Nikhil Dev

I was soo excited the whole of this week about the performance improvement in Windows 7 that I decided to finally take the risk. I downloaded the RC from the MS website, burnt it to a DVD and finally started the installation today. The installation went really fast and smooth. But what annoyed me the most is the installation of the drivers. The problem is not with Windows but with the Dell website. It does not have a complete list of software for the laptop. But I managed to get almost all of them working.

This time I decided to partition my drive. One solely for the OS and the Apps and the other only for all my data. Right now I am in the middle of formatting the data partition so that I can copy all my stuff back. Everything seems to be so zippy on 7. The boot is incredibly fast, no unnecessary notifications, beautiful visuals and I simplete LOVE the new taskbar. It just like the Apple doc.

Will keep you posted more about my finding as I start installing more and more softwares on it.

Right from the time Windows Vista was released I was wondering what would be a GOOD score of Machine assessment. When I bought my Dell Studio 1737, that was the first things that I did. And I am really happy to brag about the results on my blog.

Windows Assessment score of my laptop

Today morning I was convincing myself that I will have to wait just another couple of days to receive my new laptop. But then at around 10AM I received a phone call. The caller said that he was from BlueDart. I knew what it was. I was really excited. I signed the papers and took the box. But the security at the gate would not allow me to take the box inside saying that it was a personal laptop which was not allowed inside. I told myself that I can talk him out of this situation. So I opened the box at the security, checked all the contents and left it with them. I finished my work real soon and left for home by sharp 5:30pm. My first impression? This baby is friggin huge. I weighed almost twice my old Compaq laptop.

I started it up and the screen was enormous, I think I dont have to connect my laptop to the LCD now to watch a movie. Anyway, I set off to do what I usually do on any new computer. Reinstall Windows. This thing came with Windows Vista Premium shipped with it. So I could get all the Aero effects with the 256MB ATI card that was powering them.

Anyway, there is one thing that I havent been able to find on. I saw that a lot of users complained about the reinstallation of Dell Media Direct. They said that you have first install the Media Direct CD which will then take you through the Windows Vista installation. I tried following the instructions but this one came with Media Direct 4 and the CD was not bootable at all. The Vista CD booted pretty well though. So where was I going wrong? I tried contacting the support on chat but they were closed for the day. So I did a little reasearch and found out that in Media Direct 4, there was no longer a seperate partition for Media Direct software. In fact you have to boot the whole of Vista and the only function that the Media Direct button would do was to boot Vista and start the Media Direct software automatically.

So the process is that you have to go with the regular Windows Vista installation process and install the Media Direct software from withing Vista.

But I was really impressed with the performance of the laptop. This baby has some serious firepower in it. I think I can start with my Audio recording and production as well as I get to use this darling to play at a party this Saturday.

If anyone is thinking of getting the Dell Studio 17 (1737) in India or Hyderabad, I would ask you to just go for it. This thing costed me about INR 58,500/- after a few discounts and taxes. The upgrades that I did was to opt for a backlit keyboard and the Creative Audio drivers which I think are worth the money.

Now the interesting part that I noticed just a while ago. I started writing this post after starting the Windows installation on this machine. It’s done now. This baby flies. I think this is what I call “Money well spent”

Do leave comments if you think you need more information on this laptop, its features or its performance.

This is getting more and more onto my nerves. How can thins happend so easily. My work computer had a virus attack and it just would not reboot. Tried everything. In vain. Right now running on an Ubuntu live cd. This is the best things that has happened to the computer world. Just waiting for some money to come through.  Will switch completely to a mac then.

Anyway, the day has been a boring one. Not that much excitement. The work at home is still and its still in a mess. I feel like getting asuitcase of clothes and just stay at the office till its all done. The journey from work to home is pissing off. Got a training in another hour. So will be making it late home.

Have nothing to do right now. Just connected my ipod in ubuntu and listening to some music. Amazingly it works well.

I tried Digsby after reading about it on a website. This is one Instant Messenger that exceeds expectations for me. I dont have a Mac so have not tried Adium that people talk about so much, but I compared Digsby to the features that Adium had to offer and there are hardly that these people have missed out on. Beautiful skinning, ability to reply from the pop up and not have to deal with the main window. Support for almost all the popular protocols, Video chat and many more. What else would you want.

When I tried it, it was open for download for a restricted group. But it is open for download for all here.

It is totally worth at least one try.

P.S: Its available for dowload for all platforms. Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Update(Thanks Mark for letting me know that)

The Mac version of Digsby is not yet available. They have a mailing system setup where you can be intimidated when it is available. I think iChat and Adium are good enough till then

A really interesting and very true to its description graphic.

This has always been my biggest concern. Windows is always an over bloated operating system. For me an operating system needs to be just an empty box. The user should then have the option of filling it up with things.

Just a while ago, Nash sent me this amazing graphics and I burst out laughing in the office.

I am sure anyone who sees this will.

Last week I had a problem, that just drove me mad. This is what happened.

I was defragging my 80Gig iPod, and my desktop at home for some reason froze. I had to hard reboot, but to my horror, all my music, the songs and the videos now do not showup on the ipod. I connected the ipod again and I could see them in iTunes. Even media monkey showed that the music was there on the ipod. The ipod stats also showed that the content was there. Why the hell is the ipod library not able to detect the media. Is it that the library got corrupted. If yes, then there was not way to rebuild an ipod library. So my only solution was to copy all the music off the ipod to my work desktop using Yamipod. After that I had to restore my ipod to factory settings. And then put all the music back on the ipod. I dont use Auto sync. So it was even more tough for me. Things went smoothly until just 2 days back when I connected the ipod again to my home computer. The same thing happened again. All the music appeared to be gone. This time it was nothing that I screwed up. All I did was just update a few albums on my iPod.

This is the time, I had to research on this. I brought out my Compaq 3228AU. Connected my iPod to that and copy just one song to the iPod. Miraculously, the library now showed up on the ipod. So what went wrong??

This is really interesting. What I did not realize was that I had upgraded the ipod firmware from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 which was the latest firmware for iPod 5G and 5.5G. Now when I connected it to my work comp, the iTunes version there was 7.5 whereas the iTunes version at home was 7.3. There is a major incompatibility between the iTunes earlier to 7.5 and the 1.2.2 iPod firmware update. If you want to stick to an iTunes version lesser to 7.5 you should not update the firmware to 1.2.2. If you want to still use 1.2.2 firmware, you better upgrade the iTunes to 7.5. I think this is a nasty way Apple is forcing the consumers to use the latest versions of software.

I have been able to fix this problem after quite some research. If you are having the same problem, do comment. We will try to fix it together. If you have already fixed it, it would be great if you can share it.

Just a simple list of steps to fix this again:-

1. Upgrade to iPod firmware 1.2.2.

2. Upgrade iTunes to 7.5

3. Connect the ipod to iTunes 7.5 once and disconnect. Or just copy one song so that the library is rewritten.

4. Disconnect the iPod.

Voila!!!!

—–Update——

Just today I noticed that apple has released it Firmware version 1.2.3 for the ipod 5Gs. I have’nt  had any problems till now. but just in case there are any surprises, Will surely post.

As usual, when there is nothing to read, there is Digg. I was goin through one of these articles in that and something interesting that I saw there interested me. Microsoft has secretly launched the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp. As for now this is available to only a selected number of users and is possible through a hack. Thats why I thought that I will write some detailed instructions on how this is achieved.

1. Open Notepad and type in the following into it

@echo off
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update – Kudos to nikhildev.com
pause

2. Now save that file with any name like “windowsxpsp3.cmd” . Make sure that you have the double quotes and the .cmd extension.

3. Now double click on that file and let it do its work.

4. Once you have confirmation, log onto the window update website and look for any Windows update available.

5. You will see that Windows Xp Service Pack 3 is one of them listed. Just install that and reboot the computer once everything is over.

Thats all that you need to do to install the new Windows Xp Service Pack. Microsoft says that in the new Windows Xp Service Pack 3, it has included a lot of bug fixes and few features from Windows Vista. I I havent tried any of the features as I am writing this before rebooting my computer. Will keep the results posted about the Service Pack 3 for Windows Xp.

Do comment, if you need help or are stuck in some step.

All this while what I have been looking for in a video playing software is codec support and stability with a lot of features. But just today I came across this WONDERFUL software that adds a whole new definition to what a video player should also do.

This one is called Miro and has been recently released and can be downloaded from http://www.getmiro.com/. The best about this software is that its a complete package fro video lovers. It can play almost any video format from MPG, DivX, 3GP, .MOV and lot more. In addition to this, Miro gives you the option to subscribe to video feeds that services like YouTube and Google Videos offer. So now I no longer have to go to the you tube site to watch a video.

Another awesome feature that Miro has is the ability to download YouTube video to your desktop. Just search up for a video and click on it. The video is downloaded from YouTube to your local hard drive in the .flv format. You can later play this directly from Miro of convert it using some encoder.  I have always been looking for good reliable firefox extensions to dowloaded YouTube videos to the local computer but Miro has made it the easiest. And now that YouTube is allowing higher quality video uploads, you can use YouTube as a Video storage and download them back anytime using Miro.

Go Ahead. Give it a try. I am sure you will love it.