Apple Macintosh’s 26th Birthday

This month see’s the anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. Back in January 1984, I was only 5 years old and I believe I was still to have my first true interaction with a computer of this kind. I therefore can’t really say much about how advanced the Mac was back then.

What is evident to me though, is that there continues to be this divide between Mac users and PC users (one could also include Linux users in here too!). Why can’t people just accept that they have a preference for one operating system (OS) and other people have a preference for a different one?

I recently saw a tweet pointing me towards the following video on YouTube of Steve Jobs showing the world the Macintosh:

I started reading through some of the comments. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did. As usual with this sort of thing, I saw posts attempting to put down the PC. Why?! Can’t users just praise the Mac, if they choose to, and leave it as that. No put downs of other computers?

I have both and I find they both have their benefits. If I had to, I could probably do without either, although I think I would find it more of a struggle to do without my PCs. Yes, I have issues with Windows. There are some things that I wish Microsoft would do better and differently, but I have the same experience with OS X.

So please, can’t the two just live together side-by-side without all this nonsense!

Happy Birthday Macintosh…. Happy Birthday Mac Fan boys!

Neil

Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media: Paul Thurrott has the Answer

Until Windows Vista, it had been possible to install a clean copy of Windows without a previous version being installed. During the installation, it would ask you to insert the disk of the previous version and voila… it worked.

Microsoft changed things slightly with Vista (but I never actually upgraded so this didn’t affect me). With Windows 7 things are the same, except Paul Thurrott of the SuperSite for Windows website has a solution, with the help of some others. The solution can be found here:

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/23/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-the-answer.aspx

Thanks to Kevin Fisher and a bit of testing, I have a simple workaround that does work.

After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You’ll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).

Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from "1" to "0".

Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose "Run as administrator." Handle the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm

Then tap ENTER, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.

Voila!

Windows Live Messenger on Vista after SP2 upgrade

A couple of days ago, I upgraded Windows Vista from SP1 to SP2. I left it running overnight and when I returned to my machine, all seemed well.

However, Windows Live Messenger refused to load. I restarted, but still nothing. No error message. Nothing.

So my first reaction, which also proved to be a fix, was to re-install Messenger. I didn’t un-install the version already installed, just re-ran the downloaded executable (you can get this from here).

Hope this works for you too!