CreativeInfo Testing and Reviews

http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/pricing.asp

Win7 upgrades are generally the same price as Vista. Everyone WinXP and up qualifies. Pre-orders are only $49 but are in limited quantities and only last till mid-July. OEMs like HP are starting their free Win7 upgrades when purchasing a Vista PC starting tomorrow, June 26.

I did finally test WinCDEmu on Windows 7 and it does work, but you have to answer to UAC every time you mount an image. Still, better than Daemon tools which doesn’t work at all (at least yet.) Otherwise not a lot of tech news right now. Summer is slow in tech but fast in adventure and I have been gone quite a bit. Hopefully something big and new happens and I get to play with it.

• Icons on Desktop Default to 64×64px
• Double-Click on Application TitleBars no longer minimize app
• Stacks Grid icons are really big
• Safari 4 is really, really fast
• Safari AdBlock doesn’t work, could be Safari 4 and not Snow Leopard
• Xmarks also does not work, but could also be Safari 4 and not Snow Leopard
• The new QuckTime is also really fast, and works great
• QuickTime’s “Trim Feature gives a very fluid real-time preview of where your sliders are as you drag them
• QuickTime’s Save As Feature now converts your movie, regardless of original format
• Stacks can be displayed not he dock as Stacks or Folders, the first displaying all items in a stack like Leopard did before. They still work as stacks with Grid and Fan Views in Folder mode, they just display the folder icon.
• Stacks seem to resound better to dragging and dropping things out of stacks.
• Expose lets you assign a corner of the screen to sleep the display.
• The new Expose on the Dock and uniform grid lineup shown at WWDC is not in the WWDC build.
• Everything fades. When you eject a removable disc, it fades out. When you drag a file to a folder, it fades out from where it was. When you drag to make a selection and let go of the mouse button, the selection rectangle fades out. It’s actually really neat and professional looking.
• Runs really well on only 1GB of memory
• Spelling correction in TextEdit just fixed the word memory in the line above
• iLife 09 and iWork 09 seems to work fine, but I haven’t done any extensive testing
• Photoshop and Dreamweaver CS4 also seem to work fine, extensive testing commencing soon

Kitty got done and I was faced with a nice dilemma: how to install it without having to waste a dual layer DVD (because those things are damn expensive, stupid economy.) I thought of using an external drive until they ll failed on me (great job Maxtor, I am NEVER buying your shit again) and then I remembered Boot Camp. I fired up the assistant, made a 10GB Boot Camp partition, then closed the assitant. I took that partition into Disk Utility and formatted it HFS+ then restored the Snow Leopard image to it. Then I rebooted, and the fun began.

Setup was just like Leopard, except Printers had new options (Printers Used on This Mac, Nearby and Popular Printers, and All Printers.) Also at the bottom was an option for Rosetta. It’s only 3-4MB, but it is optional if you don’t need PPC support on your Intel Mac. Setup claims it is faster, but I call Bullshit. It took it a good half hour or more to finish, Leopard only took 15 or so minutes from what I remember.

Now I am in the OS, typing this, and it seems solid. everything seems pretty snappy with the exception of iTunes which took a while to load, but was fine afterwords. First thing I noticed was the lack of drive icons on the desktop. Only removable media shows up. I don’t know if this is a big or a change. Also, stacks work as said with cascading folders and scrolling. Two software updates were available at the time of install: iTunes 8.2 (8.1.1 comes default) and some Airport Utility Security Update.

All in all, so far so good. After I install iLife and iWork I will take some screenshots of some of the more subtle stuff.

So Microsoft’s “Morro” is finally becoming public beta as Microsoft Security Essentials and is slated to release on the net June 23, 2009. Once it’s released, I am hoping to give it a spin on my Windows 7 machine and see what type of resources it takes up and how quick and thorough it’s scan is as well as picking up false positives. As far as actual Virus testing, I might have to leave that someone else as this computer is one of my main machines, so if it misses one, I don’t want to bring it down.

As a side note, Tekzilla’s Freebie of the Week last week, WinCDEmu, is high reccomended and very useful. It works like it should (at least on XP, will test on Win7 tomorrow) and didn’t even require a reboot. Excellent job.

I am the newest member of the “CI” team. I don’t even see how it’s a team considering it’s only two other people. I have been hired to write about the stuff that is considered illegal or non-public at the least. I get things I shouldn’t have. I play with leaked software. I don’t play nice with rules. I am the pirate.

And for this pirate’s first trick, I will play with the big kitty, Snow Leopard, build 10A380, released at WWDC to developers. These developers are still being held to their ridiculous NDA agreement, but where I am from, such agreements and rules do not apply. The candidate for big kitty abuse? 2007 Generation MacBook Pro with ATI x1600 (damn Apple for such shitty graphics) and 1GB memory (damn Apple for such lousy amounts of RAM.) Will the kitty purr or spit a hairball? All will be known, shortly enough.

• CreativeInfo Website
• CI FTP Server
• Abandoned projects at Grandma’s
• Pool Table
• Space in our basement (due to moving the pool table out)
• More to come soon!

So yesterday was the official DTV switch so I figured I would rescan with my converter box and HDTVs and check on an analog TV to see what was happening. The results?

Channel 2 - Analog dead, DTV signal 80%
Channel 7 - Analog dead, DTV signal 90%
Channel 16 - Analog dead, DTV signal 50-60%
Channel 22 - Analog broadcasting “buy DTV converter” loop, DTV Signal None
Channel 26 - Analog dead, DTV signal 70%
Channel 45 - Analog dead, DTV signal 70%

So the only channel I can’t get is the only one broadcasting anything over analog. Oh well, at least I get more stations than before. If I get more reports, I will let everyone know.

So I couldn’t post anything because the automatic upgrade to WordPress 2.8 killed the dashboard to post and manage the blog. After messing with it for about 3 days, I decided to revert to WordPress 2.7.1 and adopt the philosophy: If it isn’t broke, why fix it? Therefore I am not upgrading to 2.8 unless someone gives me a good reason AND WordPress fixes the bugs (like a 2.8.1 release.)

Okay, so I know that Safari 4 is a given duh for Mac Os platforms as a good upgrade, but more importantly is the release for Windows. With the mass of Internet Explorer and Firefox users out there, I understand that Safari doesn’t even get a second thought, but please, hear me out.

Safari 4 for Windows is fast, it integrates better than the previous version (and looks like a Windows app) and is not dog slow like Quicktime or iTunes for Windows. The tabs change the location of the close button to match the same side as the main browser close button (left on Mac, right on Windows) and in Windows 7, the Aero Preview shows all the tabs open, making it the first third party browser to support this (to my knowledge.) Kudo’s go to Apple for making a Windows port of an Apple app that doesn’t suck.

While WordPress was a very great and gracious host, there is no place like home on our own domain. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you are) the hardware and software testing remains the same and so do the content of the posts, so without much fanfare, we return to our normally scheduled program.