Have you ever needed to install Windows on a computer that doesn’t have an optical drive? I ran into this issue recently when I needed to install Windows Vista on my newest laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, and thought it would be useful to share the rather simple process here. You can do it from either a USB 2.0 flash drive or a USB hard-drive (the ideal way).
What do you need? A 4GB or larger USB flash drive or hard-drive and a computer with a BIOS that supports booting from a USB device. Almost every computer made in the past three years or so supports this feature. Also, you’ll need your Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 install disc or ISO (for this, I used a licensed copy from my MSDN subscription).
Open the Disk Management console (run “diskmgmt.msc”)
Format your flash drive as FAT32 and set the partition as active/primary.
Copy the entire Windows disc to the USB storage device - the easiest way is by running “xcopy D:\*.* /s/e/f E:\” at the command prompt (where D: is your optical drive/mounted ISO and E: is the USB flash drive.).
Note: If you are using a large external hard-drive, you’ll want to create a partition smaller than the drive itself since FAT32 has certain size limitations. In my case, I chose to make a 6GB active partition and left the rest unpartitioned.
Remember, this is not only useful for computers with defunct or non-existant optical drives - you can also use this for installing Windows on multiple machines quickly as you’ll find it significantly quicker than reading off a DVD.
I have not tested this with Windows XP, however I see no reason why it would not work. If you encounter issues where you cannot boot successfully from the USB drive after the copy, you might need to run the “bootsect.exe” from the command line. Check MS Knowledgebase for more detailed information on this.
I’ve been a customer of Sprint’s Mobile Broadband service for quite a while and have wanted to whip up a how-to on getting it to work well on OS X for a while but never got around to it. However, since I’ve gotten intrigued with the idea of GPS, I thought it was time to detail how Sprint/Verizon EV-DO works with OS X, and how you can use it as a nifty global positioning device.
While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint - you can download the SmartView software here - Sprint Downloads.
However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year - $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.
To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.
Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS
Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.
Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.
Many years and many software updates ago, the iTunes visualizer was a very prominent feature of the application. It was used in television ads to illustrate the power of the iMac G3 coupled with the the iTunes jukebox/CD-burning application that was miles ahead of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player. However, as the version number climbs for iTunes, the visualizer has declined in importance, cast away and buried in the ‘View’ drop-down.
When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?
(click to view full-size)
Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 - great ad by the way.
There seems to be a curious issue present in Windows Vista (RTM and SP1 equipped machines) where audio or video being played back in Windows Media Player will have a significantly adverse effect on network performance. In my case, every device on my network is equipped with gigabit ethernet and as a result, I get exceptional network throughput when transferring files and backing up across the network to my RAID array on the server. However, when I plan music on the computer running Vista SP1, the network performance will drop by about 80% on a gigabit link. This issue is not present when using a different application such as VLC or Apple iTunes 7.
The screenshot shown to the right illustrates the issue. The initial section showing 38-42% network utilization is the network file transfer being conducted without Window Media Player playing back audio. The immediate drop-off in speed to about 9% network utilization is what occurs after playing an MP3 file located locally on the machine in Windows Vista. Closing WMP allows the transfer to resume at full speed and as said before, this issue is not present in other multimedia applications like iTunes.
There is a workaround that has been discovered by geek Courtney Malone. It involves a simple registry edit which can be done by following these steps…
Open Registry Editor by using keystroke “Windows+R” and typing “regedit”
Navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AudioSrv
Edit the value of “DependOnService” by double-clicking the item
Remove the line referencing “MMCSS”
What you’re accomplishing here is disabling the “Multimedia Class Scheduler Service” which is designed to give multimedia and mission critical tasks priority on the network. This is a standard Windows service, but we can’t simply disable it by opening the Management Console Snap-in because it is linked to Windows Audio (which of course controls all sound on the machine). This workaround will solve the issue, although Microsoft has added a bit of control for the end-user over how aggressive MCSS will be if you’d like to keep it around. You can read about that here.
Last week I wrote about a better than expected experience with a company, and now it’s time to take it in a different direction. I’ve mentioned the issue I’ve been having with my Xbox 360 a couple of times on Twitter, but I’ll detail the story thus far here.
About five weeks ago, my Xbox 360 stopped retrieving an IP address from my router. I waited until the weekend to start troubleshooting it. I powercycled all the devices involved (Xbox, cable modem, AirPort Extreme) and tried again. Nothing. I then proceeded to to reset the firmware of the router, tried plugging the Xbox 360 directly into the modem, hard reset the modem, cloned the MAC address of a different device onto the 360, manually assigned the 360 an IP address rather than using DHCP, and many more. Nothing worked. So, I reluctantly called Microsoft Xbox support on Sunday (20 July) to see what could be done about this. I was walked through extensive troubleshooting steps provided to me by the Xbox Live representative, and even though I had already been through all of them, I ran through them once more. After an hour and a half on that call, being placed on hold repeatedly and embarking on remedies that made no sense, I was told to call back after I had contacted my ISP to check with them why the issue was occurring. Rather than do this, I elected to borrow another Xbox 360 console from a friend and try that. After plugging it into my normal network configuration and tossing my hard drive onto it, everything connected just fine which shows there is absolutely nothing wrong with my home network or internet connection.
I called back about an hour after the previous support call had ended. After more holding and futile support remedies, I was told the issue would need to be escalated to Microsoft for “investigation” since they were hung up on the fact that I was using an Apple AirPort Extreme (oh noes, an Apple product!). They informed me that it would take about seven business days to completely this, and while this seemed like an extraordinarily long time for such a simple issue, I said I’d wait for a call.
Two weeks had passed without a call, so I called Xbox customer support a third time on the 3rd of August. The support representative looked into my case, placed me on hold, and came back after ten minutes to tell me that a supervisor would call me in three to five business days after they had looked at the case because it was still “pending” with Microsoft. I had other things to do that day, so rather than argue it, I said fine and waited. Another week passes without a call. A week after (10th of August), I phone once more to check on what the status was and again, I was told that I would receive yet another fictitious phone call within two to three business days. Yet another week passes without any action.
Frustrated and frankly, quite angry, I called customer support once more last Sunday. I was calm and polite throughout but became increasingly unnerved at the fact that I was receiving the same story yet again. I asked vehemently why I should expect a different outcome with the “wait for a call” routine than what I had seen over the past month, and I was simply told that it would be taken care of in two days by a manager. I ended the call and stewed for a while - thankfully I have the loaner Xbox from a friend so I could take out the frustration with some Call of Duty 4.
Welp, it’s Thursday now, four days after the last call and I have (surprise, surprise) have not received a callback. I’ll be calling back tomorrow and will not accept a callback or brush-off as an acceptable solution. I’m floored that such a simple issue can be taking this long and that the investigation of said issue is being treated as though it involves a completely different company. I’ll post again with the outcome, which will hopefully, be more positive than what I’ve experienced thus far. Astonishingly, this has not soured my opinion of the Xbox brand and I’d still recommend it to anyone as I truly think it is the best gaming experience. I just hope my case is an anomaly amongst tens of thousands they work through.
In order to watch a few events of the 2008 Olympics that I wanted to see from nbcolympics.com, I was forced to install Microsoft Silverlight on OS X. I had resisted for quite a while, but I guess the Beijing Olympics are the huge foot in the door that Microsoft has been looking for. After installing, I was pleased to see that there is a whole freaking tab just for digital rights management. I’m glad that the competitor to Adobe Flash makes it clear out of the gate what it’s about - keeping the content provided in control and a user experience second. Kudos.
Dell made quite a bit of news when they announced the latest update to their line of Latitude business notebooks. The new E-Series models are indeed quite stylish and pack a great feature set and, remarkably for Dell, clean industrial designs. But the biggest talking point that people have latched onto about these notebooks is that 19-hour battery life claim that is being tossed around. No, there was not some magical breakthrough in battery technology exclusive to Dell, it’s just the addition of a very-large secondary battery. jkOnTheRun did a limited examination of this however let’s delve into specifics and prices. Here are the details on how this is feat is actually achieved by Dell…
High-capacity 9-cell adds 0.4lbs over the standard 6-cell battery
Slice battery adds 1.78lbs to the overall weight of the laptop and 0.6″ in thickness
Overall, it’s quite a bit of asterisks checking to see how this battery life claim comes to fruition. It requires the addition of $500 in power accessories and adds some serious heft to the notebook but this isn’t too large a compromise for the serious business traveller or power user that needs all-day battery life when they don’t have the luxury of power-outlets for a top-up at every turn. Again, the claim from Dell needs to put into perspective - when I first read about the feature, I questioned my recent order of a Lenovo X200 (which offers 9 hour battery life off a single nine-cell). The X200 manages this with a still svelte form-factor and still weighs in at just a bit over 3 1/2 pounds. Dell does claim however, that the nineteen hour figure is based off realistic everyday mobile user, which we’ll see once the reviews and benchmarks begin to trickle out.
It’s rare that I’m ever extraordinarily pleased with customer service, but this afternoon, I was. While there are a few online stores that I frequent and am quite satisfied with such as Amazon (Prime!), Newegg and Apple; very few actually surprise me like Backcountry.com did. As usual with almost everything I ever order, I missed the UPS delivery attempt - but before I got home to see the dreaded yellow sticky, I received this email about the order…
Hi Carlos,
Thought you’d want to know – we just got word of a slight delay with your shipment. We hate waiting for new gear too, but it’s always better to know what’s up than be in the dark.
So here’s the deal: your package is on its way with a modified delivery date. The report from UPS says that since you were not available for delivery, UPS will make a 2nd attempt very soon.. To get the full details on your shipment’s progress, call UPS at 800-742-5877. We appreciate your patience, and can’t wait to get that brown box full of gear into your hands.
When you touch base with UPS, have your tracking number and order number handy to make your call quick and effective. We already did the legwork – check it out:
UPS Tracking Number: 1ZR7V93XXXX655XXXX
Backcountry.com Order Number: 44XXX62
I’ve never received a notice from a retailer after the order has shipped before. They went one extra step to make sure that the customer is aware of the status of their package rather than leaving it to them to dig up the tracking number had UPS not left a note. Good on Backcountry, and I anxiously await my new laptop messenger bag.
The independent and smaller software developers for the Mac platform are the best in the business - they’re committed to the operating system and identify with the experience that the end-user has come to expect. On the Windows side of the aisle, this isn’t the case. Windows developers, as a community, seem horribly fragmented and do not identify with the same goal. Each brings a product to market to fulfill a gap they believe they can fill, however just how an application will work and interface with the system and other software is almost always an afterthought. Consistent GUI? What’s that? Every program believes that it either will look as bland as possible or it will try and reinvent the wheel yielding a clusterfuck of a UI.
This morning, I was looking for a Quicksilver-inspired Windows application to use in my coming experiment (details to come soon - I have to check with Amnesty International to verify whether or not it falls in the realm of torture), and I found a new one that tries in their own special way to do the same. Dash is one that really caught my attention as it seems to best capture the basic nature of Quicksilver’s search, but it led me to another facet of the Windows developer problem which is how they market their software. Take a look at the seven reasons they suggest I use Dash at their product page. Item two on that list (because everyone loves reading lists) is “Reduce Repetitive Stress Injury”. Seriously, go look, I’ll wait… Rather than the pithy “act without doing” tagline adopted by Alcor, the developer of Quicksilver, Dash takes it in the opposite direction and is positioning this as a marvel of modern medicine. I say this in jest, but the problem is that it’s not addressing a problem they can solve or the strength of their product - it strikes me as something they pulled out of their butt to fill the empty space on the site.
And then there’s price. Dash is set at $50.00 except if you purchase now, you can get their “pre-release offering price” of $19.95 saving you $30.05. Let’s skip right past how this is on par with infomercial level “buy in the next thirty minutes and get a second free!” silliness and look at how it’s they’re establishing value. Software isn’t designed to be inexpensive and offering excessive discounts can make it seem as though you’re diminishing the worth of a product; a great example of this is Transmit from Panic Software for the Mac - it’s an FTP client, but it’s billed as the FTP client. As such, Panic doesn’t discount the software to entice those who undervalue what they offer, which is a fantastic user experience and just well-designed software. Cyberduck and Fugu are free, but I saw the value in the product that made $29 palatable. What the makers of Dash are doing is, in my opinion, either mispricing their product or using used car salesman tactics to win over customers. Ignoring the fact that Quicksilver, a vastly superior product to this knock-off, is completely free - Dash is selling an application at their ‘regular price’ that pushes it into the range of what full-fledged productivity apps cost. Launchbar, a product similar to Quicksilver for Mac is priced without the gimmicks, at $19. Fair.
I could continue, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll end this here. Windows developers and software vendors have so much to learn from the Mac developer community about creating better applications, but even more importantly, about marketing. If it can be summed up in a sentence or two, it would be this - stop selling simple consumer apps the same way Microsoft and Oracle sell enterprise CRM software. Home users don’t want to see how many different ways you can say the same thing on your “features” page, they want to see you solve a problem they have and do it elegantly.
They can try to transition to the domain they most likely paid a metric buttload for, but the social bookmarking service del.icio.us is going to continue be named as such in my bookmarks. Stubborn indignation brings change, right?
For quite a while, I’ve been an advocate of the wallet/data security application “Wallet” by Waterfall Software for OS X. It has a quick and simple interface with great security and is very reasonably priced at $14.95. However, over the two years or so I’ve used it, it’s been a smooth ride other than for the fact that it will randomly refuse to open my .wallet database. Since I’m usually rather proactive with backups in SuperDuper, I could quickly revert back to a working version and shrug it off as a random computer glitch. It’s not like Microsoft Word or Pages hasn’t eaten an important paper once or twice before…
Early last week, the same problem occurred again - however I do not have the luxury of a recent backup to revert to. My most recent was from the beginning of June and I had made significant changes to the entries in the database since then. I emailed customer support from the Wallet developers and ten days later, I’ve heard absolutely nothing. As such, I’ve spent the better part of a day resetting various passwords via e-mail and reentering data into my new password/data management application of choice, 1Password.
1Password takes a much more logical approach to storing this data. It uses the existing secure keychain feature of OS X and repurposes that in a powerful interface. In my week of toying with it, it has worked quite well and is looks like it will be far more flexible a solution than Wallet for organizing and securing data. To migrate the old backup over, I exported the database as a tab-defined text file and imported it into 1Password. A cursory amount of reformatting of the data fields and notes and I’m good to go. My only concern is the GUI isn’t as pleasing to the eye as most other applications for OS X, but it could look like Lotus Notes on OS 9 for all I care as long as it works reliably.
My advice is that other Wallet users out there either keep ridiculously frequent backups of their database or to switch over the 1Password. I have no regrets at all about purchasing 1Password which is more than I can say about Wallet.
Oh, on second thought, don’t allow. I opened the mapping application and clicked the locate button because I actually wanted to be asked if I want to allow this application to know where I am. Yes, thanks. Apple recently mocked Windows Vista’s UAC security implementation, but the quirks of the new location-based are adding a pseudo-UAC experience on the iPhone.
Fix it, Apple.
On the other hand, I’m not having nearly as bad a time as most others are reporting with the new software and third-party applications. I’ve only had one random crash which happened with the WHERE application, but otherwise it’s been smooth sailing. The finance application from Bloomberg is fantastic - it gives charts and stock quotes alongside their news headlines in a simple and speedy interface. It’s one of the few that doesn’t seem to be simply a mobile-optimized website as its own application (I’m looking at you - BofA Mobile Banking). Here’s hoping that iPhone 2.1 software is released with a slew of bug fixes before I buy my iPhone 3G.
September 6, 2008 at 3:31am
by Carlos 
Have you ever needed to install Windows on a computer that doesn’t have an optical drive? I ran into this issue recently when I needed to install Windows Vista on my newest laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, and thought it would be useful to share the rather simple process here. You can do it from either a USB 2.0 flash drive or a USB hard-drive (the ideal way).
For quite a while, I’ve been an advocate of the wallet/data security application “Wallet” by 