Even before MacWorld, the new desktop Mac Pro line was announced, with dual-quad CPUs in them (that's 8 CPUs if your math is weak). I went to the Apple Online Store and took a whack at configuring one for just plain old everyday computing, and for probably doing a dual-boot into Win XP Pro. You can order just one 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPU, 2GB RAM, a 320GB SATA HD, a 16X DVD double-sided burner, a nice range of dual DVI-output video cards (starting with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT), a keyboard, mouse, OS X 10.5 Leopard, and some Apple software for $2300. Not cheap, but it's an Apple! And with a hot Quad-core CPU and outstanding hi-speed RAM.

But, I want a second hard drive to make dual booting completely independent of the main boot drive, and I thought 4GB of RAM would be good for "future proofing" and running maybe Parallels for a virtual machine to jump back and forth between OS X and XP Pro. Well, the first "2nd hard-drive" option is a 500GB job for an additional $250. Why no 320GB for #2? Beats me, Jack. There are four HD drive bays. I just bought a Seagate 500GB SATA 7200 rpm HD from NewEgg.com for $116. Maybe Apple is using a "server-grade HD" (whatever that means, since that is what Steve says is in the Time Capsule backup device). Or, there are some Gold Heat Sinks I did not see in the lovely photos at Apple. I can't find any info on the Web about what vendor's HDs they use.

To upgrade from 2GB RAM to 4GB RAM costs $500 (that's for a 2GB upgrade!) That is $250 for 1GB RAM.. I know they probably use some of the best DDR2 800 RAM there is. One online vendor (selling Apple parts since 1988) sells 2GB Mac Pro upgrades (2x1GG) for $128 with the following claim: "These OWC memory modules fully meet/exceed Apple’s Mac Pro Quad & 8-Core Xeon model memory specifications. Utilization of qualified Apple Mac Pro Heat-Spreaders, Apple Qualified IDT AMBs, and the best major brand memory components ensure maximum performance and trouble-free operation." With a lifetime warranty.

I must discover exactly what kind of RAM carries a price of $500 for 2GB before I would give this factory upgrade a second thought. Perhaps the Apple RAM has been flown to the ISS and tested in Zero Gravity, or it has been blessed by a Rabbi, a priest, a minister, and a mullah. Apple has a reputation on the Web insider sites for charging outrageous prices for their RAM. But unless there is some dramatic and demonstrable difference between the 2GB Apple RAM upgrade for $500 and the $128 online "equivalent," the Apple pricing is simply unconscionable. And it is diminishing my enthusiasm for buying the Mac Pro.

For a comparison, you can buy a Dell XPS 420, with an Intel 2.4 GHz Quad-core CPU, 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM, two 320GB SATA HDs, a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO video card, a 16X dual-layer DVD burner, a mouse and a keyboard for about $1378! Two problems. It is a PC and it comes with Vista Home Premium. A couple of things jump out. For the $1378, you get two 320GB SATA hard drives, and the cost of a memory upgrade to go from 3GB to 4GB is only $80. That really makes the $250 to upgrade a Mac Pro by 1GB of RAM even more outlandish. Yes, this Dell config has a slower CPU than the Mac Pro. The cost to upgrade the Dell to a higher-speed CPU is significant.

There seems to be some confusion as to whether a Quad-core CPU will make your garden-variety programs faster or handle multi-threading better than a Core-Duo for instance. You always seem to read that a program "has to be recompiled" to take advantage of dual and quad-core CPUs.

I have an Athlon 64, which started out as a single core 4600+ CPU. My HDTV software took up 100% of the CPU operating cycles, even with 2GB of RAM. I couldn't even get the mouse to work! I was able to swap out the single-core Athlon for an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (the ASUS motherboard was designed with this dual-core upgrade path in mind). While watching an activity monitor of CPU activity, one of the dual-core CPUs would be nearly maxed out on the HDTV and I could open other programs (garden variety WP or Quicken, 32-bit programs, for example), and see the activity in the second core - totally independent of what the HDTV card and software were doing in Core 1.

Perhaps what is closer to the truth is that a single program cannot simultaneously take advantage of more than one CPU core unless that software is "optimized" for multi-threading in a multi-core operation. In the past, a processor could execute just one stream of software instructions, or “thread,” at any given moment. It could easily jump back and forth between multiple threads. A processor that supports hyper-threading can process two threads simultaneously. Since a single thread rarely uses all of a processor's execution resources, this enables greater processing efficiency and greater total throughput for multi-threaded applications. Software threads must be explicitly defined in the code, so performance benefits are not automatic. (See: www.devx.com/go-parallel/Article/32725).

One sophisticated writer/programmer points out that today’s single-threaded applications could actually see a performance boost for most users by going to a dual-core chip, not because the extra core is actually doing anything useful, but because it is running the adware and spyware that infest many users’ systems and are otherwise slowing down the single CPU that user has today! If you’re running a single-threaded application, then the application can only make use of one core. This is a somewhat cynical view. Perhaps better to say the other CPU core(s) can run background-antivirus and spyware software without dragging down the performance of the main program(s) you are running. For example on my Athlon dual-core, I just forced an antivirus update download. In Task Manger-performance, it seems that the update was handed by the second core, while I had several other programs open and accessing the first core.

And ... Intel makes a strong point that the Xeon Quad-core CPU is faster and more facile when handling virtualization applications (such as Parallels to dual-boot Windows and Mac OS on a Mac Pro). The Mac Web site talks about the power of the Xeon Quad-core and Eight-core setups available in the Mac Pro. But, they do not adequately address the possible advantages for plain-vanilla 32-bit programs that you may be using - if in fact there are any significant ones.

Let the iPhone, iMacs, and iPods make the quarterly profit, and give us a break on a new Mac Pro, which with a second HD and 4GB RAM would be $3049! Not today, Mr. Jobs. I am a computer freak, but that does not mean I am completely unaware of the costs of components. You can add a second DVD burner for "only" $100. From the cabling shown in the .PDFs, it looks like IDE ribbon cable. I bought a Samsung SATA 16X double-sided DVD burner for my home-built Athlon monster for about $40 (to connect to one of six internal SATA connectors). So, on the DVD thingee, their markup is only 100%, more or less. Unless they have cornered some "server-grade DVD burners," which is not something I have ever seen sold on a Web site. Just DVD burners from about $39.

Oh, what I would give to see the actual cost to Apple for RAM, the HDs they use, and so on. There are millions of us who never took to the Original Macintosh, partly because it was an all-in-one box. Now, we see the gorgeous new iMacs. No thanks. But, for those of us who have spent nearly 20 years, upgrading drives, RAM, CPUs, heat sinks, power supplies, etc., in our PCs, we want a desktop Mac Pro - where we can open the case and push and pull some stuff. And they do intend for you to be able to upgrade the RAM, the HD, the DVD burner yourself. They have some complete .PDFs with pics and text showing exactly how to do each such replacement or upgrade. Now, you're talkin', if you would just take the gun away from my head about the RAM and HD upgrade.

One last nit to pick. In describing the dual-output DVI video card, Apple talks about Mirroring, like at a conference where you project the same image you see on your monitor up on a screen. And extending the Desktop. I don't want either. For years, I have run first Matrox and now Nvidia dual-output video. Each of the two monitors has a different program on it. Maybe WP on the right and my file manager on the left monitor, and so on. If the Apple dual-monitor cards have this capability, they sure make it very hard to determine. I looked everywhere, including doing a Google search. No dice.

The ATI site is long on tech jargon and short on how the damn card actually functions in a dual-display configuration. The closest they come to speaking in practical terms is: "Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display." That's nice. I am not sure what an independent "video overlay" is, but I sure it is important. Maybe it is something like "a different program van be viewed on each of the two monitors." I used to write tech manuals that people could understand. PC Mag once said that one of my tutorial manuals was one of the best they had read.

Engineers should not be allowed to write any instructions. Just engineer. In college, my wife made extra money editing papers for Electical Engineering students. I could entertain you for hours about how I, an ex-Marine and law grad, used to interact with the engineers I plied and prodded to explain to me in semi-lay terms how their programs actually worked - so I could write manuals people could understand and not have to call tech support. It was really fun. I saw a joke the other day that said people were always calling tech support and asking where the ANY key was, as in "Press Any key." Very early on, I made a fast rule that the engineers loved. The instruction was always "Press the Spacebar." It was the biggest key, unambiguous, and the engineers just smiled. They knew I was someone they could trust to make sense out of their geek-speak. All of those years of "Press ANY key" down the tubes in 10 seconds! And you could press Spacebar with either thumb, without looking. Such a deal. Why do people say they are going to "print out" something? They are going to "print." Hopefully, it will come "out" of the printer. The result could be called a "printout," if you must, but ..... I digress again.

Just one more story from my somewhat short last career (of about seven careers) as a tech write on contract to big Dallas companies. I was fed up with corporate America and took a fling at tech writing after a friend suggested the idea to me one day at a ham-radio swap meet in Dallas. I started out by doing a massive rewrite of a mainframe database manual. I had no idea how to program BASIC, let alone a mainframe database. That was my strength. If I could somehow understand what was going on and get it down on paper, any moron could read the manual and whiz right along. I asked the chief engineering programmer one day to show me in careful steps just how a certain series of commands were carried out. He whacked furiously at the keyboard, slapped the Return key, paused and started over. About the third time, he called out "On, shit!" He realized that had never really focused on the procedure, but whacked away until something went right. I looked at him and said, "Well, we now have a new user syndrome. It is called the 'Oh, shit syndrome. '" He laughed, and we started over to record in my notes each key he touched and the end result.

By the way, it was my first tech-writing job and I was working as a sub-contractor for a bigger tech-writing group. At first I was totally confused. Eventually, I got the hang of it - with some coaching from my then supervisor, a man who saw that I had potential. The software company decided they had no more money in the budget to pay the high overhead of my sponsoring group. So, they told them the contract was ending. My partner, who had a Ph.D., and I were to be terminated, of course. The then lady boss of my group took my badge and escorted me to the front door - rather rudely. I sat in my car until I saw her leave and went back to the receptionist and asked for the chief programmer, who had told me to come back in when my lady boss left. I was hired as an individual contractor, sole writer on the project, and given a $10-an-hour raise. Like I said, more fun than the law allows. But duck soup for an old CIA agent.

I later worked for one of the original programmers of the mainframe database. He was porting this massive database down to a PC. We spent nearly a year and produced what was regarded as one of the finest tutorials and User Guide ever written. It was this tutorial that PC Mag had praised in a review of the software. We would sit at my kitchen table, eat pasta and drink wine and he would go over my drafts. Always there was fine tuning and maybe three or four drafts. Very few writers have had the privelege of working with a true programming genius like I did. He knew programming. I knew tech writing. We were unbeatable as a team. Sadly, as I learned in my travels, many tech writers are treated about like the janitorial staff and report to some low-level person who would not know a good User Guide if you hit him or her over the head with it. So, the point of the story is now how great a tech writer I was, but how little attention is given in most software and hardware companies to writing manuals and instructions. Over the years, I have bought tech items, edited the instructions and sent them to the president with a note "you all could have done better." A few times I got a thank you. More than once, the instructions were changed. My Charity work, since I am too old for the Peace Corps.

January 13, 2008

Microsoft seems to be going backward. Not only are adoption and upgrades of Vista not up to expectations, but more and more users are opting to buy computers with Windows XP Pro installed (after pressure on Dell and others to continue to offer XP on new computers), or deleting Vista from new computers and installing XP Pro. The year-end tech summaries were simply brutal when it came to pointing out the shortcomings of Vista. There is now a 3rd-party program (vLite)that will delete much of the function bloat in Vista, shrinking its footprint to as little as 1.4 GB on the hard drive. It is hard to believe that Win XP takes about 1.5GB of hard-drive space to install and Vista about 15GB. Ooops, the decimal point got moved to the right! And for this ten-fold increase in bloat, most users would have a hard time telling you how Vista is twice as functional or secure as XP, let alone 10 times. There is a free utility (vLite) which can shrink Vista's disk profile down to as little as 1.4GB, by eliminating selected components.

Vista may well go down in history as the biggest blunder since the small personal two-man helicopter I investigated on behalf of a wealthy Texas investor. Its payload was adequate for two average-size men, back when men weighed 175, but there was no allowance for full fuel in the total payload. So, two people fit in the thing comfortably, but had to sit and stare at each other, or maybe fly from one end of the airport to the other. Windows Vista was built with layer upon layer of fat on a skeleton with rickets and relied on "more powerful CPUs, more RAM, and more hard-drive space" to accommodate the blubber. But, as the 600 pound man found out. Maybe you can rely on a new wide and strong chair to support you. The problem is when you try to stand up.

Apple started all over a few years ago with its Operating System. Now, we see the Web notes about how a new version of Windows (Windows 7), with a slimmer profile, is being fast tracked. The Windows Vista 600-pound OS is trying to slim down so that it too can stand up and function. You have to feel a little sorry for Microsoft. They know they have a fat turkey on their hands, but every time they try to shed a few pounds, somebody cries out, "but how will I run my 8-year-old spreadsheet if you don't keep backward compatibility?" Read "backward compatibility" as "we are stuck with much of the old code skeleton - no matter how hard we try to keep from getting fat."

Now, Windows One Care, the security program, has run into problems that cause, rather than cure, computer problems. And the vaunted Xbox (17.7 million sold) Live had an extended outage that has caused MS to offer a free video game to placate fuming users. Also, users are complaining about problems with access to some content. It involves the DRM licensing issues for Xbox Live Marketplace downloads. Many people have been locked out of the content they've paid for. The British Educational and Communications Agency (BECTA) is recommending that British schools steer clear of Vista and MS Office 2007.

The European Union regulators said they were again investigating Microsoft. The investigation revolves around suspicions that MS abuses its market dominance by squeezing out competing Internet browsers and software rivals who depend on being provided the data needed to make their programs work with Windows. Many users worldwide have often questioned how forthcoming Microsoft is in providing the necessary "software hooks" to allow 3rd-party software to work. Often end users are told to contact the vendor of the product regarding problems and the vendors often respond that the problem is with Microsoft Windows.

This Chicken and Egg runaround is not easily resolved without courts requiring MS to make a disclosure of some code it claims is proprietary, etc., et al., ad nauseum. In the meantime, while end users suffer, Microsoft millionaires are being minted like Pennies at the U.S. Mint. And MS's outside attorneys are never without a lucrative case to work on. Microsoft profits are way up, MS millionaires are spreading like flies in a hot summer. While you and I pay nearly $300 for Win XP Pro - and more for Vista - which may end up being deleted from the hard drive in frustration. Today, you can buy a decent computer for about $600, but if you go into Office Max, or wherever, a single copy of Windows XP Pro is about $300! If you price a $30,000 truck with a V-6 and decide yoy want a V-8, they don't charge you $15,000 for the V-8. Only Microsoft charge such outrageous prices for the "engine."

All of these MS travails are good news (revenge) to those who have spent 20 years updating, upgrading computers, and massaging MS Operating Systems and programs and 3rd-party software to get them to work properly. And good news for Apple and those of us who have had enough of Microsoft and bought our first Mac in 2007. The Macworld show will surely kick off another wave of new Mac buyers. Apple's Leopard will eat Vista alive and spit out the bones for the scavengers.

There is a parallel, I think, between the price of Microsoft's software and the price of prescription drugs. Both entities say that they have to charge high prices to recover the cost of R&D. A drug patent lasts for 20 years. You cannot tell me that the blood pressure drug Vasotec, for example, took 20 years to break even and start to make a profit. Now, I get the generic Vasotec, made to the same standards, for $2 a month through my health plan. Or that the Billions in dollars in sales of Lipitor have not by now long passed the break-even point. Windows XP came out years ago and has sold untold millions of copies. Yet, the retail price has remained constant over time - maybe even raised in price now that it is close to being cut off for sale. It is a sad state of affairs when you pay X number of dollars for a computer and XXXX numbers of dollars for the software to run it. Don't ever run a Quicken report that shows the cost of your computer and the total cost of all the software you have bought for it. It will make you sick to your stomach.

Here is a software economics exercise for you to ponder. Microsoft's full version of Vista Ultimate retails for $399. Full versions of Windows XP Pro retail for about $299. Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (the latest version) retails for $129. There is only one flavor of Mac OS X 10.5, not the tiers used by Microsoft. How is it that after all the years it has been on the market and the millions of copies sold, Windows XP Pro sells for more than twice as much as Mac OS X? And Windows Vista Ultimate costs more than three times as much as Mac OS X 10.5? Especially considering that many experts and users feel that Mac OS X 10.5 is a better OS than XP Pro or Vista. And further that the Mac OS X sells only a fraction of the number of copies of Windows XP Pro and Vista. So, there is less money available for OS X R&D and new iterations of OS X. How is it possible that Apple can make any money selling to a much smaller customer base at a greatly reduced price over Microsoft's top OSs? The logical answer is: Microsoft XP and Vista are grossly overpriced. Microsoft is taking advantage of its near-monopoly position in Operating Systems with its "take it or leave it at this high price" position. It is no wonder that the pirating of Microsoft's Operating Systems is so rampant.

September 19, 2007

The sophistication of the Internet and of some Web sites continues to amaze me. I was researching for an article I was writing and needed some information about seating and seat distances from the field at Yankee stadium. Not only do they have every seating section shown and the prices and availability, but if you click on a particular seat number, you call up a photo of what your actual view of the field will be from that seat! That is unless someone in front of you is wearing a big hat or waving a rally banner.

July 19, 2007

Many people are gun shy about giving credit-card info for Internet purchases, especially for merchants they have not bought from previously. There may be other iterations of the same thing, but ShopSafe at Bank of America online is the answer to a paranoid's prayer. You must be a BA customer, of course. You log on and call up ShopSafe. A window opens where you can generate a one-time credit-card number with a maximum dollar amount and an expiration date of from two months (default) to how long you want. I do a screen-capture of each card I generate and label it for future reference. I have used it at least 100 times and no merchant has ever refused one of my "unique ShopSafe" card numbers. I buy software (download) from Eastern Europe without qualms. If the program costs $29, I make the card max for no more than $50.

Recently, another huge benefit came to light. Two software vendors sent me e-mails saying that my "auto-renewal" was about to charged to my credit card "on file." This was after nearly a year and for programs I no longer use. More importantly, I did not remember signing up for "auto-renewal." Must be some really fine print. One vendor offered in the e-mail for me to opt-out, which I did. But, I still got charged. I called rather irate that my opt-out had been ignored. The clearinghouse marked my account terminated and later sent me an e-mail confirming this - finally. Before I hung up, I said to the guy, "I really only called to keep the record straight, because the credit-card number I used was a one-time card that expired about 10 months ago! Good luck trying to charge to that!"

My banker looked at me cross-eyed when I explained my latest ShopSafe gambit. I decided I wanted to shop repeatedly with an unfamiliar online vitamin/supplement merchant, but did not want to use one of my high-limit credit cards, what with all the data losses due to hackers. So, I generated a one-time credit card number in ShopSafe for several hundred dollars. You can use the one-time number with the SAME merchant, but not with others. I set up a dummy account in Quicken for XXXXX.COM so that I could keep track of my declining balance as I placed orders. Each time I order, I copy the transaction over to my actual Bank of America credit card account in Quicken. A lot of trouble, you say. Well, it is a lot better than having a credit-card with a $17,000 max limit out there in some database of a relatively small-time vendor. Regardless of what the bank policy is about fraudulent use of your credit card, the best policy is not to have your card and your identity compromised in the first place. ShopSafe is well named.

Update: Even though I still had more than $500 remaining on my ShopSafe card for the vitamin/supplement vendor, during my third online purchase my ShopSafe card was refused. I never got around to talking to Bank of America about this. Hey, if this computer and online stuff works half of the time, that is about all one can hope for. (A later Update: Bank of America ShopSafe card now offers a card-generation selection for a card to be used repeatedly with a particular vendor.)

Never trust anybody with your private data, especially the federal government. Recently, I had to renew my amateur-radio license. With all of the losses and thefts of government computers, I did not feel comfortable using one of my major credit cards for the online renewal application. So, I generated a ShopSafe card for about twice what the fee is (I have a special short call that I chose from a list and that entails a modest fee). On Saturday, I think it was, I went to the FCC Web site and plugged in my FCC Identifier and password and whizzed through the renewal, even changing my e-mail in the process. I got an e-mail from the FCC telling me that my credit card had been charged. In about three-four days, I had my new license. An incredible response time from the federal government for anything! Then, I put it in perspective. The whole process was done by a computer, probably even the envelope being printed. So, here is the trick. Eliminate dealing with any humans in the U.S. Government and you will be in good shape. I remind you that I was a Marine, an ATF agent, and a CIA agent, so I know something about how the government does things.

June 30, 2007

The iPhone has been hyped to be all things to all people. But, after reading about all the things it will not do, and the slow Internet connect speed, I feel lucky to be out here in the sticks, where we are still trying to get a Cingular (The AT&T idiots killed a great name) signal seven (7) miles from our Cingular tower. An iPhone would be a waste of time out here. WiFi connections? Sure, we have one in the public library. I used to sit in the library with my laptop before I got WildBlue satellite Internet. So, all you folks without a free WiFi connection for your iPhone, come to the Honey Grove library. It is a free logon.

I had to return a Nokia 6126 flip-phone when it would drop out completely inside my house, only five (5) miles from the Cingular tower. I exchanged it for a MotoRazr V3xx, and it does much better. The $50 Cingular rebate is a pain in the butt. It comes in the form of a debit/credit-card with a $50 limit, that you can beg merchants to accept. I got one to bite. First the card was refused because the purchase was $67.90. When she entered a cash payment of $17.90, and then the Cingular $50 card, the deal went through. What a stupid-ass thing this credit-card rebate thing is from Cingular.

Every rebate I have ever gotten was in the form of a check. Only Cingular thought the credit-card thing was a good idea. Maybe they hoped most people would not try to use it. Cingular, now called "The New AT&T," or "AT&T," or "AT&T Wireless," or possibly "AT&T Mobility." Who the hell knows? Morons. Cingular we all knew. The rest of this renaming crap is nonsense. With all the money spent on renaming and rebranding, Cingular, or whatever - could have put up a new antenna bay out here so that the signal would carry more than 5 miles! In a thousand different locations.

Before he retired, I wrote the CEO of AT&T and suggested several reasons why Cingular should not be re-named AT&T Wireless. I got a handwritten note from the CEO thanking me for my observations. Still, "they" insisted on folding Cingular into the AT&T brand name. Now, I see that they have decided to go back to using at least part of the orange Cingular color scheme along with AT&T. A local cell-phone store has a new banner with the Cingular orange background and AT&T. Morons. Make up your minds. On Bank of America's Bill Pay site, it is called AT&T Mobility - Formerly Cingular. I would hate to sit in on these marketing meetings at AT&T for fear that I would be up on the conference table screaming at all the idiotic suggestions being made. And all the money wasted changing names and changing again.

Will the iPhone exhibit "release 1.0" problems? One would think so. For those who paid $600 for the phone and $60/month at a minimum for the service, enjoy your toy. One Web site pegged the real cost of owning the iPhone with a high-minute contract, to be about $6,000 over the life of a two-year contract. The cost of my 450 anytime-minutes contract is about $1080 over two years. Cost of phone, about $90 (I think. I have gotten confused with the exchange and the rebate.) Extra genuine Motrola battery cost $35. The cost of SD Micro card to bring my RAZR V3xx phone RAM up to 1GB was $30. The total is bad enough. But, my phone will do things the iPhone cannot do. On the iPhone, you can't even replace the battery, for goodness sake. What do you do in the middle of Central Park when you iPhone battery runs down? Pull out your "other" cell phone, I guess.

The iPhone is a great victory for media hype and the herd mentality of consumers. The views of long lines camped out at Apple and AT&T stores is simply beyond comprehension. People paid up to $300 to cancel their old cell contract, before anybody even knew how well (or poorly) the iPhone would work. It is a phone and media toy, for God's sake - not a pill guaranteeing eternal life. Get a life. The lady in Dallas who paid a kid $800 for his first-place in line, and went into the store with $16,000 to buy iPhones to sell on eBay, got what she deserved. One iPhone! The kid with the $800 windfall got an iPhone and a bunch of accessories. I am not in favor of crime. But, if the lady waving around the $16,000 in CASH outside at the phone store had the cash ripped from her hand and trotted off down the street, I would have cheered. The iPhone craze seems to have generated several classes of morons. Now, the price is $200 lower! That is one of the most rapid dramatic drops in price of a new piece of electronics in modern marketing history. Good thinking, Mr. Jobs. It will be a nice anecdote for your book: "How to Make Enemies Without Even Trying."

The MOTORAZR2, which debuts in July will have a large (2 inch) outside screen, a 2-megapixel camera with multi-shot capability (bursts), a more clear audio output - which adjusts for ambient noise, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and a good bit more of RAM storage (up to 2GB). The RAZR2 will do things the iPhone will not - and only the price, which is very high where it has already begun selling in S. Korea, should keep it from being a top contender. Phone, camera, video camera, beautiful high-rez screens inside and out, MP3 player, voice dialing, speakerphone, HTML Web viewer, and so on. If you think the iPhone ads were neat, take a look at the 3D presentation on the Web for the RAZR2 at: http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/razr2/experience/default.asp Wow! That's some spicy marketing.

February 21, 2007

Browsing for gadgets, I came across the SmartShopper Grocery List Assistant. You press the record button, say the item you want, and then SmartShopper adds that item to your list, in alphabetical order. You tell it to print out a list for you that looks like a store receipt. The SmartShopper’s creators said that it can print out a list of items according to where they’re located in the supermarket. The price is $150.

I find this rather amusing. For years, I have generated a several-column grocery list in WordPerfect, with checkboxes. I keep it on the kitchen counter and check off items as they come to mind. I virtually never run out of anything. If I want two of an item, I just add "2X" by hand after the checked item. The list contains about 95% of the items I usually buy at the supermarket. Each item has an aisle number associated with it.

The list is not alphabetical; it is by aisle number. If they move something from one aisle to another, I can update my list in seconds when I get home and print the new one. I zip through the store at about twice the pace of the average shopper, and buy less impulse items - and never forget an item. In the last column, there are boxes for Bank, GNC, Office Depot, Radio Shack, and so on. Don't laugh. When you get old, you will find you have forgotten to go to the bank (which in my case is 60 miles RTrip), or one of your other stops. Or bought lunch meat but forgot the bread. Be honest, this has happened to you regardless of your age. When I show my computer-generated list to cashiers, they say they have never seen a customer with a similar list. Incredible.

February 1, 2007

Microsoft's Vista is being greeted with less than an overwhelming response. Many of the software drivers that run your peripherals are either buggy or not even available. Microsoft is already talking about Vista Service Pack 1 (Vista SP1) being released later in 2007 (in which month nobody knows). Of the 100 or so reviews I have read of Vista, the one with the title "That $200 Windows XP Service Pack Called Vista" warms my heart (Robert Vamosi, CNET Reviews, Jan. 29, 2007). Most people will not be happy with the basic Vista version, for many reasons. For example, if you want to play Media Center (maybe pick up HDTV off-the-air or direct your cable programs to your computer), you will need at least Vista Home Premium. Vista Home Premium will no doubt be the version of choice for most home users who have done their homework.

Even Microsoft executives admit that most home computer users will only obtain Vista when they buy a new computer. Many proclaim that they will wait to buy either an Upgrade to Vista or a new computer until Vista SP1 it out. That is too iffy to make much sense. As for me, I will wait until I need a new computer before I dip my toes into the Vista pool. That will many months, since I just upgraded my computer to a dual-core hot AMD chip and have 2GB of RAM. My computer is "Vista Ready." Good for it. When I do buy, I will likely buy an HP desktop. But, if I cannot get a computer free of "crapware," (that is, programs like Norton Internet Security free trial, etc.), I will build my own once again. I will not buy a desktop full of "crapware." For one thing, I have mentioned in the past the three computers that were trashed when I tried to uninstall Norton Internet Security and/or Norton Antivirus. My three computers are now "Symantec Free," and are going to stay that way.

Update - June 2007: When I started looking at HP computers, they all seemed to be loaded with "crapware," that is, programs I did not want, especially the anti-virus program. So, I bit the bullet and built yet another computer, with an Athlon 64 dual-core 5600+ CPU, 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM, SATA hard drive and SATA DVD burner, and a medium power two-monitor DVI video card. The 600watt Zalman power supply has heat-pipes and a bottom-mounted fan that blows air over the heat-pipes and out the back vent. The ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition motherboard is loaded. It too has heat-pipes over some of the chips. Two Gigabit LANS, eSATA connection for external eSATA hard drive, PCI Express slots for video cards, RAID configurations galore, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 jacks, an external control gadget and a remote that I have not even hooked up. Amazingly, the computer worked the first time I turned it on, and the XP install, including partitioning my hard drive, went fine. I had an unused full copy of Windows XP Home that Microsoft had sent to placate me when I complained about one of my computers being told that I had tried to "reauthorize XP too many times on this machine." What? Who knew there was a limit? Most of the time, the authorization prompt came up capriciously, compliments of Microsoft. I had not changed any peripherals (which can trigger a "authorization" request) in a long time.

I got the capricious "you need to authorize this computer" message last week on my oldest computer, a P4 1.9 which originally had Win XP Home installed, to which I later had to update to both SP1 and SP2. The Internet authorization failed, but the automated phone thing, where you read them about 20 numbers and they read you some new ones, worked - after a couple of reboots. Who still has Win XP from an original install before SP1 on their machines, besides me? Not many, I would guess. I think it was originally installed in 2001. Microsoft keeps good records! I gave the computer to the grand kids, took it back and gave them a faster one I built, and still use it for ham-radio stuff, since ham-radio software is usually pretty far behind the curve.

With Bitdefender 10 anti-virus, ZoneAlarm Pro firewall, and SuperAntiSpyware Pro (paid version) - and now a firewall in the Belkin N1 router, I am shielded from most of the threats on the Internet. Other than XP (and IE7, of course), there is no Microsoft software on the machine. And no Symantec (Norton) products. I use Acronis 10 to automatically back up an image of my C drive to an external USB hard drive each night. And NERO's BackItUp to run period backup "jobs" to both the external USB hard drive and to DVDs. On my Desktop are Shortcuts for several "batch files" that back up e-mail, Docs, etc. to my external USB drive and/or to a Flash Drive. I use Palm Desktop for my event and to-do calendar, and Eudora Pro for e-mail. Still using WordPerfect 12, which does all I need it to do. Quicken Basic 2006 is all I need, and even then I don't download financial records from the Web. Of course, I still use NERO 7 disc-burning software and most of its modules, for instance, to burn a DVD to play video files. I browse mostly with Firefox and also use Opera. I have no need for a spread sheet or a presentation program - retired and reclusive here in the Outback.

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System Mechanic 7 Versus Fix-it Utilities 7

Recently, I bought System Mechanic 7 from IOLO and Fix-It 7 from V-Com. It is my intention to do an in-depth comparison of the two programs. But, something is troubling me so much about System Mechanic 7, that I want to preview those comments now. System Mechanic is a program designed to Optimize, Repair, Clean, Protect, and Maintain your computer. It is chock full of useful modules.

One day I noticed that my online bank was asking me to register again. I checked and all of my Cookies in both Firefox and IE7 were gone. After digging for some time, I discovered that in SysMech7's Defrag module, there is a submenu that has a default box checked that says: "Perform a quick PC Cleanup operation before defragmentation (recommended)." In addition to cleaning up some junk files, this function also deletes your Cookies! Now, all of the log-ins you worked so hard to prepare for your favorite news sites, your bank, your credit cards (no passwords, just logins) are gone and you have to try to find your notes for each site.

The second piece of bad news. In SysMech7, there is a module called "Internet Cleanup and Privacy Enforcement." This function will also delete your Cookies unless you had the foresight to click on More Info and discover this fact. If you are brave enough to click Next, you get a screen that allows you to customize what you wanted cleaned out. Under Internet Privacy, you can uncheck the box for "Erase Internet Cookies." Also, there is a Manage Cookies link. Here, you can "protect" individual cookies by clicking on individual boxes. Good grief. What if you are busy and don't have the time to dig down and down to find this screen? Adios Cookies.

In my opinion, no program that deletes files should have a Default set to Delete Cookies. You should have to select that function, and why would you want to in most cases? Further, modern browsers handle the management of cookies, passwords, history, and so on, very well, with easy-to-understand menus to allow selectivity. In Firefox for instance, under Tools is "Clear Private Data." You can elect to not clear Cookies, or History, or whatever you choose.

Now, in case you become victim of SysMech7 or some other program that deletes your Cookies, you need to have a backup, which I did have for Firefox. In Firefox, your Cookies are contained in your profile. This found in C:\Documents and Settings\Owner (or whatever you call yourself as a User)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles. I use a DOS batch file to back up my Firefox Profile most every day. Whatever backup program you use, make sure that "Firefox Profiles" is in the list. If your Cookies get deleted, you can simply go to your default profile backup and drag "cookies.txt" back into your default profile. Of course, your Firefox Bookmarks are also in the default profile and get backed up when you back up the Firefox Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default. You will see "Bookmarks.html," and several old cookie files, such as cookies-1.txt, etc.

In IE7, you can click on File, Import and Export. In the Wizard, select Export Cookies and select a destination. I send my IE7 Cookies to an external USB drive in a folder called IE7Cookies, Duh. Smarter people than I could probably tell you which IE7 files you could copy to backup your Cookies, but I have not discovered that secret. You can also export your IE7 Favorites, but I prefer just to include the Favorites Folder in one of my backup schemes (C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Favorites).

How Many Computers Can You Install the Program On?

There is a trend with utilities, firewalls, and antivirus programs, to allow the program to be installed on three (3) computers for one fee.

On the Web site for SysMech7, it is clear that you can install on three computers and that the program is Vista ready. My SysMech7 CD came with a sticker inside the case that listed the Serial Number and User ID and said you can use the same info for up to three installs. I had originally downloaded and paid for the program and paid for the shipment of a CD. Only after I wrote the president of the company complaining about many things (like Defrag deleting my Cookies) did I get my CD in the mail. No paper User Guide came with the CD. If there had been a paper User Guide, I would have read it and probably saved myself a lot of grief. When I edited and published software manuals, I used to tell clients that about 75% of their tech-support calls could be avoided by publishing a good manual. Sitting in the recliner with a highlighter is infinitely more satisfying and useful than trying to read a .PDF manual - in my opinion. Sadly, many, if not most, do not read page one in the User Guide. They grab the phone and expect someone in India, who has never read the User Guide, to answer their question. If the answer is not in the tech-support on-screen FAQ, you are screwed - which is most of the time. Not to pick on India, since you can get just as many useless answers from techs here in the States.

On the V-Com Fix-it Utilities 7 Web page, I could find no mention of how many computers you are allowed to install the program. I wrote them a stern e-mail suggesting that they were "behind the marketing curve." I got an answer that said that I could install the program on up to three computers. Later, I checked the Web page and under SystemSuite 7, it says you can install on three computers. I guess you must use deduction and inference about SysMech7. The CD came with three different KEYS for the three allowable installs. There is no mention on the Web site, that I could find, that the program is compatible with Vista (Win2000/XP). A small-form 103-page paper User Guide came in the box with the CD. Either you must be very young or have good reading glasses to read the guide. I now keep a magnifying glass next to the computer. At least with a .PDF manual you can make the fonts larger.

Registry Repair

In SysMech7, under Repair Registry Problems, the Custom Optimization and Repair mode allows you to select which tests to perform. The items System Mechanic detects as registry errors are displayed, and then you designate which items you want to repair. After the problems are found, the program searches your hard drive for solutions. You can view the list of problems found. Then, those that you have selected are fixed automatically.

Fix-it7 scans your computer very deeply and then presents you with each problem or potential problem. There are Green boxes (safe to delete), Yellow boxes (mostly safe to delete, but with some notations), and Red Boxes which are "know what you are doing before you check a Red Box." I am very cautious about checking Red boxes, although many are a slam dunk. For example, I download an enormous number of news and technical files and later archive them to various folders. Bless its heart, the Registry still shows the name of the files in my Download Folder, although it may now be empty. So, it is an easy call to delete all references to D:\Download when the files are no longer there. And so on. It is a tedious and time-consuming task, but you feel that the Registry Repair really dug down deep.

Here are the results of a test that can only make you wonder about the depth of the Registry search and subsequent repair in SysMech7. I ran a full SysMech7 Registry Repair and had it repair all the problems it found, and after letting it search all of my drives for "solutions." Immediately, I closed the program and ran Registry Fixer in Fix-it7. Fix-it7 reported that there were 22 useless Registry entries with Green boxes, 17 with Yellow boxes and 72 with Red boxes. Obviously, the two programs use a different approach. I left all the Green boxes checked, checked 4 of the 17 Yellow boxes, and 30 of the 72 Red boxes and clicked Apply. A few entries were listed as not being readily repairable, but only a very few. Conclusion: The average user might be better off using SysMech7's Repair Registry Problems, since it works mostly automatically. More sophisticated user might be better off with Registry Fixer, where you "Cherry pick" what you want to delete. I use both and hope I have not screwed up my Registry beyond repair.

There is some backup. Both programs have Undo functions. Perhaps more importantly, SysMech7 has a "backup Registry" function. And Fix-it7 has a "create checkpoint" function. Before you do Registry Repairs, you should back up your current registry and set a Check Point.

Both programs have a "Defrag Registry" function that compacts the Registry for faster access. Fix-it7 calls it "Registry Defrag." SysMech7 calls it "Compact the System Registry," and it takes place at the next reboot or system startup. I have no idea which is a better "Registry Defragger." I will probably stick with SysMech7 unless I find a reason to change. It would not seem like a good idea to use the function from both programs. They probably have different ideas on how to Defrag a Registry.

Both utilities have facile defragging programs with many options. As I recall, (I will check it out next defrag), SysMech7 has an option where you can opt to have certain system and other files that were in use during the process defragged the next time Windows boots. What is really strange is the way each program reports the percentage of defragmentation. For example, after a few days of use of my computer, SysMech7 consistently reports that my C:\ drive has about 26% fragmentation. I run Defrag and check the percentage of fragmentation. Now, right after a Defrag, it says that 17-21% of my C:\ drive is still fragmented. If I immediately open Fix-it7 Defrag and ask it to "analyse" the fragmentation on the C:\ drive, it reports 1% (as opposed to 17 to 21% in SysMech7). Once, I ran Defrag in Fix-it7 and immediately after that SysMech7 showed that the C:\ was 18% fragmented. This constant reporting of high percentage of fragmentation by SysMech7 has made me shy away from using it. Somebody is going to have to do a better job of explaining what it going on.

FYI: My C:\drive is only around 20GB on purpose, so that I can easily make an "Image" of the C:\ drive with Acronis 10 automatically every night. If I were to upgrade to Vista, I would have to expand the the size of the C:\ drive. Not to worry. Not gonna install Vista on this computer. Actually, I have two internal drives and two external USB drives, so I have C,D - E,F (G and H are DVD drives), J,K - O,P and my USB thumbdrive(s) check in as drive "I." Fun, fun, fun.

SysMech7 has a second Defrag function that is described thusly: "Low level defrag is the most thorough defragment method. It creates free space at the end of the drive while it defragments files. This approach reduces the tendency for future fragmentation to occur and ensures that data remains defragmented for a longer time. This level defragmentation can take a long time (up to two days in extreme cases) depending on the fragmentation of the drive and the speed of your PC. It takes significantly more time than the Optimized Defrag option."

A Defrag that may take up to two days! A little guidance on what kind of time-frame you might expect with a modern CPU and a couple of GB or RAM might help. Otherwise, in all the 20 plus years I have been using utilities, I cannot remember anything that suggested a function could take up to two days to complete. I don't do programming and/or compiling. This is what happens when geeks run wild and management and the sales department don't have a meeting to ask "What is this two-day Defrag business all about?"

I have already mentioned that in a sub-menu on SysMech7's Defrag, there is a box to check to "Perform a Quick PC Cleanup." Only after you dig down some more do you find that unless you uncheck another box, the PC Cleanup will delete your cookies. In my long letter to the president of IOLO, I said in part: "In your Defrag scenario, you have a default to 'Perform a quick PC Cleanup before defragmentation (recommended).' This is the single most misguided default I have ever seen! Even when you click on 'More Info,' there is no clue that Cookies will be deleted as part of the Cleanup. With the scores of boxes you can check, I missed the Cleanup before Defrag. If you did deep enough in the Help, you can find the answer. But too late! This is just one of 50 programs I have to dig deep into! Even though I am retired, I cannot spend all my time looking for hidden check boxes in SysMech7."

I got an e-mail from IOLO thanking me for taking the time to share my observations. The first concrete result is that they finally sent me the CD I paid for. If they don't change that Defrag default that does a PC Cleanup and deletes, among other things, your Cookies, I am, as they say in the Mob "going to the mattresses."

Power Desk 6 File Manager - Free with Fix-it Utilities 7 from V-COM

Fix-it7 comes with a free copy of Power Desk 6 Standard. I have been using Power Desk Pro file manager in place of Windows Explorer since it was first released. The free version is worthy of being on every computer. It does double panes - so you can drag and drop (copy or move) a file from one folder to another on any drive. It has an easy way to create and name new folders, a great File Finder function, and on and on. You can download Power Desk 6 Standard free at www.v-com.com, but it will only make you salivate for Power Desk Pro 6, the File Manager that Microsoft forget to make. PDPro 6 even has encryption of files and so much more. I simply could not work on a computer without it.

(These are very rich and complex programs. As time permits, I will continue to compare features. Check back. In the meantime, my tentative conclusion is that you would be well served to buy both System Mechanic 7 and Fix-it Utilities 7, since between the two of them you should be able to keep your Win XP computer clean as a whistle. Just one clue. Fix-it7 has a PC Diagnostics program that will check everything from your Video card(s), to your Motherboard, to your RAM chips. Imagine how you can dazzle tech support when you tell them the 15 different diagnostics you have already run. With these two program on your machine, you have enough ammunition to be ready when the software people tell you that your problem is hardware related and vice versa. No more Chicken and Egg run-a-round. Even better, you may not need to call tech support at all. If used properly and consistently, these programs can make Windows XP and your programs run with very few problems - unless there are bugs in the software.)

I had given up on System Mechanic 7. It tries to do too many things and gets confusing. And the sub-menu choices can bite you if you are not careful. I now use only Fix-it Utilities 7 for disk maintenance. But on one computer, I got a notice of an auto-update available for Sys Mech 7, so I downloaded it. So far, I have done little with it. I did notice that the Cleanup does not seem to default to clearing out ALL your Cookies, etc. (I had written the company president with a long list of weird things, like wiping out all of my Cookies, failure to send the CD version I had paid extra for, and so on.) But, the code that keeps track of my AntiVirus and Firewall is pretty anemic and confused. It correctly reports that my AV is BitDefender, but make no mention of whether it is up to date. It also tells me that my Firewall is Bitdefender. No, it is ZoneAlarm Pro. In fairness, ZoneAlarmPro says it cannot detect any AV running on my machine. I think ZoneAlarm does that on purpose to get you to upgrade to their combo AV and Firewall. No thanks. I tried that years ago and the AV was an outdated one. ZA now uses a different AV vendor in their combo AV/Firewall. I don't buy any security products where programs from two different vendors are lumped into one called a "complete solution." I go to the horse's mouth and buy the "real" version of what they are trying to peddle in their combo program.

Close is good only horseshoes and hand-grenades. As time permits, I will look and see what else has changed in System Mechanic 7.1.10, but I have bigger fish to fry.

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Belkin N1 WiFi Router

The 802.11n WiFi standard is not expected to be officially ratified until about September 2008. But, even in early 2006, the standard draft seemed to be close enough to the final standard that major manufacturers began releasing 'pre-N', 'draft n' or 'MIMO-based' products. I bought a Belkin "pre-N" WiFi router in February of 2006 (F5D8230-4). The main reason for the purchase was to get what was touted as "greater range." My Internet is from Wildblue satellite (1.5 Mips max), so it means very little to seek a super-fast transfer rate in a WiFi router to surf or download files.

The Belkin "pre-N" did have remarkable range. I could pick up my network on a Palm TX PDA from my neighbor's house several hundred feet away, and my laptop on the far side of my house nearly always showed full scale reception. Recently, the Belkin "pre-N" became intermittent. Rather than wait for the turnaround time for a repair, I bought the newer Belkin N1 WiFi Router, based on the latest draft of 802.11n. It is often listed on Web sites as the "Belkin N1." Its model number is F5D 8231-4. I had been looking for an excuse to buy this model.

The Belkin N1 router comes with a CD which contains an auto-install program, but I downloaded the version from the Belkin Web site, which some say is newer. After two or three tries, the router would not recognize my Wildblue modem. So, I dug in my notes for settings from the older router and opened the manual install screen. Still, no luck. I try never to call tech support. Stuff ought to install without a long hassle with somebody on the phone. But it was late, and I called the Belkin toll-free tech-support line and was informed that the wait would be about six minutes. While I waited, I fiddled some more with the settings and suddenly everything started working - and I hung up relieved that I did not have to go through the "reinstall Windows" advice this is thrown about so casually. The modem must have been ashamed that I was forced to call a tech just to install it.

I also downloaded an update to the firmware from the Belkin site, but since the router works fine, I am hesitant to try to do the firmware update. One guy on a forum said that his update hung up for about 15 minutes and that the instructions say that if you do not let the update finish, your router may become useless! He bit the bullet and pulled the plug and when he turned the router back on the updated firmware was in place. Who needs this grief? I just went through an update to my computer's BIOS that left me scrambling for my Acronis rescue disk (with a full image of my C drive) and my Fix-it utilities rescue disk (with complex Restore points) when the computer would not boot. That was enough excitement for one week.

I finally got up the courage to update the Belkin N1 firmware. I opened the router interface in IE7, logged in, and selected Firmware Update. I had placed a copy of the new firmware on the Desktop and browsed to it and executed the .BIN file. The firmware appeared to flash in seconds, but there was a clock ticking down seconds (about 180 as I recall). You are told not to unplug (reboot) the N1 router until the router timeout ticker has run its course and the Router icon on the router has stop flashing. Well, long after the timeout clock had timed out, the icon was still flashing. Just like the guy on the Web had noted. I waited only about three minutes and unplugged and re-plugged the router. It came back up fine. I connected the router to the Wildblue modem and ran ipconfig/renew at the command prompt. When I logged back into the IE7 router screen, the new firmware was showing as the current one. Well, isn't that precious? So, if your router icon continue to flash after a firmware update and long after the timeout clock has run down to Zero, I guess you have to joining the rest of us. Close your eyes, bite your lip, and pull the power cord from the router. Plug the power cord back in. Another example of why PnP is called "Plug n Pray."

The Belkin N1 router (with MIMO) has three antennae, as did the pre-N. Its range seems to be about the same as the pre-N model. But what I really like are the front-panel blue icons that tell you the status of: Security, Modem, Router, Internet, and separate icons to show if you have a wired computer connection (Ethernet)and/or a wireless computer online. This display has helped a lot. Due to heavy overcast skies, rain, or outages of the Wildblue satellite service, I fairly often will click on a Web page link and get a "sorry Charlie" message. I have always rebooted, figuring that the complex arrangement of satellite modem, WiFi router and Ethernet port on the computer have lost their way. Often, this did not help.

Now, I can look at the Belkin N1 router display and see if I have lost the Internet, but more importantly if I have lost my satellite modem connection. The modem icon blinks orange when it is not connected properly. The satellite modem has some blinking lights, but they are often deceptive as to the actual status. Now, I just wait for the modem and Internet icons on the Belkin router to go back to solid blue, and I know I am good to go.

The router has several choices for security encryption, and I chose WPA2-PSK, with a very long random alphanumeric password. Two of my Win XP Home computers would not accept this encryption scheme, even though they had Service Pack 2 installed. I found a Microsoft HotFix (KB893357) to update a computer to be able to cope with WPA2-PSK. (Since March, 2006, WPA2 certification is required for WiFi devices that want to be certified.) None of my three computers in the house that have wireless capability have a pre-N or N1 card or chip, two are 802.11g and one is, I think, an old 802.11b that somebody gave me. The Belkin N1 is backward compatible with these older standards.

I leave it to others with a very fast broadband connection to test and comment on the transfer speed of the Belkin N1. My download is limited to a max of 1.5Mips, which still beats the old dialup by orders of magnitude. And I do not try to stream video files from my computer to an HDTV or have any other configuration that would require very high-speed transfers. And I have no shared folders so far where I transfer large files from one computer to another over the WiFi LAN. I am still stuck in the past, copying large files to a USB flash drive and running around the house transferring files.

So what's this MIMO stuff? It stands for "multiple-input multiple-output." MIMO uses multiple transmitter and receiver antennas to allow for increased data throughput via spatial multiplexing and increased range by exploiting the spatial diversity. In plain English, this means that the range is increased by reducing the effect of multipath (the signal bouncing off walls and the refrigerator and arriving at different times). And the transfer speed (throughput) is increased by the each antenna transmiting and receving a separate data stream - which are cumulative to some degree. So, MIMO has longer range and faster throughput.

Diversity-antenna arrays have been around for eons. We had them in some long-range commo equipment in the U.S. Marines back in the early 1950s. Cumulative multiple data streams have also been around for eons. You may remember that when you had a dialup modem there was a Windows feature where you could have two modems and get an increase in speed by a cumulative effect of the two modems. This required two phone lines and was not popular with anyone I knew. If you want to get a headache, search for "MIMO," or "spatial multiplexing," or "spatial diversity."

So, if you buy and "N1 router" now will it be outdated when the final 802.11n spec is ratified? Most current N1 routers should be able to upgrade via a firmware update. I did notice that the proposed spec lists 2.4GHz and/or 5 GHz. The "and" is fine, but the "or" may be a problem. There are a few 2.4GHz/5GHz routers available, but the current N1 routers that I found on the Web are in the 2.4GHz range, which is loaded with potential interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, Bluetooth, etc. (I bought a 5GHz cordless phone before I installed my first Belkin 2.4GHz router, just in case.) There are several other 802.11n MIMO WiFi routers on the market. But until my Belkin N1 craps out, I am happy with it, particularly the icons that tell you the status of your LAN and connections. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, "Picture worth a thousand blinking LEDs."

The following is from a geek WiFi site: " Cordless (2.4GHz) phones tend to destroy wireless connections. It is possible, however, to set the channels properly on the wireless network and on the phones so that they don't interfere. Generally, channels 1, 6, and 11 are mutually safe, so as long as one device is on 1 and another on 6, they will not interfere. Avoid using channel 11, as microwave ovens interfere with this frequency."

I see that all the blue icons are gleaming on my Belkin N1 router, so that means I can now FTP this file to my Web page server.

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Saturday, December 8, 2007

Ask Not What XP and Vista can do for you, but what you can do for them.

I am overjoyed at the new commercials by Apple that suggest that if Windows Vista doesn't support your printer, buy a new printer - and so on. After all these years of Microsoft's arrogance and virtual monopoly of the Operating System market, it is wonderful to see a company with a tiny market share saying what most of us Windows users have been saying for years. Windows is a huge pain in the butt - and a source of unending frustration.

More than a few months ago, I build a very hot Athlon 64 dual-core computer with 2GB of fast RAM and the very best motherboard and peripherals I could find. I plugged the computer into a high-end UPS backup supply, with voltage regulation and high voltage-spike resistance. I installed Windows XP Home and many programs, although none by Microsoft - such as Office, Word, etc. Long ago, I vowed never to buy a Microsoft program or anything from Symantec/Norton. My main working programs are WordPerfect, Eudora Pro e-mail, Quicken, Paint Shop Pro, and Palm Desktop. I hooked up my newer-model Laserjet, my older HP 970 Deskjet, and a vintage HP 7400C scanner. All went smoothly.

I installed Bitdefender AV, ZoneAlarm Pro firewall, and a sophisticated spyware-detection program. I always did the Windows updates within 24 hours of their arrival on scene, did frequent disk maintenance, restore points, and so on. It was a very clean machine. It sits on top of a table, and the temperatures, voltages, and fan speeds are monitored with an ASUS utility. The temps and voltages are all fine. In fact, the particular Athlon is rated up to 70C and mine runs around 39C most of the time - with a stock heat sink and stock fan. The BIOS has a recent update, but not the most recent. About as healthy a computer as you will find - if you don't count the Microsoft OS.

All went smoothly -- for a few months. Then, I began to get three popup Hardware Wizards each time I booted, for two CD burners that had been in the machine from week one and for my Mouse! A New Hardware Wizard for a Mouse at every bootup! Surely, you jest. It is a Microsoft optical Intellimouse. I've been here all along, idiot. Also, USB got flaky. Some devices would not be recognized and when I plugged in a FlashDrive, I could find it in Disk Maintenance under Administrative tools, but I had to assign a drive letter to make it show up on My Computer and my file manager (Power Desk Pro). And several other odd things cropped up.

Often, when I would boot, I would be taken in IE7 to a Microsoft page about SP2 and Privacy. I'll be a son-of-a-bitch. As I was writing this, I turned on my other Athlon 64 XP Home machine to look up a copy I had of the exact title of this strange and spurious MS page. As the other machine booted (on the LAN) there it was in IE7! "Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3 Privacy Statement." I think it used to mention only SP2. The Texas Microsoft tech was as baffled earlier by this "strange visitor" to my browsers as I was. Once this MS page opened upon bootup in Firefox! My browsers are set to open with a "blank page" and Yahoo.com is my Home Page. And Firefox is my default browser. What the hell is wrong with you people at Microsoft? Why is this page coming up upon bootup? Or, maybe it is a form of 3-rd party malware intended to infuriate Windows users. I did find one fellow on the Web who had a URL embedded in his system that is the pointer to the SP2 Privacy statement. I could find no such pointer in my Registry(s). I'm going to pour a glass of wine. It is enough to make you wish you smoked Weed. Hey, there are ghosts in the Microsoft software. Cool, man! Far out!

After a Microsoft tech in Texas was unable to solve my machine problems by taking it over remotely on two different days, I bit by lip and re-formatted the internal hard drive and installed my full Retail version of XP Home again - with the nearly 80 updates from the Internet. All went well until I tried to load the drivers for my two printers and my scanner. After 30 or so tries, I gave up. Well, I tried another approach. I bought a Mac mini (and connected it to the LAN) and new Samsung duplexing Laserjet with a built-in LAN capability. The Mac Postscript disk installed immediately, and I was printing over my LAN router from the Mac to the new printer in one minute. But, after several days of trying, I could not get the PC driver disk to install the printer on the Athlon 64 Win XP Home machine - either for the LAN or on the USB input.

For the first time in my life (I have been messing with desktop computers since the CP/M and DOS days) I paid a young IT tech come to the house. After three hours, he gave up. He could not get my freshly-installed XP Home on my state-of-the-art PC to talk to my printers or my scanner. In desperation, he pulled my LAN cable, stuck it in his XP Pro laptop and inserted my Samsung PC driver disk. In less than a minute, the printer spit out a perfect test page. We looked at each other in disbelief. He mumbled something about "they should never have been allowed to sell XP Home." I gathered that he was implying that, "XP Home is a piece of crap." Do I hear a second?

Hmmm. So -- my PC-printer-driver disk installed okay on a Win XP Pro machine. Well, the next step was only logical. I ordered a new 500GB Seagate SATA II hard drive and a full Retail copy of Windows XP Pro SP2. I first ran a full-disk AV scan with Bitdefender that had been automatically updated within the past hour. I then backed up every piece of data on the machine and every downloaded piece of software and every downloaded update I had to DVDs and dupes to my 500GB external USB drive (and some to a FlashDrive). I made a list of serial and KEY numbers for software. My checklist was three pages long. I pulled my old hard drive, with XP Home and the programs still on it. I set the machine's BIOS to boot from CD, installed the new 500GB SATA drive, and slipped in the shimmering (and nearly $300 - that is close to extortion) Windows XP Pro disk. About 40 minutes later, I had Windows XP Pro on my machine.

During the install, I had set my C: drive for a modest amount of GB and worked on formatting D: later in Windows Disk Management. I always put all my programs on D: and back up a complete image of C: every night to a USB hard drive with Acronis backup software (and do data backup very, very often). After activating my copy of XP Pro with Microsoft over my modem and landline, I turned on the Windows firewall (it may have defaulted ON) and downloaded about 80 Windows updates via my WildBlue satellite Internet.

Before I installed Bitdefender AV or any other clutter, I put in my Samsung PC-driver disk and watched as it got the drivers loaded and started to install the files to disk. The suspense was nearly unbearable. After all this work and expense, what if the printer drivers failed to install - as they had repeatedly on Win XP Home? But ... the dreaded Red Xs did not appear and my Samsung ML-3051ND printed a test page over the LAN! Now, I had Postscript drivers printing from the Mac, and two sets of drivers for the PC, Samsung's normal drivers and HP's PCL6 drivers. I am not sure why PCL6 is on there, as the computer defaults to the Samsung drivers. Some day, I will figure that out.

I have no current interest in trying to install my HP inkjet and HP scanner on the PC with Win XP Pro. The inkjet and scanner work fine on the Mac mini and that is where they are going to stay. Also, during all this PC downtime, I fired up Mac Mail (I actually like it as well or more than Eudora Pro), moved my Palm Desktop and Palm TX syncing to the Mac (thankfully Palm has a Mac OS X download), installed the Mac version of Firefox browser, and bought iWorks, the Macintosh answer to MS Office (for $79 with word processing, spread sheet and presentation program). More about all of this in my next article about "Mac Versus PC." I moved my Quicken and WordPerfect data to my backup Athlon 64 X2 while I fiddled and fussed with the main Athlon box.

So, now I had spent days and weeks trying to find the problems with my initial install of Win XP on my Athlon 64 X2 5600+, then nearly two weeks off and on backing up data and doing a hard drive re-format, a clean install of Win XP Home, and re-installing programs and program updates. After all of this, my printers and scanner would not talk to the new XP Home install. I bought a new LAN-enabled Samsung duplexing Laserjet printer. Popped in the Mac Postscript driver disk and it worked fine on the Mac, but would not talk to the PC.

Okay, you left me little choice. I put a new hard drive in the PC and a did a new install of Windows XP Pro. And finally got the PC to talk to the new Samsung LAN-enabled printer. Bottom line. I had spent over two months, nearly every day, several hours a day, messing with Windows XP Home, and finally gave up and installed Windows XP Pro. Aside from the time I wasted, I bought a new printer for $260, and in order to get that to work with the PC, spent about $400 on a new hard drive and Win XP Pro! Hell of a deal.

While I was ordering online, I also bought the new Acronis 11 (I make an Acronis full disk auto-backup image of my C: drive every night), WordPerfect X3 to replace my aging WP 12, a new copy of Fix-it Utils 8 (which NewEgg has managed to lose in their computer), a copy of Street Atlas 2008, and got a steep discount on a download of a full upgrade from NERO 7 to NERO 8.

A Ph.D. engineer friend of mine (and programmer of satellites, et al.) recently bought three laptops that all came with Windows Vista installed. He deleted Vista and installed Win XP Pro and said I had made a wise choice to bite the bullet and install Win XP Pro. Once SP3 for XP Pro comes out, I will ride XP Pro until they stop supporting it with updates or I die. I am 76 with 5-heart bypasses. Don't count on me outlasting Win XP Pro support. The reports are that XP Pro with SP3 will blow away Vista with SP1. I doubt I will ever have a copy of Vista on any of my three PCs. Never say never, Rick.

One computer is an older ACER laptop with XP Home that is used in my ham-radio shack for logging, looking up calls signs and accessing the Web now and then with the built-in WiFi (Centrino chip). It seldom gets used now that the radio DX cycle is at the bottom of the 11-year Sunspot Cycle, but it is still working - last I checked. I fire it up on MS Patch Tuesdays and from time to time to update Bitdefender AV. Otherwise, it is simply a very expensive and inactive ham-radio log book. Most ham-radio programs are written for DOS or Windows and I was convinced that I was "stuck" with a Windows computer for my ham stuff. But, I found a couple of ham-radio-logging programs for the Mac on the Web. One of them, which has already been updated for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, appears that it may be a better program than the one I now use in Windows - which I thought was the ultimate. So, my Windows laptop used primarily as an expensive "ham-radio-log-book" may be replaced with a very expensive Mac laptop - with Firefox for the Mac, of course. Then, I would be down to only two Windows computers - and counting.

The other desktop Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (also on the LAN), with XP Home, is now a separate work station, with its very own Samsung duplexing laserjet. I use it with an HDTV tuner card and BeyondTV software to record HD over-the-air from Oklahoma, as a backup for e-mail, WP and Quicken, and odd uses like a program that tracks the International Space Station on a World map (among other orbiting objects) so I know when to send messages to the ham-radio packet-set on board the ISS or listen for a possible ham-radio voice contact from an ISS crew member. My ham call sign is an icon on the map right at the co-ordinates of my house. The radio-beam-coverage circle from ISS tracks over the earth. When my house is in the beam, communication with ISS is possible (for about 12 minutes) Cool. Way cool. Free software program, too. I use a standard VHF/UHF ham radio of 5-50 watts of power and a simple vertical antenna on the patio roof. The ISS has a radio set identical to mine on board (cost about $600). Poor NASA and their $100,000 boxes of stuff that only work now and then. But, I digress.

In the meantime, I will be learning more about my Mac OS X (Tiger for now) and programs with a view to eventually getting off Windows entirely. It will not be easy to make a clean break - nearly impossible, frankly. For now, the lack of a decent Mac version of Quicken and no current version of WordPerfect for Mac are holding up any hope of the transition to the one Mac I already own. It is hard to give up 20 years of working with those two wonderful programs. And I won't. A $1500 hot PC computer, twin LCD screens (22-inch and 19-inch) and a 500GB USB drive just to mostly run Quicken and WordPerfect and a little Text Editor and FTP program for my Web page. That's how it is shaping up. Oh, and for now I still have all my ripped MP3s on the PC and play them via Media Player 11 and through a set of Klipsch speakers with a subwoofer. I could easily move both the MP3s and the speakers to the Mac. I just glanced at my Mac to check the 300-mile Doppler Radar and the weather, and to see if I had any new e-mails. It is 68 degrees at 9 p.m. in North Texas and the wind is calm. Delightful.

So far, I love the new Intel-based Mac mini. I bought a 21.6-inch wide screen Samsung LCD and a 325GB Seagate USB drive for backup. I now hate Windows more than I have since I tried to install Windows 1.0 (or was it 1.1?) on several computers in the library and one at home. I once sent Bill Gates an early Windows floppy disk which I had used for pistol target practice. I suggested that was all the disk was good for. Way back then, he probably read his mail.

Trust me, I came very close to taking my .45 to this Athlon PC over the last several months and sending it to the President of Microsoft as a reminder of just how frustrating bloated, vulnerable, and archaic code is - for someone 76-years-old. Young kids can usually handle this crappola. Geezers not so well. For the money I spent screwing around with this PC with XP Home and now XP Pro, I could have bought a new machine and been able to blame someone else for my problems. But, I could not find a desktop machine I wanted that did not come with Vista installed. Put the gun back in the safe, Harold, bite the bullet, and make this expensive piece of crap you built live up to its potential - at any cost. I'm making progress. Very costly progress. Worst case scenario, uninstall Windows and install Linux. That would be fun?

By the way, I have built my last computer. After I wrote the original drafts of this article, I found a series of Dell Vostro 1500 laptops for under $800 with Intel Core 2 Duo chip, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, DVD burner, and Windows XP Professional installed, with no other software clutter - if you wanted a "clean" machine. They are listed under the Small Business icon. And I found an inexpensive ACER desktop, nearly as powerful as my current Athlon 64 X2, with Win XP Pro installed. Since my ham-radio programs will be mostly XP/Vista for the foreseeable future, I ordered the Dell 1500 Vostro with Win XP Pro. For $10 they even partition the hard drive for you for C: and D: drives. It helps to have a small C: drive content when you back up a disk image, for example. A laptop without any Win Office software, no Norton AV, no McAfee AV. Never thought I would see the day.

I am putting my very expensive - and it would appear soon to be extinct - Windows XP Pro disk in my gun safe. Come about June, as I read it, no computers will be sold at retail without Windows Vista. And no retail boxed versions of XP or XP Pro. There are some OEM exceptions. It's too late to make a killing by buying Microsoft stock. Maybe we should buy all the copies of Windows XP Pro we can find. The price is already rising. Like the lady says in the commercial. "Some Vista owners are 'upgrading' to a more familiar Windows XP." If they are smart, it will be XP Pro. Never in the history of personal computers do I recall any major OS upgrade being deleted and replaced with an earlier version - on such a grand scale as Vista. Many people did bad mouth Windows ME, but I had it on several computers and had good luck. Windows 98 SE was a good OS, or maybe I am just repressing bad memories.

Now that XP Pro is installed on my main Athlon 64 machine and seems to be working, I have a new Windows OS hobby. With the older hard drive and Win XP Home and with the new hard drive and XP pro, the hard disk is accessed about every second and the disk activity light comes on and off quickly. It's like a strobe. The new Seagate SATA hard drive is louder than the old Seagate and these quick bursts are very distracting. Searching the Web, this constant disk access seems to be a common problem. Yes, it may be AV checking for suspicious activity or spyware doing a background scan or the satellite Internet firing bursts to the LAN to make sure we are still in touch, or a myriad of other things. After shutting off every background service I can find, including Indexing in Services, disabling the LAN, and spending hours on the Web reading other failed attempts at stopping the constant disk access, I have given up.

Ah ha, I thought, I will set the Power Management to turn off my hard drives every 10 minutes of inactivity. That will help. Nice try. I went into Power Options and set Office/Desk to turn off the monitors and hard-drives after 10 minutes and Standby after 30 minutes of inactivity. The monitors go into standby after 10 minutes, but the hard drive(s) churn merrily away and the Blue Strobe keeps on aflashin'. Something is keeping it (them) alive. The machine did go in Standby after 30 minutes several times since I set that parameters. I tried Standby overnight. That did not work out well, I had to unplug my satellite modem and re-acquire the sat signal, and turn the computer off/on to get back to normal.

I could not find rubber slide mounts for a hard drive, but there are $75 - $175 HD "quiet cages" to better isolate the hard drive noise. Overall, the computer is very quiet, with slow 120mm fans, a quiet Zalman power supply with heat pipes and a quiet fan and a video card with a huge heatsink and no fan. So, the noisy hard-drive bursts stand out amidst the low ambient noise generated by the rest of the computer. And I am mostly deaf in the ear on the side of the computer tower!

Just ten seconds short of ordering a "quiet cage," I pulled the hard drive, took off the rails and fashioned a soft rubber pad to rest the drive on and rubber wedges to isolate the sides from the cage. I also put a piece of foam inside the cover which sits between the hard drive cage and the metal cover. It does not affect the air flow over the hard drive from the front fan. I taped a piece of cardboard over the flashing light (I could have disconnected it on the motherboard). Now, the disk thrashing noise is less apparent, but I will be ordering a "quiet cage" for the hard drive. If the constant disk activity causes a premature disk failure, so be it. I cannot spend the rest of what is left of my life trying to keep that damn light from blinking - and the hard drive from thrashing. I can buy a new hard drive and go through the whole Windows/programs installation easier than I can find the solution to the constant disk access and the flashing strobe light. I ran the HD Tune program in the background for a while. The disk is healthy and the disk temperature ranges from 36-39C after constant use, which is well below a level of heat that might cause a problem.

I hold my breath every time I boot the XP Pro machine, but up to now things are looking up. I was able, for instance, to install a 500GB Western Digital MyBook on the eSATA external jack (it would not even work on USB with XP Home). By the way, an eSATA (external) cable is different from an internal SATA cable, as I found out after trying to use a SATA cable out of my spare-parts box. The WD eSATA external drive appears to run lickity split on backups. And to my surprise, Windows Update (Custom) found a new driver for the SATA chip on my motherboard. All four of my FlashDrives (up to 8GB) come up as disk H: as I plug them in one at a time - which was not the case before with XP Home -(HD is C: and D:, DVD burners are E: and F:, the external eSATA drive is G:). XP Home would not read the 8GB FlashDrive at all, and I had to assign drive letters to get my other three FlashDrives recognized. Each one had a separate drive letter! At times, Windows shows signs of brilliance, but they were few and far between on my main state-of-the art computer with XP Home.

I spoke too soon. In order to see if I could identify what might be causing the constant disk activity and the flashing drive light, I booted with the Diagnostic Startup in MSCONFIG, which loads only basic services and no AV, ZoneAlarm Pro or other "startup" programs. A message came on that since so many things had changed in my computer, I would have to re-activate it! You stupid bastards at Microsoft. I have downloaded and read the MS paper which notes the hardware that is monitored during an activation and none of that had changed. Just another capricious and maddening poke in the gut to an honest person who actually buys all of his software. Microsoft has a right to protect from piracy, but to require a re-activation when the only thing you do it leave off the startup programs and the network - and so on - at bootup can best be expressed in one word. Bullshit!

I rebooted with all programs active and tried to re-activate, both over the Network LAN and via dialup. No connection to Microsoft either way. So, I am posting this new information now in case I end up with a dead computer. (I finally got it re-activated after bootup finished completely by going to System Tools/Activate Windows.) I hate Microsoft with a passion that is unparalleled in my life. I had less of a beef with the Mafia when I was an ATF agent in Philadelphia, with Communists when I was with the CIA, or the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao when I served with the CIA in Laos in the late 1960s. Microsoft operating systems have been the largest ongoing, source of anxiety and frustration in my life. And if you read my resume, I have had a challenging and tough go of it in my professional years. Picking a lock on a KGB apartment. Piece of Cake. Getting DOS or Windows to work. Constant hell.

My hatred for Microsoft goes far beyond the unending grief their operating systems have caused me. I am a law-school grad, either managed or owned several small businesses, was a marketing director in a division of a $9 billion company, and taught business administration at a nearby junior college. I know predatory and ruthless business practices when I see them. Many may have forgotten the lawsuits brought against Microsoft because they were preventing vendors from putting the Netscape browser on their machines to be sold. That was only a tiny fraction of Microsoft's ruthless and illegal practices. It was a smoke screen, to cover up some real ruthless coduct. MS would, for example, tell vendors who put Windows on their machines that they had to install some version of Word or Office on their machines. Vendors were prohibited (threatened with withholding Windows) from installing programs like WordPerfect on their machines at the factory. Quite simply, this was how Word became the de facto word-processing standard. They nearly drove WordPerfect out of business, but enough of us loved the program that we were willing to delete Word from our hard drives and buy a copy of WordPerfect. I am on my sixth or seventh version of WordPerfect.

I ordered a lot of computers back then for myself, businesses, and the library, and begged vendors like Gateway to leave off Word or Office or Norton anti-virus - and was willing to pay extra for a "clean" machine with only Windows on it. Vendors consistently said that they could not do that - under the terms of their agreements with Microsoft and others like Symantec. That is one reason I started building my own computers. Screw you guys, I will build a computer with Windows only and no MS or Symantec crappola on it. Finally, the courts recognized the predatory and illegal practices of Microsoft - and went so far as to threaten to force them to break up the company into separate units.

Suddenly, you found vendors offering computers with the WordPerfect Office Suite. Unheard of before the courts dropped the anti-trust/monopoly hammer on Microsoft. Today, you can order, for example, a Dell computer with no extraneous Microsoft (or other) programs or any anti-virus or other "gratuitous or trial" software. It took many years to reach this point, but by then Microsoft had established Office and Word as de facto standards. If people had been allowed to choose their word processor back then, I predict that WordPerfect would have become the WP of choice - as in its heyday before Microsoft put the screws on vendors to install Word and Office.

It was during this period of predatory, illegal, and heavy-handed practices by Microsoft that I vowed never to buy a Microsoft product, other than the Windows Operating System. WordPerfect got to where they could open or save a document in a Word format - or save in the PDF format. There were free readers from Microsoft for Word, Excel and Presentations, in case you got such a file from someone. I never found it a problem to eschew all Microsoft programs. WordPerfect, Palm Desktop, Eudora Pro e-mail, Quicken, Bitdefender AV, ZoneAlarm Pro firewall, mapping programs from DeLorme, Firefox and Opera browsers, Power Desk 6 Pro for file management in place of Explorer. You can have a very full and efficient work-product without using any Microsoft programs. If you are in a corporate environment, not so easy.

It is kind of a joke to me now to think back to when I moved from WordStar to Microsoft Word for a short time. I was writing software manuals on contract for a big law-firm-type software company in Dallas. They used WordPerfect. I had to work in Word all day and then convert my files to WordPerfect. Well, it did not take me long to get the message. I changed to WordPerfect and that was one of the best things in my computer life. Microsoft has thoroughly indocrinated people that Office and Word are the de facto standard, by their early massive, and often illegal (restraint of trade, et al.) actions. Not long ago, an electrical engineer and I were talking about programs I ran on my computer. When I praised WordPerfect Office X3, he said that he thought that "WordPerfect had gone out of business." Almost, but like a cat with nine lives, the faithful kept it alive. Now, it is pre-loaded on some computers at the factory.

My impression so far is that XP Pro is the son who just got a scholarship to Harvard, and XP Home is the dim-bulb son who is told to go to his room and play when company comes to the house. And Vista is the overweight son who appeared to have the most promise, but whom the neighbors are now throwing rocks at when they see him on the street. MAC OS X is the son with a Ph.D. EE, M.D., M.Ph, who works with the underprivileged in the ghetto to show them that there is a way out - to a life of prosperity and happiness - and stability.

Now that I think about it (I have gotten out of bed at 3 a.m. to edit this piece.), maybe I should use the removed XP Home Seagate hard drive for .45 target practice and send it to the President of Microsoft. Not Bill's buddy, the CEO bald-headed bully, but the new president. I might suggest that he display my "shot-full-of-holes" Win XP Home hard drive - and this article - in his office as a reminder that bad coding and vulnerable software do have consequences - and can push people to the limits. I would not be the first person to shoot a hard drive. Or a Windows PC! Or a monitor ..... or...... "Chester, why are you walking with a limp?" Miss Kitty asked. (TV's "Gunsmoke" for you young folks). Modern answer: "Mam, I was aiming for my PC sitting on the low shelf under the desk."

I must stop now. I need to go to my other Athlon 64 X2 with XP Home to see why my AV is not updating automatically, and I can't even force an update. The same (licensed) AV updates fine on my newly-minted XP Pro installation and on my Win XP Home laptop. (Update: my Bitdefender AV has a Repair function, which worked and undid whatever brain damage Win XP Home [update?] may have done to it.) I have too many Windows PCs for a person living alone, thus my Windows problems are magnified times three. On the other hand, I basically have two backup machines. If you look on the bright side, you can never have too many backup machines if you run Windows.

A Charming Footnote:

People are fed up with high-priced stuff that does not work and inadequate customer support. The "AARP Bulletin" for Dec. 2007, reports on a 76-year old lady who got continually jacked around by Comcast about a faulty Internet, phone, and cable service bundle. She grabbed a claw hammer and when she arrived at the Comcast office, she took several whacks at a computer and a phone near a customer-assistance counter. She was charged with disorderly conduct, fined $345, and given a suspended three-month jail sentence. If she had gone to a jury trial, the jury would have come in with a "not guilty" verdict and stood en-masse to applaud her. We need more people like Mona Shaw who said as she whacked away, "Now, have I got your attention?" Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, keep a close eye on your computer. And be on the lookout for angry customers with claw hammers.

Update: March 8, 2008

The Semi-final Insult from Microsoft

I say "semi-final," because I am sure this will not be the last insult and/or gross frustration I experience from using MS Operating Systems. I decided to give my grand kids an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 2 GB of RAM and running Win XP Home SP2. This was part of my phase out Windows and phase in Mac OS X game plan. The computer had worked well for the three years or so since I built it - partly because I seldom used it. The machine had only two 80GB HDs. I bought a new 320GB Western Digital internal HD with about the same specs as the Western Digital boot drive. Once I got it installed and could copy files to it, I shut the computer down. On startup, I got the dreaded "found new hardware" message for the new HD. Cancel the New Hardware Wizard, and with reboot after reboot, up came the same "new hardware" message. Cancel, Cancel, Cancel is now part of the boot-up routine.

This was the same problem I had with my main PC with XP Home, but there I was getting three "new hardware" messages each time I booted. After months of fiddling, I solved that problem on the main PC by buying a new hard drive and installing a full retail version of XP Pro. About $400 to get rid of a nuisance. No more stupid "new hardware" messages. And in general a much more stable machine.

So, I pass on the grand kids a computer on which I simply cannot kill the "new hardware" message. They think I am really smart for a 76-year-old grandpa, building computers and all. Now, my reputation will be sullied because I passed on a top-notch computer with a persistent problem I could not solve. Maybe XP SP3 will cure it. Maybe I will have to spring for another copy of XP Pro, or maybe - and this is a long shot - Vista SP1 will behave well enough that I will buy the kids a copy of Vista Home Premium. The word "Home" strikes a little fear into my heart. Why can't Microsoft make one version of their software that works and is stable, like OS X, instead of this hodge-podge of tiers? Maybe one of the grand kid's hacker buddies can solve the problem, even though Microsoft techs in Dallas who took over my main PC remotely could not solve the "found new hardware" mystery.

In any event, I am ordering a desktop Mac Pro with a quad-core CPU, 4GB of DDR2 800 RAM and OS X Leopard. This thing is built like a battleship. By now, I tend to agree with the IT guy who tried to get my XP Home computer to talk to my new LaserJet with LAN - with no luck. It finally took XP Pro to get the PC to talk to the brand-new Samsung LAN LJ - while it talked to the Mac Mini in about the 45 seconds it took to install the Mac printer disk. As he was walking out the door, the IT tech (who was a tech at Dell in times gone by) said, "They should neve have been allowed to sell XP Home." He makes a good point, now that I have tasted XP Pro. At just over twice the price of OS X Leopard.

This is the way the cookie crumbles when you are a virtual monopoly. But even a monopoly is sometimes forced to have a Thanksgiving Day (read that as "Turkey") sale, with the new reduced prices of Vista. I bid $50 for Vista Ultimate with SP1. That's my final offer. Otherwise, my goal is to outlive the support cut-off date for XP Pro, and at my age that is an iffy proposition. In the short run I will be dual-booting XP Pro and Mac OS X, sort of. In front of me is my XP Pro desktop. On my right, at 90 degrees, is my Mac Mini (soon to be replaced by the Mac Pro). More and more, I find that I let the XP Pro machine go into Standby via Power Options, where it slumbers peacefully while I do more and more of my work on the Mac Mini. This helps the PC, because I never have found out what causes the disk to be accessed in bursts every second it is on - even with AV etc. turned off. I taped a piece of cardboard over the HD activity light, which my neighbor, an airline Captain, calls "the blue strobe light." A piece of cardboard on the most beautiful computer case I have ever seen - by Gigabyte.

Update: I knew it was not the last insult from MS XP Home. When my grandson got the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, with XP Home, back to his house, he could not get it to recognize any Flashdrives (it did find all of mine okay) and could not get his HP all-in-one printer to install. I offered to buy him XP Pro, since I have had all I can take of XP Home. As sort of a throw-away suggestion, I noted that you can take a retail XP Home CD and do a Repair, which restores all the original XP files. I sent him a couple of URLs that explained the procedure more completely than the one on the Microsoft KB. But then, you have to download the approximately 90 updates from Microsoft since that XP SP2 disk was minted. He did the XP repair. But, the poor kid is on dialup and left the machine on update all night long and it was still going in the morning, so he had to do some more updates later. But, the New Hardware Wizard for the hard drive is gone at bootup, and his flashdrives and printer are now working. As I said, kids seem to have the patience to tolerate all the nonsense it takes to keep Windows working properly. I will send him the 500MB XP SP3 standalone installatioin on a CD, since it is due on April 29, 2008 for download. I also told grandson that if he could hold on, Windows 7 might be out in 2009, and he could skip installing XP Pro SP2/SP3 or Vista SP1.

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Mac Mini versus Windows PC

What the heck is a Mac Mini? Was it featured in an Austin Powers movie?

In the super hype over the new iMac, the iPhone, and the new iPods, a little treasure was lost in the smoke. The NEW Mac Mini is a box that measures just 6 1/2 inches by 6 1/2 by 2 inches. It contains an Intel 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 120 GB hard drive (can be up to 160GB), 1GB of DDR2 667 MHz RAM (can take up to 2GB RAM), four USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, Firewire, WiFi (Apple's Airport), an 8x DVD burner, small built-in speakers and audio-out jack, and a DVI video port that has no trouble running my 21.6 inch Samsung DVI LCD at 1680 x 1050 resolution. Apple supplies an adapter for DVI-to-analog and I tried an old analog Samsung LCD and it looked great.

The Mini accepts most Windows keyboards and mice. I bought the new aluminum Apple keyboard with dedicated OS X keys and two USB ports. I run a Microsoft USB three-button optical Intellimouse from a USB jack on the keyboard. The Apple keyboard USB outputs are notoriously weak, but my mouse works fine. The mouse right clicks and scrolls just like it does on a Windows PC.

How can all this stuff be packed in such a small box? Simple. Look at a laptop. Take away the battery back, the keyboard, and the monitor, and the Mac Mini is what you have left. The Mini gets its power from a large AC/DC brick.

The Mini, running OS X Tiger (I am holding off on 10.5 Leopard), recognizes every USB device I have plugged in - including my now somewhat old Nikon Coolpix 4800. An icon shows up on the Desktop by name. You can look at the files on a FlashDrive, for example, in several formats, icons, list, and details. When you have dragged or dropped files, you right click and select Eject and the drive is disconnected. The Mini instantly recognized my old HP 970Cse Deskjet and installed the Apple drivers. As pointed out in an earlier piece, with my new LAN-enabled duplexing LaserJet from Samsung, I popped in the PostScript CD and in short order I was printing duplex docs over the LAN to the printer.

I installed a 325GB Seagate USB drive and formatted it to the OS X file scheme - for use as a backup drive. You can leave the USB drive formatted with the default FAT32 and can transfer files back and forth between the Mac Mini and a Win PC. I reserve such transfers to FlashDrives, formatted to FAT32. You can transfer .PDF, .JPEG, MP3, .HTML files, for example, back and forth between the Mini and the PC. I may download a .PDF manual on the PC and copy it to the Mini. No Acrobat reader is needed, since the native Mac Preview program reads .PDF files. Or, I may download an HTML page from the PC to the Mac. It will open in the Safari browser. This limited file exchange is universal and outside any consideration of "file or folder sharing" between the Mac and PC on the LAN.

The OS X disks come with some Apple programs, such as iPhoto, for photo editing, iTunes, iMovie, Safari Web browser, TextEdit (a miniature WP app), Calendar App iCal, Quick Time player and a few other goodies. The only program I bought was iWorks, which contains a full Word Processor (Pages), a spreadsheet and a presentation program (for $79!).

My intention is to move as many programs and operations as I can from my Win PCs to the Mac Mini (and eventually bigger Macs). On the Mini, I now use the Mac version of Firefox (kept up to date along with its PC counterpart), Palm Desktop and Palm TX syncing, printing from my HP Deskjet and scanning from my HP 7400c scanner, and printing to my new Samsung ML-3150 LAN-enabled duplexing LaserJet. But for anyone hoping to completely kick the PC habit, there is probably not much of a chance if you have many "favorite" programs that are not written for the Mac OS. Quicken 2007 for the Mac is an archaic program that is roundly criticized. Quicken is supposed to be working on a new version that will be fully compatible with the new Mac X Leopard OS (10.5). I have used WordPerfect since the DOS days. There is no current WordPerfect for the Mac OS. I did fire up Mac Mail and am using it, whereas I used Eudora Pro on my PCs for years. More about dual-booting Mac OS X and Windows later.

Backing up my apps and data is a snap. You make copies of your folders (which may have many foldders embedded) and put them in a single BackUp to USB folder. The USB hard drive icon is also on the desktop. You drag the backup folder over to the USB drive, it asks you if you want to replace the old file and off you go. I also drag the same backup folder to an 8GB FlashDrive now and then for redundant backup. Or there is a DVD burning auto-folder you can populate and use to back up to DVD.

One of my favorite features is Dashboard. You can populate it with Widgets, free mini-programs from the Apple Website for every conceivable use. The Apple keyboard has a dedicated Dashboard key. On my Dashboard, I have a Dictionary, a monthly calendar, a weather bug tied to a weather station at a nearby high school, and a Doppler Weather radar with 300 or 600 mile ranges and an adjustable scan rate and Hangman. Under "Manage Widgets" are a string of installed but not active Widgets, like a world clock where you can set several clocks on the Dashboard in different time zones or different countries. Some of the Widgets eat up memory, so I go light on them with only 1GB RAM. I should have listened to the kid who tried to upgrade me to 2GB at the time of sale - except Apple wants too much money for RAM.

The Pros and Cons

I now have two computers with Windows XP Pro, a desktop and a laptop, and my Mac Mini with OS X 10.4 Tiger. The new Mac 10.5 Leopard boasts 300 new features, but is getting some bad reviews. It has some bugs - and like Vista, some backward program compatibility problems - but there was an update only a few days after Leopard came out, and more will follow until it is as solid as 10.4 Tiger has proven to be. The Mac OS is stable, it has no pesky Registry to get corrupted, installing a program usually requires you to input your password. I paid no money for anti-virus, anti-spyware, or a firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro and Bitdefender on my PCs), and thus no yearly fees to keep these things current. My PC boots in about two minutes - or so. My Mac boots in 34 seconds and that includes the only program in my Startup folder, Palm Desktop (appointment calendar). A friend has four Macs, a laptop, the big desktop Pro, and two of the older Minis. In 12 years, he has never had a virus or any spyware. Mac OS 10 has a built-in (and seemingly robust) firewall, plus there is a firewall in my WiFi router.

It is beyond my technical level of understanding programming, but writers speak of the Mac OS being isolated from the programs you install and run. The Mac Mini came with a tiny Guide booklet. Without David Pogue and Adam Goldstein's book, "Switching to the Mac, Tiger Edition," I would have been completely lost. Mac writers love to boast. They tell how you can receive a virus-infected .DOC Word file, or an infected e-mail, and nothing bad will happen to your Mac. But, if you send it on to a friend who has a PC, you will pass along that virus. Apple is so proud of the stability of OS X that they suggest putting the computer in Sleep Mode rather than turning it off - unless you are going to away from the computer for several days!

One thing comes as a surprise. In the Mac OS there is no Add/Remove program, which in Windows usually still leaves behind some trash - both in folders and in the Registry. To uninstall a Mac program, you go into your Applications folder and drag the program's icon to the Trash. If you don't empty the Trash, you can drag the program icon back and it will re-install. Well, purists say that dragging the icon to the Trash is not a complete removal. You find a program like the Freeware AppDelete (from Reggie Ashworth) which say it will clean out all of the "associated items" belonging to a program you want removed. That gets into some lists and logs that might be left behind, and maybe some other items I am too much a Mac newbie to appreciate. Little things constantly impress. I was moving several e-mails from my Inbox to one or more of my many mailboxes. After I had moved one to "Orders," the next time I right-clicked on an e-mail in the Inbox, there was a entry "Move to Orders again?" How kind of you to ask.

There are a lot of Mac OS-specific keys or combinations. The Control Key we use in Windows, as in Ctrl-C for Copy, is used in a different way in the Mac OS. For example, there is big Command key. Press Command-C to Copy, Command-V to Paste or Command-X to delete. Same horse. Different saddle. Command-Q closes an open program and is handy. The new keyboard is full of key commands I have not had time to discover. As noted, there is a dedicated key for Dashboard. Hit the key again to close of just click your mouse on an open screen area. Dashboard slides back down to the Dock, which is similar to the Taskbar in Windows, although much more intuitive and facile. With a right-click on an item in the Dock, you can "Remove from Dock," "Open at Login" (akin to startup folder in Windows), "Open" or "Close" and so on.

Mac Mini has a tiny remote that brings up a Menu of DVD, Photos, Movies, and Music (iTunes). I don't find it useful, but some people are using the Mini as a part of a home-entertainment center, along with the remote and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I am on WildBlue satellite Internet. Heavy cloud cover or rain can cause problems and dropouts. I bought a Mac USB 56K modem about the size of your thumb, followed the simple instructions and logged onto my online account to test and save my password. I am now ready, since I also have modems in my two PCs.

There are a couple of popular Disk Maintenance and/or Disk Utility programs for the Mac (some that also defrag and so on.) One thing you notice is that third-party programs for the Mac are more expensive than comparable programs for Windows. A Windows-based utility suite might cost $40 and a similar on for Mac $98! The new Mac OS v 10.5 Leopard sells for $129. There are no levels, like Basic, Home, Pro, just one flavor. And there is no registration Key or online authentication! I did, however, have to do an online registration of my iWorks suite, which I bought from the Apple store in California via phone.

The one call I made to Apple Support (and I call any tech support about once or twice a year) about not being able to access the Web over my LAN was the most pathetic "tech support" call I ever experienced. The lady obviously knew nothing about the computer - any computer. She kept pausing, putting me on hold, and finally told me to Ping a couple of sites. Finally, she admitted that she was being "coached" from someone at another location. She said, "You have a DNS problem, call your ISP." I knew I had a DNS problem when I called. I explained that in detail. I could type in a numerical address and get to a Web site, but not by typing in the URL by name. I will probably never call Apple support again. I ended up trying 50 different solutions until I hit upon one in the way my Mac Mini was talking to my router, changed a setting and was surfing. But that is still only a temporary workaround. The problem seems to revolve around the proxy used in my WildBlue satellite Internet. I am trying to switch to a Wireless Internet and during the first tests, my Mac DNS problem went away.

The iPhoto program, there is a paid higher level photo program, is weak compared to Paint Shop Pro, or Adobe Photoshop Essentials (which I have used on other people's machines). The free TextEdit is maybe more robust than WordPad on a PC, but TextEdit is no word processor - as we understand the term from Word or WordPerfect. The Apple Pages word processor is perhaps not as robust as either Word or WordPerfect, but its graphical templates and layouts are very good. Of course, it is one part of a three-part package that sells for $79. Pages handles envelopes in a peculiar way. There are a bunch of Templates, and I had to put my return address in one for envelopes and save it with a new name to get it to print envelopes correctly. And I can find no way to print an address bar code on an envelope using Pages, as you can easily do in WordPerfect. In total, WordPerfect simply runs circles around Mac's Pages - at least in my experience so far. I used MS Word about 20 years ago, after I cut my teeth on WordStar. Word got it's foothold by being forced on users when they bought a PC. They were reluctant to pay for a different WP. I made the paid break to WordPerfect when I was writing software manuals on contract for a company that produced massive legal programs that ran on HP minis at the time.

I probably will hardly ever use the iWorks suite unless my WordPerfect X3 or my big Athlon crashes, or the Athlon refuses to print to my LAN printer. I don't do spreadsheets or presentations (which they say iWorks does very well). During the time when my Athlon would not talk to any printer, I wrote a letter to my son in WordPerfect and saved it to a .PDF file (you have been able to do that for a long time, back to at least WP12). I then copied the .PDF file to a FlashDrive, opened the .PDF file on the FlashDrive now connected to my Mac and printed the letter to the LAN printer. An interesting exercise. My son called to tell me I was a very funny guy. I thought it was pathetic that I had to do that while I struggled with XP Home on my big Athlon and before I dumped it and installed a new hard drive and Win XP Pro.

Most of us have several favorite programs written for Windows but not for the Mac OS. So, you either use two computers, as I intend to do for some time, or you dual-boot on your Mac into XP or Vista. Boot Camp is supplied with OS X v 10.5 Leopard. Parallels is a third party app that allows dual-booting, and there is VMWare Fusion for the Mac. Each has its own merits and method of operation. You do the research before you decide that you are going to dual boot. But .... I, like so many of you are trying to get away from Windows programs. Why would I then buy Microsoft Office for the Mac? I wouldn't.

If you dual boot into XP or Vista, you essentially inherit all the problems in Windows you were trying to get away from; vulnerable programs, often unstable operation, and all the joys of viruses, Trojans, and spyware of all kinds. So, for Windows, you need to buy anti-virus, firewall, and spyware programs. Back to square one. But a lot of people do it. If you have any doubts, look at the new version of Parallels, which comes with Kaspersky security software and Acronis disk image software. Leopard's Time Machine does all that Acronis disk image does (I use Acronis on my PC), has a robust built-in firewall, and most gurus still say that you don't need an anti-virus on OS X Tiger or Leopard. The worry warts, and those who make AV software, are good at planting stories that with Mac's "newfound popularity," MAC OS will increasingly be a target for viruses, malware, etc. Just for the drill, I downloaded the Open Source AV called Clamxav and have run it a couple of times. Well, that was fun and took up some time better spent.

I suppose if you use a Mac laptop away from the house a lot, or in business, there would be some logic in dual booting Mac OS and either XP or Vista. When I am absolutely convinced that dual-booting a Mac into Windows will not corrupt the Mac OS, I will probably do it. In his new book, "Mac OS X Leopard Edition," David Pogue (New York Times tech writer), claims that in dual-boot with Mac/Windows, even if Windows gets infected, it will not infect the Mac OS. Maybe so, but my distrust of Windows runs so deep that I will have to scope this out in depth before I make the plunge to Parallels or VMware Fusion. With Boot Camp, you have to reboot to go from Mac OS to Win XP or Vista. All three dual-boot choices still require you install a full XP or Vista, with a KEY!

I already have a form of dual boot. I turn on both my PC and Mac in the morning, which sit at 90 degrees to each other - and both are on the LAN. The best defense against Windows infecting or corrupting the Mac OS X is the have Windows on a separate machine. Duh. You can buy a Mac mini plus a pretty hot Win XP/Vista cheaper than you can buy a Mac Pro desktop machine, and yet another copy of Win XP/Vista, and so on. We'll see what MacWorld has to offfer for new machines. As a guy who tinkers, the iMac or other one-piece Macs do not appeal to me. I made an exception with the Mac mini as my "start to learn the Mac OS X machine." See, now the iMacs are now going to have better CPUs and so on. Like I said, other than the Mac Mini trial machine, I would never buy an all-in-one desktop computer. How mad are the iMac users who bough the first of the new versions going to be when the hotter ones hit the market?I started with a CP/M computer with two floppy drives and later had an early IBM PC with the two floppy drives. Ironically, my son, Richard, Jr., who is a high-level programmer and consultant, latched onto one of the first Apple computers. We had adjoining offices in a suburb of Dallas. He went around helping people with their Apple computers and modifying software to fit their business needs. By the time he was in about his mid-20s, he was making more than $100,000 a year. Back then, that was a lot of money. Dad never got the Apple craze. He kept on the CP/M, then DOS, then Windows path, which has brought him many times to a near nervous breakdown. Junior came over one day with a "Winchester" hard drive and converted my IBM PC to one hard drive and one floppy. The official name for the store-bought version was the PC/XT. I had one of the first in Dallas, thanks to my in-house tech. The other twist of irony is that Rick began to program for Windows programs - and several mainframe languages - and did some Web design for major national companies - and was involved in the Y2K thing at a big company in the Northwest.

Now, after all these years, Dad is becoming a Mac convert. It only took me about 25 years to get my head on straight. I said to a young IT tech the other day, "How many 75-year-old guys do you know who build their own computers. In this small town, his answer, "I don't think I know anybody who does." No Mas! My home brew computers have always been of the best components I could buy and virtually never failed. I can only remember one IDE plug-in card that failed way back in the distant past. What failed me over and over was Microsoft Windows. I would use my home-brew job for about 18 months and pass it on to my grand kids, who beat it up for a couple of more years. Recently, I gave away one of my Pentium P4s that even the grand kids had outgrown. I had taken it back from them and put in a new tower. It still worked, and it had an original version of Windows XP Home. I had later added SP1 and finally SP2. How it continued to work is one of the great mysteries of computer life.

A little bit of history. Way back when, I had a manufacturer's rep business. I called on Radio Shack's buyer, Donald French, to try to sell him my state-of-the-art current-sensing car burglar alarm. We had several visits. I had a hot product. I made the down payment on a Lincoln Town Car with just one order for my alarms from a car-detail shop in Houston. In Donald French's small cubicle at Rad Shack in Ft. Worth, was a breadboard layout. (A "breadboard" is a board with many holes in it, something like a peg-board for your tools. You stick compenents in here and there, twist some wires and solder some, until you find what seems to work best.) Being an old ham-radio builder, I asked him what the project was. He explained that the CB radio craze had peaked, and he was trying to talk the Rad Shack brass into building a proprietary line of computers. There on that side-table breadboard was the prototype of the TRS-80. Incidentally, I never bought one. When I tell this story to young employees at Radio Shack stores, most of them have never heard of the TRS-80. I tell them to Google, Donald French, Steve Leininger, and TRS-80 and get back to me. They are on par with the nice lady press secretary at the White House who said she had never heard of the "Cuban Missile Crisis." Another child left behind by our education system.

Radio Shack did not buy my alarms. The order would have been 7,000 units just to sample the stores. Sometime later, Rad Shack came out with a current-sensing burglar alarm of their own (you know, where you did not need door plungers, just the current drain of the dome light coming on, etc.) Very interesting. Well, I had a nice car. What would I have done with a Porche?

Like Rodney Dangerfield, I don't get no respect. Til I 'splain the program. Way back to my Televideo 820 CP/M machine (with two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, WordStar, etc), my IBM PC, my Compaq 386 (best desktop computer ever built), my days as an early contributing editor to "Texas Computing," my first published booklet "WordStar - Quick as a Wink," writing software manuals for mainframe and HP Minis and PCs for companies in Dallas, and on to my days of building P4s and Athlon 64s and now Athlon 64 dual-core jobs, teaching classes on DOS, Windows and computers, and doing some consulting. Not to be redundant, but it is Microsoft Windows that constantly has brought me to my knees in tears and asking God, "What have I done to deserve this?" Obviously it is something he does not care to share with me. He is not answering my Voice Mail. I suspect that if he ever did answer, his comment would be" "Buy a Mac."

Well, I see by my Doppler Radar on the Mac Widget that some heavy stuff is coming in from the West - and the weather station at the high school shows that the winds have picked up from the Southwest. Time to close down and start pulling some AC plugs. A direct lightning hit takes no prisoners. I've been there - more than once.

Footnote: Age is taking its toll. I found at least 25 errors or omissions or letter transpositions as I read this for about the fourth time. And 20 more the fifth time. I'll be 76 in January. At least I try. And I write reasonably coherently for a Geezer. But, it is getting harder. Only revenge and vituperation keep me going. And the hope that somebody may learn something.

rcrhotx at Yahoo dot com

Dear Sir, Can You Fix My TV Ears Headset?

Over a year ago, I lost the hearing in my right ear one night while watching the evening news. From hearing a clock tick across the room to total silence in one minute! After tests and a run at a prescription, the Ear Doc said that I would never hear in that ear again. Plus, I had some high-frequency loss in my left ear. I love HDTV, have a big 7.1 channel amp/receiver with top-of-the-line Klipsch speakers, an excellent DVD player, a CD changer that holds 60 CDs, a full 88-key digital piano/organ, and I have several VHF, UHF, and HF ham radios. The hearing loss was a tough pill to swallow.

I set about doing what I could to improve my ability to listen to ham radio and to TV. The classical music and Diana Krall CDs would just have to gather dust. First, I bought a speech-intelligibility enhancer for ham radio. The box allows for tailoring of four segments of the audio spectrum, a left-right balance control, and headphone/speaker outputs. It was then that I learned what I knew vaguely from selecting microphones with different speech bandpasses over the years:

The frequencies important for speech intelligibility range from 500 to 4000Hz. Frequencies from 1000 to 4000Hz contribute 48% of intelligibility, but only 4% of the total sound energy. The frequencies from 125 to 500Hz contribute 55% of the sound energy, but only 4% of the word intelligibility. With the ham-radio filter box, I was able to get rid of the bass and fiddle with the midrange and highs until intelligibility was good enough that I could understand most hams on the radio. I wrote a review of the device on a popular ham-radio Web site. My main complaint was that the box was only single channel, but most hearing loss is different in each ear. A year of so later, the company came out with a stereo model, with adjustments for each ear.

Next, on to the HDTV. I had no trouble with news and late-night talk shows, for example. But almost every drama or comedy was partly or almost completely unintelligible. I knew it was not just my ears. It turns out that they play mu