Running Windows 7 RC 64 and Liking It!

I’m now running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) on my 2008 Mac Pro. While I’ve only been using it for a few days, I have to say it is a marked improvement over Windows XP. It is smooth, crash free, and delicious, full of enough eye-candy to satisfy even the most gluttonous of computer wizards.

So far, what’s surprised me the most is the number of my old programs it is running without complaint. All but one of my primary flight simulators, including Jane’s F/A-18, Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, and X-Plane 9, work. The one that doesn’t is the original Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator nor will it load Star Wars Racer or other programs/installers closer to the Windows 98 era. I am running many of those programs, though, in a Windows XP virtual machine hosted by the free Virtual PC download from Microsoft. That said, running XP under Virtual PC isn’t hassle fre. It takes longer to load it up under Virtual PC than it does under VMWare’s Fusion on my MacBook Pro under OS X, though once it comes up it runs fairly effortlessly. It does exhibit one bug, and it does not see my CH Pro Combatstick when it’s plugged in, preventing me from testing any of my other sims or games, even though W7 does detect it. So, I’m only loading business programs on the XP VM for the time being. When I have more time, I’ll try to find a fix or some download associated with the RC that will fix it for me.

Office 2007 installed and ran without a hitch in both the W7 64 bit and XP VM environments, as did Symantec Anti-Virus 2009. I did have to buy an extra copy of the Symantec NAV to cover myself in the XP VM and also need to spring for a new CD burning utility since the last one I bought for Windows was Nero 6, and it’s incompatible with W7, according to the little window that popped up when I tried to load it. But I really don’t mind that. It’s a small price to pay to harness all the power in my Apple hardware.

Loading, unloading, and operation of applications has been both smooth and error-free. W7 provides a beautiful interface, and though not radically changed from that of XP, its small changes enhance the user experience. I liked what I was seeing enough to spend all my free time over three days to rebuild my Windows system around it; and though that has taken an excruciating amount of time, Microsoft says I can run on the RC until June 10, 2010. That’s smart marketing. You know I’ll buy a copy of it then even at a one-time, ridiculous Microsoft price. I’m hoping part of what that money will buy e is the ability to continue running then by plugging in a new “key” or, at worst, applying the final release via “upgrade”.

I’m still just playing, still on my honeymoon with this software, but I feel Microsoft has a winner in Windows 7, though not enough of one to convince me to switch off OS X. I like OS X’s simplicity and functionality and was more than ready to return to it after three days of nothing but Windows 7. For me, having and using W7RC is akin to having the best of both worlds and using whichever operating systems fits my mood or my task at hand. For those of you reading about my experiences, you need temper what I’m saying by only one thing, i.e., the knowledge that I’m running Windows 7 on a 2.8 GHz eight core machine with 16GB of ram and an ATI 3870 Radeon HD video card with 512MB video RAM on a PCI-E 2.0 bus. Your own mileage may vary, but that is always true.

Adobe Reader 9.1 for Mac Dumps Fonts when Printing

My wife, who is an assistant professor of nursing at a university here, downloaded a .PDF copy of the “DASH Eating Plan” diet from the National Institute of Health’s website. When she printed it from her MacBook over our wireless network to our Okidata C3200N color printer, the copy came out with randomly missing fonts throughout the document. Wanting to eliminate the wireless network as the culprit, I downloaded the same document and re-printed it to the same color printer using our wired network and got the same result. Missing fonts were everywhere. I then closed Adobe Reader and opened the file in Apple’s Preview and tried printing it again. It worked just fine.

I went to the Adobe site and spent a few minutes looking for a Knowledge Base article on this problem but didn’t find anything. There is a generic “printing problem” article and you’re welcome to follow it but I don’t think it’s going to help you at all. So, if you run into this problem, just pull up the PDF file in Preview and have at it.

Almost Worthless

We’ve all seen the new Microsoft ads, and there’s been plenty of press about them, so I won’t repeat any of that here. They’re not aimed at me and they’re almost worthless. The only thing they’ve done is pinpoint for me how much I love Apple’s OS X.

I’m not a Microsoft hater. Windows 7 is pretty cool, and I’ll update my XP set up on my Mac Pro to a Windows 7 sixty-four bit version if I can get all my flight simulators to work under it or get them to run somewhere else. And if it doesn’t cost too much. Otherwise, I’ll just keep my XP set-up. It’s paid for, and it works just fine.

That said, the ads made me go back and look at OS X and why I liked it. There are too many reasons to count, and one of them is that it largely “just works”. I’m not saying OS X never crashes; it does; but I never spend anywhere near the time trying to get the OS running or responding to crashes as I do and did when running Windows. That’s a fact. A lot of folks, especially those PC users who hate Macs and have never, ever used one, will discount what I’m saying about OS X because “I’m biased”. That totally overlooks the fact that unlike many people I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I started out with a DOS 3.1 IBM clone 286 PC, went from there to building my own PC’s and troubleshooting Windows systems for me and my friends and family, and—like many zealous PC users—even argued with a neighbor in New Mexico about the inferiority of his PowerPC Mac. I paid my dues with Windows and PC’s. I literally gave up decades of Windows experience when I switched to Macs. God, how I wish now I’d done it sooner! I might have ten novels out in the world instead of twenty or thirty PC’s, and most of those are in landfills now.

Believe me, there are times I wish the Apple Experience could be entered at less expense. But if you really want to see something that’s more expensive, go look at what it costs to buy a copy of Windows Vista. I can buy a family pack of five licenses for OS X for less than I’d spend on a single version copy of Vista, and every copy of OS X will have FULL functionality. That’s one reason why it’s no big deal for us to own multiple Macs, despite the cost of the hardware.

There's also a beauty and synergy when working with OS X on Apple hardware you almost can't pay enough for. That's the real reason why we continue to work with Macs. And it's something we're never going to find on a Windows PC. Been there; done that; priceless!

The New Apple Airport Extreme Basestation: Some First Impressions

A few weeks ago, I sprang for one of Apple’s new Airport Extreme Basestations. Our overall need to upgrade wasn’t strong, but the new station’s ability to run separate 802.11G compatible and 802.11 N only networks was a real draw for me. My wife’s new MacBook/Apple LED cinema set-up is relegated to network access via wireless connection alone; and I wanted the best for her I could get. While most of our Macs were “N” capable machines, our iPhones are first generation “G” only devices. So, that meant my wife’s connection would never be optimum on our “old” Airport Extreme which now was two generations old. It also only had 10/100 wired Ethernet connections while the rest of our wired network was equipped with Gigabit Ethernet connections; by upgrading to the new base station I could not only segregate my wireless networks but I would also make the router meet the rest of my wired network at 10/100/1000 Ethernet speeds.

The physical set-up was as easy as disconnecting my old unit and connecting the new one. I pulled up the Airport Utility on the CD that came with the unit to discover I already had that version installed, and there was no need to do it again. I launched the utility on my MacBook Pro and selected Manual Set-Up to configure the "new" networks. While it was not necessary to give the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless networks individual names, I did so to make management easy and ensure I got the segregation I was after. I also did not change any parameters in the set-up for our current N network on any of the Macs but did reprogram the iPhones to pick up the G compatible wireless band.

To digress a bit, before I had disconnected the “old” Airport Extreme basestation, I had run a file transfer performance test using my wife’s MacBook. I had placed a 191.1 MB video file on one our Buffalo 500GB NAS hard drives and then copied it to the MacBook’s desktop. It took 2 minutes and 14 seconds for the copy operation to take place. This equated to a 1.42 megabites/second transfer rate. Once I had the new network configuration in place (where my wife’s MacBook was using the “N’ only network), I repeated the copy request. The operation took only 21 seconds! That equates to 9.1 MB/sec, or 6.4 times faster!

I’m not saying for a moment you’ll see that kind of speed increase. I believe that some of what I’ve experienced is due to being able to segregate the networks but I also think some of it is a byproduct of the segregation, i.e., that I had some kind of interference going on that segregating the networks stepped me away from. Apple advertises 5 times faster performance than “previous” 802.11G networks which would seem to indicate that our old Airport Extreme had dropped down to G speeds because of the presence of our iPhones. I am also running one wireless mouse, a Logitech VX Revolution, which runs in the 2.4 GHz Range, the same frequency range as my now mixed G/N network or our old Airport Extreme basestation. It’s possible that the mouse was providing some interference that also helped slow our previous network set-up down.

But, no matter what the cause, the ability to set-up a mixed and pure “N” network on two different frequencies makes the new Airport Extreme Base Station worth the money. It also has a “Guest” networking feature I am not now using but that might also prove to be of benefit to visiting guests, though most of those are family whom I don’t mind allowing full access to our home network. I’ll write about that in the future once I have some experience with it.

The new AE base station also has Gigabit Ethernet networking; and while I am not attributing any of the speed increase I saw to that, it is possible that the extra bandwidth between the file server and the router played at least a small role.

Lastly, I can report that we have not had the problems some users have reported with wireless networking dropping under Firmware version 7.4.1. I updated the router to that firmware version a few weeks ago, and it did not seem to impact its performance negatively.

I haven’t really investigated whether our range has improved. I haven’t seen any differences one way or the other under our “everyday conditions”. I’ll comment on that later once I have a chance to take my MacBook Pro outdoors and outside the house.

Overall, I’m happy with this purchase. It achieved what I had hoped it would by providing my wife’s living room set-up faster file transfer speeds, which was the main thing I was after. I think my only criticism of this unit is that an attached USB drive is still not Time Machine compatible. It’s a silly way of forcing users to consider spending more for Apple’s Time Capsule. It really doesn’t do anything but demonstrate that sometimes Apple and Microsoft are not that different.

The Incredibly Inaccessible iTunes Store

I’m one of those people who’ve invested over four years of my life watching, talking about, and buying up every episode there was of Battlestar Galactica. Despite the behests of one of my friends who was also a BSG fan, I bought my episodic copies from the iTunes Store rather the waiting for the DVD’s. I preferred the almost immediate access to the material, the ability to place episodes on my wife's or my iPods, the ability to run episodes on either 23 or 24 inch computer displays, and, finally, the ability to stream episodes to our HDTV via Apple TV in our living room. Yes, I do have every episode that defined the series; but I am beginning to curse my naivete in trusting the iTunes Store too much. Doing so has cost me quite a bit of money.

You see, I heard early on that BSG was being shot in High Definition, a fact that left me scratching my head as iTunes’ copies of the episodes only showed up in Standard Definition. I shrugged and pressed on, figuring incorrectly that the releases would stay that way. They did until Season 4 after NCB returned to the iTunes Store after a catfight with Apple. The episodes were now High Definition and cost a buck more. Frankly, that fact alone didn’t bother me, and Apple and NBC made it worth my while by including a standard definition copy as well. So, I bought Season 4, as I had done with the miniseries and Seasons 1,2,and 3 and realized at the end of it all that I had a mixed breed collection that contained only one season’s worth of HD episodes. Then, Seasons 1, 2, and 3 showed up in the iTunes Store in High Definition. Surely, I thought, Apple would give me some kind of credit for the Standard Definition episodes I already had paid for and didn’t need to download again.

I was wrong!

Yes, boys and girls, even though the music side of the iTunes Store has a “Complete My Album” feature that lets you get some credit when you’ve already bought songs included on an album you decide to later buy, there is NO such accommodation on the video (e.g, TV) side of the house. To upgrade my TV library of BSG to get HD versions of the show (so I can get full utility out of my APPLE TV!!!), I am paying FULL PRICE and BEING FORCED TO PAY FOR SD VERSIONS I ALREADY HAVE!!! You can bet that since I’m being forced to pay for them, I’m also making sure I download them, even though they are winding up as somewhat useless duplicates on my hard drive. This is causing me to re-consider and think more carefully about purchasing TV shows from the iTunes Store of an ongoing series. Apple needs to institute the same type of crediting system toward TV shows that it uses on music when duplicity exists in the purchase. In other words, if the customer already has copies of a video being downloaded, the some kind of credit toward the larger purchase needs to be made. If not, customers may decide (and I certainly would) that waiting for the DVD is indeed the thing since the tools exist to crank out each and every episode for my iPod or Apple TV with or without Apple’s help.

Secondly, I searched all over the Apple site for some way to give them feedback about this, but there is no official place to provide feedback about pricing at the iTunes Store. This is something Apple needs to fix. It might help them in negotiations with the music and movie studios to have that kind of consumer feedback, and it will help the iTunes Store appear to be more accessible than it is.

Samsung Spinpoint M6 versus Seagate Momentus 7200.4 in a MacBook Pro

Last night, I installed one of the new Seagate Momentus 7200.4 five hundred gigabyte hard drives in my MacBook Pro. It is one of the first 7200 RPM drives for a notebook bringing desktop speed to your portable set-up. This is after a few weeks of running the Samsung Spinoint M6 in the same machine. Both these drives are some of the first 500GB size drives in a 2.5 inch format. So, what I intend to talk about today is a somewhat subjective comparison between the two in case you’re struggling about which one to buy for your MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Since they’re both 500GB hard drives, the trade-off’s you have to consider are speed, noise, heat, and power usage. Once you’ve seen the Seagate in action, you’ll have no doubts about its additional speed. Application launch times now rival those of any desktop. For exact numbers on how fast it is, go to barefeats.com and take a look at the read/write tests they ran. The Seagate beat everything they compared it against. So, if speed is more important to you than battery life, buy the Seagate and install it. You won’t be sorry.

If battery life is more important to you than speed, then the Samsung Spinpoint M6 is the drive to pick. The Seagate seems to drive my battery down at least twice as fast as the Samsung does under the same usage and the same power settings under OS X. (Yes, I know Tom’s Hardware said that the Seagate drive had one of the lowest wattage requirements when at rest; I have to report to you what my experience is…and I can watch the percentage readout tick down with the Seagate in my MBP.) The Samsung is slightly better in the “low noise” department as well, though the extra noise from the Seagate is a background “whoosh” that I have lean close into the machine to hear in a quiet environment. In most office environments, I doubt if you’ll notice any difference in the hard disk noise at all.

I haven’t noticed the MBP’s fans kicking on any more than they did before. I do feel the fans are closer to kicking on than they have been, but that’s all I can say about it.

Which do I like better? I honestly haven’t decided, yet. I’m running the Seagate to see how I feel. I may actually decide I like the lesser noise and better battery life I get out of the Samsung. Generally, though, I tend to like all the performance I can get. If living with the Seagate doesn’t prove too hard to live with, I may have given one of them a new home.

A Mac Guy Runs Windows 7 Betas

I finally got the opportunity to download both the 32 bit and the 64 bit copies of the Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000) a couple of nights ago. I have the 32 bit copy running under VMWare’s Fusion 2.0 alongside a Windows XP virtual machine and the 64 bit copy is running under Boot Camp. I was not able to get the 32 bit beta to run under Boot Camp due to problems burning it to DVD which somehow make them not bootable. I solved that problem later using Finder and got the 64 bit copy to work right from the download.

To install Windows 7 under Fusion, I used the .iso file as the source for the installation files. That said, the first try seemed to hang during the “Completing Installation” phase of the Windows 7 installation. I stopped the installation, shut down Fusion, deleted the Windows 7 virtual machine from the Documents/Virtual Machine folder and then deleted the reference to Windows 7 from Fusion’s main window. I tried the installation again, and this time it went without a hitch.

I successfully installed Norton Anti-Virus 2009 (NAV 2008 would not install), and Microsoft Office 2007. Both ran with the same friskiness they have under XP Pro. I’ve had the most trouble trying to run Internet Explorer 8, which hung with almost any attempt to use it. That was all I got to do that night before running out of time.

The next evening I downloaded the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Beta and installed it via Boot Camp. That also took two tries not because of any technical difficulty but because of my ignorance. Sixty-four bit Windows 7 will not install into a FAT32 partition, which is what Boot Camp leaves you with after it re-partitions your hard drive. When the Windows 7 installation halts because of this, you simply need to select the Boot Camp Partition and select “Format” (which may be hidden behind the Advanced Disk Functions link). The partition will automatically be reformatted into NTFS. On my first attempt and after I did that, I wasn’t sure if I had just hosed my OS X installation, so I backed out. I reassured myself that everything was okay by using the Boot Camp Assistant to delete the Windows’ partition and then rebooted the MacBook Pro to check how it ran. It was fine. That gave me the confidence to jump back into the Windows 7 installation and complete it without a hitch.

Inside W7-64, I’ve loaded up a trial version of Office 2007 and the latest version of Firefox and they ran fine with the same speed you’d see under XP. My real interest was to see if my current batch of flight simulators and games would also run under that OS. I’m hoping they do because, from what I’m seeing, I would invest in a copy of the 64 bit version of Windows 7 for my Mac Pro to tap more of the machine’s raw power. Rather than risk my Mac Pro’s set –up, though, I decided to run my testing on my MacBook Pro.

I tried running the Boot Camp 2.1 update, which is a Windows application, in W7-64; but it crashed and died just after launch. So far, though, I don’t seem to be missing much without it. My McAlly Bluetooth mouse paired up with W7-64 without loading any additional drivers, though it did take several attempts to make it work.

I’ve seen enough of the 32 bit and 64 bit systems to preliminarily say they seem to perform equally well. If I buy one of them in the future, it would be the 64 bit version to run on my Mac Pro to better tap its power. That’s why I spent the rest of my time this week focusing on the 64 bit version and determining whether or not I would lose any of my flight simulators running under it. My oldest and one of my best flight simulators is Jane’s F/A – 18. It runs fine under XP Pro SP3 with compatibility mode set to Windows 2000. I decided to start my testing with that.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that it would not run natively under Windows 7. I decided to try running it under emulation, so I downloaded the 64 bit version of Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft. (It’s free, by the way.) I had hoped I might run copies of Windows 95 or 98 or 98se I had, but I needed to provide a boot device to Virtual PC and while I did have boot floppies for all those operating systems in my closet, I had no way to make them readily available to this set up. (It would simply take more time than I had that evening to make it work out.) I did create a Windows XP Pro virtual machine but found out quickly that though Jane’s would install, only the cover screen would appear when the application was started and then the application would quit. I tried multiple compatibility settings but couldn’t find one that would work. At this point, my hope to run Jane’s under emulation appears dashed; the only way it will work is to run it on an XP system under Boot Camp. If I want to keep the sim then I have to forget about upgrading the Mac Pro’s Window’s partition or establish one on my MacBook Pro and see if XP will also drive my new 24 inch monitor. I may try that soon.

There's a trick to using the MacBook/Pro with the Lid Closed.

There's a trick to using the MacBook/Pro with the Lid Closed. I discovered this morning that the differences between our MacBook and MacBook Pro boot sequences were due to a difference in procedure. In other words, using Apple's procedure (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3131) for booting the MacBook when it's hooked up to the 24 inch display was causing a lot of the sleep/hang/disconnect problems we'd been experiencing. Here's the procedure I've been using with my MacBook Pro and the new LED display that gives me a clean boot up, i.e., the exact same experience I'd have if I were doing the whole thing on an iMac:

(1) With the machine off, hook up all your connectors to your MacBook/MacBook Pro(power, USB/keyboard/mouse, mini-Display Port).

(2) Slide the machine forward so you can crack open the display enough to reach the Power button on the MB/MBP.

(3) Push the Power button and IMMEDIATELY close the lid.

(4) Slide the MB/MBP into place.

If you've done this right, you'll get the grey boot screen you'd see if you were booting up the MB/MBP on its native display. This procedure will also work for both the MB/MBP whether the power connector for the notebook is hooked to it or not. You can use this procedure to boot and run the MB/MBP on its battery while using the LED and an external keyboard and mouse with it, helping to extend the notebook's battery life.

The trick to this is to push the power button enough to ensure the boot is occurring and then to get the lid closed as early in the boot sequence as you can. It might take you a few trials to get it right, but once you do, I think you'll find that using the MB/MBP with your new LED display will be the great, hassle-free experience you were looking for.