Richtig said Fred!

Ok, I am writing this post from my new Vista installation on a Athlon 64 Laptop. The installation is now fully graphical, although the first part when all those 3.3 Gigabytes of files are being copied is fairly long and you don’t get any details other than a percentage completed… You get to know also that on my computer Vista is taking 6667 Megabytes…. That looks like a joke since the movie The Omen came out 3 days ago on the 06-06-06… We all tought that Bill Gates was the devil, but it seems Vista is its evil spawn

The installation went well, all hardware was recognized on my laptop except for the sound card and 2 other devices which were loaded once I tried a Windows Update. The wireless works well, the sound too. I will try it for a couple days then try my hand at Vista 64 Bit, I hope the 64 bit experience is better on Vista than on Windows XP because the hardware support was completely non-existant on XP (complete lack of Wireless, Video and Audio 64 bit drivers). I went ahead and installed the ATI drivers for Vista and they work without a hitch (haven’t tried a game yet), I also installed Netstumbler to test the wireless networking of Vista, and I can report that all is well (so far). You can see from my picture that Vista is currently being certified with Easy Mac.

I have just downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 since it is now availlable to the public. Having to use a proprietary download manager was not without pain since there are already several methods like Bittorrent that could perform the work and make distributing it much easier than having to press retry in a browser for 8 hours straight. So my first Vista experience was pretty painful so far. I suggest using a fat internet pipe since 3.3 gigabytes takes a while to download. I was wondering if they forgot to remove a memory dump from the DVD image because it is so large compared to even Windows 2003 R2 which stands at less than 900 megs.

If you want to try out Windows Vista Beta 2 visit Microsoft.com.
If you want a faster alternative (and it’s free too), then try Open SUSE 10.1.
If you want a popular alternative, try Fedora Core 5.

Seagate has just announced a hybrid hard drive that will have 256 megabytes of flash memory, so that files which are used often (such as the files required to boot windows) or files that are saved could be stored on the flash memory instead of having to restart the hard drive. This is especially good for laptop users since it could mean extended battery life. Now imagine the performance boost if these drive could find their way into desktops too, they would let PCs perform write operations using a much larger cache than those 8 megabytes typically found in today’s IDE or SATA hard disks. I’m already planning my future desktops with 1 GIG cache SATA drives at 10K RPM. It would be good if the drive controller on the HDD was smart enough as to perform defered writes when i’m not doing anything on the disk. As allways a hardware solution is not as flexible as say an operating system doing caching, but writing to a disk even when the OS handles it allways consumes system ressources no matter how you look at it. Hardware just performs better, allways.

Check out the PCMag.com article about Hybrid Drives.

Well I’m talking about Jack PC. The PC that fits in a Jack… Well just look at the picture, what you see is the whole PC. It is even powered with Power over Ethernet (PoE) so there is no need for a bulky AC/DC converter of any sort.
If you ever tought the Mac Mini was the smallest it could get, well it can get much smaller with Jack! Unless you reduce the number of connectors there is not many practical ways to make it smaller.

If you want to read more about it then check out ZDNet.co.uk’s Article on Jack PC.
Or visit Chip PC Technologies’ page about Jack PC.