Back in January I posted a few articles about Windows 7 Beta and what it did to my laptop. It’s not Microsoft’s fault, it’s a combination of Dell and nVidia’s faults. It was the perfect storm: a known design flaw in the video card that affected a boatload of Dell, HP, Sony and Macintosh notebooks. On top of that was a poor design choice by Dell to not actually have contact between the overheating GPU chip and the copper heat pipe that’s supposed to cool it. On top of that was running a Beta OS. On top of that, using a pre-beta alpha-release of a driver for said beta os on a flawed laptop with a flawed GPU. A perfect storm.

While watching a video full-screen in Windows Media Player, the GPU overheated and blew up. Not only did it crash and blue screen and completely wipe out the running OS, but somehow it managed to overwrite the GPU BIOS! That shouldn’t be POSSIBLE, but it happened. The computer would boot up, just no screen. If I watched and waited for the hard drive to stop spinning away during bootup, typed my password and hit enter, it would log me in! I could HEAR the windows startup sound, but no video. No video on the external monitor or HDMI ports, either. Ultimately, because it was under warranty, Dell sent out a technician who replaced the whole motherboard, GPU included (although they replaced it with the same broke-ass GPU chip) so the story ended happily.

One of the things I noticed in the beta was the feedback system, which I used extensively (duh, that’s what betas are for) until I couldn’t. The big huge crash dump from the video card was never sent because after the motherboard was replaced, I was too scared to put the Windows 7 hard drive back in again. I figured I would wait until another beta (or RC) came out and hopefully there’d be a newer driver from nVidia available then, too.

On another note, there’s a way to use a clean, shiny penny to sandwich between the GPU and the heat pipe which drastically improves the transfer of heat to the heat pipe and can avoid just such an occurrence. (you can google nVidia GeForce 8400M GS Copper Mod to see for yourself). On the down side, doing so invalidates your warranty. I’ve refrained from doing it because of that, but when the warranty runs out, that’s on my to-do list for the very next day. Instead of doing a recall and replacing the bum chips (and the heat pipe while they were at it) Dell instead extended everyone’s warranty by 12 months, so if your laptop blows up (like mine did) you’re covered for an extra year.. but if it happens AGAIN after that period, you’ve got a dead laptop. No one else did anything better (HP, Sony, even Apple) so I don’t want to be TOO unfair and shit all over Dell only because they and their tech support have been very good to me over the years. No, really! :)

The Windows 7 RC is out today and will work (for free) until June 10th, 2010 or about 13 months. In the fine print is that starting 2 months before that, your computer will shut down every 2 hours as a warning sign that the expiration is imminent and that it’s time to get a properly licensed copy. Hopefully there’s an upgrade path so you can punch in a new product code and activate Windows without having to re-install with the release version. I can’t see myself NOT re-installing with 100% gold code, but I’m sure there will be people out there who have tweaked and modded their user profile and software set-up JUST SO and won’t relish the thought of starting over.

Happy Valentine’s Day, ladies. I hope you had a lovely day…

This Saturday it’s your turn to return the favor. That’s right, it’s been a month already! March 14th is Steak and BJ Day. It’s pretty simple… It’s steak… and a BJ!

www.steakandbjday.com for more details (pretty NSFW content)

We’ll be celebrating this year at Little Billy’s Steakhouse in Burnaby, but the jury is out on who’s picking up the tab! ;)

Over the past few years I’ve used a few different trackers for food & exercise. I started off trying out CalorieKing but it was meh. It had online and offline versions and the original version I tried had a pretty limited database. The app got better the more it went online, and even had mobile versions for Palm (I had a Treo at one point) and Blackberry (Pearl & Curve) and probably have an iPhone app. The main drawback was that it was too expensive.

My old roommates Zac & Steph started using Fitday which was free and had a premium, no-ads version too. I tried it out but found it a little too much work. It had a good database but I just found it a little clunky. Everything was entered in 1 gram or 1oz and then you had to enter how many grams or ounces you consumed. Great if you’re weighing everything out, not so great when you’re eating on the run.

In 2005 (or so) I found a link to DailyPlate which was the same sort of thing, but was using this new AJAX method for updating the website dynamically. I can’t remember where I initially read about it, but I’m thinking it was probably Lifehacker. I immediately took a shine to DailyPlate and found that it was easy to use, had a gigantic database of prepared/restaurant food (mostly prepared/restaurant food to be exact, sometimes it was a chore to find a “roast beef sandwich” that wasn’t a specific dish at some restaurant or other. They had a “gold” premium version as well, but didn’t hard-sell you on it as much as Fitday or CalorieKing did.

Since then, I’ve used DailyPlate in fits and starts… I think I was 90% accurate for over a month straight one time, but usually I’d go for a week or two and then start to peter out and then leave it for awhile… sometimes it was a pain in the ass to remember exactly what you ate and when and where and then find it and enter it later. The other side to that is that the geek in me sees these things like video games and want to “win” it and see the graphs and charts… to see that you have to have data. To get data you have to track what you eat and DO exercise so you can track it.

This week I went back to DailyPlate to track again (at least for awhile) my intake and output while I was running and doing Wii Fit. I put in my weight this morning at 178lbs (based on the Wii Fit scale) and told it I wanted to lose one pound per week. It calculated my caloric intake to be 1854 to stick to that goal. (As an aside, if you try to enter something too aggressive--more than 2lbs per week--it displays a warning that it’s not realistic and probably isn’t too healthy to eat so little and I shouldn’t try it except under the guidance of a doctor).

I found (and I’m not surprised really, considering they were early adopters of tech advancements) that they’ve been bought by someone else and are now part of LiveStrong and… wait for it… ta-da they have an iPhone app called the Livestrong Calorie Counter that works in conjunction with your DailyPlate account. You can look up their database on-the-go and add foods/exercises and then sync it with your online username/interface.

I installed it, logged in and synced it with my online account, where I had just entered in my breakfast. The main display (My Plate button) shows “TODAY” and has a Calorie Breakdown box that shows your daily calorie goal (1854) and your progress in a nice bar graph. So far I’ve taken in 17% of my daily intake, for breakfast. Below that is the calories remaining (1533).

Below that is broken down what I’ve eaten today and if you take the step to categorize when you enter (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, etc) it will group them together for you. Each entry has the little “more” arrow > and if you click it, it takes you to the nutritional information for that item. Time of day eaten, period (breakfast), servings (1.00) (which are all editable) and then a box with the actual info for that item/product. It’s all displayed with a dark background/pattern with white boxes and dark text. Very easy on the eyes and high contrast.

Other buttons along the bottom take you to the different screens. My weight is a chart that shows your weight over time (if you enter it on a regular basis). Food shows you recently eaten items and a search box at the top will let you add new items from the online database. Fitness lists your exercises and a search box like the food screen does. Mine’s blank at the moment because I just installed it and haven’t done anything yet. Finally the 5th button is Account and that’s where you log in to the online portion and also shows your Sync information. You can also edit your profile from this tab, which is your height, weight, goals and activity level. Mine’s set to “lightly active (i.e. desk job, computer work, etc).

I’ve put the icon on my home screen on the first page where I’ll see it all the time and that should be enough to keep it in my conscious mind and keep up to date with it. I’ll make another post in a couple weeks after having used it more with more insight.

I’m about as fat as I’ve ever been right now. In 2003, my then-girlfriend HazMat Jenny thought that she was overweight (as if… she was a little stick of a girl) so WE should try the South Beach diet. “WE” did and stayed on Phase 1 for two weeks, and then stuck with it through phase 2 and 3 for another month or so. At the end of that six weeks, I had dropped from 180 down to 162. Jenny only dropped about seven pounds. My friends Rick & Fran were doing it also, and had similar results: Rick lost more than double what Fran did. I should add that at the time I was teaching a lot of SCUBA diving, doing shore-based resort courses for cruise shippers. According to a few different calorie trackers, scuba diving burns up a HELL of a lot of kcals per hour, plus climbing in and out over the rocks/shoreline help, too.

I stayed around the 160-165 range for almost a year, and then started creeping back up again the more sedentary my job got. (In 2004 I left the diving company and went to the airline) The last time I started to balloon up again was two summers ago after my Vespa accident. I was more or less eating the same way I had before, but for nearly a month, I didn’t move around all that much because my feet hurt from the accident. Once I was up and around, I worked through the Couch to 5k running program with the help of some awesome podcasts that '”walked” you through it. I stayed with the running, doing a mile or so when I was pressed for time and two to three when I had time at least twice a week. Since I moved back to Vancouver I haven’t done much of anything… and have the waistline to show for it.

Last week I started the Couch to 5k program again and started all the way back at week one again, thinking that it had been too long since my last run. Where I was gasping for breath a year and a half ago on the last interval, I was able to complete week one’s workout barely breaking a sweat. Rather than push too much too fast, I stuck with week one and will do the last workout tomorrow and switch to week two on Monday.

We also picked up a Wii fit last week for Laurie’s birthday. I asked her not to tell everyone that I got her a Wii Fit for her birthday, because that sounds bad… like it’s a passive aggressive way to tell her to lose weight. “That’s almost as bad as telling everyone you got a vacuum cleaner for Christmas” (which she did) but that was just bad timing because we had moved into a new apartment and needed one with a pet hair attachment. I AM an a-hole, but not THAT much of an a-hole!

Between the Wii Fit yoga/strength training and the couch to 5k running program/podcasts I should start to shed some of this junk soon. I’m seeing the benefits already in that I’m hitting the sack earlier and sleeping better. Next post I’ll elaborate on tracking it.

For the past few weeks I’ve been having trouble with my DSL connection at work. We have two connections, and the firewall is set up to “fail over” to the other if one should go down.

For some reason, the DSL link would fail. This would cause the firewall to generate an alert (to my inbox) and then failover to the alternate connection. It would then realize that the DSL was back up and switch back again. Every time the link went down, it generated three emails and sent them to me.

It was going down every few seconds. You can imagine the state of my inbox. We went and looked at the DSL modem and could see that the DSL light would go out… then flicker on (while the connection was being made) and then go solid, when the connection was up. Then it would go out again. We weren’t sure if it was a loose cable, but when I picked it up, it dropped the connection again. I unplugged and re-plugged the telephone cord, the power cord and the ethernet cord and that seemed to stabilize it… for a few hours.

We would get a rash of DSL disconnects for a few hours, and then it would stop and be stable again for a few days, and then start crapping out again. Part of this was what led to the frustration I had trying to join a new subnet to the domain from a new, remote office last month.

Finally I had enough and I called Telus TAC to open a trouble ticket. It had to be line noise or something like that causing this. I dialed the 866 number and was told the service was not available in my area. Whaaaaat? Ultimately I had to go “inside” found out that I just needed to dial 310-TECH without the 866 or 877 or anything else.

Once I got  a human on the line (and it was less than 30 seconds after the automated attendant picked up and thanked me for calling and my call will be (not may be, but will be) recorded for QA and training purposes) he was able to bring up my circuit and noticed that there WAS a high signal-to-noise-ratio. He asked me if I could try changing the telephone cord that goes from the wall to the modem, just to rule out something simple before they sent a technician out. I took this opportunity to move the modem INTO my rack and plugged it into the wall with a new, shorter telephone cable. I also noticed that the Dlink modem was plugged into a 3Com wall wart power adapter. Strange… Everything seemed to be fixed… until 4:49PM when it started again. When I came in the next morning I had 300+ emails waiting for me. Great. I pulled up my notes and called Telus TAC back with my case number and told them it was still happening, and please send out a tech to do a line test. Maybe some work was done in the risers downstairs and something was shorting to my line, or causing some interference. It would explain the high SNR and frequent disconnections.

The first thing the tech did when he got here was disconnect my DSL modem from the line and test the line. It seemed to be working and the SNR was within acceptable limits. He also thought the modem was “running a little bit hot”. Then he also noticed the 3Com power adapter plugged into the DLink modem. We unplugged it and examined it and that’s when we learned that the 3Com adapter was putting out 15v and the DSL modem was marked with a 7v input. THAT’S why it was running hot! It was being force-fed twice the voltage it required, like trying to drink out of a garden hose. Instead of water coming out it’s ears and nose, it dissipated the energy as heat.

The DLink was also and old model and had been replaced by the Netopia Speedtouch in Telus’ network a few years ago. They stopped issuing the DLink modems over four years ago. He went down to his truck and got a modem and replaced the DLink. As soon as the link came up, it stayed up.

During this time, my firewall was going batshit crazy with the emails because the link was going up and down as we poked and prodded and replaced the hardware. To keep my sanity and my inbox from getting clogged (and by extension my mail server) I unchecked the “Preempt and failback to Primary WAN when possible” so that once it failed, it stayed failed.

What I couldn’t figure out (and still can’t, it’s a bit of a mystery to me how the Sonicwall TZ series works) is that even though it was in “fail state” and all traffic was switched over to the other connection, as soon as the DSL was up, my outside IP address (as reported by www.whatismyip.com ) was showing my Telus DSL fixed IP address. Mystery! Everything seemed to be working though.

Sometime over the weekend, each of the VPN tunnels connecting each of my branch offices back to head office timed out. When they tried to re-negotiate, the interface was still in “failed” mode so the packets were re-directed to the Telus DSL IP address, which didn’t match the intended target… so the firewall dropped all traffic from all my offices as “IP Spoof Intrusion Detected” or some such malarkey.

Did I mention that since it’s the first business day after the 15th of the month that it was TPS report day?? Ay carumba. I poked around in the SonicWALL settings for a good 20 minutes before clueing in to the fact that the primary connection said FAILED and then looked into the load balancing setup. Once I re-checked the “preempt and failback to Primary WAN when available” then ALL of the remote/branch office tunnels came up almost instantly and traffic started flowing as normal. Phew!

Take homes from this crisis: Telus TAC are pretty good. This is the second time I’ve had to call Telus TAC (Tech support) and both times I’ve had a resolution. First time was on the first call, this time on the second. Second take home: ESPECIALLY if the firewall doesn’t seem to make sense to you, and seems to be logically backwards from what it says to what it does, all the settings that were in place before you touched it were there for a reason. Don’t monkey with it. :)

I watched the season five premiere of Lost last night. I’ve made a couple posts before, years ago, when I first started watching it. At the time they were running the in-show/out-of-show online game that had people running around buying things and figuring out puzzles and finding easter eggs on websites to win something. I postulated that the entire series was going to be like the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring scene in A Christmas Story… Once you eat 5 boxes of cereal and send away for the decoder ring, the secret messages you decode are commercials.

Ironically I watched the first episode (the one where the plane comes apart and they crash land on a tropical island) WHILE I was on a flight from Cayman to Miami on a PSP.

There are probably a zillion websites about Lost out there already, so I’m not going to post any theories or anything here. I’ll read some of the message boards (The OnionAV Club’sTV Club recaps and discussions are by far the best of the bunch and not just for Lost… for Battlestar Galactica, Top Chef, The Office, 30 Rock and a bunch of other shows, too) and contribute there if I feel like farting in a hurricane (again).

What I wanted to expound upon were the ads. For the last four seasons of Lost, I was, well, almost Lost myself. No cable, never home, no TV… I relied on BitTorrent to watch the show. Nice half-HD widescreen content and no commercials. Bliss. I watched it “live” last night which I had only done a few times before and was appalled at A) the amount of commercial breaks and B) the content of said commercial breaks.

Astra Zeneca, some gigantic pharma had ads for all these poisons (sorry, I meant to say medications) they’re peddling for everything from boner pills to asthma and anti-depression add-ons (+2 to your hit points when taken with another anti-depression med!) The anti-depression add-on they were shilling had the longest list of possible side effects I’ve ever heard up to and including “fatal” in two or three of the effects. Listening to all the awful things that could happen to me if I took this drug, I think I’d almost prefer being depressed and killing myself. At least the pain wouldn’t last as long! At one point, Laurie turned to me and asked me if this was an SNL spoof commercial but it was on ABC. The sad thing is it wasn’t.

Whatever you do, do not tempt Happy Fun Ball.

I’m not sure how I could have possibly forgot, but I let this domain expire. :)

I saw the email from Network Solutions on my phone this morning and assumed it was just one of those “your services expire in six months! renew now!” semi-junkmails. Nope! this one said “Your Network Solutions Service has Expired”.

Oops.

And the DAY before payday, too. Ahh well. I suppose that’s what credit cards are for.

Since my laptop is down for the count (I’m expecting the new replacement laptop to arrive today or tomorrow) I haven't synced my iPhone for about two weeks since I installed Windows 7 to try it out so it hasn’t been syncing my calendar.

My email is downloaded via POP3 from my Exchange mailbox, so when I connect to Outlook Web Access, I don’t have contacts or calendar to remind me there, either.

In the end, no harm, no foul. I’m back up and running and the DNS servers probably didn’t even have a chance to propagate to the pending deletion landing page.

Dell now has three open service calls for me, and I sense it’s going to get worse before it gets better.The local firm that Dell contracts to do their re/re’s told me that I would be receiving a new unit. Then Dell’s national technician appointment center called me to let me know a new part had shipped out and I would be contacted by a technician to arrange a time to come and do it. Then the local tech’s dispatch called me to tell me that the parts hadn’t arrived and would call me back tomorrow (today now) when the parts arrived.

I stopped him and asked him if I was getting a new motherboard or a new system, and he didn’t know, but thought that it was odd that the delivery address was both my home address and their business address.

I got his cell phone number and name and said if nothing showed up by Friday noon I would call him back and he could sort it out with Dell. Fortunately (for both me and Dell) I’m not a one-computer household that’s relying on this one system. I’ve got Laurie’s desktop, her netbook she got for Christmas and a media server plus my work laptop all at my disposal. He thanked me for my patience and said he would be in touch shortly.

Dell’s local supply chain technician called me yesterday morning to set up a time to replace the parts on my laptop that seemingly blew up. They didn’t have the parts yet, but were expecting them later that day so they’re going to call me back this morning to arrange a time to do the repair.

I brought my laptop to work, and the tech’s office is actually just around the corner from mine, so that way he could do it whenever and when I take it home tonight it’s fixed.

I turned to my co-worker James and said “hey, do you want to see my screwed-up video card?” he came over and I turned the laptop on…. and it worked! WHAT THE HELL??

I’ll mention it to the repair tech, but I’ll still have him replace the parts. Save him a trip out again later, ESPECIALLY if he can replace the GPU with another, non-f’d up one.

Update: Well it must have been it's final hurrah. when the technician arrived, it came up with the BIOS logo screen, but then died. He began to disassemble the laptop to replace the system board (that's the motherboard in Dell-speak) and unfortunately it has the same GPU chip on it as the one being replaced. Ultimately he had to stop and make arrangements to come back tomorrow because--get this-- he couldn't get one of the screws out and has to get a different screwdriver. I have one that's the perfect size for laptops, but unfortunately I left it behind on Vancouver Island last week. He's coming back tomorrow to finish it. It's a darned good thing that I'm a huge nerd and have three other computers at home I can use until this one is back up and running.

http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/PermaLink,guid,7fb8de9f-9daf-408e-8351-e8f7b15ca17e.aspx http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/PermaLink,guid,7fb8de9f-9daf-408e-8351-e8f7b15ca17e.aspx Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:17:34 GMT Ahh the joys and risks of running beta software.<br> This morning I fired up an xvid video that I downloaded and partway through the video, the audio stuttered and then froze and the screen froze. The screen went black. then it came back, then went black again. i tried to hit escape, out of full screen so maybe i could catch it and click close, but before that happened, I got a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). No big deal, they happen from time to time and it IS beta software.<br> The problem was when the computer restarted, I didn't get the Dell logo screen. I didn't get the Windows logo startup screen. I didn't get a login screen. What I got was a series of lines running top to bottom mostly on the left side of the monitor... multicolored but slowly becoming all white. The rest of the screen slowly started showing vertical lines until eventually the whole screen turned white. Not good. What the hell? How could a crash physically damage hardware? I tried turning it off and on again, same thing.<br> Watching closely, I could see and hear the BIOS POST (Power On Self Test). After a minute or two, the hard drive activity light blinked out. On a hunch, I entered my password and hit enter. Hard drive activity resumed and it logged me in. Of course, I couldn't see anything so all I could do was shut down gracefully.<br> Using my other computer, I checked Dell's support site and did the diagnostics they suggested. Turns out my LCD monitor is fine, but the video card is hosed. How on earth did watching a video cause a crash in the driver that resulted in not only a BSOD but a physical corruption of the card itself? That's unheard of!<br> In hindsight, I think it was a combination of things. My laptop has the nVidia GM8400 video card in it which is known to have a major design flaw. This affected Dell, HP, even Apple's MacBook Pro laptops that had this chip in it. Ultimately Dell extended the warranty of every system with this chip in it for free. The combination of a flawed video chip and a beta driver for a beta OS was a recipe for disaster.<br> Ultimately I had to call Dell. The NEXT major obstacle is that I bought this laptop through my corporate account... through Dell Latin America. I'm now in Canada and have to have the system transferred. I called the Dell XPS tech support line (XPS has it's own tech support department, which is one of the nice things about paying a premium for a product) I got through to a technician with a slight FRENCH accent, which leads me to believe the call center is here in Canada, rather than Panama for Dell Latin America or India for Dell US and A.<br> I explained what happened, and what steps I had already taken. (Having dealt with Dell Tech Support for issues for the hundreds of systems I had at my last job, I learned how to work WITH them rather than them having to rely on their flowcharts) I also told him that since this was the known-bad GPU, that I'd prefer to have a technician come on-site and replace the GPU rather than send my laptop in for depot service. You just never know if you're going to get your own computer back, with a freshly-installed OS and no data, photos, emails, contacts or anything else on it. They said no problem, got my address and-waitasecond. This address isn't in Grand Cayman.<br> Uh-oh. He processed the dispatch for me and then said he was transferring me to customer care to update my records, since tech support has read-only access to customer records. He gave me the case number and transferred me to Customer Care reception. I gave them my case number and said I needed to transfer from Latin America to Canada, and he put me through to someone. Someone else picked up right away (I think I spent less than 2 minutes on hold this whole time so far) and I explained my situation to him. This person, who DID have an Indian accent told me that it was purchased through a corporate account and would have to be dealt with by the corporate sales department, not customer care and would transfer me. I tried to stop him, and he listened to what I had to say and then repeated his script and transferred me... to an automated message saying that the department I was trying to reach is currently closed, and please try again on the next business day. ARRRRRRRGH! I hung up and the call was 19:44 seconds.<br> I re-dialed the XPS number, and again got a technician, Robby, who sounded Canadian. I said I had just called a few minutes ago, spoke to a tech, got a case number and then was transferred to Customer Care who sent me down a rabbit hole into a dead end. He apologized, asked for my case number, re-confirmed my name, address, email and phone number. Then he said he would re-submit it to dispatch and could he put me on hold for 3-5 minutes. He came back on in about 3 minutes and told me everything was set, he gave me a dispatch number and told me a technician would be calling me sometime early next week (because it's 5:00 PST on a Saturday) to schedule the best time to come and replace the part. Just like that. I asked him if they were going to replace it with the same GPU, the nVidia 8400 that's known bad or were they going to replace it with something that wasn't borked by the factory. He said he didn't know, it would be up to the technician. If they had a better solution at the time of install then yes they would replace my GPU with a different one.<br> SO. Windows 7 beta: out. nVidia GS8400m: out. Dell XPS tech support: big thumbs up. The worst part is going to be getting through the next week or so with only my desktop, Laurie's desktop and Laurie's netbook in the apartment :)<br> <p> </p> <img width="0" height="0" src="http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/aggbug.ashx?id=7fb8de9f-9daf-408e-8351-e8f7b15ca17e" /> http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/CommentView,guid,7fb8de9f-9daf-408e-8351-e8f7b15ca17e.aspx Tech Tech/Gadgets Tech/Microsoft Tech/Windows http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/Trackback.aspx?guid=2ee0c015-b37b-44cd-bb03-c178e57d01c6 http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/pingback.aspx http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/PermaLink,guid,2ee0c015-b37b-44cd-bb03-c178e57d01c6.aspx http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/CommentView,guid,2ee0c015-b37b-44cd-bb03-c178e57d01c6.aspx http://www.docjelly.com/Blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=2ee0c015-b37b-44cd-bb03-c178e57d01c6 2

I haven’t really been using my computer much this week. I’ve been smokin’ busy at work, so by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is spend MORE time in front of the screen. Everything is on track now for a business trip tomorrow, so starting this weekend when I get back everything should slow down again… until Monday. :)

The last post I made about Windows 7 I mentioned that the fan was acting weird. I went to Dell’s support site and there was a new BIOS version for my specific laptop. I installed that and the fan began behaving as expected, so thank you Dell. I’ve still got i8kfangui running, but just in informational mode only so I can see the CPU temperature.

Every window has a “Send Feedback” link up next to the minimize, restore/maximize and close buttons. I read today that there’s a registry hack you can make to turn it off if it really bugs you. I don’t know why you’d find it annoying though, it’s a BETA TEST of an operating system. It’s provided free of charge in exchange for reporting metrics, crashes and other things… LIKE FEEDBACK. It’s actually pretty cool. There’s a dropdown that you can select what category you’re reporting on, and then some stars to give you a choice of how well it worked (or didn’t) and then comments.

The dropdown list itself is pretty encompassing, too. Everything from Accessibility features, printing, faxing, security settings even Tablet PC functions. Finally at the bottom there’s an “other” category.

So far I’ve sent between 12 and 15 feedback “emails” to the team. Some of them have just been “This works exactly as advertised and as expected”, a couple suggestions and a few negative ones, too. I sent one when I crashed IE the first time the other night, too. Being a beta, you’re not supposed to use this as your “main machine” and in fact, part of the terms of use specify that you won’t use it ‘in a production environment’. I WILL be implementing it in a production environment in a couple months at work. I’m planning a pilot project for myself and my co-administrator, as well as a couple people who are tech-savvy to run Windows 7 with all our line-of-business applications to iron out any kinks that come up over the next year before we start migrating to it (skipping over Vista) in early 2010 when it’s released.

I wrote on the 2009 advancement plan at work that if I tried to upgrade people to Vista that we’d have a mutiny on our hands. I’ve been running Vista on my laptop since last December when I got it, and forcing myself to use it on my desktop at my last job for almost a year previous so I could get to know it before I had to start fielding calls about it. While Vista came out of the gates flaccid with few compatibilities with existing hardware and software, it was something that needed to be done. If Vista hadn’t come out when it did and been a dog, then there wouldn’t have been new drivers and new versions until Windows 7 came out. Then *IT* would have been the dog that nobody wanted. Vista was the pain of living with no floors in your home while contractors reinforced and rebuilt your foundation and drainage. It sucks, and it’s hard, and it tries your patience, but in the end, what you built on top of it was all the better for it.

While I could have rolled out Vista Business with Aero Glass turned off and the “classic” skin/theme selected to make it look like Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 7 takes that option away. I might have been able to slip it past a few people if it LOOKED like the old Windows :)

What everyone seems to forget is that in 2001, XP was hated just as much as Vista is, with people decrying the “Fisher Price toy” interface and the new double-wide start menu but as people actually used it and adapted to it and started to reap the benefits of the new system, they liked it and ultimately loved it (evidenced by extension after extension for the availability of Windows XP for OEM systembuilders).

The difference between 2001’s hate-in for XP and 2007’s hate-in for Vista is a 24-hour news cycle and a lot more people  out there trying to justify their employment filling column-inches. Vista’s missteps were a convenient mule to whip.

Yesterday I watched from the sidelines while the Microsoft web servers were hammered into submission and ultimately failure as people tried to download the Windows 7 Beta. Someone found a direct link to the .iso files and some people reported that their multi-gig files just stopped partway through. I guess there were people physically deleting the iso file from webservers at that point. It was an epic fail; microsoft.com was down for a little bit, windowsteamblog.com was offline, eOpen (licensing site), MSDN and TechNet were all having problems as the deluge continued.

Lifehacker actually posted an opinion piece admonishing Microsoft for not being ready for it and while they DO have a point, I don’t think they anticipated just how many people wanted an alternative to Vista. To give them some credit, there’s a difference between 38 million Firefox 3 downloads and 2.5 million 2.4 gigabyte Windows 7 downloads.

By late last night and this morning they had things ironed out and brought more capacity/bandwidth online and re-opened the beta. (I wonder if they ate their own dog food and used some sort of Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, or if they just used Amazon S3 or (doubtful) Google’s cloud computing platform. More likely they just upped their commitment to Akamai.

Earlier today I signed up for the beta and got my product code that’s good through August 31st, 2009.

Tonight I backed up my laptop (which has been having wireless connection issues almost since I got it) and then did a hard drive swap so as not to damage my vista installation that has all my data on it. On a side note, I picked up a 320gb, 7200RPM, 2.5” SATA notebook hard drive at NCIX on Friday for $104 after taxes. While not as cheap as 3.5” SATA drive, that’s still pretty cheap.

I fired up my laptop with the Windows 7 DVD in the drive, made a few selections (language, regional settings, keyboard layout, that sort of thing) and then it installed. It seems to have installed a little slower than the Vista beta did a couple years ago. Once it was “ready” it asked for my name, a computer name (for networking) and then asked me if I wanted to connect to a wireless network. Judging by that, it had a driver and installed it during setup. It asked me for my WPA password and that was it. It then checked with Windows Update and downloaded 68mb of updates. One of the updates it downloaded (probably the bulk of the 68mb) was the nVidia video driver for my laptop. (At the time, it was running at 1024x768) Once it downloaded and installed the video driver, the MP3 bug fix and a couple other updates, it rebooted and came up at the native 1280x800 resolution. There was one “optional” update yet to be installed, the Broadcom Ethernet adapter driver. I installed it, and then downloaded/installed the new Windows Live Essentials (including Windows Live Writer, which I’m using right now to write this up)

I opened up the Device Manager, to see if any drivers did not get installed and was shocked to see that there was only one device that didn’t have a driver installed: the biometric fingerprint reader. The good news was that it identified it as a biometric reader interface, rather than just “PCI device” or something like what probably would have happened in an earlier version of windows.

I opened up IE8 and navigated to Facebook, and then I opened a new tab and went to another page. When I was done, I clicked the close button and it asked me if I really wanted to close Internet Explorer, or did I just want to close the current tab? Nice touch.

The only annoyance I’ve found so far, is that my fan is cycling on and off constantly. I don’t know why yet, but it’s probably something simple.

There was a notification that came up, telling me I did not have antivirus software installed. Clicking the notification balloon where it said “click here to find antivirus software online” opened Internet Explorer and went to a Microsoft Security webpage that had links to AVG (woo!), Norton/Symantec and Kaspersky Labs websites. I clicked on AVG and the landing page said “Welcome Windows 7 users!” It had a link to download AVG Antivirus standalone or AVG Internet Security for 38.99 or 59.99 respectively.

I don’t know about anyone else in the position to beta test a new OS, but I sure as hell am not going to pay $60 for a security package for a beta install. Sure I can re-install it in Vista or XP if I go back to it, but what the hell. I clicked on “all products” and then over to “free trials” to get a copy of AVG Free.

So far, the only thing that hasn’t “just worked” right out-of-the-box (so to speak) is the Windows Live Call. I wasn’t sure how it worked or even really what to do with it, but when I clicked it in the start menu, it came up with an MSN messenger-like window with a telephone keypad on it and a text message saying that the service was temporarily unavailable.

Even IE8 seems pretty responsive. Firefox 3 has been getting on my nerves lately. Facebook, Canadian Tire, Rogers and VanCity Savings websites constantly gave me problems with connection reset and other “page cannot be displayed” type errors. If it wasn’t for AdBlock Plus, I would probably have switched back to IE7 by now.

Tomorrow I’ll install Office 2007 Small Business and use Windows Live Sync to copy my pictures, videos, data and downloads back onto this installation and start “using” it for real and contributing feedback to the beta team.

I bet you think this is going to be a product placement post… It isn’t, but it’s sure going to sound like one.

Last December, I attended a course in Tampa, FL. They had a “free gift” if you signed up for more than three days, and this course was five. The choices were an Xbox 360 Core, a PS3 40GB, Nintendo Wii, iPod Classic 80GB, a Zune, a Garmin GPS/wristwatch or a $300 Visa gift card. Since I already had the others, I chose a Wii.

Of course the Wii was out of stock, so I asked if I could wait and get one of those. They said OK. They were good about sending me updates, and then around May they emailed me and said they still were having trouble getting the Wii and would I like something else? I still wanted a Wii, so I chose the $300 Visa gift card. A few weeks later a $200 and a $100 American Express gift card showed up on my desk. I was going to use them to buy a Wii.

Of course, I never did and carried around the gift cards for awhile. Eventually I did use up the $100 card, but I still had the $200 card. I tried to use the $200 card at Ikea last week and it was declined. I think I had about $230CAD rung up, and it was $200 USD, so whatevs. Last night I tried it again at London Drugs for $150 and it was declined again. Perhaps I can only use it at a US merchant…

Just for grins, I went to www.americanexpress.com/giftcard and clicked on the Check Balance link. I punched in the card info and up came… a balance of $35.20. WTF?! I started clicking each month in the dropdown for purchase history and there it was, June 16, 2008. Two purchases at Hotwire.com for travel on the same day. My gift card had been hacked.

I tried to send a message through the AmEx website, but you had to be a registered member to do so. After three attempts to create an account with the giftcard failed, it locked me out. I called the number on the screen which was generic AmEx Customer Service and spoke with Paul from INDIAna (as if) and he gave a different number for Gift Card services.

I called them and spoke with a c/s named Cindy (no trace of an accent whatsoever) and asked her if it was too late to dispute the charges as they were nearly six months old. She said she didn’t think so and said she would transfer me to the Fulfillment team. I was put on hold, and listened to Bing Crosby xmas tunes for a few minutes, and then she herself came back on the line and apologized for it taking so long and would I like to continue to hold, or did I want the number to call fulfillment directly? I said I would wait a little longer, and then she connected me with Jose on the fulfillment team. He asked me a couple questions and before I could even ask if it was too late to dispute the charges, he said he was going to send out a replacement card for the full value.

Excuse me?

He thought I didn’t hear him and repeated it. I heard him fine, I just couldn’t believe it! I gave him my parents address, and he had to check with someone to see if they could mail it to Canada, but re-iterated that the card would only work in the US. It turns out they couldn’t, so I gave him my address in Sumas, WA and he said it would be there in 2-3 business days. That would be Boxing day, so probably not (although they don’t celebrate Boxing Day in the US)

At the end of the call, he asked me if I was an American Express cardholder. I said “No, but if this is the way you treat your customers, then I’ll be signing up for one later this afternoon!”