1986 Mac vs 2007 Windows PC. Mac wins!

This sounds like a joke, but in a series of 17 tests measuring the speed of various everyday Word & Excel tasks, a 1986-vintage Mac Plus won 9 times over an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Check it out for yourself!

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SoftwareInReview.Com: Vista a step down from its predecessors.

I definitely do not recommend upgrading to Vista from any previous edition of Windows. If you end up stuck with Vista because you’ve bought a new PC, there are other operating system options available to you. Read more.

Criticisms of Windows Vista

Considering buying Windows Vista? Read this encyclopedia entry from Wikipedia.Com before you do. Windows Vista, the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system, has been the target of a number of negative assessments by various groups. Criticisms of Windows Vista have included… Read more.

QuickBooks’ Vista problems are six years in the making.

David Berlind and Mary Jo Foley have been intensely following the story of QuickBooks incompatibility with Windows Vista. Mary Jo is questioning if Microsoft is responsible for this latest failure of QuickBooks (anything before QuickBooks 2007) incompatibility and went even further to give Intuit a free pass. Read more.

Windows Vista is no more secure than XP: Report

A new report blasts Vista, saying that it’s “equally at peril” compared to Windows XP. The report is instructive, but also contains some considerable flaws that show the difficulty of assessing Vista’s new security architecture.

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The Grooveblog reviews Windows Vista Home Premium.

My Dell E520 has arrived. As previously reported, it came with Windows Vista Home Premium. Jesus christ, could these lame Windows icons be any fucking larger? Vista looks sharp, but to be honest, I prefer the graphics and look of XP. Vista is just full of bloat and by bloat I mean… Read more.

Microsoft Vista & Office 2007 – It’s A Lemon!

When I bought my Lenovo T60p a few months ago I was excited it was all optioned up on the hardware had Vista Business and while it shipped with Office 2003 they promised me an upgrade. My first new laptop in four years. The last was a very trusty Thinkpad T40. Now I’ve had no end of problems with Vista.  Read more.

60 Days With Ubuntu Linux (A Switchers Review.)

I have been using Ubuntu for approximately 2 months now. This has been a fairly monogamous relationship, I think I booted Windows all of twice, mostly because I had to go to a specific site that uses IE7 streaming capabilities. I know I can install IE7 in Ubuntu, but I am not that devious. So, how does it feel like?

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Duncan Riley: I hate Vista already

I’m tempted to download Ubuntu and be done with Windows altogether, or even the hacked version of Mac OSX that is suppose to run on a normal PC Read more.

Apple now valued at over $100 billion

Apple Inc.’s market capitalization broke the $100 billion barrier for the first time on Wednesday, as shares of the company surged above $116 following a bullish research report from investment bank Morgan Stanley.

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Apple Introduces 160GB Apple TV for $399

In the press released for YouTube videos for Apple TV, Apple also reveals that they will be introducing a 160GB Apple TV for $399.

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Free Mac Switching Seminar at London Drugs (Local News)

The Computer Department at London Drugs on #3 Road in Richmond, BC Canada is holding a Mac seminar for potential Switchers entitled “Tired Of Broken Windows?”on Saturday June 2nd from 1-3pm.  If you’ve had it with Microsoft’s buggy products. This may be the thing for you. (I’m going.)

Microsoft Top Secret Product Revealed: “Surface”

Microsoft “innovates” again with table top pc version of iphone screen. Color me confused. Wasn’t this technology created by Jeff Han? Wasn’t it licensed or bought by Apple for the iphone and possibly future Macs?

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Firefox Users Reach 25%

Statistics show that people are switching to Firefox fast as ever, while Internet Explorer’s share drops every day! Have a look!

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Palm’s New Secret Device Coming Tomorrow

“Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm, will host a live video webcast on Wed., May 30, to describe a new category of mobile device. The webcast will follow the announcement of this new product at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif.,”

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Top Secret Microsoft Product To Launch May 29th At Midnight

Gizmodo reports that, at 12:01am EST the division of Microsoft that launched the Xbox and the Zune will unveil something very special . What it is, we do not know for sure, but it’s “something totally new coming out of the Entertainment and Devices division, and it’s going to change the way people interact with technology.”

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[update: See this post for details on the product.]

Google Buys Anti-Malware Security Startup

“Google has quietly made its first anti-malware acquisition, snapping up GreenBorder Technologies, a venture-backed company that sells browser virtualization security software. GreenBorder’s software creates a DMZ (demilitarized zone) between the Windows desktop and programs downloaded from Web pages or opened from e-mail messages in Microsoft Outlook. Read more.

New Zealand School System Dumps Microsoft Office for Macs

Microsoft Office programs have been ordered to be removed from about 25,000 Apple Macintosh computers in schools. The Ministry of Education did not renew its deal for the programs, meaning that students using the Apple computers will not have access to common programs such as Excel and Word unless the school buys the software independently. It is thought to affect around 30 per cent of all schools nationwide. Read more.

Did you READ the Vista License Agreement? Here’s The Coles Notes Version.

Lawyer Wendy Seltzer had a closer look at the Vista EULA. Here’s what she had to say. “Reading the Windows Vista license is a bit like preparing for breakfast with Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: You should be ready to believe at least six impossible things about what users want from software. It is unlikely that a home user looking for a computer operating system has any of these “features” of the Vista EULA in mind.” Read more.

What do you think is Windows Vista’s biggest problem? [Poll]

Vista4Beginners.Com has a Poll running that let’s you voice your opinion on Vista’s biggest problem. (I picked “general usability”.)

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Apple’s Lesson for Sony’s Stores: Just Connect

RETAIL is supposed to be hard. Apple has made it seem ridiculously easy. And yet it must be harder than it appears, or why hasn’t the Windows side of the personal computer business figured it out?

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A Day in the Life of an Apple Genius

Apple jealously guards its Apple Store “geniuses” — the tech-support people behind Apple’s Genius Bars. The editors of Mac|Life, however, got two of those geniuses to talk. Here are their unapproved-by-Apple comments on what it’s like to work for Apple.

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Picture Of The Day

Pray your xbox 360 never gets the dreaded “3 Blinking Red Lights of Doom” like mine.

If it does, there’s still a chance for you if it happens within one year of purchase and you have the original receipt.

Vista’s Morning Sickness

Some mornings Vista is all but unusable. On waking it up from standby it seems frozen, except the hard disk light is permanently on, suggesting it is moving massive amounts of data between RAM and the Page File. It is unresponsive to the point that it can take minutes to respond to a single mouse click. It takes a reboot to bring it back to “normal” responsiveness. Read more.

What’s so great about Vista that it’s worth crippling my PC for?

The rationale of investing in a machine with at least 5 times the processing power, 4 times the RAM, 3 times the disk space, more modern and faster architecture, was all about getting some performance out of it. The reality is that my new PC with Vista on it is just as slow and tedious, and in some instances far worse. It still chugs for ages writing to the page file and it sometimes takes absurd lengths of time to do what you’d think are trivial things, like emptying the recycle bin. Read more.

Apple’s retail notebook sales up 94 percent in April

Mac maker Apple Inc. saw retail sales of Mac units grow a solid 62 percent year-over-year for the month of April, which included a 94 percent spike in notebook sales thanks to solid MacBook and MacBook Pro momentum, as well as increased distribution. Read more.

iPhone to be released on June 20th

A number of reader reports and Google Groups message board posting indicates that CNBC’s is reporting that the iPhone will be released on the 20th of June. On the Money last night on CNBC, the telco Analyst said they had been given the confirmed date of the 20th.

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Microsoft offers Amnesty Bin for iPods

From the entry way at Microsoft’s Zune headquarters: the iPod Amnesty Bin. It’s like seeing adorable puppies in a pound. I instinctively wanted to grab those poor sweet neglected iPods into my arms and give them a proper home. Someone ought to notify the association for the prevention of iPod cruelty.

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My hate for Windows Vista…

I’m more disappointed from a consumer standpoint. Basically – you need a new new machine that was custom built with vista in mind. This way you have the few drivers that exist for Vista. If you’re just Joe Schmoe with somewhat decent hardware updating to the Vista isn’t the best idea. We’ve found multiple instances where even “supported” network cards are no longer recognized when we install Vista.  I hate you Microsoft. I’m seriously thinking about going Mac. Read more.

Vista experience turns into consumer nightmare

IT professionals know better than to jump on the bandwagon right away when Microsoft launches a new operating system, but consumers don’t have much choice. For Kary, who just wanted a reliable computer that worked like her old one, XP was not an option. All of the PCs she saw at her local Circuit City ran Vista. That turned out to be a big problem. Read more.

Costco turned Zune boxes into tables to sell iPods

Costco found a use for Microsoft’s Zune.

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Xbox 360: 61% failure rate!

Everywhere you turn, there’s another story of a broken 360 and anyone you speak to has either had their console fail on them, or knows of many others who have. It really is the problem that simply won’t go away.

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Microsoft doesn’t want you to see this. [Video]

The fact is Microsoft is scared of open source Linux. And they should be. If the average computer user knew they could have something far far superior to Windows Vista, ran on their existing PCs, and that it sold for $0.00, think about how many people would drop Windows in a heartbeat.

Is Now A Good Time To Buy [A Mac]?

There is no slam-dunk “right time” to buy a computer, and if you’re seeking insurance against buyer’s remorse, it doesn’t exist. Whenever you make a computer system purchase, the one sure thing is that within six or eight months at the outside, and perhaps even in days or weeks, the model you bought will be superseded by a machine that is faster, with new and/or better features, and often cheaper. Read More.

Windows XP SP3 To Ship Later This Year – Microsoft Confirms

Microsoft is announcing that Windows Vista supports this protocol today and Windows Server 2008 and Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) will support it as well later this year.
Read more.

What happened to Vista?

Just shy of about four months ago, Microsoft released its latest version of Windows, named Vista. It was supposed to solve all world problems (or at least as far as compuers go). Microsoft boasted of many features that sounded very promising. So what happened? Almost four months later, we hardly even hear anything about Vista!

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Slow Vista File Copies – Microsoft Ignores Users

Vista users have been battling unbearably slow file copies, sometimes as low as bytes per second. Microsoft refuses to comment on the situation or do anything about it.

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Apple’s next-generation iMacs to add a touch of grace

AppleInsider has learned that Apple’s popular line of iMac personal computers are about to undergo a substantial facelift that will showcase striking new industrial designs aimed at leaving both competitors and onlookers smitten. Read more.

No CDMA iPhone for 5 years. Canadians weep.

AT&T has exclusive U.S. distribution rights for five years — an eternity in the go-go cellphone world. And Apple is barred for that time from developing a version of the iPhone for CDMA wireless networks.

That ban is no small thing. AT&T rivals Verizon Wireless and Sprint are both CDMA shops. AT&T uses GSM, a global standard incompatible with CDMA. Read More.

[Update: Hope exists in the form of unlocked GSM phones for Rogers]

[Update: iPhone unlocked]

Symantec’s Norton software causes China glitch

An automatic update to Chinese versions of Symantec’s Norton line of antivirus software on Friday incorrectly identified files contained in Microsoft Corp.’s XP operating system as threats and deleted them, Symantec said.

That prevented computers running XP from functioning properly, and has caused some users to have to re-install portions of their operating system, the company said.  Stock dropped 2%. Read more.

Windows Vista? All Hail XP

I’ve never been one to follow the waves of mania that occasionally sweep through the IT community when some unstoppable goliath threatens to leave a path of destruction in its wake, but I can’t seem to get away from this one. Godzilla is bearing down on Tokyo, and I’m trying to get away on a tricycle with a rusty chain. Read more.

Vista “no security cure-all” – Symantec

A new report from anti-virus company Symantec has challenged the notion that Microsoft’s new Vista operating system will banish security problems that plagued its predecessors.The security company said that Vista’s new plumage has been mainly plucked from the open-source community, rather than being new security developments in themselves. Read More.

Running OSX and Windows XP on Ubuntu [video]

So what exactly IS this Linux thing you keep hearing about? What is Ubuntu? Well to put it simply, Linux is a free alternative to Windows. And Ubuntu is a fancy version of Linux. This video shows just how fancy it is.

What’s with all the Macs?

A blogger’s observations on the status of Macs. “They’re everywhere! Just yesterday I caught my best friend, who has been a proud Mac hater for years sitting in front of an iMac asking a colleague whether iMacs comes with dual core processors. What’s the world coming to?”

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Lawyer starts “Microsoft lawsuit invitational” page.

Feeling threatened by Microsoft patent infringement claims? Neither are these people. In fact Lawyer Christian Einfeldt invites Open Source users to join him in daring Microsoft to try and sue them.

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Target & Costco now carrying Apple TV

Ars Technica reports that Apple TVs have begun to show up at Target and Costco stores in limited quantities. Read more.

Apple Investor News debuts – News portal for Apple financial news

Apple Investor News goes live today. The site is a standalone web site devoted solely to the financial and stock news of a single company.Apple Investor News is an always-updating investment news portal covering Apple, Inc. financial and AAPL stock news. The site aggregates headlines from hundreds of sources worldwide, then uses filters to sort those headlines into 20 sub-topic categories. Read more.

Law.Com: Is Ubuntu the Linux OS for Law Firms?

To Vista or not to Vista; is that really the question? With Microsoft’s long-awaited operating-system upgrade, well … upon us … it might be time to consider alternatives. Apple’s fine Unix-based OS X is certainly an option, but if you’re balking at investing in the new hardware you’ll need to support Microsoft’s new graphically seductive, resource-gobbling OS, do you really want to replace all your Windows machines with Macs? Maybe it’s time to consider Linux — or rather a Linux.  Read more.

YouTube comes to the Apple TV

alanquatermain presents a video featuring “A Series of Tubes”, a plug-in by Xdog that brings YouTube to the Apple TV. Watch the AwkwardTV plug-in directory for its appearance, which can be expected to be soon.

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Microsoft Likely to Buy Yahoo, Analyst Says

Microsoft’s plan to buy Web advertising firm aQuantive increases the likelihood that the software giant will also buy Yahoo, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto. Yahoo would plug a “strategic hole.” Also: Yahoo might be seeking to shed assets or get acquired.

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