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 7: Restoring the Quick Launch toolbar

I’m not a fan of the new “pin to taskbar” feature on Windows 7. I much prefer the old Quick Launch toolbar. If you are like me, you’ll be glad to know its quite easy to restore (or should I say recreate) this toolbar, and can be done following these steps:

1. Right-click the taskbar and make sure that “Lock the Taskbar” is un-ticked.
2. Right-click the taskbar again, hover over “Toolbars” and then click “New Toolbar”.
3. Enter this folder path into the “Choose Folder” window that appears:

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

On the right of the taskbar, you should now see a new toolbar called Quick Launch. All we need to do now is configure it so it looks like it did in previous versions of Windows:

1. Right-click the divider for this toolbar and un-tick the “Show Text” and “Show Title” options (you may also need to ensure that the “Small Icons” option is selected.
2. Drag the divider to arrange the new toolbar where you’d like it (I usually have it on the left just to the right of the start button).
3. Right-click the taskbar and tick “Lock the Taskbar” again.

Applications should still be able to add their icons here as the path to the folder for this toolbar hasn’t moved. However, as new application are developed for Win7, I wouldn’t be surprised if they stop adding Quick Launch icons automatically. Still, its easy to add them yourself!!

Neil