Weblog of a “Switcher”

Another Get a Mac ad: are they even trying anymore?: "The tone of the commercial also makes Time Machine seem a bit like you will never lose anything again, when in actuality if you create a document and delete it in the same hour Time Machine wont save you, no matter how many cables Mac has coming out of him."

(Via Ars Technica: Infinite Loop.)

This is actually a good point made by Charles Jade (Wasn't he a private-eye from Alpha-verse?). If a user creates a document minutes after Leopard's Time Machine finishes it's backup, then 45 minutes later, he accidently deletes the file and want's to get the file back. He's S.O.L. I guess that's one thing that Microsoft Windows Vista has over Leopard. Vista uses a file versioning system similar to CVS or SubVersion where every time the file is changed, a record of the changes made to the file is recorded. This way, Even if the file was created, then deleted by accident immediately afterward, you would be able to recover the file. Of course you have to have Vista Business or greater in order to take advantage of this feature. Vista Home Premium doesn't have a way of recovering the file. (What were they thinking!)

Even with the above mentioned flaw in Leopard's Time Machine, it's nice that there is a backup system that is basically invisible to the user. Just plug in an external Hard Drive and tell Leopard that it's a Time Machine drive and your finished.

My concern is mostly things like iTunes and iPhoto getting it's data files corrupted. I used to do a daily backup that would overwrite the backup everyday. So if I didn't notice the corruption quick enough, I would loose the files. With Time Machine, I can go back to just before the file was corrupted to recover the file and I'll be good to go.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Actuality, Ars Technica, Backup System, Cables, Corruption, Cvs, External Hard Drive, Guess, Infinite Loop, Iphoto, iTunes, Leopard, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows Vista, Private Eye, Subversion, Time Machine, Vista Home Premium

Wow guys, I thought installing Windows XP in Parallels or Boot Camp was bad...

OK, so I did something kind of stupid this weekend, I attempted to "update" my Windows XP game machine to Windows XP Pro. I thought: "How bad could it be, I'm going from XP to XP Pro?" What a freaking mistake!

So I did the upgrade and when it rebooted to finish the upgrade, it started bringing up the Windows splash screen, then went black then instantly after that, the infamous Blue Screen of Death followed immediately after that with a reboot.

Why did this happen? Well, my guess is that I had a separate partition with Vista RC2 installed and so I probably had a "dual boot" boot sector that wasn't updated properly after the update. So, I might have been able to recover the update, but I really didn't feel like it, so I wiped out the partitions, and started from scratch.

I almost decided to screw Windows and install Ubuntu. However, I am wanting to play Spore when it comes out next year. So Windows it is...

This is where things when really south. Oh sure, the install of XP Pro went easily enough. What went south was the fact that my computer was running like an IBM AT from back in the day and had no sound. Why? No drivers. Really, Windows had no drivers for my system.

At first, I was pissed. I have an install disk with Windows XP Pro SP 2. Then I realized something. There are billions of hardware combinations that Windows runs under. How in the world could Microsoft have all the drivers for all the combinations that it has to run under? Then I remembered that my Dell came with a "ResourceCD" that has all the drivers for the hardware that it came with. So I pulled out the CD, after taking about an hour to find it, and ran the installer to install the drivers I needed to get my system up to something a little more modern.

What surprises me, in this day and age, is why isn't this stored "in the computer" as a ROM drive that can be activated so that the Windows install could find it and use it to get drivers installed? This way, after installing Windows, a user will have a system that "works". Instead, I had to do things that a normal home user would have no idea how to do. It wasn't easy at all to do. I had done it once before so I actually had a clue what I was doing. Otherwise I would have been a little iffy my self.

So compared to Leopard and the Mac, the process of installing the OS from a wiped HDD is like night and day. Leopard was extremely easy and Windows XP Pro was a nightmare.

Now after all the hell I went through to get Windows installed and my hardware drivers installed. I then had the fun I have had in the past with Parallels and Boot Camp. 87 lovely updates followed by several more updates for a total of over 110. So, about 10 reboots and 110+ updates and I finally have a Dell PC that is ready to use again. With Leopard and the Mac, it was install, maybe one reboot no more than two, and I was up and running with the Mac. Yet there are still people out there that think that Windows is way easier to use than the Mac...

It's really a shame that most game developers don't make Mac versions of their games. There are a few that do. Thanks Blizzard! It's funny really, since the Mac has a limited number of graphics cards that are supported and all the rest of the hardware is built into the Mac, developing games for the platform has to be as easy to do as any XBox/Playstation/Wii game would be. Oh sure, there are not as many Macs in the home as there are PC's or Game Consoles, but still...

So that was my fun this weekend. All because I wanted to be able to access my Dell with Remote Desktop Connection instead of VNC. Ah well...

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Billions, Blue Screen Of Death, Boot Camp, Boot Sector, Dell 8400, Dual Boot, Game Machine, Guess, Hardware Combinations, Installing Windows, Mistake, Parallels, Partition, Partitions, Reboot, Rom Drive, Scratch, Surprises, Windows Splash Screen, Windows Xp

Usually, the Mac blogs and news sites I read fill up pretty quickly. I'm used to seeing about 50-75 posts a day from where I read.

Today, I have only seen about 15 or so posts.

My guess is that everyone is installing and playing around with their pre-ordered Leopard installations that were shipped FedEx Overnight like mine.

Heck, I would be too if I were actually at home right now.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Blogs, Fedex, Guess, Mac News, Mac Sites, News Sites, News Today, Quiet Today, Today News