Category: Windows

Safari, Now for Windows UPDATE

Safari 3 can now be downloaded as a public beta starting today. Steve Jobs announced that Safari will be available for the Windows platform. I haven’t had a chance to play with it because I’m running a MacBook right now however I will try it out as soon as I get a chance.Apple is saying that Safari will be much faster than any other Windows browser, showing these benchmarks:

Up to twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.6 times faster then Firefox. Safari for Windows seems to run just as well on Windows as it does under OS X, however I’ve only seen the demos and anybody could make a product look good during a demo. They hope to gain market share in the browser space by doing this and I can only imagine that the key to all of this is to get Windows users into the Apple environment. If they see how well Apple products work under Windows then maybe they will have to consider buying a Mac as their next computer.Check out the Safari for Windows Beta. And I know I said that I wasn’t going to be posting today but I figured that this was cool enough to post about.

Update: I had some time with Safari for the Windows and it is the fastest browser that I have ever used on the Windows side of things, it is incredible. I haven’t had any hiccups at all so it seems that the beta is very far along. It does give you a lot more screen real estate for your web pages and I love that the scroll bars look like you are in OS X. Please everyone go download it and try it out you will enjoy it.

244 Copies of Windows Vista Sold in China

According to newlaunches.com only 244 genuine copies of Windows Vista have been sold in China. The software piracy in China is so rampant that almost all of the copies of Vista that have been sold are pirated. In some places you can find Windows Vista on the streets for as low as $1.

I don’t really have much to say other than that I don’t understand why no one has just switched to Linux instead of Windows. It seems like Linux would be perfect for countries with high piracy rates because for one thing they can stop doing something illegal and for another they can still have a good stable operating system.

I guess the only thing really stopping them would be the PC game support is not on the Linux side but on the Windows side.

Newlaunches

AutoPatcher, a Geeks Friend

For all of you out there that have been appointed the family tech geek against your own will know how difficult it is to deal with going to, lets say, your grandmothers house and updating her computer because she keeps getting a pop-up in the lower right hand corner saying that her anti-virus is out of date.

The worst part about that visit is that you have to download the updates for the anti-virus but because your a good little grandson you decide to download the updates for windows as well and if that doesn’t sound all that bad yet, she still has a 56k modem as her internet connection.

This will at least help with the Windows Updates, Autopatcher. AutoPatcher, which is released once a month to keep you updated, is a great tool that will make a CD that will install of the updates for Windows on your machine. It’s smart too because it checks to see what updates you need and only trys installing the ones that you do need.

It is a free utility and I suggest you download it just incase you need it. Please help them out and download it with bittorrent, and do seed.

iTunes 7 updated to 7.1 but no Vista support yet

iTunes was updated to 7.1 yesterday but it still doesn’t have full support for Windows Vista yet.

The update that has fixed some of the problems that occurred with Windows Vista along with some other bugs, but most notably added a full screen CoverFlow view along with support for the AppleTv.

If you are running Windows Vista and would like to use iTunes because of an iPod or a large collection of music/movies/TV shows you seem to still be out of luck for at least another couple of weeks, but I’m sure many coders at Apple are hard at working getting Windows Vista running smoothly with iTunes, it will come soon.

The coverflow feature does look really good but I still can’t think of any practical uses for it other than those few times you tell your friends and family “hey, check out what this program can do!”

Download page
One of the many Vista compatibility issues

Only 2 Posts Today

 

I only posted 2 times today as you may have noticed. I had to go do a family computer call. Had to fix some things and I ended up taking her old computer home so that I could bring it back and add a second hard drive to her new computer with all of her stuff on it. I took it home because its an hour long drive over there and I didn’t have any hard drives with me.But the computer that I took from her I will have for the next week or so. This will be the computer that I try Windows Home Server on. I haven’t installed it yet but plan to do so tomorrow during the day so don’t expect too many updates tomorrow also, maybe 3 or 4, but most deffenitly more than today.

As you may have figured out I won’t be getting the review up this week, stuff has come up and things didn’t go as planned but it will get up next week if the install goes well and everything works, If I can’t even get it to work than I won’t get the review up but I will tell you my experiences with it.

Microsoft Windows Home Server !UPDATE!

I just got the beta key for Microsoft Windows Home Server, therefore I most likely will not have as many updates today because I will be fiddleing around with that. I should be back up and running normally tomorrow thought, and then in about a week or two I hope to have a little review of Windows Home Server up for all to see .I’m excited about the product, even though I primarily use a Mac it will still be cool to play around with.
!UPDATE!
I haven’t gotten Home Server set up yet but I think I’m going to take my time get it installed, mostly because I need to borrow someones old computer so that I can set it up on that system. The laptop I was going to put it on doesn’t seem to want to boot right, and its overheating, not sure what is up with that.

The Wow has started now!

Well many of you out there have seen Vista and maybe have been playing with it for the past few months, well I booted a Vista PC, it was my own, I probably played with it for about 2 minutes before I realized why it looked like crap, I didn’t have drivers for my graphics card. I quit playing with it after that. Yesterday I recieved in the mail my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit version. It really is a much better operating system than Windows XP. I’m using it right now as a HTPC and its great. I have Juiced downloading all of my podcasts and then I click the little Start button on my remote control and Media Center pops up. It works great.

I haven’t had any problems with it crashing at all (not that I had problems with XP). I really like the look and feel of the OS, I don’t think I like the new start menu but I haven’t had too much time to play with it and get used to it.

I do have a fairly fast machine, here’s what I’m running:

Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Soc. 939
2GB DDR 400 Memory
160GB SATA HDD
Geforce 7800GT
EVGA nForce 4 SLI Motherboard

I don’t think that it runs any slower than XP did for me so that whole arguement is a little dumb.

I’m now on to installing it on a bit of a slower machine, the one I’m building for my mom and I’ll let you guys know how it runs on that.

Weekly Picks

These are the things that I wanted to buy this week. There wasn’t very many products that I wanted this week so there are only two of them. I might not actually buy them but I do want them.

The Orange iPod Shuffle. Even though I have the silver first rev one I want the orange one because it looks cooler and it comes with the newly designed headphones, really cool!

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate. I know that many of you have been hating on Vista but I think its a great operating system and I plan to use it for my HTPC in the living room, that Media Center interface is beautiful and its more secure.

The Floppy is Dead

I’ve seen a few articles recently talking about the death of the Floppy drive. A lot of them talk about a computer store in Britian called PC World dropping the floppy disk. I don’t know why that got a lot of coverage because I think what really killed the floppy disk is Windows Vista. Now when installing Windows Vista you don’t need a floppy disk to install additional drivers like you do with Windows XP. This is huge because I would always buy a floppy drive when building a new PC because I might need additional drivers when install XP. I will no longer have to buy a floppy drive.

Windows Vista can now pull drivers off of any removable media. I will be installing Vista for the first time in a couple of days once it comes in from Amazon and I hope that this will make it a lot easier for me when I install it on a RAID.

The floppy is dead, and Vista killed it.