Thursday, March 08, 2007

Free Starbucks?


Looks like next week Starbucks will be giving away a free cup of coffee on March 15, 2007 from 10:00am - 12:00pm.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/strabucks/free-starbucks-next-week-242448.php

Of course it cannot be any worse than the line for the one in the MGM Grand in Vegas where I have been visiting this week, thankfully I have a few well placed folks in line that are on speed-dial. ;)

Beware of the lines...

Sunday, March 04, 2007

My trip to "Vista" land - A short chronicle of my upgrade to MS Vista


A short while back I got a new notebook. Up to this point I have been using Windows XP, well the time has come to upgrade to Vista. I elected for a clean-build and since I still have a bit of consulting to do I went with a dual-boot option.

To do this the M65 has a DVD drive replacement that is a 80gb hard-drive.

The dell hard-drive arrived and so did the Vista DVD. Installation was relatively easy, though there were a few tricky sections:

1. Copied DVD content to hard-drive.
2. Installed new Drive bay, formatted drive and assigned drive letter (D:)
3. While logged into XP on the machine I started the Vista installation from Step #1 above.
4. All checks went well and installation started, sort-of. Each time I input the serial number it would run for another 5-10 minutes then fail with a message saying " vista could not update the boot configuration". This kept up, rebooted, etc... Still the same issue. After a bit of reading I came across two items that helped:

4a. The first was a registry hack, make a back-up before you play with this; http://www.technipages.com/article249.html

4b. The second was to not put in the serial number when first asked. You will be prompted later to input this, you will need to know which version of Vista you have. In my case I selected Business Edition early on then later input the serial number.

Once these adjustments were done, Vista installation went pretty quick. A few reboots later to finish (which it did automatically) and Vista was up and running.

Software installed so far:
Office 2007, Photoshop, MasterListPro and Buzzsaw.

Office installed quick and easy. Photoshop CS2 kept asking me to register, though this was already done each time I started up. This ended up requiring me to right click the start icon and choose to run this as administrator.

MLP has not been tested yet as a restart was needed and productivity time is short this weekend for the deadlines I am working to meet. Since I have been focused on GTD, this is one of my tools that I rely on quite heavily. Thankfully I have my printed list as a carry around. :)

The full buzzsaw client installed easily and has been working with no noticeable issues.

Next is the new line of autodesk products... This part should be exciting.

The Vista gadgets (widgets) offer some useful items as well, so far I have found the following useful: battery meter, alarm clock and Call Wave voicemail. This is a great way to burn some time reviewing all the extra gadgets, find what works and remove the rest.
 

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