Snow Leopard Unboxing

At this point I’ve actually completely (and successfully) installed Snow Leopard. It’s just that I got sidetracked with a web design project, which led to a distinct lack of blog posting. Forgive, and enjoy:

Snow Leopard

Apple totally designed this cardboard sleeve

Snow Leopard is better and stuff, we swear.

More Apple stickers? Dude, just what I wanted!

Snow Leopard is fierce.

…yeah, that’s all I’ve got.

Windows 7: I am Victorious

After 24 hours of checking and rechecking four different sites for availability of the Windows 7 beta, I finally snagged myself a copy. That’s with a product key, mind you – if I were impatient, I would’ve grabbed the ISO long ago and just let it expire after 30 days. That’s the weak way to do it. Vigilance pays off, my friend. That, and about a metric ton of caffeine. On the other hand, if you aren’t as cool as me (aka didn’t get a beta key), here’s the 64 bit ISO, and here’s the 32-bit ISO. It’s crippled (no updates) and it’ll die young (read: 30 days), but I’m sure you’ll enjoy the time, right?

I’m currently sitting at 17% 24% downloaded, around 570MB 775MB so far out of the total 3.2GB file. Once I’ve got it, I’ll burn the sucker to a disk and document the super fun lovely exciting install process. It’s going onto a second partition on my Macbook, so we’ll see how that goes. In particular, I’ve got this morbid curiosity to see if the multi-touch support will actually work with the touch pad. I’m told (as in this is unconfirmed) that Windows 7 has 48 bit color support, though this isn’t even remotely useful yet as not graphics cards can take advantage of that yet.

Anyway, plenty of screenshots and stuff await your eager eyes/faces/brains/whatever. Don’t forget to check back later tonight tomorrow, my loyal (or perhaps accidental) readers.

Note: the delay in content is due to the fact that my Macbook is absolutely dragging it’s feet on the hard drive partition necessary for a dual-boot install. I’m just about ready to restart and begin the partition all over again – it might actually be faster than sitting here hoping that it’ll magically go through.

***Update*** I’ve temporarily given up on the Windows 7 beta. Boot Camp Assistant won’t recognize my burned ISO as a valid Windows Installation CD, meaning it won’t let me boot from the CD and actually use the partition I created for that specific purpose. I’ve got other PCs in the house I could use, but I’m at home, not away at school right now, so I’d rather not do an install on a computer that isn’t mine. The Windows 7 beta is tabled indefinitely.

And with that, POW!

Gone. Just gone. 

That’s the best way to describe the state of my desktop right now. My secondary hard drive went from being detected saturday night to disappearing when I woke up yesterday. I couldn’t find any sort of reason for it online, so I shrugged and restarted, chalking it up to another one of those really weird Windows quirks that not even the boys up in Redmond can explain. When my computer rebooted, it gave me an unnerving two beeps from the internal speaker. That’s not generally a good thing. I got an error screen explaining that neither of my hard drives (SATA 0 and SATA 2, for those of you that care) could not be found. 

I tried to do a repair from my Windows disk, hoping that it would somehow magically fix the problem (yes, I realized that it was a thoroughly illogical thing to do – can’t fix the operating system if you can’t find the HDD it’s located on). One of my more knowledgeable friends suggested that my SATA ports were bad. That made sense to me, so I switched the drives to my other two SATA ports and restarted. I activated those ports in the BIOS, and voila! Still no drives recognized. I don’t have any old IDE drives, so I can’t bypass the problem that way. Essentially, even though only one feature no longer works on my motherboard, it has been rendered useless.

This presents me with a conundrum.

My Macbook Impressions: Two Weeks In

I’m typing this on my still relatively-new Macbook. As the title suggests, I’ve been in possession of this notebook for a grand total of two weeks, and below are some thoughts as to my experience so far. Keep in mind that before this, my use of Macs / OS-X has been minimal. Things that Mac users don’t necessarily notice stick out for me. I’m directly comparing the usability of this system to that of my main PC, in regard to both hardware and software.

New Computer Interface?

Check it out. This company called Mgestyk (say it out loud, you’ll get it) has posted videos of their product being demoed on Youtube.

Essentially, they’ve taken a high-end 3d webcam and paired some software with it that allows gestures to be recognized as input, similar to a mouse or keyboard.