Weblog of a “Switcher”

No, I'm not talking about updates to OS X Tiger or Leopard. I'm talking about installing Windows XP Pro SP2! Yes that's right. After SP2 there are 86 updates that need to be downloaded and installed after installing Windows XP Pro SP 2. Not counting the update to the updater.

I really get the feeling that Windows XP needs an SP3 and soon!

Anyone who complains about Apple and the updates that they have to go through after installing Tiger, just point them to a Windows box and have them install XP Pro SP2.

I also know there will be more to go, since I haven't updated Internet Explorer and there are also other updates that are usually not critical but are still desired.

Man, I am soooo glad I switched to Macintosh!

Why am I installing Windows XP? Oh, yea, I forgot to mention that I am installing it to my Mac Pro in Boot Camp. I lost my secondary HD which had the previous Windows installation on it. Not sure why the drive bit the bullet, but when you hear clicking and spinning down and back up, you have to assume the drive is toast. I went out and purchased a 750GB SATA drive today and used Time Machine to restore the OS X side of the disk. (That process was so damn easy a cave man could do it.) Now, I'm reinstalling Windows and a few other programs so that I can use Parallels to access it. I rarely reboot into Windows on my Mac Pro. If I am going to play a game, I switch to my Windows box behind my monitor and play there. I just like the convienence of having a Windows partition on the Mac for doing non-game things.

Well, I'm about half way through installing the 86 updates, so I guess I'll wrap up this post and get ready for the hundreds of reboots I am going to have to do to finish getting windows ready to use again.

Update: I only had to install about 20 more updates after the 86 to start with. Also, only had 4 reboots during that process. So, it's really not that bad... really... (sarcasm sign being held up and waved furiously)

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Boot Camp, Cave Man, Convienence, Hd, Installing Windows, Internet Explorer, Os X, Os X Tiger, Parallels, Partition, Reinstalling Windows, Sarcasm, Sp 2, Sp3, Time Machine, Toast, Windows Box, Windows Installation, Windows Xp, Windows Xp Pro Sp2

PC World decided to compare Vista and Leopard since they pretty much compete with each other. So I figured I had better step in and put an Apple biased perspective into the article...

First comparison: Shadow Copies vrs. Time Machine
Really, is there a need to compare these? Yes, Vista has an incremental backup. Wonderful. However, as PC World makes out that having the backup on the same drive is a good thing, I'm wondering how useful that is if the drive gets damaged? At least they point out that the feature is only useful for the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions of Vista. What they fail to mention is that it's active in all editions of the OS Meaning that you loose disk space in the Home edition and have no way of turning it off since you can't use it. So a 200GB HD winds up being probably about 150GB's or less. Way less than the typical loss of space due to the manufacturer claiming the *1000 size vrs. the *1024 size.

Gadgets vrs. Widgets
Not really sure why they are bothering to make the comparison here. Gadgets/Widgets are really not all that useful in either OS They are strictly fluff. I will admit that they are marginally more useful in Vista since they can live on the main screen instead of a Dashboard that opens when you press a key or click on an icon.

Explorer vrs. Finder
Here is a place where Vista could shine. Apple hasn't done much with the Finder since OS X's initial release. In fact, it is still a Carbon application instead of being Cocoa like most others. Mostly this means it's still 32bit instead of 64bit. However, it's really due for an overhaul. Yet, Vista's Explorer manages to make Finder look pretty darn cool. Vista has the usual Explorer views: Icon, List, Detailed, and Thumbnail. Finder has all that plus column view and Cover Flow. Now, for looking at your applications, Cover Flow is pretty silly, but for Documents, it's not all that bad.

Windows Photo Gallery vrs. Quick Look
Really, they want to compare these two? A feature in Leopard that allows you to see ANY document without opening the application that edits it versus a feature that lets you look at pictures only maybe videos too? Wow, that's really bizarre. Quick Look has to be one of the killer features in Leopard. Being able to open and view any document to see if it's what you are looking for is way more useful than just browsing pictures. I can do that in Leopard with Cover Flow and Icon view. In Explorer, you can do that in thumbnail view. I think PC World was just grabbing at thin air here.

Networked PC's vrs. Shared Computers
Another odd place to compare. Leopard has Vista beat hands down here. Both allow you to see networked computers, sure. However, Leopard gives you the ability to dig into your networked Mac's to the level of actually controlling them remotely with Screen Sharing. Oh sure, you can use VNC on a PC to do the same thing, but you have to install VNC on each PC in order for this to work. With Leopard, it's built in. The default is for it to be disabled. However, once enabled and password protected, I can not only connect and control a Mac in another room, I can also control my desktop Mac from across the country with absolutely no knowledge of how to set this up thanks to Back to My Mac and the .MAC service.

Enhanced Searching in Vista vrs Spotlight
Here is an area that Vista could have really stepped ahead and taken the lead. Spotlight has been out for over 2 years with Tiger. There have been quite a few attempts at Spotlight clones with Google Desktop, and the multitude of other search programs that could be installed in Windows. None of which really works well. Microsoft decided to add search into Vista and make it available in XP. However indexing in XP dogs the system, and I can't speak for Vista. On the Mac, indexing can be pretty slow too, but it doesn't take all that much time to do. For some reason, with Windows it seems to take forever. The PC World comparison actually gives Leopard and Apple kudos here. They say: "even on well-equipped Windows machines, searches are rarely as fast as in Spotlight; and by default, results aren't segmented or organized as cleanly."

Vista Desktop vrs. Leopard Desktop
Heh, there really isn't much to compare here. Vista doesn't have a built-in virtual desktop feature like Spaces. There are plenty of shareware/freeware apps to choose from though. Yet, even Microsoft didn't deem it necessary to update it's virtual desktop PowerToy to work with Vista. Are virtual desktop's necessary? No, not really. Are they useful. Sometimes. Especially on notebook computers where screen real estate is at such a premium. They also point out that there is no equivalent to Stacks.

Flip 3D vrs Exposé
Wow, what a totally useless feature in Vista. Flip 3D is totally fluff. There is absolutely no useful reason to use Flip 3D unless you want to "impress" your friends with an OS that boasts a 3D element. Exposé is useful in that it displays all windows as big as it can so that you can choose the one you need. You can do this with all virtual desktops, the current desktop, the current app or just slide all windows out of the way to see the desktop. The key is that you can see all windows entirely. With Flip 3D, you can only see the topmost window fully, the rest are mostly hidden behind the topmost window.

Apparently, that's all the comparison. There are a bunch more features in Leopard, but I guess that there are no equivalents in Vista so they didn't show them. iChat with it's ability to show slide shows and share desktops, Mail with it's Templates and integrated ToDo's and Notes. Odd since Vista has Mail, but I guess it doesn't integrate anything like Outlook does. I really can't say for sure since I haven't switched to Vista on my Windows boxes. I don't plan to for quite some time.

If someone reading this does have Vista, could you comment on Mail? Does Vista have an iChat type program "built-in"? I really would like to know.

(Via PC World - Vista vs. Leopard: Battle of the New Features.)

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, Carbon Application, Cocoa, Column View, Dashboard, Disk Space, Fluff, Gadgets, Hasn, Hd, Initial Release, Os X, Pc World, Perspective, Photo Gallery, Thumbnail, Time Machine, Typical Loss, Widgets, Windows Photo

I have been trying to get Boot Camp to work for me since I got my Mac Pro. Up until just a couple of days ago, I had not been able to succeed. I found the solution to my problem on Apple's discussion forums thank goodness.

However, let me impart my latest attempt and success first and as I do, I'll reveal what I learned to allow myself to get Boot Camp to work.

My latest attempt was started because a dear friend is allowing me to use a version of Windows XP Pro that doesn't require authorization. Is that an Enterprise version?

I first installed the OS under Parallels using the .ISO I was sent. That worked flawlessly and using the latest Parallels makes installing Windows and Vista as easy as using OS X. It's quite impressive. Coherence is just amazing. There is just something very odd about seeing Internet Explorer 7 running side by side with Safari and not seeing the Windows desktop but the Mac OS X desktop.

So I burned the Windows XP Pro .ISO to a CD and downloaded the latest Boot Camp (1.1.2) to make sure I had the latest and greatest. I started the Boot Camp Assistant. I partitioned my second 250GB HD for Windows. Burned the Apple Windows Driver CD and attempted to start the install.

Again and again, I kept getting this message that I needed to wait for the CD to be recognized by the OS before the process can start. Since I'm burning the CD, I thought that maybe the CD wasn't bootable, so I put it in my Windows box and booted the computer. Sure enough, the CD booted just fine. So that isn't the problem.

My next course of action was to go off to Apple's discussion forums. I keep hearing that they are not the best place to get info, but I figure it's better than nothing at this point. I find a couple of threads about my problem, but they were pretty much saying the same thing I was thinking. Later that evening, I had a thought. I wondered if I needed to be logged in as an Administrator in order for this to work. So I logged out of my Standard user account and logged in with my Administrator account and tried again. Low and behold the process of installing Windows XP Pro began. It sure would be nice if the documentation stated this fact.

So installing Windows went without incident. Some have had problems. Maybe all the problems I was having getting the process started allowed me to skip all the installation woes others have had. Anyway, I finished installing Windows, inserted the Drivers CD and installed all those. Then started the way too much fun task of installing the 60 odd patches and approximately 12 suggested updates. Windows really needs a better way to deal with updates. Their way really sucks!

I finally got the OS up and running and I just say it's pretty nice to be running Windows XP Pro on a Quad XEON system with 2GB's of RAM. The OS sees all 4 cores so at least when games start supporting multi-core systems, I'll be ready. I may need to get a better video card thought. World of Warcraft seemed a little slow compared to my OS X version. The OS X version has been updated to support multi-threading OpenGL which really sped up the frame rate on the Mac side.

Using Boot Camp has some big drawbacks thought. I like to listen to iTunes while I play games. Normally I'm playing on my old PC box and the Mac is playing iTunes. If I'm booting to Windows on the Mac Pro, I can't do that. So I have to use my iPod instead. It works, it's not that big of a deal, but I like the freedom.

If I could wish for anything in the new Leopard OS coming out soon, I think I would like to see the ability to switch between OS X and Windows via a simple menu option or keypress. Kind of like how a KVM works. When I'm using OS X, Windows is sleeping in memory somewhere and when I switch to Windows, OS X sleeps in memory. It would really be nice if they didn't sleep but just didn't display, but that would probably take up too much physical memory.

Anyway, Boot Camp is pretty cool, Parallels is cooler. Parallels is even cooler still since it can use the Boot Camp partition as it's virtual HD.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Boot Camp, Camp 1, Coherence, Couple Of Days, Dear Friend, Discussion Forums, Driver Cd, Enterprise Version, Goodness, Hd, Installing Windows, Internet Explorer 7, Mac Os X, Os X, Parallels, Safari, Windows Box, Windows Desktop, Windows Driver, Windows Xp

Last evening, I ordered my desktop Mac. A Mac Pro. What an amazing machine. Quad Xeon processors, SLI Video, 2GB's RAM, and 500GB's HD.

The Mac Pro is leaps and bounds above anything I have seen other companies make. It has 4, count them, 4 SATA HD bays, 2 optical bays, 8 Memory slots (for up to 16GB's of RAM), all Mac Pro's have Quad Xeon processors, it has 3 PCI-Express slots and a double wide PCI-Express slot (I'm assuming for SLI). All easily accessable.

According to my order page, the new machine should arrive on my birthday (Aug. 16th).

Life is good!

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 2gb, Amazing Video, Bays, Desktop Mac, Hd, Leaps And Bounds, Memory Slots, Pci Express Slot, Pci Slot, Pci Slots, Quad Processors, Video Ram, Xeon Processors

One of OS X's newest features was one of the biggest reasons I switched to Mac. That feature (as you probably gathered via the title of the post) is Spotlight!

Today I had a rather frustrating time at work in Windows trying to locate a single file in millions. Every time I attempted to launch WinCVS, it would either lock up or tell me that there was a deadlock with a TCL84.DLL file.

Reading the error message that displayed, it implied that it was possibly using an incorrect version of the DLL stored somewhere else. From the name of the file, I figured that it was something to do with TCL/TK. This is odd since I didn't install the Python/TCL options it wants. I didn't have them installed before and had no problems.

Anyway, I wanted to see where there were other copies of the file. So I asked XP to do a file search (the one in Explorer) for me. After 30 minutes of my system running at a snail’s pace looking through all the files on my HD for that file, I gave up.

"Why didn't I use Google Desktop Search or Microsoft Desktop Search?" you ask? Well, I'll tell you. I don't use those tools because they cause my computer to run at a snail’s pace when I don't want it to. Even though those programs claim to not run if the computer isn't idle, they still seem to. Also, I have had Google Desktop Search cause some rather strange problems to show up. Like getting errors during project builds because it's indexing a file that was just touched by the build and since the file is in use, the build errors out.

I have tried both of the search engines above. Microsoft's search at least allows you to put it to sleep for 1 hour, 8 hours, etc... What they need is a scheduler that I can say exactly when the indexing should take place. That way I can specify the hours I am not in the office.

Enter Spotlight on the Mac. I have used this many times since I got my MacBook. I constantly forget where I store files. All I have to do to find the file is type part of its name and before I finish typing that name, it appears in the list. I'm sure OS X is indexing the computer, yet I never notice it.

Why is this such a difficult task for Microsoft or Windows to do? For file name searching, I have created a batch file at work that does a "DIR /S" and pipes the output to a file. I do this for all the volumes on my computer and I schedule it to run overnight. In the morning I can simply search the text file created to find a file. It's not real-time, but at least it's something.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 30 Minutes, Deadlock, Desktop Search, Error Message, File Search, Google, Hd, Macbook, Microsoft Desktop, Office Mac, Os X, Pace, Python, Scheduler, Search Engines, Single File, Sleep, Spotlight, Strange Problems, Tk

So, thanks to Microsoft Windows, I was finally able to convince my parents to switch to a Mac as well.

Why? Well, my Dad mistakenly used Internet Explorer to go someplace on the web. Apparently, that place wasn't very nice, and the next thing he knew, windows were popping up left and right. Later, when my mother tried to use the computer, Internet Explorer windows started popping up all over the place for her too. There were two processes running that were suspicious looking. "isamini" and "isamonitor". Looking these up on Google, I find that one is a trojan and the other was just malware in general. Aparently both do bad things to the system.

So this weekend, I spent 6 hours backing up their data, wiping out their HD and re-installing Windows. The backup/re-install/restore didn't take that terribly long. It was the freaking UPDATES that took forever. First, there was the fact that Windows Update thought we were not using a Genuine copy of Windows. That was utterly ridiculous. I used the "Re-install" disk that came with the freaking computer. I had to go through some bizarre set of webpages that identified the little certificate on the side of the computer. Once I did that, I was allowed to start the update process.

There were 10 updates in the first set. That took about a half an hour, then came SP2, that took about 45 minutes, then after SP2, there were 49, count them, 49 more updates that needed to be done. I stopped at this point. Enough is enough.

So to try to combat future problems, I set up both my parents accounts as "limited users". This works great. Now, they are not allowed to change the Power Saving features in the Display options. I also forgot to install some printer drivers they need for the printer they have. So back to their house I went tonight to make those adjustments.

Tomorrow afternoon, on my way home from work, I'm buying a MacMini for them. I'll get it setup and bring it over to them when I finish. If they don't want the Windows box, I'll probably bring it home and install a Linux distro on it.

There was a time when I really though that Winows was not all that bad. Between Vista being as useless as Windows XP when it comes to security, (I'll explain) and XP being useless, it wasn't really all that hard to convince the matriarch of the family that the switch was necessary.

I make the claims about XP and Vista that I am making due to the fact that Vista seems to have a similar security model to XP. A "Standard user" can't do much (apparently they can change the power saving features unlike XP). I suppose this is a good thing. However, in order to do anything with the system, you have to log into an administrator account. XP is the same way with it's "Limited user" accounts. I take part of the above statements back... I tried to change a setting somewhere else, and it asked to put in the password of the admin account. So they did make some improvements. Maybe the other places it doesn't ask will get fixed before it's released.

I am writing this post under Vista as a "Standard user". Basically, I want to see how Vista fairs compared to OS X and the way it handles changes to the system by non-admin accounts. Windows XP just doesn't deal with Limited users at all. From what I can see with Vista, at least it has the ability to make some changes as a Standard user. My opinion, it doesn't stack up at all. Apple got it right with OS X and the way it deals with standard users vrs admin users.

Thank God I was able to convince my parents to switch. :whew:

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Computer Internet, Dad, Genuine Copy, Google, Half An Hour, Hd, Installing Windows, Internet Explorer Windows, Isamini, Isamonitor, Macmini, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Parents, Printer Drivers, Sp2, Tomorrow Afternoon, Trojan, Windows Box, Windows Update

I have to say that I am very impressed with the design of the notebook. It's thin (just over an inch), light (just over 5lbs.), and a battery life that is really good. Just about everything you would want in a notebook.

It comes with a bunch of stuff like 802.11g and Bluetooth. It has a "mini" DVI connection port to plug in an external monitor that can work in either mirror mode or as a secondary display with the notebook open or closed. An Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, an iSight camera (which turns out to be quite useful. I'll explain later when I start describing the software I find), a "scrolling" trackpad (meaning that you can use the trackpad to scroll a browser window without having to put the mouse on a scrollbar), and a little remote (which is quite useful with Front Row).

Having bought the base options, my first task was to get more memory for it. I found 2 1GB RAM cards at newegg.com for about $180. Installing the RAM was interesting. It was a simple matter of removing the battery from the bottom. There's a lock that is unlocked with a coin. Then a small jeweler's screwdriver is needed to remove the three screws holding an L shaped plate on the edge of the bay where battery sits. The RAM slots have a little lever in them that pops the RAM out of their connectors. That was no sweat. Putting the new RAM in was another matter. They were very difficult to get all the way into the slots. I wound up having to use the handle of a spoon to put the necessary force on the RAM card to get it to go in far enough. I still don't think one of them is in all the way, but the computer is running with no problems so I have to assume it's in far enough. Putting the L shaped plate back on was a little tricky, but not bad.

My next upgrade for it will be to get a 120GB HD for it. 60GB is adequate, but I'm already at about half full. I don't want to spend too much money on a drive so I've been looking, but haven't found one yet. It's not high on my list right now.

The only thing I can say bad about it right now is that it does run rather hot. I use a door from an old shelving unit I had as a laptop tray. Even with that, the heat from the notebook is pretty hot.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Base Options, Battery Life, Firewire Port, First Impressions, Front Row, Hd, Isight Camera, Jeweler, Little Lever, Mirror Mode, Necessary Force, Ports, Ram Card, Ram Slots, Screwdriver, Screws, Scrollbar, Simple Matter, Spoon, Usb 2