Urge to get the latest Britney Spears”… Prepare to be swamped by Urges for popcorn!
I want to say I hope the service is good because it’ll foster competition and grow the market for downloadable music. But what I’m really thinking is that iTunes will continue to clean their clocks.
One positive could be the pricing scheme MSFT goes with. I believe I saw that they will be doing multiple levels which will probably push Apple to finally implement the same. Why’s that a good thing? I truly hope the latest Top 40 garbage gets priced at $5 a song and all of the stuff I listen to will drop in price. The reality is the cheapest songs will probably still be around $1. *sigh*
Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
Glenn Reynolds over on
http://www.instapundit.com/ refers to hearing the Singularity dismissed as such. That got a chuckle from me. I was listening to
this WEEK in TECH this morning and the Singularity was one of the things they discussed. This is something that’s always fascinated me as I’m not sure where my beliefs fall. Kind of funny to talk about beliefs when you’re discussing robots. But that’s really what it is. Do you believe a machine can have a soul, or can it only emulate one. What is a soul. Does it matter? To me, these are key questions in figuring out who will be in charge once a machine becomes self aware. If nothing else, the next twenty years will be very interesting.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
