An upgrade tale 2: upgrade harder
So, almost three years had passed since my last major system upgrade—downright shameful negligence for someone in this line of work, clearly. I won't rant about diminishing returns all over again (that was last month's topic), but suffice it to say I remained largely satisfied with my Core 2 Duo E6400 throughout that length of time. The more time passed, the more I became resigned to stick with my old parts until something major came along, something that would really justify spending an afternoon gutting my computer, cutting my hands on sharp case edges, and trying to get screws out from underneath my motherboard.
That something finally came on September 8. I had contemplated Intel's Core i7-900 processors for some time, but I wasn't particularly thrilled about the prospect of blowing almost $500—or, in my case, €500—on a processor and motherboard, and then having to pay a further premium for one of them fancy triple-channel RAM thingamajigs. Via Lynnfield, Intel brought the Nehalem architecture to a price point I found much harder to resist.
Not only that, but in my diminishing returns post, I clamored about my wish for more power-efficient parts. The new platform fulfills that requirement in my eyes, with remarkably low idle power consumption that puts even previous dual-core offerings to shame. Then there's Turbo Boost, which can clock up individual cores by as much as two thirds of a gigahertz depending on load. It's like having your cake and eating it, too. You get a blistering-fast quad-core processor, excellent single-threaded performance, and really low idle power draw.
I gave in. On September 9, I ordered the following parts from local e-tailer Materiel.net:
- One Intel Core i5-750 processor
- One Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R motherboard
- 4GB of Kingston DDR3-1333 memory
- One Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus cooler
That processor and motherboard combo would go on to become the cornerstone of our fall system guide's Utility Player build. As for me, I decided to combine the aforementioned with the following from my former build:
- One Zotac GeForce 8800 GT graphics card (with a custom Zalman cooler)
- One Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer sound card
- Two 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16s (in RAID-1 mode) and one 1TB Caviar Green
- One Samsung SH-W163A DVD burner
- One Seasonic S12 430W power supply
- One Antec P180 enclosure
- Some fans
I already had a large Thermalright SI-128 heatsink on my Core 2 Duo, but the lack of a readily available LGA1156 mounting kit prompted me to grab the Hyper 212 Plus from Cooler Master—one of the few Core i5-compatible coolers available at launch. Despite its relatively low price, the 212 turned out to be very decent: it takes up to two 120-mm fans and features a convenient tower-style design, a variable-speed fan, and a great multi-socket mounting mechanism that bolts securely through the motherboard.
With a 120-mm Nexus fan doing a constant 1,000 RPM, the 212 keeps my Core i5-750 at around 35-37°C when idle and 61-62°C after a 15-minute Prime95 torture test. I'd probably get lower load temps with the bundled, variable-speed Cooler Master fan, but consistently low noise levels are my main priority. (Hey, I practically live in front of this system. Give me a break.) I left the disturbingly puny Intel heatsink in its box for the same reason.
Well, that's not strictly true; I did take it out for a comparison photo next to the Hyper 212 Plus. Yeah, Intel is totally skimping on stock heatsinks these days. Look at that thing! Even the cooler that came with my 65W Core 2 Duo is at least twice as thick.
Here's everything securely bolted and fastened in preparation for the Great Platform Swap. That operation was surprisingly uneventful, taking about an hour and a half in total and eliciting no cursing on my part. I can thank Antec's cleverly designed P180 for the lack of cursing, although the enclosure also made me spend an inordinate amount of time on cable management. Yes, I have the old version of the case that doesn't let you run cables behind the motherboard. I'd probably upgrade if I opened it more frequently.
My motherboard choice probably deserves some attention, too. I believe I've covered all the bases in the latest system guide's Utility Player section, so I won't regurgitate it all here. In a nutshell, though, I like the GA-P55-UD3R's relatively low price, its abundance of SATA and USB ports, and the little touches like dual BIOS chips, all-solid-state caps, eight-phase CPU power, and Dynamic Energy Saver software. My only gripe is the presence of only two PCIe slots aside from the main graphics one. Since I use a dual-slot graphics card, however, I'm really no worse off than if I'd gotten, say, Asus' P7P55D LE or P7P55D.
With the hardware swap complete, I attempted to boot into Windows 7 using just one of the drives from my RAID 1. Predictably, Windows 7 threw up a blue screen of death during the startup sequence. I expected this, and I was ready to reinstall when I came to a realization: I'd forgotten to set the Serial ATA controller to RAID mode in the BIOS. It was still in IDE mode, and my Windows 7 installation didn't have the right drivers for that. I made the change in the BIOS, and much to my surprise, Windows 7 booted up without a hitch; it just spent a while re-detecting all my hardware afterward.
Better yet, the P55 PCH's storage controller knew my hard drive was part of a RAID config, and once I plugged in the other drive, it happily started rebuilding the array via the Windows software. Switching from one Intel chipset to another isn't exactly pushing the envelope, but I still appreciate when things just work like that.
The next little while was spent trying to get Internet access. After a driver update and several reboots, I finally remembered about the MAC address filtering on my router. Apparently, switching to a completely different motherboard with a different Ethernet controller also change your MAC address, even if you keep the same enclosure. Who knew?
Everything was soon in order, and I happily ran a few games and applications to gauge the performance increase. Oh, it was noticeable. Photoshop never loaded up so fast, and even web browsing felt snappier, especially in JavaScript-heavy sites. While all of this was going on, I noticed my hard drives were making more noise than usual.
A lot more noise. Except it wasn't coming from the hard drives.
Turns out, somehow, simple tasks like scrolling and dragging my mouse across a web page caused a high-pitched screeching noise to emanate from the power supply. Switching to Windows 7's "Power saver" power management scheme made the noise go away, but it also made the system feel a little sluggish. (Clock speeds rarely went above 2GHz, according to CPU-Z.) Switching to the "High performance" scheme made the screeching constant. A Google search revealed other users with similar problems. Some blamed it on their motherboards, others tried switching motherboards with no success, and one guy was unable to get rid of the noise even with different motherboards and different power supplies from different vendors. That didn't bode well.
I still decided to get a new PSU. Something inside there, probably a coil, was generating the noise after all, right? I'd been meaning to decommission the ol' S12 for a while, anyway—it had only two SATA power connectors and no PCIe power connectors at all, and I was sick of cluttering my case with more and more plug adapters. So, I shopped around and soon came across Corsair's HX450W. That unit isn't actually available in the U.S. for some reason, but it ticked all the right boxes for me: 80 Plus Bronze certification, modular cabling system, seven-year warranty, and a relatively low price. I got mine for around €67, a good €20 less than the HX520W, which has lower efficiency and a shorter warranty.
I switched out the S12 for the HX450W last weekend, spending another 30 minutes or so making sure all the cables were neat and tidy. Well, at least as tidy as you can get 'em in a first-gen P180. Happily, though, the noise was gone. The other Seasonic unit still works just fine with my Core 2 parts, which I've since transferred to my fiancee's PC, so I'm gonna chalk up the screeching noise to the S12's age. I mean, that thing came out before Intel's first quad-core CPU. Maybe its response to the state-of-the-art Nehalem chip with Turbo Boost and madly fluctuating voltages was PSU talk for, "Get off my lawn!"
But I digress. This adventure has left me with a very quick, power-efficient, and tidy PC. I dig the modular power cables, and they really make sense in an enclosure like this one. The Core i5-750 is a fantastic processor, and watching Turbo Boost kick in still makes me giddy. Part of me regrets not going with the i7-860, since it'd be really cool to see eight little activity graphs in the Task Manager instead of four, but the i5 is more than fast enough for my needs.
One component remains in need of an upgrade: that GeForce 8800 GT. With mid-range DirectX 11 cards so close to release, I've decided to hold off until AMD's Juniper cards... or maybe I'll get tired of waiting and spring for a Radeon HD 5850, who knows?
I'd rather not spend more than I have to, though. My primary gaming display has a pretty sane 1920x1200 resolution, and I only play games a few hours a week (if that). Besides, as I said last month, the vast majority of console ports and cross-platform titles already run great on the 8800 GT. I want my next graphics card to be faster, yes, but I also want it to be power-efficient and relatively cheap. Hopefully, Juniper will fulfill those requirements. If not, well, I might just sit this one out and see what Nvidia comes up with.
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Last by Left_SHifted at 3:58 PM on 10/25/09
Last Saturday, I decided to head down to my local Apple reseller and grab a copy of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The new operating system costs €29 here in France, but the clerk told me that, because of a fault in the store's pricing database, I would only be charged €28.99. Had I been in America, a different clerk would have asked me for $29.
The French clerk and I quipped about buying coffee with the extra cent while the credit card transaction cleared, and I left with a small white box inside of a disturbingly feminine red paper bag. A bit of mandatory Saturday grocery shopping later, I was back at home with the Snow Leopard DVD spinning away in my aluminum MacBook. Trademarks and buzzwords flashed through my head as the installer did its thing—OpenCL, Grand Central, 64-bit, QuickTime X. Having just finished reviewing Windows 7, I was eager to sample Apple's comeback.
Well, here I am now writing this blog post on my freshly upgraded MacBook, and I can't say €28.99 is quite the bargain I thought it was. As a matter of fact, I almost feel the same subtle tingling of buyer's remorse I did nine years ago after paying £15 (if I recall correctly) for the original Mac OS X Public Beta. Snow Leopard isn't bad or unusable like the Public Beta; I just don't quite feel I got my money's worth.
When I wrote about Snow Leopard pricing in our news section last week, I said the $29 fee was well below what Microsoft charges for Windows 7. Oh, sure, a few early adopters got to pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium for 50 bucks, but on October 22, that same upgrade will set you back $120, and a non-upgrade license will cost $200. In the same news post, I attributed Snow Leopard's low price to the fact that Apple already sells the only computers capable of running the OS legally and easily. There's an element of that, definitely, but I now see another side to it.
Generally speaking, Snow Leopard looks, feels, and behaves almost exactly like Leopard. A few things here and there have changed, of course. Popping open the System Monitor shows most system apps running in 64-bit mode, Exposé now stacks windows neatly, and QuickTime X has a swanky new interface. The system feels ever so slightly snappier overall, as well, and Apple has thrown in little tweaks and fixes all over the place, like an option to minimize windows inside their application icons in the Dock.
But whether you're moving files around in the Finder, surfing the web, using Spotlight to find an application or file, copying files across the network, or changing system preferences, you may have to keep reminding yourself what OS you're using. And no, Safari 4 doesn't count; it's been available for Leopard for months.
Apple still hasn't implemented a package manager to deal with apps that come inside .pkg installers. QuickTime still doesn't play DivX out of the box, unlike Windows Media Player 12. The Finder still feels weak and stripped-down compared to Windows 7's Explorer—it still doesn't remember folder view settings unless you force it to, it still truncates file names in an odd way (by showing the start then the end with an ellipsis in between), and the Cover Flow view mode is still completely pointless, especially with regular icons scalable up to 512x512. Oh, but inexplicably, the Finder now computes file sizes in base 10 like hard drive vendors, which is sure to confuse anyone who regularly swaps files between Mac OS and Windows machines. Great.
Window management still feels a little disjointed, too. As I said above, a new option lets you minimize windows into the application icon, but hovering over that icon doesn't show thumbnails like in Windows 7. Instead, you can click-and-hold, which lets you pick a window in a single-app Exposé view; you can right-click, which shows the apps in a menu; or you can trigger Exposé, which shows all active windows at the top and minimized windows in a single row at the bottom. I love Exposé, but I wish Apple would revamp window management instead of tacking more and more little features and options on top of each other.
Snow Leopard doesn't assuage my gripes, but then again, it was never meant to be about dazzling users with new and exciting interface changes. Most of the improvements, which our friend Jason Fox summed up in his blog last week, lie under the hood.
It's a bit like if Microsoft released Windows Vista in 2003 as a $50 upgrade with almost nothing but core changes like DirectX 10, consumer 64-bit support, SuperFetch, the new networking stack, and so on. Microsoft could have then released Windows 7 in 2006 with the same underlying features and all of the shiny, dazzling additions like Aero, the new bundled applications, instant search, etc.
Similarly, I expect Apple will use Snow Leopard as a springboard for a future OS X release with more visible changes. In Vista's case, we all saw that too much ambition can lead to disaster—Microsoft had to start development over from scratch half-way through, and it's fair to say the final product wasn't very well-received overall. I therefore think Apple deserves some credit for making 10.6 more of a maintenance release. Some users may not like it, but I bet they'd be even less happy about waiting longer for a more groundbreaking release with less polish, poorer compatibility, and a higher price tag.
That said, if you plunk down your $29 expecting a Windows 7-style leap at a discount, prepare to be disappointed.
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Last by derFunkenstein at 3:03 PM on 09/14/09
Like many of you, I'm giddily waiting on the release of Intel's Lynnfield processors to upgrade my main desktop PC. This system is still trucking along with a first-gen, 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo E6400, having skipped three major generational steps on the Intel side—the first quad-core wave, the shrink to 45 nm, and Nehalem—and two on the AMD side—the first Phenom series, then the Phenom II.
In fact, I've barely upgraded from the build I wrote about all the way back in November of 2006. Sure, popping the side panel will now reveal an extra 2GB of RAM, a GeForce 8800 GT, and a 1TB Caviar Green. Oh, and I suppose I also switched sound cards and CPU coolers, but those were more like side-grades to get around driver problems and minimize noise, respectively. Point is, the core components are getting pretty long in the tooth.
I was wondering about that the other day. After all, I'm a PC enthusiast with a job and a reasonable amount of disposable income, and I like to play games. My computer should already be rocking some sort of 45-nm processor with a latest-gen graphics card (or two). At the very least, I should have four CPU cores.
What gives?
Sitting down and actually using this thing provides a pretty good explanation. In the past, I could readily feel when a machine was aching for a serious upgrade. Games started to choke, the operating system felt sluggish, booting up or opening apps took a frustrating amount of time, and occasionally, I didn't even have the right slot in my motherboard for a new graphics card. This time? I can't really complain about anything.
Here's a good example: I finally grabbed Techland's Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood last weekend. This month-old game ran buttery smooth and looked drop-dead gorgeous at 1920x1200 with the detail turned up. That's using a three-year-old processor and a two-year-old graphics card, neither of which were even high-end parts when they came out.
I get the same impression with Windows and the software I use daily. Vista never felt particularly sluggish to me, and Windows 7 is even faster. Photoshop CS4 feels delightfully snappy, probably because it taps into the GeForce via OpenGL to accelerate the user interface. Firefox has been getting quicker and quicker with each new release. I buy my MP3s online these days, so I hardly ever use MP3 encoders anymore. And my other apps—Pidgin, Thunderbird, WinSCP, FileZilla—well, they're not that resource-intensive to begin with.
The only exception I can think of is Armed Assault 2, which runs like a three-legged dog on heroin unless I turn down the resolution and disable post-processing. To my knowledge, though, Bohemia Interactive has yet to make a game that delivers smooth frame rates at launch. (I had similar problems with the original Armed Assault, and don't even get me started about Operation Flashpoint.)
So, if I don't really need to upgrade, why am I already pricing out a Lynnfield system in my head? Why am I excited about AMD's upcoming DirectX 11 GPUs? Good question. I think a good part of it is my desire to tinker with new hardware and brag about my PC once again, if only for a few months. Another part is that, while I may not crave the extra performance, I certainly wouldn't mind it.
This situation has made me re-think my priorities a little bit, though. I may just splurge for a low-power Lynnfield variant if Intel releases some. After all, it would be foolish to suffer more noise, more heat, and bigger power bills if performance isn't a priority. The same goes for graphics—no foot-long, watt-guzzling cards for me, thank you. With current consoles still setting a hard ceiling for games' graphical demands, a mid-range or mainstream card based on a next-gen, 40nm, DX11 GPU should serve me just fine.
I may even take a hard drive (or two) out of my desktop PC and buy one of those little Atom-powered Windows Home Server machines, like Acer's easyStore H340. At that point, I'd be free to ditch my Antec P180 chassis and turn my main PC into a quiet little MicroATX gaming rig. That would involve finding a decent MicroATX motherboard, of course, and those can be hard to come by.
Or who knows; maybe I'll just wait for Clarkdale. Two cores, four threads, low power, and low pricing—wouldn't that be good enough?
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Last by Krogoth at 5:44 AM on 08/23/09
This morning, TR's resident Mac blogger Jason Fox posted a somewhat pessimistic piece about that tablet device Apple is supposed to launch next year. In the post, Jason rightfully questioned the utility of a slab of aluminum (or plastic) with a 10" touch-screen and otherwise unremarkable hardware—pretty much what the Mac rumor mill has been describing.
The prospect of such a device doesn't excite me much, either. That said, history also tells me that assessment is a little premature. If I were a betting man, I'd say we may all find ourselves pleasantly surprised next year after Apple introduces a tablet-like product that's simultaneously well-thought-out, compelling, and... still overpriced. (Hey, Steve Jobs likes his margins.)
The fact that I'm writing this post using Firefox on my Windows Vista-powered PC should rule me out as an Apple fanboy. So, why am I so hopeful? Let me show you some choice quotes from the months leading up to the iPhone's original unveiling in January 2007:
- "Apple cell phone is real and ready for production - analyst" - September 5, 2006. Quote from an American Technology Research analyst:
Clearly, we would like to share more detail as we have conducted extensive work on the product pipeline, but for now, here is what we will convey . . . The design will be an iPod nano-like candy bar form factor and come in three colors (we are not certain of the exact colors but we suspect black, white and platinum, similar to Apple's current color scheme of iPods and Macs).
- "Prudential: Apple to release two iPhone models, one with WiFi" - October 16, 2006. Quote from a Prudential Equity Group analyst:
Our checks indicate that Apple will produce these phones in limited quantities initially as a market test vehicle. . . . Moreover, while our checks indicate that production of Apple's new wide screen video iPod will begin in the [December quarter], we do not expect the product to be released until early next year.
- "Palm CEO brushes off Apple cell phone threat" - November 22, 2006. Quote from Palm CEO Ed Colligan:
Colligan reportedly "laughed off the idea" that the Cupertino, Calif.-based company would experience any immediate success in delivering a device to the fastidious smart phone market.
"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,'' he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.''
- "Prudential: iPhone to sport click wheel; video iPod by Q2" - December 5, 2006. Quote from that same Prudential analyst:
In an extensive research note released to clients earlier this week, Prudential analyst Jesse Tortora said the first and slimmer of Apple's initial two cell phone models will look like an iPod with a small screen and a click wheel interface. . . . Tortora said the iPhone device, which he calls a "slim music phone," will pack camera functionality and be GSM/GPRS network compatible. Meanwhile, he said Apple is also working on a smart phone device with a larger OLED-based display and a sliding keyboard that will be WCDMA compatible to allow for higher bandwidth.
So, even shortly before Macworld 2007, folks were still expecting a small candy-bar phone with a click wheel, which would be out in small quantities as a market test vehicle. Oh, and everybody was still excited about the prospect of a "wide screen video iPod." Boy, did things turn out differently.
We're now seeing a similar tide of reports, many echoing each other, that describe the Apple tablet as something relatively unappealing. Maybe these reports are totally right. Or perhaps Apple simply keeps things under too tight a lid for precise, reliable information to slip out before the eve of the launch. The company might even be engaging in active misinformation, which might help it keep competitors (like Palm) unaware.
We should also remember that Apple has been extremely selective about the products it introduces, especially in recent years. Go compare the firm's hardware lineup to Dell's or HP's, and then tell me with a straight face Apple would be careless enough to launch a device without a clear target market—or at least an effective enough marketing campaign to create one. Unless Jobs' health problems have clouded his judgment, I would sooner expect him to cancel an unappealing Mac tablet altogether than to release it and hope for the best.
In any case, I think it's probably too early to draw any conclusions. It's still fun to speculate about what Apple could really be cooking up, though.
Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say the company is developing a streamlined netbook that lacks the shortcomings it has identified in current devices—"cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and [a poor] consumer experience," to quote Tim Cook.
Apple may indeed go with a lone touch screen to avoid the cramped keyboard problem in a tight form factor. However, I'd expect something slightly larger (or at least higher-resolution) than current 10.1" netbook displays, a full-featured operating system, and a totally sweet multi-touch software interface to tie it all together. As for the internals, considering the performance and compatibility limitations of today's ARM processors, I'd expect Apple to select an x86 CPU—perhaps simply the next-gen Atom system-on-a-chip, which is also supposed to come out early next year.
Price this thing at, say, $599, and I could definitely see folks choose it over the confusing cornucopia of netbooks floating around the market. With a good enough display, it might even work as a stay-at-home Kindle tied to an iTunes book store.
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Last by shaq_mobile at 4:13 PM on 08/19/09
At the risk of treading on the toes of our resident Mac blogger, I'd like to take a minute to rave about my aluminum MacBook. The more I've used the machine since reviewing it last November, the more I've come to appreciate Mac OS X, its functionality, and even some of its quirks.
Today's blog post is about Spaces—Apple's virtual desktop implementation. Since I use a reasonably spacious dual-monitor setup with my Vista desktop, Spaces is pretty much the only way I can use my MacBook's 1280x800 display for actual work without getting frustrated. I've used Spaces for a while in conjunction with Exposé, but only recently did the two come together for me.
Indeed, it took me an embarrassing eight months to notice that I can set up a corner of my screen to trigger the Spaces overview. Somewhat unintuitively, Apple put that option in the Expose control panel, which I never had to use before. Since the MacBook has a touchpad gesture to trigger Expose, I can now zoom back and forth between virtual desktops and windows by just gliding and tapping my fingers across the touchpad.
I've documented the result in the YouTube video below:
These features come together so well that I've found myself using the MacBook while at my desk, with my two big monitors displaying the screen saver. At this point, I almost wish Apple made a sub-$1,000 desktop machine with room for a discrete graphics card and a few hard drives... and I believe I'll stop here before ruining my enthusiast street cred forever.
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Last by funko at 11:46 AM on 07/30/09
Late last month, Microsoft revealed plans to offer a free Windows XP virtualization solution to users of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate. In a nutshell, this solution is supposed to let folks run virtualized legacy apps seamlessly within their shiny new Windows 7 desktops.
The XP mode beta is now publicly available alongside the Windows 7 release candidate. I was eager to take it for a spin, because I regularly use Virtual PC in Vista for a similar purpose. (As TR's de-facto HTML and CSS code monkey, I need a Windows XP virtual machine to test rendering in old versions of Internet Explorer.)
So, how do you get this thing up and running? First, you'll need to grab both the 4.88MB Windows Virtual PC Beta and the 445MB Windows XP Mode Beta. Both are up on this page. The former is essentially a standalone Windows Update package, which will require you to reboot. The latter contains the entire Windows XP operating system in a pre-baked form, and it adds a handy "Virtual Windows XP" entry in the Start menu.
I like how simple Microsoft makes the setup process. The first time you try to load up the virtual XP image, a setup box presents you with a license agreement and asks you to enter a password for the XP installation. You then get to watch a progress bar moving across the screen for five or six minutes. After that, your Windows XP desktop pops up inside its own little window, ready to go—it's already set up and everything!
The virtual machine provides you with Internet connectivity, clipboard sharing, and access to your Windows 7 drive, so installing old apps and copying files should be relatively easy. I couldn't drag and drop files between the two desktops like in the old Virtual PC, but since you can now use the cut-and-paste CTRL-C, CTRL-V maneuver for the same purpose, it's no biggie.
Otherwise, the virtual XP desktop behaves pretty much as you'd expect, with a couple of exceptions. There's no explicit way to shut down, and closing Virtual PC will hibernate the image by default. The software also lets you run XP in full-screen mode, but with a little pop-out bar at the top to prevent you from trapping yourself in. Oh, and OpenGL/Direct 3D games don't appear to work.
Of course, Windows Virtual PC isn't for gamers. It's for serious-minded business users whose productivity depends on old applications they haven't paid to update (or those written by programmers they fired). Therein comes XP Mode's flagship feature—virtual applications.
Getting those to work is relatively simple: just open up your virtual XP desktop and install an application of your choosing. You're free to run the app within the virtual desktop, but a shortcut for it will also appear in the Windows 7 Start menu, under "Virtual Windows XP Applications." Click on that with the VM closed, and Virtual PC will let you load the VM silently and open the app inside an XP-themed window within your Windows 7 desktop. Neat.
That particular feature is a tad rough around the edges just now, though. When I tried to load up Winamp in that fashion, a pair of familiar notifications promptly popped up in the Windows 7 tray: Windows XP was telling me updates were available and I didn't have anti-virus software installed. The only easy way to make both of them go away was to install the updates and tell the Security Center to stop bothering me. One of the warnings appeared in the hidden part of the tray, too, and it stayed there after I'd closed everything else. If I hadn't known any better, XP Mode would have stayed open in the background, eating up resources. (And, worse, I would have been confused about where the notifications came from to begin with.)
Otherwise, virtual applications may look like they're part of the Windows 7 desktop, but they're definitely not. Dragging them around shows glimpses of the virtual XP desktop, and save/open dialogs point to the VM's virtual system drive.
So, even though it's easy to install, XP Mode feels a tad counter-intuitive in the way it operates. Add to that the lack of support for "Home" editions of Windows 7 or processors without hardware virtualization support, and it becomes clear this tool won't be much help to folks who aren't enthusiasts or business users backed by qualified IT staff.
Hardware requirements could be especially bothersome, since as it turns out, Intel offers very spotty VT support across its product line. Check out these three CPUs: the $190 Core 2 Quad Q8300, the $167 Core 2 Duo E8400, and the $120 Core 2 Duo E7400. Can you guess which ones have VT? Only one does: the E8400. (AMD, by contrast, supports hardware virtualization down to its $55 Athlon X2 5000+, but Intel has a much bigger presence in the corporate world.)
That's a shame. Despite the rough edges, I think offering a free, easy-to-install copy of Windows XP to Windows 7 users is a fundamentally good idea. (Besides, you can always keep things simple by running your legacy apps in the virtual desktop.) Fragmented support may prevent this feature from gaining much traction as a reliable compatibility solution.
Check out the image gallery below for more shots of the installation process and XP Mode in action.
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Last by derFunkenstein at 9:33 PM on 06/03/09
When Microsoft released its first Laptop Hunters ad, I found the concept interesting—a fresh angle on the Mac vs. PC rivalry and an opportunity to show what the Windows laptop market has to offer. Unfortunately, as more ads come out, I'm getting the impression that Microsoft is stuck in a rut.
The company released its fourth Laptop Hunters spot yesterday. Here it is:
Okay, first of all... a self-described artist and filmmaker who can afford a MacBook Pro but turns it down because the default config has "only" 2GB of RAM? Really, Microsoft? Is this how you're going to woo one of the few Mac-loyal demographics out there?
But I digress—that's not the subject of this rant. See the system "Sheila" walks away with? If it looks familiar, that's because we already saw a variant of it in the second Laptop Hunters ad. And the two other ads in that series feature very similar machines:
- Lauren has a $1,000 budget and gets a 17" HP Pavilion dv7.
- Giampaolo has a $1,500 budget and chooses a 16.4" HP HDX 16.
- Lisa and Jackson have a $1,500 budget and pick a 16.4" Sony Vaio FW.
- Sheila has a $2,000 budget and goes with a 16.4" HP HDX 16.
All of these systems have large displays, aren't very portable, and run Windows. Microsoft's message so far seems to be: "Why buy a Mac when you can get a good deal on a bulky, Windows-based desktop replacement notebook at Best Buy?"
I'm sure many people would be perfectly happy with a large notebook like that, but come on. If you've ever walked into a brick-and-mortar chain store, you'll know those thick, bulky laptops are all over the place. Consumers already know about them, and there's a good chance they don't find them very exciting. It's like Microsoft is so eager to get actors to talk trash about Macs that it's completely forgotten to pimp the PC notebook market's biggest upside: diversity.
Netbooks have been conspicuously absent from the Laptop Hunters series so far, but that's not surprising. I'm sure Steve Ballmer doesn't want to advertise Windows XP-based computers at this point, especially when his company only makes about 15 bucks for each netbook-bound XP license.
But why not showcase something like HP's Pavilion dv2? It's a great little ultraportable with a low price tag and Vista installed out of the box. More importantly, it has zero competition from Apple. Where's the ad with Alfredo looking for a sub-$800 laptop to take away on vacation? Microsoft evidently likes promoting HP systems, so why not use this one to highlight the limited scope of Apple's mobile offering?
Even ignoring newly released low-cost ultraportables, though, the PC notebook market is brimming with options. In my view, releasing four commercial spots about similar 16-17" systems just shows a fundamental lack of originality and imagination on Microsoft's part.
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Last by leor at 1:38 AM on 05/08/09
