Category: Reviews

I thought I’d give a shameless plug for my sister to help her out a little. This site gets a decent amount of traffic, so maybe it could help her out a little.

She and my new brother-in-law are starting a new theatre in Jackson Hole, Wyoming called “The Playmill Theatre in Jackson Hole”. She and my brother-in-law have lots of experience managing, teaching, and producing throughout the US, including on Broadway, so it ought to be a great theatre. Several locals to Utah are performing (including my other sister), and in my Sister’s own words:

>>”It runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day and will be performing The Music Man, Nunsense and Chaps. There will be a different show each night, so one can go to Jackson on the weekend and see all three shows. We just finished casting the shows and are well on our way to a great summer.”

So if anyone can make it, it makes for a great weekend trip from Utah. From now until May 1st tickets are only $20, but they will go up after that, so order soon. You can order tickets at:

[www.playmilljackson.com](http://www.playmilljackson.com)

If you have any questions, feel free to comment and I’ll forward them on to my sister.

UPDATE (4/9/07): My sister says tickets are selling quickly so buy now before they’re sold out!

My Linux and Mac Buddies are going to have my hide for this one. First of all, I love Macs. I love Linux. I think they both have their place, and have both done an excellent job putting a huge challenge to a very large Monopoly named Microsoft. Linux, in fact, is my livelihood.

That said, it irks me when I hear stories that Microsoft is not an Innovator and that Vista has no new or innovative features. It bothers me that people think Microsoft is copying Apple in everything. Now, before you come after me with your shovels and torches, let me explain.

Microsoft has been secretly doing something behind the scenes. They haven’t advertised it much, they haven’t even talked about it much. It started back in Windows XP days with a new release of XP called Windows Media Center Edition. It mostly came as an OEM release, meaning that it could only be purchased pre-installed with a manufactured PC such as Dell or HP. You may have seen it at your local Computer Retailer.

Media Center was essentially an add-on to Windows XP that allowed you to do media-related activities with the touch of a remote, no mouse needed. You could watch TV through it, pause, rewind, fast-forward TV like Tivo. You could schedule recordings to your hard drive and watch them later. You also had access to your entire video and/or mp3 collection via one of the best interfaces around.

Not long after Windows XP Media Center Edition was released, Microsoft started releasing hardware clients called Windows Media Center Extenders. These extenders attached to any TV in your home, and basically allowed you to stream TV over your home network for each TV Tuner card you had in your computer. Not just that but you had all the features you had on your main Windows Media Center PC.

Soon after that, Microsoft released software that allowed your Xbox to communicate with the Windows Media Center PC, making the Xbox its own Media Center Extender. Now not only was the Windows PC the central Media Hub for your home, but now worked with the gaming in the home all in one box.

Later they released the Xbox 360, this time with the Media Center extender bundled in for free. Along with this came built-in audio and video streaming from a Windows PC (doesn’t even need to be Media Center!). You got this, networked gaming, some of the best graphics around, all in HD format, all in one device that communicates with a Windows PC!

Now, we see the launch of Windows Vista. Vista Ultimate comes bundled with Media Center. Microsoft has released the Zune, while it may be a rip-off of the iPod, integrates better with Microsoft’s Media Center than any other portable device out there. Not just that, but it syncs with the Xbox directly! It came with features iPods only dreamed of having.

Microsoft has now announced IPTV that will integrate with the Xbox 360. I hear of no other manufacturer announcing such a product.

Now, out of nowhere, Apple has released their Apple TV product. It streams video, music, pictures, connects to the internet. It is meant to stream from a local Mac hub in the home. Gee – sound familiar?

Now there are already talks of Apple hiring game console developers and the possibility of an Apple gaming console that integrates with Apple TV. Apple is releasing faster and faster network speeds between Apple devices.

I ask, who’s copying who? Who’s the innovator? I think Microsoft is about to start marketing one of the largest innovations in their history – they just haven’t made it officially known yet. The thing is, it’s already here, right in front of our noses!

Apple is playing catch up – they know it. The great thing about Apple however is while they may copy, they at least copy better than Microsoft does. You be the judge – who’s the copycat?

I’ve recently been battling Comcast. They tell me I’m paying for 6 Mb/s downstream speeds, when Broadband Reports tells me I only have 2-3Mb/s. I would call their tech support, they would run me through the whole “disconnect everything from your modem (has that ever worked for them?), wait 30 seconds, and reconnect the modem again.” And then there’s the classic, “connect your computer directly to the modem, rather than through the router, then to the modem.” It always ends up with a technician coming out to my house, testing the line, telling me I’m getting what everyone in my neighborhood is getting, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, I went through that process again recently after giving up for a few months, figuring maybe someone else would have a solution finally. After 2 or 3 sessions of tech support, I finally convinced them to send out a technician *again*. The first technician called my cell 2 times in a row (my cell phone literally showed him calling less than a minute apart), and said he had called twice and it was their policy after 2 calls to cancel the service call. I called furiously (being sent on a wild goose chase to even speak with the guy’s manager, who I never was able to talk to and had to leave a message), and was forced to reschedule for several days later. Well, this time it was my fault and I was unavailable when the technician called. So we rescheduled again.

Today, the technician finally came and we were both available. When he got here, I showed him the broadband reports speedtest (I think this was probably the first time he had seen it, as he was taking notes as I showed him), and he agreed that it was too slow. All this as he ooh’d and aah’d over my Windows Vista install and custom-built computer. Well, I suggested we disconnect the modem from the router and connect directly to the modem. This time we got up to 4 Mb/s. He grinned and said that was it, that no one in this neighborhood could get the full 6 Mb/s.

So I started to search around the internet looking for solutions as to how I can speed up the connection between the router and the modem so I would still get at least the speeds we got when we disconnected it from the router. Here’s where I think I finally found a solution!

I found an article at http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1885, which suggested moving the router away from the modem, and that line noise can cause significant slowdowns. I didn’t really believe this would work, but I decided to try it.

So I moved everything apart from each other. I moved my router up to the highest level I could, tucked away between some floorboards on the level above. I then moved my cable modem 2-levels down, also tucked between 2 wall joints. I then moved my VOIP box away from all the rest. I went and tested the speakeasy.net connection on Broadband Reports. What do you know? All the sudden I was showing 6.6 Mb/s down with 360 Mb/s up! I now officially get more than I’m paying for!

So, rule of thumb is if you’re having speed issues, one of the first things you should try is move all your equipment away from each other. I think Comcast would have a lot more customers if they actually recommended useful things like this.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m starting a new section called reviews. I figure as a tribute to James Kim, who was known for his CNET reviews, this was a better time than any to start. We’ll see how much time I have to maintain this and how long my posts are, but I figure this is a section I can post my notes and experiences with products I buy and use for others to use later. Expect reviews down the road on the Xbox 360, Intel Core 2 Duo 6600, the nVidia GeForce 8800, the T-Mobile MDA, among other things.

The last week I have spent my evenings, and any spare time I have had towards building my new computer (a review and my experiences with that to come later), an Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR2 Dual-Channel RAM, nVidia GeForce 8800 768MHz video card, and 2 ATI TV Wonder 650 cards (with HDTV support) for the full media experience. I decided I wanted the full 64-bit experience, and as part of that I decided with Vista being released to consumers end of January I would try the full RTM version of Vista (the 30-day trial period ought to expire just in time for me to buy it in January). As a MS beta tester, I figure it due-diligence to share my experiences for others to use, especially when it is released to the general consumer in January.

As a disclaimer, I’d like to note that I am an avid Linux user (my primary desktop at work), also own a MacBook (and love it), and I do like to use Windows for Multi-Media, in particular in conjunction with my Xbox. I find the Media Center server and Extender capabilities of the 2 working together to be far superior to anything else, even OSS, available out there. Maybe I’ll compare and contrast sometime on that.

So on to Vista… My first experience with Vista RTM I have to admit wasn’t very good. In fact, I gave up for a short while, moved on to try and reinstall Windows XP, and realized I was having similar problems with XP, so it must have been something to do with the hardware. In fact, what was amazing was that XP wouldn’t even recognize my SATA ports or SATA RAID 1 array I had set up with the hardware, while Vista recognized it immediately. Vista does seem to have much more support on the CD for modern hardware. And if you don’t have support for the hardware on, the good news is Vista allows you to load them off of a CD or USB device, while XP’s install CD still requires you to somehow either have a floppy drive (which must be marked as drive A:), or create a custom install CD bundle with the drivers already on it with something like nLite.

So after several tries (and 2-3 days), both on Vista and XP install of starting the install, and waiting 1/2-1 hour for it to even get to the setup screen, I finally decided there was some sort of issue with the way Windows was interacting with the hardware (I’ll admit that I think this is an MS flaw, not the Hardware’s fault, as their software ought to catch the issue and report an error to the user if there really is something wrong – the install, for both XP and Vista was just freezing!). I started by removing my extra PCI TV Tuner cards and a spare Firewire card I had put in the machine. I restarted the Vista install, and it didn’t freeze any more! So one rule of thumb is that if the install starts freezing, start removing hardware one at a time – it is most likely a conflict with hardware somewhere.

I was finally into the install. The install went flawlessly after that. Some things I liked about it:

• It was very simple. Only about 3 steps.
• I really liked how it recognized my SATA and RAID right off
• Hardware drivers can be loaded right off a CD or USB key!
• No more ugly DOS screens! Fully-graphical UI the whole way through
• While it may have just been that I have pretty fast hardware, the install in full seemed to go much faster than previous Windows installs I’ve been through

Some things I didn’t like about it:

• It was not very good at telling you status of what it is doing, particularly at the beginning of the install process. Even at the end when it lists the steps it is going through it doesn’t tell you how far into those steps it is in.
• It should have caught the hardware issue and rather than freezing or spontaneously rebooting on me in the install it should have reported an error
• Not enough ability to customize – it seems to automatically connect to the internet for updates. This I would like the ability to turn off if I want to.
• My mouse didn’t work through the entire process. I have a Logitech Wireless Click Mouse (I think that’s the model) that isn’t yet supported. In fact a lot of miscellaneous peripherals aren’t yet supported – I’m guessing most of them are the older models. I suspect this will change as vendors write support for their hardware, but I would really hope support for something like this would at least be on the install CD!

So, that was my experience with the install. I intend to write another review on my user experience of the Operating System itself. Overall I am quite satisfied (as a Linux and Mac user I hate to admit), with only a few disappointments. Stay tuned for more of my Vista experience!