false precision

MacPro Windows 7 Install Success!

I had a nice week long vacation over the Thanksgiving Holiday. One of the many things on my list was to settle once and for all the illusive Windows 7 install on my MacPro at home.

I have bitching about it on my blog for several posts. I tried without success to upgrade the Vista image on my Bootcamp partition several times. Over the break I bit the bullet and did a fresh install on the Bootcamp partition AND – no luck. Realizing I was over my head (or at least past my interest level) I called my neighbor Tom over to help. Tom is my goto IT support for home issues that need a level of commitment that perhaps I lack.

We tried several things that didn't work. We ended up reading the installer log that shows you everything that worked, but failing to tell you what did not work. A more information dialog at the end of the unsuccessful install simply said that "Installer failed". Hmm?

Armed with that information we hit the Interwebs and found a reasonably long dialog about unsuccessful installs on MacPro hardware. It seems that Windows 7 runs fine on a MacPro, but the installer crashes. Really?

Two solutions were outlined on the web. One, install windows on the drive installed in another machine then boot the image and hope you can correct the drivers and get the install to boot. The Second, download Parallels the PC virtual machine software for MacOS and use it to install windows into the Bootcamp partition. After you get Windows 7 running off the Bootcamp partition in the emulator, then boot the image natively and fix up the drivers with the Snow Leopard drivers disk.

Tom opted for number 2 as number 1 was a lot moving disks around and involved some kind of drive slot number magic that we viewed as higher risk than the high wire act we chose to perform.

We downloaded a trial copy of Parallels, installed Windows 7 into the Bootcamp partition, rebooted AND Viola.. Installed the Snow Leopard Drivers and I'm off the races.

Ok, that was a big deal. But Windows 7 runs perfectly and the machine seems faster to me now. If you need Tom to install your Windows don't count on it – he's busy constantly bailing out my family.

You kids get off my yard!

I swear down deep I'm a technology lover. Some stuff is so retarded though…

I think the Mac is great at editing video and making DVD's and surfing the web. Once beyond that it becomes PAINFUL for me to use it. Back when I was more of a programmer, it was a cool platform because of all the Unix like stuff but now I need more traditional things like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. I sometimes imagine how much it must suck to be a programmer on the Apple "Numbers" team. You go to a party and someone asks what do you do? Well I'm a programmer for Apple and I work on "Numbers". The person says, "huh"? And you have to say, "You know, Excel but for the Mac". Rewarding.

This weekend I copied some photo disks to give to Marlo's friends after they went indoor skydiving for her birthday. I did this on my Vista machine and took the disks upstairs to the party still underway. Lura's Mac laptop was on the counter so I thought I would just throw the disk in and start a slide show. Wrong, after 10 minutes of dicking around I never did figure out how to do it. I even imported everything into iPhoto. Still no go. On Vista you just double click a photo and click slideshow. That's a pretty easy and common use case, WTF Apple?

I have been trying to upgrade to windows 7 for a week or so now. Nothing works. The Upgrade assistant says all is good, it does literally everything and in the final minute it says, "This version of Windows could not be installed". Ahh, thanks - that's very helpful.

Today I took a few minutes to Google the error to see what I need to do. No real help was found but I love the advice given by this dude.

I feel silly I didn't think of this myself.

I did finally make it over the hump with the Apple Martini phone. It took a few weeks to give up the stuff on Blackberry that just works SO much better. I think if I had to boil it down to the thing I miss the most about the Blackberry it would be the red LED on top that says I have a message. With the Martini phone I have to wake it up, unlock it, goto the email thing, ahh – no message, put it back to sleep. I do that about 100 times a day, stupid. On the flip side, the voice mail is genius. It took a company with the size and influence of Apple to put enough pressure on the Telco's to make voice mail logical. Telcos hate logical and easy to use stuff. Just goes against their DNA.

Do I sound old? This stuff makes me feel old.

Comscore U.S. Search Market Share

Wow, the chart of the day on Silicon Alley Insider.

How long till Bing crosses Yahoo (or are they asymptotic)?

And when it does happen will anybody care? I know people who use Yahoo but I don't know any human on the planet that uses Bing.

Next time you're in a room with a group of people ask them 1) Have they have ever tried Bing, 2) If they have, do they continue to use Bing.

Based on my observation you may get 10% on the first question, but pretty universally you will get 0% on the second. In my observations about 60% have heard of Bing.

Day 3, Upgrade to Windows 7

Yes, Microsoft does seem to have gotten it right this time…

WTF?

Just another day in the Airforce

I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit on this Airforce commercial.

 

I've never been in the Airforce but I was a contractor to NASA for about 10 years and worked with a lot of Airforce people, in a lot of Airforce places.

I can't recall seeing or hearing of a commission with the Airforce Space command where anyone got to maneuvered a giant transformer style space craft at a moment's notice, in a room with a giant holographic projection of the earth, eerily hovering above a projected battlefield while controlling the entire thing with hand gestures on a giant tablet.

If you see all this after you enlist for the Airforce Major Tom, you may want to take a look in your frosted flakes.