Upgrading to Vista?

Like many people, I love new stuff. Like way back on christmas morning (when I was a kid..... serious) I'd be so happy to open my junk....

Anyways... Vista.

It's been around for a little bit now.

I've heard some good things.... I've heard all the promo hoopla, and I'm never really swayed by that stuff.

But, I've heard some bad.

I've also seen some general weirdness.

I have not upgraded my work laptop to Vista. I'm quite happy running XP Pro, with 2 Gig of RAM and my software like Eclipse, MySQL tools, Outlook....etc.

I've seen a couple of computers literally crawl after upgrades and have some weird bugs... my boss had a strange bug with MS Office 2007..... he got it taken care of with the help of Microsoft support on the phone (which means they do score a few points).

Recently, I also worked a little on a brand new dell laptop, only had 1 Gig of RAM and came with a fresh new install of Vista. This thing is just plain bogged down. When this person would run just a few things, the laptops RAM shoots up to about 760 MB of usage (and up!!).

I got it to run at about 500MB, but it wasn't running anything. As soon as she uses Outlook for her email and a couple of other programs.... it's just painfully slow.

I would not bother thinking about Vista with any less than 2 Gigs of RAM. And at that, if I was to compare it with my work laptop that currently has 2 Gigs of RAM, to get the same performance as this one with Vista, I would get at least 3 Gigs of RAM. 4 preferably.

Plus, I'd rather see other people go through the pains of the first releases and make sure some bugs are worked out.... because I don't have time to fight with this thing.....

Also, care to "test drive" Vista??

Then go here:
http://windowsvistatestdrive.com/

Over/.

First post back: iPhone... not exactly new

I haven't posted on this blog in an eternity.

So recently, I decided that I would try to start publishing some general thoughts on new, current, upcoming technologies.

One thing that I found was kind of interesting..... Apple's new "iPhone" for instance... Apple now have an army of products (or at least it seems like it) that have that distinct "i-something" kind of ring...

Well... it seems the "iPhone" was around back in 1995-96.

Check it out!

Microsoft's new anti-virus does well

Sales have been good for Microsoft's anti-virus package.

I'm very surprised that it has taken them this long to come out with this kind of product, considering that they seem to have products in so many categories of software.

Check it out.... yet another option for your computing security.

(ZDNet news article)

Technology brings new political campaining methods

Check out this story...

It wasn't quite the candidate's doing, but I believe that they obviously saw the value in the exposure.

(CNN story)

Movies may be distributed as downloadable soon

I had read on how the movie industry was thinking of offering movies as downloads.

The payoff could be huge for them, depending on how they package this.... they could and likely would get a huge cut of the movie rentals industry.

You want to watch a movie, download it for a few bucks. I imagine it could vary.. can play once, twice, three times...whatever.

Possibilities are very interesting.

One thing I wonder is just what the service providers will do... because millions of movies being downloaded for DVD is major bandwidth.

Interesting to see how this develops.

(CNN article)

AOL gives out 5GB of storage.

Ok... back to blogging... it's been a while.

AOL announce that they are going to give out 5GB of storage space to anyone who has an AIM account. That's pretty neat. This service is something that has been charged for for quite some time. This is being offered through XDrive.

Check it out here