Help with Windows Vista!

[Dan Lyke]

Dave, I haven't installed Ubuntu on Apple hardware yet, but you should be able to dual boot it using the boot loader that comes with it. That's the way it works on other hardware.

As for installation, download a CD image, burn it (on a Mac, save the iso to your home directory, pull up a terminal, and type "hdiutil burn ~/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso"), and boot off of it. It'll come up, let you run various applications, make sure that it found all of your hardware and such correctly. If it did, then you can use OS/X to repartition your drive to have a place to put it, boot off of it again, and click the "Install" icon on the desktop.

Some hardware it may not work on, which is why the "live CD" is so cool: you get to try out the whole thing without touching your hard drive.

 

[Dave Ronyak]

Dan,

Can a person do similarly to boot a (non iMac) PC?  I am thinking that booting off a CD using a non-MS OS might be the safest way to surf the internet in terms of minimizing threats from various malware.

Dave R.

 

[Dan Lyke]

Dave, yep, Knoppix and Ubuntu are both options for web browsing that boot off of CD on Intel (or AMD or whatever, Intel architecture) based computers and provide you with a full fledged operating system, including web browser, that doesn't need to touch your hard drive.

Note, though, that depending on the exploit, "doesn't need to" isn't "can't", there are still applications running on that computer. However, the fact that you'd be running an off-brand browser on an off-brand operating system greatly reduces the chances that anyone's targeting those sorts of exploits towards your environment, so I'd guess they'd be far safer than running Windows, and likely even much safer than running Linux off of a hard drive.

 

[Matthew Schenker]

Matt,

Did I hear you offer a more-or-less free iPod for the asking?  I don't see any responses, so if such is the case, sign me up!  Is it good on the $200/250 Nano, or do have to buy the $350+ dollar versions?

Sorry, the iPod is sold!  I could not stand having to always go through iTunes for every single move.

 

[Matthew Schenker]

I'm not usually one to quote from ads, and I am not really that interested in Macs any more now that I have Kubuntu Linux installed on my machines.  But this "Don't GIve Up On Vista" series from Mac has hit the spot!

Check this:


Matthew

 

[Dave Ronyak]

And absolutely perfect ad (and perfectly honest, too, in my opinion and experience)!  But my son's iMac crashed after downloading the required OS updates from Apple's site, so they aren't perfect, either.  That required him to reload everything from scratch, and took a couple of days and several long telephone calls to Apple support.  But all appears well now.  I'm still running VISTA on my Dell Inspiron, but since all I do with this machine is read/write email, read/write on FOG and search the internet, it works well enough for me.

Dave R.

 

[dheisner]

I realize I am late to the game, but I just had to chime in.

My wife's Mac laptop has never crashed...... My IBM latptop on the other hand (which was ranked as one of the most reliable when I bought it...... is another story.  It has gone back for repair once and I am on my third hard drive.  I can't wait for my laptop to give up the ghost completely so I can go Mac.  I'll still have Windows on the Mac, for work purposes, but I will run OS X as much as I possibly can.

My mother-in-law runs both on hers and Windows ran great after I fixed it.  She doesn't know how to spell update.

You all have a great week!

Danny

 

[soggycrow]

Last year my PC crashed.  My brother-in-law, the IT pro, figured out that the CPU was toast but the hard drive was ok.  I asked if I could rip out the hard drive and slap it in an enclosure to function as a slave external hard drive for a new PC, and he showed me how. 

Went to buy the new computer.  This was right after Vista came out.  I was afraid that the transition might not be smooth so I asked the salesman if he had any XP machines left.  He said he had about a dozen.  He also said that they had to be labeled as refurbished, even though they were new.  I bought one.  I feel like I really dodged a bullet here.

 

[John M. Corbett]

Matthew,
Excellent instructional video!  I just "upgraded" (I use the term advisedly) to Vista and if I had seen this video beforehand, I probably wouldn't be having the problems with it that I am having now.  Highly recommended!
John

 

[Ned]

It'll get smoother, John.  There've been a lot of updates since I installed Vista a couple of months ago.  It is running better and better.  Crashes are a thing of the past now.

I admit I haven't tried copying 15,000 files in one operation to see if they've fixed that...

Some things, like the lack of drivers for my perfectly good scanner, will just not get fixed.  That's life.

Day by day, if you must run any Windows, Vista is becoming a better choice than XP.  Not to mention that, in the long run, you don't have a choice. 

Ned

 

[Dave Ronyak]

I agree that Vista is getting better with passage of time and MS' updates, and there have been a lot of them for security and other issues in the past year.  On my home PC (Dell Inspiron 1505) I am running Vista Home Premium edition.  Some of the continuing annoying/frustrating issues I am experiencing deal with photos.  Sometimes they come through fine on my home PC, and and not on my work PC (Dell Latitude D610 running XP Professional, and soon to be replaced with another Dell laptop running the same XP).  Why is that?  Another issue is limited to the home PC with its wide screen format.  Many times the photos are stretched out in width, thereby distorting them.  Other times, the photos are not.  Why is that and what settings need to be changed to cause the photos to appear with normal proportions.  I note that similar issues can happen with various TV and Cable TV broadcasts and DVDs fed into my widescreen 1080p capable digital TV, but least the manufacturer equipped the remote control unit with a button that enables the viewer to quickly scroll through the various picture size formats so the viewer can quickly decide which one is best.

Dave R.