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Email There was a time when the horse was king. Work was done by it, wars were fought with it, and it was even a symbol of wealth. Well times have changed huh?
Having one of my weekly meetings with a client of mine we sat down over lunch and started to discuss the things we’ve come together to discuss. He started talking about how he was going to build a box from a server he had around to do some VM work. We discussed hardware speeds and size etc etc. We then started to talk about the assumption of superior hardware a mac was over a PC.
The conversation came from a story I told of a graphic designer back in the day telling me he used a mac for design because “it had round pixels and was easier to work with”. Then, that there was a brief time in computer history that the hardware in mac was in fact better than what PC’s had at the time. This post isn’t about how PC’s are better than Mac’s (they are, it’s just people that buy Mac’s spent too much unnecessary money or are too vain to ever admit it) or how, for some reason people lump Microsoft and Apple in the same category. Which is wrong and honestly stupid because Apple is a hardware company (phones, computers, audio devices etc) and Microsoft is (for the most part) a software company. In fact, as a tidbit of info for the fan boys out there, I believe Microsoft is still one of the top selling vendors for the Mac platform. No, this post isn’t about any of that /soapbox.
This post is about the context around Technology. You all know the cliché, older generations look at the technology of today and shake their heads and state, “you know in my day….”. Well lets dig into that statement a bit… let’s talk about your day.
To understand the context of technology you have to timeline things out a bit. My grandfather, a retired steel mill electrician would tell me many times of the days when computers were being introduced to his workplace and how when things would go wrong with the computer he would know exactly what the issue was because computer power can’t match human brain power.
As far as my grandfather knew, his context of technology was the the prime of a man, will power, strength and smarts. But what if technology never evolved to the point of even having a steel mill job, what if he worked in a blacksmith’s shop instead. No machines to monitor and fix or wire up, just a hearth, raw iron, hammers, anvils and brute strength. His understanding of technology would be limited to just there in that small shop. Now what if he was around when the first steel mill opened and it was a direct competitor of his. Being able to churn out thousands and thousands more pounds of refined steel by the hour. His understanding of the progress of technology would at that moment change. In his world, that would be the dawn of an era, the industrial revolution buildings, manufacturing etc.
All the people in the generation before his would look upon that change with obvious distain. I'm sure it was spoken that man would get lazy or that they wouldn’t know the reward of pounding out that iron and making steel. Now it’s made for them, all these buildings are going to go up take over the rural landscape etc etc and so on.
That could be said for so many other things: snail mail vs the telegraph, horse vs car, etc.
Let’s fast forward to my father time. My father early in his career was a building drafter and architect. He still, oddly enough (to my generation) works for the same company as he did when he started. He no longer draws however, now there are computers for that. All he did at that switch of technology was verified those drawings and make sure it was done right and to code. His context of technology changed as computers really took hold and started doing a lot of the calculations and advanced thinking in jobs. I'm sure when that time came he was afraid for his job, I'm sure there were people (just like in my grandfather’s time) that were worried that man would get lazy, less intelligent even and that man would have to evolve to compete. We know now that’s not really the case, it’s just another type of job when working with computers.
Now to my generation, the glorious computer age. I can still hear the ring of my mother’s gripe in my ear saying “Eric, why don’t you go outside and get out from in front of that darn computer”. Well the funny thing is that computer is my proverbial TV that my folks would sit in front of and kill time, or the radio that my grandfather would sit in front of and kill time. It is all IN CONTEXT a way to entertain one’s self. Now that computer that my mother was griping at is the sole reason I have a career today. It’s still a joke we throw around often to this day.
Even in my, hip on the times mentality I can see tangible aspect of my theory at play in my own life. My first gaming console was a Nintendo; it was chip based cartridges, wired controllers and VGA inputs. Now my Xbox 360 is wireless with optical disks, it's even got a controler that you just stand there and move and high definition displays I never dreamed possible when I was kicking bowsers ass in Mario Bro’s on that grainy 13 inch TV with rabbit ears.
I'm seeing the exact same mentality my grandfather had with electronics in his steel mill in my world. Example; I'm not big on the tablet craze in my opinion you either need a cell phone, a laptop or a desktop why do you need a tablet to do remedial task’s that can be done with a laptop. Guess what, my context of technology is based on tactile input of computing (keyboards vs. touchscreens) and the comfort zone I came to know and love.
I look at the gadgets that are coming to market faster than I could have ever imagined and I sit back and catch myself sometimes saying; “you know I just can’t see the use for that” instead of what I used to say “wow that’s a cool piece of technology”. There’s no doubt in my mind my context of technology will fall by the way side of what is cutting edge and the generation that has come after me will pick up where I left off.
When they have personal robots, cars that drive themselves and dare I say it… hover boards. That will be the new context of Technology.
It’s ever changing and if you map it out on time vs. gadget advancement you’ll see its actually compounding exponentially upon itself. That might seem annoying and unnecessary now but when other generations look back at this time and say that’s when the computer was built it will be a stepping stone that doesn’t seem as advanced as they have come to know.
So next time you're looking at that new latest and greatest gizmo or wondering, "do we really need yet another ebook reader, taking an actual book out of a person's hand" remeber to think about your context of technology. Always interesting to me at least.
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Email Hey! My first Windows Phone 7 posts #wp7 !
Luckily since the interface is pretty intuitive it will be a short post. First let me give you a little background on what I was facing.
On November 18th when all Microsoft employees were allotted to get their new phones, I thought I would be clever since I was in Seattle (Bellevue specifically), I would run over to Bellevue Square and go to that AT&T store to get my phone on the morning the store opened. Well what I didn’t know is that’s the day that the Bellevue Microsoft Store was opening. So instead of being one of the first people in line I was like 14th . No biggie the employees went through customers pretty easily and I had a phone in my hand within the hour.
When standing at the counter I was upsold on a 32 gig card. I relented as I didn’t think I’d really need that much storage on my phone. I had a traditional WP 6.5 phone with a 16 gig card in it and found that I never got close to using that much storage even with all my photos and apps installed. So I opted for the 16gig card. Knowing full well based on reading I was doing for other customers during phone launch day that the card may or may not mount correctly. I took a risk.
The employee, put in the card, turned on the phone and as soon as the phone fully started hit the key combo to restart the phone and mount the card. I was headed out the door when on the phone it read something to the effect of “restarting and reloading…this will take about 10 mins”. Well I drove all the way to the Issaquah campus with this prompt on my screen. It was about 30 mins total. I got tired of waiting and restarted the phone and started playing with it. I noticed at that point that the card did not mount correctly.
I had some bum hardware as my phone wasn’t charging even though I had it plugged in all day so I took it back to the store that night and after a 2 hour wait had the phone replaced. Mentioned to the new employee that card didn’t mount either.
His process was different, he started up the phone (with out the card in it), went through the entire phone’s setup process, powered down the phone, put the card in, started it back up, THEN did the key combo to mount the card.
The card mounted fine. I'm not saying yours will mount fine I'm simply saying, when we used that exact process the card purchased from ATT mounted just fine. This was a Samsung Focus.. I guess i should mention that.
Now the second part of this story, and second find.
When I got the new phone and we were mounting the card, when prompted with the Windows Live sign in screen that is like step 2 in the wizard, you have the option to skip this portion. I made the mistake of skipping this option.
As a result a feature I noticed I had when I used the first phone was not there when I had the new phone. Windows Phone 7 has the ability to pull from SkyDrive and Facebook photo albums and show them directly in your Photos section (brilliantly simple).
I hunted around for hours for a setting I thought for sure I had missed that told my phone not to sync my SkyDrive and Facebook photos. All I could find was options to upload images to skydrive or facebook when I took them from my phone.
Well here’s how you get it back if you find you skipped that portion of the setup. Its not pretty or elegant.
Reset your phone.
Yeah that sucks but it was worth it to me to get that feature back. No reason to do the full key combo reset just go to Settings > About > reset your phone. I did that and went through the “recommended” setup wizard. My card was still mounted and I got the feature back.
Keep in mind that if you change the Live ID you used to purchase anything, you don’t get that stuff back when you set your phone back up.
Hope that helps (wasn’t that short afterall)
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Email Well I promised I would detail the ordeal I went through to get the 128 Gig SSD drive working with my Lenovo W500. It was quite the challenge but at the end of the day it was working and the hoops I had to go through in hindsight all made sense.
Let’s set the stage.
The laptop is the Lenovo W500, which for the record is a freaking heavy beast. I really miss my T61 but I digress.
The accessory is the ATA Ultrabay. It basically replaces your optical drive that you use maybe once in 3 months with an extra slot for a hard drive.
The hard drive is a Kingston Vseries 128g
Let’s start with the initial problem. If you have no optical drive how do you boot into an OS disk or iso? Well you can’t unless you use a USB device or via the network connection. This wasn’t my biggest issue because I could just swap out my main drive with my SSD, use the dvd drive to install the OS then swap them back into the ultra-bay. The issue for me was that I knew that under normal conditions I’d be on the road and wouldn’t have access to such a luxury so I wanted to be able to boot from a USB thumb drive.
No matter what I did I could not get my w500 to boot from this USB device. I’ve mounted many ISO files in my day and I knew I was formatting the stick correctly for boot but the laptop just wouldn’t have it. Finally I plugged in my USB hard drive, booted into windows 7, partitioned the drive and stuck the Server 2008 R2 iso on the new bootable partition.
I rebooted with the USB hard drive plugged in and the w500 saw it right away. Ok first hurdle down.
The next issue I faced was once I got through the pre-boot install phase of the Server install when the installation is running the pre load items then reboots you into the main installation phase of the process, my SSD wouldn’t allow me to boot from it. I really wish it I wrote down the error it gave me but it was one of two errors.
The first one was that the SSD drive couldn’t initialize or something to that effect.
The second was that it couldn’t recognize a bootable area of the drive and therefore couldn’t boot.
It always happened at this phase. Here’s the trick.
In your bios you have two selections in Config > Serial ATA. Compatability and AHCI
This mode has to do with how the SATA channel is controlled. Compatible mode runs the channel like a normal IDE / parallel ATA interface. AHCI is the newer way, it adds some features like hot-swapping (theoretically) and native command queuing, which is supposed to speed up how the drive works, but all the real-world tests I've seen have shown no significant improvement.
Basically the SSD would not support running in ACHI mode, which is set by Lenovo by default and is what mode my normal platter based drive in the laptop is formatted under.
So what you need to do if you installed your primary OS (in my case Win 7) under the default ACHI mode (which 99% of you probably have) you need to boot to bios (ThinkVantage button > F1) go to Config (first option on the first page) Serial ATA and change the mode to “Compatibility”. Then go back through your install process.
The only down side to this is that whenever you want to boot into one drive or the other you have to change the mode. It kind of sucks but unless you go back and reinstall your primary OS drive using compatibility mode you always have to keep switching them. Scary thing is once you get this all up and running and you forget to swap one time you get a BSOD and it freaks you out. Nothing is wrong you just have to restart and change the mode.
Make sure you never defrag your SSD drive. Additionally you'll want to turn off the "superfetch" service as well.
These two things keep the SSD from writing over sectors on itself. Because SSD is solid state memory as you continue to write over the sectors on the drive they eventually go bad physically and can not be written to anymore. You'll notice over time that your drives capacity goes down even if all you've done is copied the same file then deleted it over and over again. You want to conserve how much you write to the drive avoid copying gigs and gigs of files only to install a application then delete the files.
Hope that helps !
Thanks to DevHammer for his post on SSD's as well Adventures in SSD
Side note if you want a great tool that flushes a ISO to a DVD drive OR A USB DRIVE download Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool
With my login, 22.8 seconds.
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Email Just a quick note on Duel Booting and BitLocker. If you've stood up an OS and BitLockered the hard drive, if you then go and try to duel boot it's possible you'll receive BSOD. To get around it, either suspend, or fully decrypt the drive, restart setup the duel boot, then re-encrypt.
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Email With the release of windows 7 there will be a lot of folks doing fresh installs of their OS. Well I ran across great service to get a lot of the freeware that we use and love every day. Ninite is a free service that compiles all the installable files that you will need to install one at a time on a normal reinstall into a single executable.
You can go build your own customized list of app's to install over at ninite.com pretty cool thanks ninite!
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Email Well I recently made the decision to move over to windows 7. My last PC build I was smart enough to buy components compatible with a 64 bit platform (believe me this was a shock to me as well haha). I upgraded with a dual boot setup. Keeping windows XP around long enough to help me with the switch over. Keeping Xp really was because of the VPC's I have running SharePoint that I had not done the proper research for pulling them over to a 64 bit platform.
Long story short, the setup and install was seamless, I mean totally easy. I didn't notice anything negative, it found most if not all of the drivers I needed to have stuff up and working upon first boot up. There were some drivers and install packages I had to go back later and install to get the richer user experience going.
I then realized I had two sticks of one gig ram just waiting around to be installed when I put up an OS that could handle more than 4 gigs. So I went digging in the Tupperware storage bin that sits in my closet and holds all the PC components the world could ever need. Seriously I could build an additional two PC's merely out of parts in this thing. So I throw the ram in and boot up. Initially I noticed no ill effect, everything was running smooth and it recognized the additional two gigs for a total of 6. Then something strange happened. The "AERO" taskbar failed because "there is not enough memory to run". I found that odd considering it was running perfect with 4 gigs and the fact that I added two more should have no issue.
I figured it might have something to do with the timing or mhz the ram was running at and the fact that it was a different brand. So I bit the bullet and jumped on newegg and purchased 4 more gigs of the exact same ram that was in the computer initially. I assumed surely this would fix any issue I had and I would be cruising along with 8 gigs of ram. I wasn't so lucky.
First thing I found odd is that the exact same ram, some speed, capacity and manufacturer came in like a mini size. I popped in the ram, and initially the computer would not boot up with the new ram. This is a common issue with PC's and meant I probably didn't install the chip fully. Quickly corrected I booted back up everything was right in the world. Until that is, the world came to a grinding hault.
Everything froze up, it was a flash back to my Windows ME days. This is the first time I've had a PC lock up in years. Ok so I'm fibbing a little, it wasn't everything locked up. I still had mouse and keyboard control but anything on the screen was totally frozen.
After doing some research I found that most of the hardware vendors don’t have solid Win 7 drivers out yet (to be expected). But a lot of the Vista drivers and even some of the XP drivers work just as well. I also noticed since it seemed to be related to my video I would focus on the video drivers as well.
System specs:
2.4 ghz QUAD core
Asus P5B motherboard
3 terrabyte of combined storage
8 gigs of ram Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel
Nvidia 8600gt
Nvidia 6200
2 light-on DVD-r's (16x)
Thermaltake 500 w PSU
Koolance Exos water cool system:
CPU Block, GPU Block, Northbridge Block, 1 Hard Drive Block
So here's what I did:
The first thing I did was strip out the drivers windows 7 installed for my video cards. I caught a few lines from a forum post that mentioned support for multiple video cards running multiple monitors was sketchy in the RC release of win 7.
Next I restarted, and booted into the BIOS. I manually changed my Ram speed from auto to 5300 MHZ.
Back into windows, I went back through and using the install CD's for my video cards I manually installed the drivers in the device manager, because none of the CD's would auto run.
I restarted once more and once back into windows I was good for a solid hour then I had a brief lock up when opening a few programs all at once.
Lastly, I turned off the auto rotation of background images on my desktops.
I think a combination of all these things especially the last one did the trick (knock on wood). I haven't had a lock up at all. I'll keep this post updated if anything changes. Good luck with your upgrades, ahh the joys of early adoption.
UPDATE:
Had a few more lock ups so I did some research and found that, its certainly due to my dual video cards. One is PCI and one is PCI-E. I pulled out the PCI one (nvidia 6200) and I haven't had a single lock up. This is got to due to the lack of drivers out right now in an infant product. Hopefully I'll find a fix soon.
Update 2: Well I figured out the problem and well, it’s not the best of fixes but it worked for me. In the end either my main video card was going bad and putting too much load on the 6200gt Nvidia card. OR it was the fact that my 6200 was old school PCI based (not PCI-e) so a combination of the PCI secondary and the going bad primary PCI-E card I think was the culprit.
Solution: I bought a new mother board (Asus P5N-D) that had two PCI-E slots for Dual SLI compatible video cards. I bought two of the exact same video cards (Nvidia 9500 GT). Loaded up a fresh OS install of windows 7 and she’s running great. And it only took 200 bucks in parts [/sarcasm]. Oh well as much as we do on our computers it’s a good investment.
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Email Dear Windows Mobile,
If I’m deadly seriously, I think your parents should be fired and completely replaced. All that money you spent on building that silly coffee table that you named “surface” was the worst idea ever. All that time and energy could have put into some quality therapy sessions and even a better and more improved lifestyle. All that argument over selling your “surface” at the next yard sale for 10,000 dollars, you realize that’s just insane right?
Until then WinMo cant really progress. Even with the billions being pushed into it. I’ll keep my phone around and tinker with the Rom’s that come out for it and I REALLY hope that it surprises me and I go back to it. But for now, sigh…. Iphone here I come.
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