Upgrading to Windows 7 from XP without the pain

I've just completed my second of 3 (ultimately) upgrades from windows XP to windows 7.

For the first machine i just followed the standard Microsoft line and did a custom install "over the top" of XP. This takes your existing setup and stores it in a windows.old folder on the new machine running windows 7. You are then free to do with that folder what you will (such as delete it). This was ok on my first laptop as I'm just using it as a windows 7 media centre - didn't need my old stuff.

However, for my next (main) machine, that wasn't the case. It's the main machine that I use for all my personal work, which includes a lot of image creation and production (more on that in a later blog). I absolutely could not afford any downtime nor a whole weekend or more of solid copying and re-installing. (A process which from experience drags on and on for weeks in my experience.)

Thus the promise of a smooth migration, keeping all the existing XP setup alongside windows 7 was sufficiently tempting for me to take up. The system is called zinstall XP7 and you install it after you have done your windows 7 custom upgrade (keeping your old files in windows.old). When you install zinstall it wraps up all those old files and creates a fully functioning virtual machine of your old installation. Absolutely everything remains intact, all programs work correctly and all data is preserved. 

In use the system places an icon in both the windows 7 system tray and the XP system tray (is it just me that finds it quite clever it can install itself into an operating system that has been replaced?). Double clicking this icon allows you to switch between windows 7 and XP. XP is displayed full screen, even though it's running in a virtual machine and could theoretically run in a windowed container (I intend to try this). Presumably this is to make it less confusing for novice users - zinstall describes its mode of operation as "TV Channels" - which makes it easy to understand.

You can copy and paste between each system with ease, and see the file system on each system for moving files between the two. 

So what's the point of all this? Well - it means you can get windows 7 up and running, but keep your old system running in parallel - allowing you the time (as long as you want) to re-install and move applications and data to Win7. And if you have applications that will only ever run on XP, then you can keep them running indefinitely. 

It should be noted this is not the same as Microsoft's own "XP Compatibility mode" which consists of their own VM container ("Virtual PC") and a specially licensed copy of XP to run in it. The hardware requirements for their solution are stricter and you get an empty XP which you have to get your programs and data back into. This compares starkly with zinstall which is a one-click process and retains everything as is.

After 3 days, I'm giving zinstall a big thumbs up. 

I love the fact "pint" and "shot" are the same predictive key sequence...

...of course, if you have too much of either, then you could also generate a "riot".

Such elegance in language :)

A love hate relationship with my Samsung NC20 Netbook

I love my Samsung NC20 Netbook - I love it for its great 12 inch screen and full size keyboard that allow me to type articles like this during tedious Travelodge stays with consummate ease.

However, in a way, I hate it for the same reasons - because although fairly lightweight, I adored the dinky size of my previous Advent 10 inch Netbook. I also find the following things frustrating:

a.. The screen seems washed out to me - the colours are not saturated enough at what I consider normal viewing angles. And it's too bright - or more correctly doesn't go dim enough for me when working in dark conditions (which would save battery power).
b.. The track-pad is very annoying - it regularly seems to switch to "scroll mode" with the lightest of touches, even when your finger is not on the "scroll region" on the right hand side.
c.. The speakers are woeful.
d.. I'm not convinced by the Via Nano processor. The machine regularly runs at 100%, thus gets hot and canes the battery life. And I've had trouble ever getting BBC iPlayer to run smoothly. It's just about bearable with the colour depth set to 16 bits and performance set to max. And again, this canes the battery life.
e.. Battery life: if you are doing very little you may squeeze the claimed 4 - 6 hours out of it - but anything multimedia and not a chance..
f.. The Samsung Recovery system - which claims a minimum 25Gb of your hard disk for what seems to me very little use. Backing up your machine to the same physical disk seems almost pointless. If the disk fails or the machine is stolen, then I'm likely to end up data-less regardless. It might possibly save you if some key disk sectors get corrupted, but that's about all.
g.. Pre-installed Macafee security. Sheesh, this thing just guzzles resources. Uninstall it as soon as you can, and use something free like Avast.
h.. There's no firewire port. So although in principle I could throw together a few MovieMaker movies when I have my camcorder along with me, I can't transfer the material.
i.. There are no office tools. Although basic, at least the Advent came with Microsoft Works.
j.. Even though i upgraded to 2Gb memory, it doesn't really seem to have made a significant difference.

On the plus side i like that you can extend the desktop onto an external monitor (i.e. basically see two displays).

So - I suppose it does what it says on the tin, but it doesn't make me grin.

Oh no! They gave me a scrapberry!?

A bunch of not-so-endearing nicknames I have for the hideous horrendous mobile computing device I have been given for work - otherwise known as a blackberry. I would never ever buy one of these terrible things.

They are very popular in business - and sadly that usually means the people who buy them are not the people who use them. Sadly this means that usability appears to have taken a back seat. Such simple errors of usability still about on these appalling devices. 

For example, there are two "convenience" keys on the side of the device. These are right where I have have to grip it when using it as a phone (for which, incidentally, it is a terrible form factor). So, inevitably these keys are always getting pressed when i try to hold it like a phone.

Whereas other manufacturers have learned to make the most of their keyboard real-estate with multi-function context keys (the ones that change function as you navigate through the menus - usually two just underneath the screen) - the blackberry designers felt it unecessary to provide such convenience to us business users. Instead practically every single function has to be accessed by first pressing a single menu button to pull up the list of functions and options - sometimes as much as 3 screens long! It's so tedious it's untrue.

And don't even mention all that wasted real estate on the main front screen....

so, some nicknames - feel free to suggest more:

• scrapberry
• crackberry (seems generally popular, though not sure why)
• splatberry
• whackberry
• crapberry
• quackberry
• blockberry
• bolokberry
• shatberry
• hackberry
• slackberry
• drawbackberry
• lackberry
• sackberry
• setbackberry
• smackberry
• thwackberry
• blankberry
• blattberry

Can we read minds?

The question: the extent to which the mind can be used to control a computer. Neural signals are already used to control artificial limbs, for instance:  if you "think" walking, you send those control signals whether you physically walk or not.

I gather that this is the case for speech, too. So that it would seem feasible (if not currently practicable) for us to be able to "think" words onto a computer screen by monitoring neural speech control signals; the software would do a statistical analysis similar to that performed on audio signals for convention speech recognition, deriving the words but having no sense of their meaning. [follow source for more]