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Large Screens: “The Best Computer Upgrade Ever”

Leave it to Apple to help us make priorities on our peripheral purchases: as noted on Slate yesterday, Apple has posted a study by Pfeiffer Consulting promoting ultra-large monitors (or monitors >24″) as a boon to productivity. Say’s Slate:



“When working on a computer, we lose much more time than we realize through user-interface manipulations,” Pfeiffer’s researchers wrote—even if we’re handling only e-mail and Web pages and not Photoshop.


“I dismissed the report as marketing collateral, but after a few weeks at my own widescreen I’ve reached the same conclusion—it’s surprising how much more work I crank out lately. Co-workers praise my newfound motivation. The truth is, I can finally see what I’m doing.”


No kidding. I noticed the difference at home upgrading from a 17″ to a larger wide-screen LCDs: it made a major difference, allowing me a greater work surface and improved visibility over all of the things I keep open on the desktop. (A coworker questioned my sanity when they noticed I had 30-40 mails open along with 15-20 browser windows – that’s an every-day occurrence.) Better, look to the crop of 20 to 24″ wide-screen monitors (as reviewed at CNET and PCWorld, with reviews of the top 5 20-inch and 23-inch): many good choices in the 20″ range for under $500. For improved performance, pair the monitor with a new video card with increased capabilities (like DVR, extra memory) and it’s a new computer experience.


[Note, added 011609: a great 20″ screen today is under $200, and highly-rated, name-brand 24″ models for around $300.]


If you want to know more about the display market, I recommend the Display Search web site.


http://tinyurl.com/9kbvej


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More on Windows Visa Upgrade Pricing

As I noted previously re: Windows Visa Upgrade Pricing, I received some spirited comments and mails. 


As I mentioned, I haven’t seen an announcement of UK or EU prices for Vista, but will post a link to them when I see them.


As for the pricing on Vista upgrades on the Windows Vista “Get Ready” site, I was glad to see that there is pricing is at parity with the XP upgrade pricing we see today: that covers our home laptops which stay in the home.


Windows Vista Home Premium includes the features of the current Media Center Edition (MCE), which is fine for our MCE PCs at home, as we don’t require the feature set of Ultimate. Home Premium also includes the the Aero UI and the DVD authoring, and features I won’t take advantage of on our desktop MCE PCs like the Tablet PC UX.


IMHO, a “Family Pack” offering for multiple PCs in a home is an interesting approach that Apple has taken with Mac OSX Tiger (which offers coverage for up to five Macs in a single home: one friend in the Valley with multiple Macs called this his “annual upgrade fee”). Just as I’m able to cover three PCs in our home with an annual OneCare protection and maintenance subscription for SRP$49.95 a year, it’s an interesting value proposition to cover multiple PCs in a home on a household annual license basis. (Note: I found OneCare on sale for $19.95 this past Labour Day weekend, after rebate.)


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Windows Vista Upgrade Pricing Announced

MSNBC reported that Windows Vista pricing is now live on the Microsoft corporate after a busy week in the press on pricing last week. You’ll find the retail details on the Windows Vista site. Overall you’ll find that the cost for a



  • Windows Vista Home Basic is US SRP$199, with upgrades to Windows XP for $99.95.

  • Windows Vista Home Premium: $239 (upgrades will be $159). upgrade for Media Center PCs to record TV and link to the Xbox 360.



  • Windows Vista Business: $299 (upgrades will be $199).



  • Windows Vista Ultimate: $399 (upgrades will be $259). This version combines the feature set you see of Premium with the features in Vista Business.

My blog report on our  move to Vista at home is delayed (imagine that) due to our need to install on our home PCs, wind down our last summer weekend, and get the kids ready for school this week. In short, most time was spent on archiving the data form the machines than on the installs.


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Dual booting Vista with XP: moving the rest of our PCs

One small step… deep breath.


This weekend I’m reimaging a couple of Windows XP-based OEM machines with the latest Windows Vista software, and I’m following the details on setting up a dual-boot system with Windows Vista., as outlined on the Windows Vista team blog. This is the same scenario as I have on a dogfood machine at the office, the different is that I’ll be moving my remaining desktops at home to Windows Vista RC1.



“[Dual booting] is a very common scenario at Microsoft and as such, I figured I’d walk you through our typical dual-boot installation procedure via the corporate network.  Many of my colleagues choose to run both operating systems simultaneously (not me — I’m all Windows Vista, all the time) by partitioning their hard drives and running a separate OS on each partition.  They do this for a variety of reasons, but in many cases it’s so they can test new builds of Windows Vista while retaining Windows XP (or another OS) on another partition.  This will allows them the flexibility to perform build-to-build upgrades more easily while retaining the original OS as an alternative should there be a blocking bug in the Windows Vista build.”


Before I do this, I’m backing up everything with OneCare as well as a drag-copy to an external drive.


Given my interest in using audio at home, I was glad to see the details from Amir on the audio subsystem advances in this new whitepaper, and this info on the improved Movie Maker and DVD Maker. 


Although I’m running Office 2007 beta on a Vista PC at the office, we’ll see how the move goes before I take the plungs at home.


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Take a whack at it: you might be surprised

All summer long, my eight-year-old son has been struggling to complete a five-minute math quiz sheet, thinking that he would never be able to complete the 100 subtraction questions in the time allowed. All summer, he’s inched up from 60 questions out of 100 all the way to completing 90 within five minutes. But he was frustrated that he would not be able to complete all 100, without even bothering to try, he’d utter the classic phrase “I’ll never be able to do that!”


I explained to my son that he could do it, as he had overcome “incredible odds” (at least in his mind) when tackling addition at the beginning of the school year. “If you believe you can do it, you just might surprise yourself and find that you can do it.” 


As we discussed the quiz sheet, I thought about  Roger von Oech’s creative thinking books, “A Whack on the Side of the Head” and “A Kick in the Seat of the Pants.” In particular, this pane from his web site on believing in yourself:


Believe in Yourself. (c)1999 Roger von Oech.“What concerns me,” remarked the philosopher Epictetus, “is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.”


If you think you’re creative, you’ll act that way — and vice versa. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. As you think, so you are.


In what ways are you creative?


What strengths do you have that you can apply to your issue?


– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –


So I explained that if you think you’re going to complete the sheet, you’ll go ahead and do it. “As you think, so you are.”


Still unmoved, with lots of excuses, lots of delays… classic eight-year-old procrastination. I explained that he would just have to do it.


Nothing. Classic dog-staring-into-a fan-moment.


Finally, I explained in terms that he could understand, in the immortal words of Yoda: “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”


This evening, he completed the sheet, with nearly half a minute to spare. And he did it a second time as well, just to show that he could. Sometimes, you just need to take a whack at it: the results may surprise you.


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