About the time that we got our new Dell M1530, the internal video card on our MacBook Pro died. My wife is now trying to use the M1330 as her personal computer. I erased the Ubuntu partition and installed WIndows Vista on it. Also, since our Mac OS X machine was disabled, I have installed Windows XP in a virtual machine on my Ubuntu m1530 to do everything that I can’t do in Ubuntu.
There are several things that I have noticed about Windows:
- The backup functionality in Windows Home Server works perfectly with Windows machines. (I actually have used this to rebuild a machine and it worked perfectly)
- There is no calendar program. I don’t get how Microsoft can ship an OS that doesn’t have a calendar program. Mac OS X ships with iCal. You would think that Microsoft would want a computer to be functional for a family with just the base OS install. They ship a mail program, photo and video editing programs, but no calendar. This means that I can not sync my calendar with MobileMe.
- I am getting tons of errors from MobileMe Sync on both XP and Vista. The errors state things like “a sync in progress” or my “MobileMe account is expired”.
- The Windows version of Quicken is so much more functional that the Mac version. Once I confugured Quicken for our accounts, it automatically configured itself to use the online bill pay from the bank. With Quicken for the Mac, you have to use a third party bill pay service.
Continue Reading September 30th, 2008
I installed Windows Vista on our Mac mini. I wanted to document the process, in case I need to do this again.
When I started, I use the Mac OS X installer to create two partitions. One 12Gb partion for Mac OS X and the rest for windows. This didn’t work, as BootCamp can not be enabled unless you have more than several GB of space availble. So, I had to create one partition and then reinstall Mac OS X. Once I did that, then I could use the Boot Camp installer to resize the Mac OS X partition and install Windows.
The other problem that I had was that the DVD drive on the Mac mini is starting to malfunction. I was able to install Mac OS X by putting the Mac mini in Firewire Disk Mode, and using the MacBook Pro to actually do the installation. Unfortunately, you can not install Windows like this. You only can enable Boot Camp on the internal drive. Also, you can’t use an external USB DVD drive to install windows, as Mac hardware. Luckily, I was able to get Vista installed by rebooting without the DVD inserted, and the option key held down. Then when in the disk selection screen appears, insert the Windows DVD, and then boot into the installer.
I was using our LCD TV as a monitor for the Mac Mini. Once Windows was installed, I wasn’t able to see any video when setup assistant started. I had to switch to a different monitor that supported that resolution so I could finish the setup.
Once, I installed Apple’s drivers everything worked perfectly. Media Center works on this, and I am able to access this on the Xbox through Media Center extender.
I have installed TVTonic and MyMovies. I have set up several video feeds in TVTonic, and now I need to start creating images for our DVDs.
Continue Reading September 30th, 2008
Fall is my favorite season and for some reason it brings in the most reader questions. This year is no different except that there was one dominant question that was asked in many ways. It has to do with how to block websites. The interesting part is that no age group or gender was excluded. I’ve got four solutions that don’t require you part with any funds.
Continue Reading September 22nd, 2008
I was at a Starbucks last week, waiting for my appointment at the DMV. This was the warning that Firefox 3 showed me, when I attempted to log on to the wifi network there.
Starbucks and TMobile need to fix their ssl certificates.
Continue Reading September 20th, 2008
Recently, I attended an industry summit that had an expert’s panel where people provided their best tips. One Excel tip involved filtering cells with a certain number of words. A nice tip, but it left some attendees wondering where Excel’s word count function was. The program doesn’t have this feature, but you can get the answer by creating an Excel formula to count words. (Includes sample Excel worksheet and formula)
Continue Reading September 15th, 2008
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