Category Technology

Entries 16 Total

Howto: Install Windows Vista from a USB Drive

Sep 6, 2008 3:31 AM

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.

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Sprint EV-DO, Mac OS X, GPS, and you.

Aug 30, 2008 11:57 PM

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.

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iTunes Visualizer – Seven Years Later

Aug 24, 2008 2:42 AM

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)

(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.

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Windows Vista, Audio, and Network Speeds.

Aug 22, 2008 11:00 AM

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.

click for larger imageThe 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.

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