Virtual PC 2007 vs. Windows Virtual PC Feature Comparison Table
Microsoft released Windows 7 Release Candidate today (I'm downloading my copies of it plus Windows 7 server right now). It includes the Windows XP Mode which is essentially a specialized virtualization container. Microsoft provides an informative table that compares Virtual PC 2007 to Windows Virtual PC at...
Compare some of the many features of Virtual PC 2007 to Windows Virtual PC
Windows Virtual PC includes a bunch of features that a lot of people have been clamoring for for years including:
- USB support (finally!)
- Clipboard sharing
- Drive sharing
Note that unlike Virtual PC 2007, Windows Virtual PC requires either AMD-V or Intel VT-x hardware virtualization support. So, old PCs and Atom 270/280 based netbooks can't run it.
And The Windows Blog has a useful item for those of you planning to deploy Windows XP Mode in the enterprise...
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Weighs in at 509MB
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released today and it is gigantic. Although Windows Update reported that it was 397.3MB large, the actual download was 509MB.
It is supposed to be faster (Outlook 2007 SP2 is said to be 26% faster) and more stable. It also provides built-in support for working with ODF and PDF files which previously required add-ons to do so.
Here's what I'd like to know though: Why does an Office update require Vista to reboot? That just seems wrong.
Instructions for Upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to RC
Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog has instructions for upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to the upcoming RC.
Delivering a quality upgrade experience
The primary advice is to reinstall Vista and then upgrade to Windows 7 RC. Um, ack! My Asus Eee PC 1000HA came with XP. So, their primary advice is a no-go for me. And, here's their slightly less ugly alternative instructions.:
Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:
- Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
- Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
- Browse to the sources directory.
- Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
- Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000.
- Save the file in place with the same name.
- Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.
Time Warner Cable Data Metering: Tax for iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Video Podcast Users
DSLReports.com digs into Time Warner COO Landel Hobbs comments on the coming 100GB cable data cap for Time Warner customers...
Time Warner COO: Metered Billing Is What Consumers Want
I agree with the article's author (Karl Bode) about the purpose of this data cap plan. IMHO it is just a tax on people who use and who will use high bandwidth services such as iTunes (buying or renting HD TV shows and movies), Hulu, Netflix and even casual video podcast fans who may not notice how many gigabytes they download per month viewing the favorite (and free) video podcasts.
And, if you, like me, are an MSDN subscriber who chose the download route, this may be an incentive for us to switch back to having DVDs of software releases shipped to us instead of downloading them. This may even kill the software downloading business altogether.
Unfortunately, wireless broadband doesn't provide any threat or incentive since they have 5GB caps on their services.
SUSE Studio Lets You Build Custom Linux Distros
...is one of those product ideas that makes you wonder why it hasn't been done before. It looks like a simple-to-use utility that lets you build custom SUSE Linux appliances by letting you choose which components are installed with each appliance.
Linux Haxor has a good preview article about it here...
Downgrading Ancient Linksys BEFW11S4 WiFi Router is Like Downgrading from Vista to XP (Makes Things Better)
I keep an old Linksys BEFW11S4 802.11b WiFi router running as an access point (DHCP server and other features turned off) to use with things like a Sony PSP that only has 11Mbps WiFi. The 802.11g router is the real router and only speaks with other "g" devices. The BEFW11S4 has been flaky ever since I updated its firmware to 1.52.02 about two years ago. But, I didn't pay attention to it since it is rarely in use (it mostly sits there to use its additional 4 100Mbps Ethernet ports). I finally got around to trying to figure out why it is so flaky and ran across this two-year old blog item...
How to Fix the Linksys BEFW11S4 Router
...by Kevin Worthington. His problems sounded a lot like mine. And, his advice was to downgrade from firmware version 1.52.02 (the last update for the BEFW11S4 provided by Cisco/Linksys) to version 1.50.14. Linksys' website doesn't list this older firmware. But, fortunately, Kevin provides this link to Linksys' ftp site...
BEFW11S4 firmware version 1.50.14 (ftp link)
So, I downgraded my old Linksys box as suggested and its seems a lot more stable now. It is like downgrading from Vista to XP. Things seems faster and more functional on the old Linksys WiFi router box now.
BTW: The Sony PSP seems to connect more reliably when the Preamble is set to Short instead of the default of Long.
CentOS 5.3 Released: Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux Community Build
CentOS takes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code and repackages it as a free Linux distro. I used to use CentOS on nearly all my servers in my old job. I even installed it on a PC in the home. But, somewhere around the 5.1 or 5.2 release, it became a problematic install on some PCs so I switched to Fedora. I noticed that CentOS 5.3 was released on April 1...
[CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS-5.3 i386 and x86_64
I've been pretty happy running Fedora 10 on my home PC. But, I may download CentOS 5.3 and try it as a Guest OS in a virtual machine.