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How about a blogpost regarding iPhone (one phone, one OS, one provider) surpassing WinMobile (one OS (sucks horribly), multiple phones, multiple providers in the US) in the US, in less than three years after it was released?

This is the sad realization of Microsoft: a rapidly dying dinosaur, soon to be extinct.

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I started to install this and just quit halfway through.  How come this wasn't made available like live messenger, it's a crap way of delivering a cool addon.

Requires sign in so you can only play as long as Games for Windows exists for a particular OS and you are connected to the internet. Tommorrow if they stop supporting XP, you won't be able to sign in and day after tommorow if the LIVE service is discontinued, you lose the game entirely.

Loggammin is just jealous he has to run windows on his overpriced hardware to get Tinker.

Ha Mac's, my cousins just replaced his second logicboard on his precious MBP 2700 bucks for substandard crap.I offered to loan him my 9 year old Toughbook, I think he's considering it.

@Logjamming

In the UK, the iPhone has two providers.

I like the iPhone, but I just set up my partner's HTC Droid Eris for Exchange an POP3 email. It's very snappy/quick and easy to navigate. At the same size as the iPhone, a good browser would make this very competitive with the iPhone, but that's a feature that I did not test, although I've heard good things about it's browser. I would call that DROID ERIS a winner for Verizon.

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@whip:

I just worked on an aluminum iMac the other day.

The thing had a buggered up bootloader.  Lady bought it because someone talked her into it because of the screen and design, but she also paid full retail price for XP Home ($249.99CDN - price sticker was still on the box) which is what she uses most on it.  It wouldn't boot into OS X at all, and the startup keys only worked for me 2 times out of about 30 tries.  When I got into Windows, she had several viruses, Avast antivirus running, and no real Windows updates to speak of (it even still had IE6 on it).  She figured using Firefox would prevent viruses.  She was wrong.

Anyway, I've never done a lot with Boot Camp's bootloader, but she said she doesn't use much on OS X, but sometimes her kids go on it.  It was one of the 2008 systems that originally shipped with a late version of Tiger, but she got the Leopard upgrade for free.  I proceeded to back up what data I could off her Windows XP, and try to fix her bootloader.  There is no real fix for that though, so I figured a total reformat would have to suffice.  Anyway, Leopard is supposed to be on par with Vista, and it takes AN HOUR TO INSTALL off disc??  That's exactly what happened.  Not only that, that was ONLY the install.  I skipped the disc verification check at the beginning because it took nearly 5 minutes to budge a single percent.

Updates took about 3 reboots to complete to get them all done, and the first big Leopard update bundle was about 800MB (and that's starting from an initial install of 10.5.6, just FYI).  It took all of about 2.5hrs to get the thing up to the latest Leopard update.  If anybody says OS X is fast to install, they need a good slap.

Vista takes ~15 minutes to install off disc.  If you have the install files for SP2, it's fast to install, unlike the Leopard 10.5.8 update.

Anyway, on to the relevance part:

I went on to install Windows XP, which went along crawlingly as usual (about half an hour on any modern system).  Once I got it installed, I proceeded to install the Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard 10.5.6 disc.  They installed fine, and I rebooted.  The system has a GeForce 8800GS mobile GPU in it.  I found that out by looking at the NVIDIA control panel in Windows....and here's the kicker:

It's running at PCI Express X1 speed!!

Not X16 as one would expect, NO!  It's freakin' X1 speed!!  We're talking LESS than the equivalent of AGP!  (PCIe 1.0 runs each lane at the same speed as AGP, so it would have to be a PCIe 1.0 X8 card to match AGP 8X)

The video card is totally crippled by the poor PCI Express speed.  Now I thought maybe that was a driver problem, so I went on to NVIDIA's website and grabbed the latest GeForce 8M driver package and updated it.  Nope.  Didn't fix it.  Maybe it's an issue with the Intel chipset driver.  Updated - nope.  It's either a hardware limitation that's built in, or Apple is synthetically limiting the speed of the GPU under BIOS mode (ie. to make Windows look bad).

In either case, this is EPIC FAIL on Apple's part, and just more proof that they're screwing over customers.  Whatever the case, it's a bad graphics card option that had cost her a premium at the time.  I have NEVER seen NVIDIA mobile graphics chipsets in the 7000 series all the way up to the new GTS series mobile GPU's with anything less than PCIe X16 on a non-Mac notebook or all-in-one PC.  EVER!  

So, buyers looking to by an iMac and thinking they'll get a good Windows gaming experience:  look elsewhere!

BTW:  Bootup on these iMac's is anything but fast.  The grey screen with the Apple logo takes at least a minute before it even clears.  OS X isn't ready and finished loading for another 20 seconds after that.  I am not impressed one iota.

BTW:  @Grannyville:  I use Forefront Client Security (FCS) for my business PC's.  We have it deployed in unmanaged mode though (no server monitoring workstations, but we have a couple GPO's that have modified default settings, and SBS keeps track of security on workstations).  On my personal notebook, I use MSE.  FCS is basically just MSE, aside from the server part and the GPO programmability.

@sub:  You can't run an antivirus without receiving instructions on how to detect and clean threats, hence you will always some type of definition, otherwise it would mean that every single file would have to be uploaded to the vendor for them to scan it remotely.  Do you honestly think that's going to happen?  Also, I never meant to make that hyperlink active.  I was emphasizing the point that it's called "cloud" antivirus but you still have to download it, which is counter to the term.  Panda isn't anything special.  Definition and engine update packages for MSE are ~40MB.  Not exactly huge.  Definitions by themselves are even smaller.  If you're arguing for space concerns over 40MB....I mean, come on!  I've looked at Cloud.  It's just another free, basic AV/AS with an internet community sending information to the vendor.  That's what all of Microsoft's products have been doing with Spynet for years now.  It's nothing new.

Wae, IMO, and I'm no expert, but an 2008  iMac is just a 2006 laptop with a big screen. However, updating Tiger to Leopard on 3 iMacs took me less than 40 minutes, but I did not wait to verify the disc as it was too slow, so I click skip all the time.

So when I install Win 7 on my XP box, can I dual boot, maybe with Acronis?

Re: Mac GPU neutering

I'd like to know from anybody else that has noticed this on another Mac system.

On an NVIDIA GPU system, do this in Windows:

Minimize some windows so that you can right-click on the empty space on your desktop, and choose "NVIDIA Control Panel".  This works on Windows XP with most standard NVIDIA drivers.  On Vista or 7, it should also work.  DO NOT choose Properties, or Personalize, as I'm sure your instincts are familiar with.

If this is the first time launching it, choose either option.  It doesn't matter what you choose - either basic settings or advanced.

Look at the window that pops up with all the setting categories on the left.  We're not adjusting any settings there.  There's a menu bar along the top.  I'm not in front of an NVIDIA system right now, but the last menu on the menu bar should be "Help", I think.  

Choose System Information from that menu.

Now look at the section that has all the info about which NVIDIA GPU you're using, which should be the bottom, right-handed box.  It should report the PCI Express speed.  It should say X16.  If it says X1, you're also being screwed over by Cupertino.

Let me know what GPU you're using, and what type of Mac.  Driver versions are also helpful.

The system I was using was a late Tiger aluminum iMac with a fairly large screen (probably 24" or 26" I'm guessing - larger than 22" anyway).  It wasn't one of the new ones though.  It had a Core 2 Duo E8435 CPU with an 8800GS.  IHNI WTF that CPU is.  I've never heard of such a model from Intel.  E series Core 2 Duo's are supposed to be desktop CPU's, but it's running a 965 mobile chipset which wouldn't be compatible with mobile CPU's.  It's a 3.06GHz clockspeed though, and I'm guessing it's a special OEM-only model that's not available in the channel.

@Doc:

When I installed Leopard on a clean hard drive, the clock started at "59 mins remaining".  I clocked it.  It was correct.  I skipped the disc verification check also, but the clock doesn't start until AFTER the disc check, so that 59 mins was entirely for the install.

If you have XP already installed on a system and want to dual boot, you should have a separate partition or (preferably) an entirely separate drive.  Windows 7 will detect Windows XP and set up the bootloader to include it.  You won't need Acronis, unless you need to repartition your single drive.  Windows has limited functionality to shrink partitions, as some large files (the hibernate and pagefiles in particular) are moved away from data spaces so that they are less likely to be fragmented.  What happens is that you'll have some free space between your data files and those files, and Windows likes to add a buffer space even after those ones.

If the system is capable of hardware VT, I'd recommend just using XP Mode instead.

If you want a good recommendation for a new system to use with XP Mode on Win 7 Pro 64-bit, I build systems with these configurations for very little money.  You can buy the parts from any respectable computer store and build it yourself:

AMD Athlon II X2 250 or X4 630 (dual-core or quad-core options with hardware VT, 64-bit, and near $100 cost)....buy retail box

Asus Radeon HD 4200 chipset motherboard with 128MB Sideport video memory (<$100):

www.asus.com/product.aspx

....buy retail box

Antec NSK3480 micro-ATX case (<$100 and includes a good quality 380W psu):

www.antec.com/.../product.php

....retail only

WD Green SATA Hard drive with 32MB cache (various sizes - <$100)....beware of "OEM" drives, which are different from "bulk" drives.  Both are bare drives in a static bag, but OEM drives don't include end-user warranty.

SATA DVDRW (~$28US for just about anything - I prefer Optiarc or Pioneer because they don't have white lettering on the front)....OEM drives are cheap here.  Don't buy retail.

Various brands of DDR3-1333 "value" RAM (go for 2 sticks of 2GB to take advantage of 64-bit, and makes for a decent system to run XP Mode, leaves room for 2 more sticks - <$100)....Buy either retail or bulk, but make sure you can get end-user warranty service if it's bulk.

Everything has a 3 year warranty, except the RAM, which is lifetime warranty, and the DVDRW which is cheap to replace should it die.

Win 7 Pro with XP Mode works great on these.  Plus, you have onboard eSATA, and HDMI with DX10 capable Radeon HD 4200 which can play games just fine.  Also includes a PCIe 2.0 X16 slot if you want to upgrade video.  Lots of options on this board.

The case is a tight squeeze, but they're small and slick when everything's put together.  I install the primary hard drive underneath the optical, both of which fit into the top 2 drive bays.  The floppy bay I leave empty (printers include card readers in them now that show up on your PC, so no need to waste money on another one in the PC).  I stuff the extra PSU cables in the internal floppy cage.  There is a spot for a second hard drive in the bottom of the chassis, which I leave open in case a customer wants to add a second one easily.

"965 mobile chipset which wouldn't be compatible with mobile CPU's"

....should read "...*desktop* CPU's"

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@Doc

Yes you can dual boot Win 7 with XP. Acronis Disk Director will give you an additional partition which 7 can go on. Just be careful during the install to put Win 7 where you want it. I'd always image my XP partition before doing anything of course.

Wae, you are a demi-god! Thank you. I have a nice new empty Sagitta case, but it did not fit in the desk, so I may just get that case too. I have been desiring to build another PC for at least a year, even though my over-clocked 3.4 GHz P4 is running like a champ for 3 to 4 yrs. But the wifey would probably like a new sweet Win 7 box [for me to play with].

Also, I forwarded your suggestion for VPN replacement to our IT guys. Wow, they have started a campaign with our vendors now. The software MUST be compatible with new computers, since most docs can't get any thing but Win 7, and mostly 64 bit. This is getting very exciting now. I'm almost a geek-jock.

PS, if you would have chosen to verify that install disc, you would have gotten gray hair before it was done.  always skip for that reason.

Thanks,

Bill

"The software MUST be compatible with new computers, since most docs can't get any thing but Win 7, and mostly 64 bit. This is getting very exciting now."

Having the 32-bit XP Mode is ALMOST the next best thing to running it natively.  (The next best thing would be having the software run "natively" but with just a compatibility mode option turned on)

Those Athlon II systems make really good business machines because they have VT support.  To get VT support on an Intel involves getting a high-end Core 2 Duo or Quad processor.  All of the sub-$600 systems will usually ship with an E6000 or 7000 series though, and those don't have VT.  Plus, AMD also includes a free video encoder tool that takes advantage of that on-board ATI Radeon GPU using ATI's Stream GPGPU technology.  Intel doesn't have any good onboard GPU's, and they certainly don't make any GPGPU software.  Getting an Intel CPU system with an NVIDIA chipset with CUDA isn't easy either.  Availability of OEM's and vendors that deal with NVIDIA chipset boards with CUDA-enabled onboard video is slim.  Then you have to buy the CUDA-enabled software on top of that because NVIDIA doesn't have any free software, and there aren't any other vendors that are giving their wares away.  AMD has a better platform strategy right now, IMHO.  NVIDIA isn't playing nice with Intel over their chipset business either, so that side of the fence is looking rather weak.  The only card that Intel is playing is the high-end CPU market, but that's not exactly relevant what with the mainstream and low-end getting better and better.

@Logjamming and Grannyville:

In the UK, iPhone is available on at least 4 providers: O2, Orange, Vodafone and Tesco.

@heran

I didn't know Vodafone got the iPhone, thanks for the info : )

As for Tesco, I kinda forgot about them until the hosts of CNET UK Podcast mentioned it :S

@Waethron

I'm looking at my MacBook Pro's GPU settings while booted in Windows 7 and I cannot seem to find the detail about the PCIe speed. Where abouts should I be looking?

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