Hardware Geeks

For the past few months and in particular these past few days, whenever I see an article about the Microsoft PC Hunter ads, there are countless comments to the article that say “Oh they aren’t factoring in the cost of the 975 dollars in Software you have to buy with a new PC”.

99% of the time the person who made the comment has a username of MacAddict, OpenSourceGuru or LinuxLover and 98% of the time they end up promoting Linux and OSX or both at the end of their post.

For example of what I mean, check out this Reuters article. Just read the comments.

Microsoft comfirmed today that they plan to open some Microsoft stores near Apple stores by the fall, and more in 2010.

Since the launch of Vista Microsoft has been trying to gain a more visable presense in retail stores around the US. What they have done is add kiosk in retails stores like Best Buy and Target and also hired people to man the PC Sections of big computer stores on behalf of Microsoft these employees are known as Microsoft Gurus. So its really no surprise that Microsoft has decided to open up stores on their own.

With the release of Windows 7 expected in October, the opening of stores this fall is a given and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are lines outside these stores the night before the launch.

Last year Yahoo attempted to screw their small business customers into paying $34.95 a year for their domain, the renewal fee prior to that was just $9.95. Yahoo said they wanted to cater to small businesses as the reason. Total BS but then again Yang ran Yahoo into the ground.

Any how, I had read complaint after complaint from people having issues transferring out their domain from Yahoo to Godaddy or any other domain registrar for that matter, and as our daughter site CellRants.com was registered with Yahoo I thought I would have problems transferring out. Well I didn’t. It took a total of 4 days to get my domain transferred from Yahoo to Godaddy, and both Yahoo and GoDaddy made the process easy.

Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of talk about a possible UAC (User Account Control) flaw in Windows 7. Microsoft stance on the issue kind of implys they don’t think the flaw is a flaw and have gone as far as to say it’s by design.

If you are a Vista user, you probably are familiar with UAC, if not UAC is basically a prompt that alerts you that a program is installing or alerts you if some program is doing something suspicious. While I like UAC some complained that it was annoying, and Microsoft wanted to make UAC less annoying in Windows 7.

The problem is, if you install malware on your Windows 7 system that Malware can disable UAC with out alerting you. That in my opinion and the opinions of others like Mary J Foley, Long Zeng and Rafael Rivera is a huge problem.

I am in the need of a new TV, and have been looking for a new TV since about early September. But times are tough and I have put the TV on the back burner, as it’s a want and not really a need. However if a deal comes by that is too good to pass up I will buy a new TV.

So today I thought that too good to pass up deal had come by, Sharp sent me an email telling me they were having a Customer Appreciation Sale that started today and ended the 23rd of January 2009. I was excited checked out the TV’s saw the prices and well the price was still too high for me. But since I thought it was a great deal I forwarded it on to a friend of mine.

I recently updated my CPU and Motherboard and the entire process went well. After booting up Vista installed the needed drivers and I was back up and running in a matter of 5 minutes.

However when I tried to play music or a video, Windows Media Player would now lock up, I would then get an error that said “Media sharing is currently disabled, either because the service is not running or your firewall settings have changed.”

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and for two days I did everything I could think of to fix the problem. I even updated my copy of Vista to Vista Sp2 (beta) but that did not fix the problem either. 

This past Black Friday, Microsoft ran a promo I told you guys about on their Live Cashback Site. The promo offered 40% cash back on all of your HP purchases during a 12 hour period on Black Friday.

Well just like the Dr. Pepper debacle, Microsoft couldn’t handle the demand, their server began to act funky and people were unable to take advantage of the promotion they promised to them.

HP who had no part in the promotion, just that they were the company Microsoft offered the promotion with felt bad at this, and sources from both HP and Microsoft had told me they were working on a deal to bring back the offer, and from my understanding HP was even going to help out.

Update: I have spoken with Lexmark about this problem and the cause of the problem was other wireless printers on my network. Once I disabled those printers I was unable to duplicate any of the problems. Lexmark says there is a software fix for this from Microsoft and they will be sending me that information so that I can share it with you guys.

Yesterday I got the Lexmark X4995 Professional, a wi-fi all in one printer, scanner copier. I will bring you guys and gals a full review on it in a week or two, but I just had to bitch about the software and set up process now.

First unless you have a WPS enabled router you can’t install the printer onto your network with out connecting it to a computer first, this kind of defeats the purpose of it being wireless but with more WPS enabled routers being made every day that will become a non issue.

However the included software, even if you don’t install the majority of the add-on software, it takes forever to nstall.

After waiting 5 months, we finally have some more Ultimate Extras from Microsoft and this time it looks like it’s worth Downloading.

Microsoft is spinning it as 3 new Ultimate Extras but it’s really just one, as the 2 others are basically added content for DreamScene and the new Ultimate Extra. So what exactly is the Ultimate Extra? A game called Tinker, a game that Microsoft didn’t even develop a third party did.

Ultimate Extras has become such a big joke, that Microsoft isn’t even developing for it they are hiring third parties to. Let’s just hope this “Ultimate Extras” scam is not in Windows 7.