Over the holidays at the end of December, I spent a bunch of time messing around with computer stuff. I often do this at the end of the year, as it is a good time to do things like re-building machines to clean out the “kruft” and experiment with new things when I have plenty of time to handle any problems I run into.
In his CES keynote, Steve Ballmer talked about how this is an exciting time in the computer industry, despite the economic turmoil going on. Although I will surely come across as biased on saying this, I really, strongly agree. My explorations in recent weeks brought me to the same conclusion.
Here’s some of the more exciting stuff I played with:
Windows Live wave 3. OK this was not new to me, since I’ve been working on it for over a year now, but I spent the time to update all my machines to the new builds of the WL Essentials. WL wave 3 is really compelling, with features like deep “What’s New” support, better integration with other social services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, the ability to use Messenger simultaneously on multiple machines, cool support for groups, web favorites synchronization across machines, advances in all the apps like Photo Gallery, Live Writer, and much, much more.
64-bit computing. It’s time. Although I have messed around with 64-bit OS installs many times in the past, I never deeply adopted it on my primary machines due to various issues with drivers and the like. When I learned that I could use VueScan to support my Nikon film scanner on a 64-bit Vista installation, the last real hurdle was gone. Now I’m using things like Photoshop CS4 on my 8GB home desktop, and it flies. Having all that additional RAM really helps in many situations—things are much faster with so much RAM caching enabled.
Windows 7. You might have heard rumblings that Windows 7 is good. Updating an OS, especially to a beta, is always a scary proposition, as you never know what might break: apps, drivers, scenarios and more are all often at risk. So I did my initial Win7 installs on fresh hard drive, keeping around my Vista installations on separate hard drives so I could easily revert if needed. Well, I never needed it. I’ve installed Win7 on four machines now, and I’ve had no notable problems on any of them. This OS works amazingly well: it is fast, robust, easy to learn and use, attractive, and so far I have not run into any app or driver incompatibilities beyond minor stuff. I’m sold, and I heartily recommend the Win7 beta to any more sophisticated computer user.
SSDs. “Solid state drives” use flash technology instead of rotating disks to store data. I’ve messed with them in the past, but they were always disappointing. Although they bring modest advantages in weight and battery life, I’d not experienced the performance benefits often touted for these things. In fact, in real-world usage they were far slower than even 5400RPM laptop drives. Well, that is now changing in a HUGE way. A colleague gave me an Intel X25-M to try out, and I am absolutely blown away by the performance of it on my two-year-old laptop. It is significantly faster than the hard drive I previously used. It feels like a 100,000RPM drive. Nearly everything I do is faster: booting the OS, running Office and Outlook, file copies, browsing, suspend/hibernate/resume, etc. These are truly a quantum advance in computing, a game changer that may be even bigger than things like multi-core CPUs. They’re expensive now, but with our friend Moore’s Law, we can expect a very exciting future with them.
Huge 2.5” USB HDDs. One downside of SSDs is that they have less storage capacity then today’s HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). The SSD I use is “just” 80GB. I have more data than that, so I like a way to carry it around, especially in travel situations where I may not have a fast network connection back to my home and work machines that store everything. Historically, the external USB hard drives were a pain to use, requiring a separate power supply, using large 3.5” drives to get 100s of GB of capacity or being very space constrained and requiring funky double USB connectors for the more svelte 2.5” form factor. Well that too has changed. I bought a couple of Western Ditigal My Passport Essential 500GB drives. These are small, use just a single, simple USB connector, and they’re pretty inexpensive.
Netbooks. Through the 1990s, “the computer you want” cost around $5000. We all know that has changed significantly, and the recent crop of netbooks take this to the next level. I got an ASUS Eee PC 900HA XP. For just $329 this tiny computer has decent power for basic scenarios like web browsing, Office and running the Zune app, it is lightweight, and I get four or five hours of battery life. The keyboard and monitor are on the small side, so I wouldn’t use it as a primary computer, but it is really handy to have around the house as an occasional-use machine.
"”Network sound card.” Like most people, I have many thousands of songs that I have ripped from CD over the years. I’m also starting to buy more digital music online. Now there’s the excellent Zune Pass offering, which gives access to nearly all music for $15/month. With these giant music collections, selecting something to play can be hard. Using a remote control or even a device like a Zune, it can take an annoying few minutes to find something specific. A keyboard, monitor and mouse are much, much quicker for selecting music, as typing is a very quick way to specify a song, album or artist. In other words, using software like the Zune 3.0 client on a PC works a lot better than nearly any other way to do music selection. The problem is connecting a PC to a home stereo receiver: you want the keyboard/monitor/mouse where you’re sitting, and that is usually not near the receiver.
I found a pretty good solution in the Sondigo Sirocco Wireless Audio Bridge. The way it works is that you install software on the PC basically like a normal sound card driver, then you attach the device via SPDIF or RCA cables directly to the receiver. The PC sends audio over 802.11 or Ethernet to the device—no special wires required between the PC and the receiver. It can be controlled from multiple different PCs, but I usually control it from the Asus netbook. Basically, I think of the netbook as a sophisticated “remote control” that can also do things like web browsing.
One warning on the Sirocco: it was pretty difficult to set up. If you don’t know about IP addresses and DHCP, it might be too much hassle.
Amazon Kindle. For a while after its introduction, I was pretty skeptical of the Kindle. I have enough computing devices in my life already, so why would I want another when it is easy to use books, magazines and newspapers? My wife Lynn got me one for my birthday a couple of months ago, and now I am a convert. It is small and light, so it is easy to carry around. The screen is very readable—much better than a LCD screen. The battery life is very good. The best part, though, is the wireless connectivity. Being able to download instantly a newspaper is a really nice feature. When travelling, I can trivially buy a current newspaper. It is also nice to be able to have plenty of reading content without having to carry the weight of several books and magazines.
Virtual PC. OS virtualization is a pretty amazing technology that can enable a ton of scenarios. For a while after Vista came out, I used Virtual PC to run old apps in an XP guest running on the Vista host. Nowadays that is hardly ever necessary, but a recent way in which I have been using virtualization a lot is to have fully Microsoft-IT-managed virtual machines that I run on my home machines which I don’t want under the control of the IT department. It is also handy for checking out new software. I can copy a version of the VHD file, install some dicey software, try it out, and if I don’t like it then the easiest “uninstall” is simply to erase the new VHD file and revert to the copy I saved. There are many other ways in which client virtualization is handy; I wouldn’t recommend it for the typical computer user today, but if you work with computers a lot, you should have it in your toolbox. Until recently, client computers weren’t fast enough to run virtual machines with acceptable performance, but with 64-bit, multi-core and the like, it is fine for basic computing scenarios like email and web browsing.
Mesh. So with all these devices, all this data, all these applications, and all the people with whom I interact, I need ways to keep them all connected and in synch. Having worked on it for a while, I’m surely biased on this as well, but technologies like Mesh really facilitate all of this. Mesh truly makes it a lot easier to make the best use of client computers, the web and the mobile phone. It also helps things like exercise commuting, as I do not have to carry a laptop to and from work when I’m synchronizing everything I care about. On Friday, the technology was voted as the Best Technology Innovation or Achievement of 2008 at the Crunchies, which was a great honor for the team. If you use more than one computer regularly or if you need to share a lot of files with friends or family, check it out.
My perception is that 2009 will be a very exciting time for computing. A lot of seeds planted in the last few years are starting to come to fruition, and that will enable a tremendous breadth of new and improved scenarios.