Ever since Windows 7 was released I’ve been running it on my MacPro for gaming. I have 2×1TB hard drives for my Mac side, but I’m only using 2×180GB drives for Windows. Not exactly horrible, but with all the gaming madness I’ve been stricken with I’m actually juggling drive space often and I really need to buy another TB drive for Windows eventually, I guess.
But that’s not what I’m writing about here. Windows 7 is good. I hate to admit it, but it is. I was okay with Windows XP. Like every sane person, I despised Vista. Games run AWESOME in Windows 7. The interface for the OS is nice. However, out of curiosity (I just misspelled “curiosity”, Windows told me so, but didn’t offer the correct spelling, doh! Big minus points there!), just to see how useful and comfortable Windows 7 is for me, I’ve tried to push it further by doing web dev and other things while in the Windows environment. I can’t do it.
Photoshop in Windows? Nope. It’s so close to being the same but it’s not. Notepad++ and Sublime Text are great editors, but neither compare to TextMate. Windows 7 achieves so much but yet falters with it’s little things that drive me crazy. I hate the start menu. I try to use Launchy, but it’s no QuickSilver or LaunchBar or Butler. Internet Explorer sucks. So, I tried Safari for a while. It’s not bad in Windows, but I’ve found myself using Chrome when I never use Chrome in Mac OS X. Chrome works. Well, not for Super Farkle on FaceBook, but I can forgive it that since I can open an IE tab in Chrome for gaming.
Windows 7 is awesome for gaming. It’s pretty. But it’s still no where near as nice as Mac OS X. Will Microsoft ever get me to switch back? Maybe. Windows 8? We’ll see. But it’s unlikely.
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I just received, installed and configured my brand new Hewlett Packard OfficeJet 6500 Wireless. It’s replacing my old HP PSC 2175 All-in-One. As soon as I got it unpackaged, untaped, plugged in, configured, which was a snap, I printed my first batch of labels and shipping forms for my Amazon sales. Color me very impressed.
I was always happy with my HP PSC 2175 AIO but the other day the ink cartridge holder broke and I couldn’t repair it myself. I figured getting it repaired would cost enough that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. So I started digging through reviews, and prices for a replacement. I wanted something under $150 and due to the holidays I got the HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless for $117. Woo. Great price. Normally it’s $150+.
The inkjet printer/copier/scanner/fax has two slots for memory cards (SD, MMC, Compact Flash, Sony Memory Stick, Sony Memory Stick Duo, and XD) to print pictures directly, can print borderless 4 by 6-inch photos and does double-sided printing. The scanner is a nice, sharp 2,400 dpi, 48-bit scanner. Standard printing runs right along 32 and 31 ppm for black and color. Just as stated on the HP specs. Draft mode? 80 ppm for a 20 page video game walkthrough that I printed! The scanner also includes a 35 page automatic document feeder. Sweet.
And I love having a wireless printer. True, it’s not Bluetooth, but I don’t really care about that. Setting up the wireless printer with my Mac Pro was a snap. My Mac instantly saw the printer. I have yet to try configuring it with my wife’s Windows laptop. Hoping it’ll be just as easy.
Bravo HP! I love my new printer.
Popularity: 1% [?]
So I’m fixing up a two year old Dell Dimension 4400 with Windows XP Home for a co-worker of Christina’s. He’s had it sitting in a closet for most of that two years because his daughter had allowed so much junk to be installed on it that it wasn’t stable any more.
I didn’t hear Christina the other day when she said he wanted it completely wiped with a fresh install. So I downloaded a BootCD system repair package deal and started at it. See, if I booted his computer in its current state it would freak out because it wasn’t online. He had so many trojans and non-such trying to contact someone or something that the system was completely overloaded. And something kept crashing some service and a window would pop up informing me “system shutdown in 60 seconds” a few minutes into every boot. So I tried the BootCD… and ran Ad-Aware. OMGIGE (Oh My God It’s Going to Expload)! Ad-Aware found nearly 300 critical problems. Not just cookies or little minor things… I’m not counting those.
I tried McAfee Anti-Virus next. After 30 minutes… I gave up. The system was so infected with so many different things his system wasn’t ever going to work after everything McAfee was finished cleaning and deleting.
This is where Christina reminds me that he just wanted a wiped and fresh install. YEA!!!!! So I pop in the little Dell Operating System CD (so cute, it’s not labeled Windows XP… it’s labeled “Operating System”) and go through the process of wiping his drive and installing Windows XP clean. It does that pretty smoothly and quickly enough.
But then comes the driver updates, hotfixes, service packs, etc. I left it to its own at the point last night and went to bed. I also left it running smoothly with the latest nVidia graphics drivers.
This morning… I’m looking at 4bit color and it’s throwing fits about the screen resolution. I was able to rollback the driver but come on Microsoft, why did you UPDATE the graphics driver from 2006 to one from 2003? You know better than nVidia? Or me… the current end user?
Of course you do.
Everything is back in order and I’m installing AVG Anti-Virus trial on his system once it finally gets the remaining updates from Microsoft. I’d put Ad-Aware on there too but I’m not sure if he or his family would know when to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to inquiries from Ad-Aware about what it discovers in scans. It really can be a bit confusing some times.
With all of this, again and again I’m reminded, it’s why I love my oh so sweet Mac, even when it’s going on six years now. Imagine running Vista on a six year old PC. Bahaha.
Popularity: 60% [?]
Late night browsing I end up coming across something really cool. favicon2dots will take any favicon from any website and turn into a spiffy image. It also provides a gallery of all the images it has created, sorted by color. I really do like this site. I’ll have to return tomorrow to play with some of my favorite favicons.
Here’s the icon for Casual Hex after it’s been converted.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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