Vista and XP Downgrades, Pt. 2: SATA RAID

The deluge has begun. We are seeing people walking into the store with new PC's and a retail box of XP in their hands and it can only mean one thing.

We have come upon some interesting kinks in the upgrade process. Yesterday's treat: Some of the new HP Presario machines with Intel chipsets are shipping with single SATA disks but with the RAID mode turned on. This causes all kinds of problems for the XP installer which does not have drivers for these new Intel Matrix storage chipsets.

We fought with it a lot. Of course most new PC's do not have floppy disks, so the traditional process of downloading the XP drivers to a floppy and pressing F6 during the XP installation start-up is immensely complicated.

Our solution which has worked so far: Go into the PC BIOS, and set the default SATA operations mode from RAID to IDE. This will emulate a traditional single-IDE disk drive and the XP installer will run.

Vista Upgrade Diary, Pt. 1

Well, I've decided to take the plunge and put Vista on my laptop and work with it every day. John, the owner has been running it on his PC for about four months and he hasn't taken a sledgehammer to it yet, so I'll see.

I will say this, it is now six months on into Vista's launch and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of PC's on which we've worked on Vista. I'm not sure if that is relative to Vista's stability or to the lack of consumer uptake.

On to the nuts and bolts.

Part 1: Prepare Your System
Make sure you have a good backup of your currently running system. This means doing one of two things:

1. Using a disk imaging tool such as Acronis True Image to make a complete image of your current operating system, files and documents such that you can, if neccessary, just restore your entire pre-Vista operating system in place.


2. Doing a manual backup of your files to an external drive in case something happens during the upgrade.

I doing method two in combination with installing Vista clean onto a new hard drive. The down-side is that I will have to reinstall all my applications again. The upside is that I will have a clean disk and a clean Vista OS (as opposed to upgrading XP). Plus, if I end up hating Vista, I can just swap out disks and go back to the status quo ante.

I've taken the opportunity to upgrade the stock Matsushita 80GB 5200 RPM SATA drive in my HP nx9420 laptop to a new Seagate 100GB 7200RPM HD. I'm hoping the faster spindle speed on the Seagate drive will improve Vista's performance as I don't have a dedicated video card.

Backups done, I'm about to do the switch. More later. For your amusement, I have attached a humorous Vista Upgrade Decision Tree flowchart. Mildly offensive language. Click to enlarge.

iPhone: How Big Will It Be?

We don't deal much in Apple products at ENLLC. But we do deal in cell phones. We are a proud, U. S. Cellular dealer. And we are technology watchers and this blog is dedicated to distributing our technology wisdom to our customers and the rest of the world. So...

The introduction of the iPhone has been the most-hyped product introduction since... well since the Mac really. But does it live up to the hype? Early reports say, mostly yes. Does it have some quirks and shortcomings that all first generation products have? Certainly. The non-user replaceable battery is a biggie. But on the whole reviewers seem to agree that it is just as cool and paradigm-changing as the marketing hype makes it look. And quite frankly, if the thing does 80% of what is looks like it will do in the ads, as easily, it will going to do some major paradigm shifting. It is "a breakthrough," in the words of WSJ tech commentator, Walt Mossberg.

The iPhone's true measure will probably be more greatly felt a few years down the road, when the exclusive deal with AT&T expires and when the second (third?) generation iPhone starts to really move into the masses, when and if the iPhone installed base starts to push into say, the tens of millions.

How major an innovation is the iPhone? Well, let's look at a recent New York Magazine profile of Steve Jobs.

With the iPhone, in particular, he is hurling Apple into foreign waters. His motivations for doing so aren’t difficult to discern. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion cell phones are sold worldwide every year; in terms of scale, ubiquity, and relevance, it’s the mother of all consumer-electronics markets. The chance to upend this sprawling industry, bend it to his will, is one that Jobs, being Jobs, finds irresistible.

Apple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. “The entire [expletive] Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,” says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. “But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?”

Indeed. What then? What if Apple starts moving iPhones in numbers comparable to the iPod, at 16 million a month.

What then is that the mobile computing industry -- and increasingly, that is what cellphones are morphing into; Apple has merely finished the job that was started by the Blackberry and the Treo -- is going to have to get really serious. Serious about innovation, serious about quality, serious about customer service and serious about interface design and function.

One of my favorite business bloggers, Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture, posts the big lessons and hard questions that are going to be asked not only of cellphone companies, but of all of us who run businesses in the wake of this.

1. 1. Committees Suck: The old joke is that a Camel is a Horse designed by a committee. As we have seen all too often, what comes out of large corporations are bland-to-ugly items that (while functional and reliable) do not excite consumers.
   
   When a company decides to break the committee mindset and give a great designer the reins, you get terrific products that sell well. The Chrysler 300 does not looks like it was designed by a corporate committee. Think of Chris Bangle's vision for BMW -- and its huge sales spike -- and you can see what the upside is in having a visionary in charge of design.


Better pick a damned good one, though . . .


2. 2. Present Interfaces Stink: How bad is the present Human Interface of most consumer items? Leaving the improving, but still too hard to use Windows aside for a moment, let's consider the mobile phone market: It was so kludgy and ugly that the entire 100 million unit, multi-billion dollar industry now finds itself at risk of being completely bypassed, all because some geek from California wanted a cooler and easier to use phone.


What other industries may be at risk?


3. 3. Industrial Design Matters: We have entered a period where industrial design is a significant element in consumer items. From the VW Bug to the iPod, good design can take a ho-hum ordinary product and turn it into a sales winner.



4. 4. R&D is Paramount: While most of corporate America is slashing R&D budgets (and buying back stock), the handful of companies who have plowed cash back into R&D are the clear market leaders this cycle: Think Apple, Google (Maps, Search), Toyota (Hybrid), Nintendo (Wii). A well designed, innovative product can create -- or upend -- an entire market. Even Microsoft did it with the X-box;


What other companies have the ability to disrupt an entire market?


5. 5. Disdain for the Consumer can be Fatal: As we have seen with Dell, Home Depot, The Gap, Sears, etc., the consumer experience is more important than most corporate management seem to realize. Ignore the public at your peril.

Vista and XP downgrades.

In the last week I have had one customer order a new PC with Vista preinstalled and one case of personally ordering one with Vista preinstalled instead of the XP option. Short of boxing the thing up and returning it to the store/distributor and getting one with XP -- if that is even available, getting harder to do -- what is one to do?

This is a topic that Microsoft has been rather weaselly on. But it is a hot topic. What exactly is one permitted to do?

One is permitted to downgrade Vista to XP subject to the following constraints:

• One must supply one's own XP installation media -- XP install CD's
  
  

  
  Per the EULA and OEM DTOS Agreement, the end user customer is responsible for supplying media for the OEM or customer to create the downgrade product image on the customer system. Neither Microsoft, the OEMs, nor the system builders are responsible for supplying this media.
  

  
  


• One must have a legitimate and UNACTIVATED Vista key. On a new PC this will usually be on a sticker on the CD case or on the bottom of a notebook.

Windows XP will not install on top of Vista. It will refuse to do so. Therefore the only option available to the user is to use the Windows XP installation program to reformat the hard drive (destroying all information thereon) then installing XP cleanly. Third party device drivers not included or supported on the version of the XP media one is using are the users' problem.

Once the activation screen appears for Windows XP the user must then use the telephone option (ONLY) to contact MS, inform them that they are preforming a downgrade from an OEM version of Vista. The user will then give the MS rep the Vista key on the sticker and the MS rep will give the user the activation code.

This is a one-time-only operation. If the user wished to go back to Vista later (s)he will have to purchase a retail Vista package. Microsoft's policy with new OEM operating systems; one OS one machine, forever.

Office 2003 end-of-the-road June 30 for OEMs.

Microsoft has announced that June 30, 2007 will be the end date for OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers, e.g. Dell, HP, Sony, etc.) to bundle Office 2003 with new PC's. After that it will be Office 2007 only. This comes only 5 months after the new office productivity suite's release.

I've been using it for about three or four months now. Be prepared for a shock. It's different, a lot different. One thing to be particularly aware of is that the native format for saving Office 2007 documents is the new (and open) Open Document format which is based on the widely-supported XML scheme. The bad news is that this is not compatible with older versions of the Office Suite. Fortunately, the Save As menu offers a helpful and easy-to-access Save As Word (or Excel of Power Point) 97-2003 feature.

That said, the Microsoft Open License program offers business users the opportunity to buy licenses with the rights to operate and install two generations back of the Office Suite. One license allows the enterprise to install either Office 2007, 2003 or XP. Yet another reason to eschew the OEM Office license.

Elements of E-Mail Style

I had some quality windshield time coming back into the office from a client this afternoon and caught a very interesting interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Authors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe of "Send" a book about surviving e-mail disasters (Reply to All) and getting the most out of e-mail to strangers (use a proper salutation and sign-off).

I've been using e-mail long enough to have been both victimized by and the recipient of many of their examples of e-mail disasters, faux pas, and cringe-worthy grammar. I can say that anyone who uses e-mail for any sort of professional correspondence should give this a listen or read the excerpt.

DRM House of Sand Begins to Fall

I'm in Cedar Rapids taking care of mom. But do check out the coverage of record label EMI's decision to drop digital rights management (aka DRM, aka "copy protection," aka crippleware) from all songs it sells through the iTunes Music Store.

This comes after Apple CEO, Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry urging them to drop DRM because it does little or nothing to hinder piracy but does a lot to alienate customers.

This story follows the typical technoculture shift cycle of: enabling technology -> market disintermediation -> erosion of traditional business models. The kicker is that since the introduction of the enabling technologies (digital music, compression, broadband Internet) the traditional companies have been fighting their disintermediation tooth and nail, trying to use legislation to turn back the clock. Hence the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to attempt to copy or to even try to figure out how the company goes about preventing copying of music (or videos, or ebooks) that you have paid for.

It has been obvious to everyone except the recording, TV and movie industries that these courses of action were unsustainable. Now, at last we have the first crack in what has heretofore been a solid wall in the entertainment industry with EMI being the first major to cave in. The others will stand on the sidelines and wait and see. But I think that their line will not be able to hold and we will be able to mark this as the beginning of the end of the old entertainment industry. What will replace it will be a new kind of market where customers are trusted and ala carte content becomes a commodity.