Posted 11/02/2009 at 12:32:21pm

I've been running 7 since Beta days, it's great!  I've had no issues with stability, compatibility, or anything.  Shoot, I have it running on an old P4 3.0GHz with 1GB of Ram, no issues.  It's time to make the change.

Posted 06/24/2009 at 07:02:04am

A new Ad for MS?  Can Mac OS X make this claim?  Hmm...interesting...very interesting

Posted 05/12/2009 at 09:17:50am

I did an upgrade (figured I'd do the clean install once the final is released...) from x64 Vista to the x64 RC and once I smoothed out a few hiccups it's been working great.  I'm looking forward doing the clean install.  That said, win 7 fixed many of the remaining issues I had with Vista (that I'd mostly forgotten about) and is working extremely well on my main machine!  Faster, more responsive, much stabler, just overall a much more XP'esk OS.

 I'm also running 7 on a 6-7 year old P4 with no issues.  It took to the old hardware surprisingly well where I would never have attempted to install Vista.

 I think back to the XP betas and I remember them doing a pretty much the same rigor back then...after botching ME so badly.  So M$ seems to be on a hit, miss, hit, miss cycle.

Posted 04/24/2009 at 07:14:24am

Overall this works out really well and I'm happily using OpenDNS...but I ran into an issue where I could no longer ping or remote into computers on my LAN.  After a bit of research I discovered this is because the names were going out to the DNS server to be resolved instead of staying on my LAN.  I don't know exactly why this happens and didn't when I was using my ISP's DNS servers, but if you run into this, it can be fixed (if you're using OpenDNS anyway).  You have to go into the VPN exceptions section (can't recall the exact name at the moment) and setup "your domain" as an exception so it'll resolve the name locally.  Once you know what's going on, finding your domain is pretty easy - when you do a ping (i.e. ping mycomputer) it'll come back with something like "pinging mycomputer.isp.domain.com" so you just add an exception for "isp.domain.com", wait the three minutes and try again...  you may have to also add "domain.com" so just keep going until you get a ping and ip from your LAN.

Hope this saves someone some time as it took me awhile to figure out why my WHS wasn't talking to my computer, etc...

Posted 03/26/2009 at 07:31:50am

So far so good.  I've been using SageTV on the WHS for a long time now (WHS does all my recording) and that's been working great, but I may play with the new  MC integration just to see how it works.

Fixing the remote access will be good as it was 50/50 whether it would work in the past, so hopefully that will be more reliable now.

Oddly enough, I had to do my first restore on a PC Monday, right before this update, and it worked just fine.  My wife got a trojan on her computer and couldn't get rid of it, so we just restored back to before she had it and everything is good again - a very good safety net!

Posted 01/15/2009 at 12:24:56pm

It just needs a 20kV shell to protect it from theft and it'd be perfect.

Posted 12/04/2008 at 01:22:24pm

I can think of another name for Comcast...

Anyway, seriously, I'm not worried about hitting their cap, half the time I can't even get on the internet.  Ok, so it's not quite that bad...and I'm hoping it's because they're working on upgrading my area to the higher speeds...

 Personally I think they should've introduced the ability to check your bandwidth usage (even on the web under your account info) BEFORE they ever introduced the cap.

 Qwest has started to advertise fiber in town, so maybe I can switch to that before long...

Posted 11/17/2008 at 07:49:33am

Not that retailers are given a lot of options when it comes to pricing products from Micro$oft, but one wonders if the OEM licenses, back to school deals, etc will be as prevalent with this direct from redmond...

Posted 10/02/2008 at 02:39:07pm

My beef with Blockbuster is shortly after I started to like having the in store rentals, not 1, not 2, but all 3 of the Blockbusters close to me in town went out of business!!  There's no way I'll drive to the ones left just for that "extra".

Switching to netflix soon!

Posted 09/20/2008 at 08:00:28am

Let me begin by saying I was never going to buy this game, so take these comments for what they are.

 Publishers that keep insisting on crazy DRM schemes for PC games do not take the PC Gaming industry seriously in the first place.  In fact, they would probably be tickled pink if PC gamers just went away so they could totally focus on the consoles where they don't have near the issue with pirated software because of the consoles built-in DRM.

If you want to have DRM, make it for multiplayer only!  Even then I'm not sure it's necessary.  A bunch of us used to get together and play a LAN game and we'd do what it took to make sure everyone could play.  Eventually everyone ended up buying the game so we could play on the net.  But it sure was nice to be able to expose people to the game without having to buy it 10 times.  

 No DRM means nothing for hackers to hack...which means they eventually go away and do other things.  Keep throwing new challenges their way and they're never going to go away and people will continue to play the games without buying it.