It seems to be rarer and rarer that software actually works as it claims so I guess this has been a fairly lucky week for me.  Late last week Jason’s laptop hard drive started to fail.  He got the critically important data off but didn’t have time to get all his other media (like pictures, video, music, etc).  So he asked if I could do what I could to get that media off.

I started fairly simply by putting his old drive in an external enclosure and connecting it up to my XP machine.  XP wouldn’t even mount it, it would just hang until I unplugged it.  At this point I knew this wouldn’t be easy so I booted into Ubuntu to see what I would get.  Well after messing around with Ubuntu for a while I dediced to try out HDD Regenerator since Joel had heard good things about it.  Man am I glad he suggested it.

According to the HDD Regenerator site it has the ability to repair physical bad sectors on the disk using reverse magnetism.  I was skeptical to say the least but as it also promised that it would be non-destructive I didn’t have much to lose.  I started it up and went home for the day (it must have taken at least 8 hours to scan the 100GB drive).  When I got in this morning it told me it was finished and had found and repaired only one bad sector.  I thought that can’t be right, that it’s clearly more than one bad sector that’s keeping it from mounting and hanging Windows.  Well I was wrong and it was right.  The machine booted right up like nothing had ever been wrong.  I quickly plugged in an external drive and started grabbing the data off, all the while grinning ear to ear.

So thank you HDD Regenerator you make me look like a hero.  Now if only Microsoft could do the same from time to time…

If you’ve been following my blog for a bit you’ll know that we haven’t had the greatest time with Windows Vista so far.  For a while now I’ve been holding out hope that SP1 will resolve many of the issues we’ve been facing (specifically performance).  I’ve been reading the rumor that SP1 would be released on February 15th.  This is good given the amount of issues we’ve had.

Now today I read that while it’s done and being released to manufacturing today, they aren’t going to release it to the public until sometime in March.  What?  Why on earth would they do this.  They’ve got fixes ready to go, no more testing, no more changes but they are going to purposely delay the release until March.  This is ridiculous.  If it’s ready it’s ready – POST IT.  I can understand if they only posted it for tech professionals or to MSDN and didn’t push it through Windows Update but they aren’t even doing this.

Microsoft you just keep making this hard on me and this time for no good reason (or none that I can see).  Why am I even having to think about this, it should just be out.  And it better rock.  I guess if it doesn’t I’ll just upgrade everyone back to Windows XP…

If you read my blog I’m sure you know I’m no fan of DRM.  I have no problem with the underlying goal of keeping people from profiting from piracy but in general I believe that DRM simply makes things more difficult (or costly) for regular consumers.  While I’m not really a regular consumer and am pretty out on the fringe when it comes to digital media I’m doing what everyone else will at some point.  So why did DRM cost me $85, I’m so glad you asked…

This weekend my new Bluray drive finally showed up and I sat down to install it.  Everything went great with the hardware install (took about 20 minutes to physically install it) so I quickly moved to install the software.  Once I got that installed and going I popped in my first Bluray title and sat back on the couch ready to be blown away ready to be disappointed.  And disappointed I was.  The disk started to play and the FBI warning came on screen (since I must be a criminal).  A few seconds later an error message popped up which lead me to a tool to test my system for Bluray support.  I ran the tool and it found only one problem, my video card doesn’t support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) – DRM.  So while my system runs great, my current video card works perfectly and looks beautifully AND everything I’m trying to do is perfectly legal (I’m not ripping, stealing, etc) I’m screwed.  I’m trying to play a disk that I rented in a machine that I own in my own home.  And because someone somewhere is afraid I’ll try to capture a digital stream of the 30GB movie as I watch it I have to get a new video card.  This is utterly ridiculous.

So thanks to DRM I still am unable to enjoy the $250 Bluray player I bought with the Bluray disk I rented.  I completely understand I’m out on the fringe here doing this in Windows Media Center, my point is if DRM is going to stop me from doing something that should be totally legal then how is this ever going to work for normal consumers.  The answer is it isn’t which is why we’re all seeing DRM slowly fall away.  Too bad it couldn’t have happened sooner, I really wanted to use the stuff I bought to entertain me, not give me another reason to bitch.

I should really just rename my blog to “Ramblings from a guy that wants to love Microsoft but is having a really hard time doing so”. So yes here is my “stupid Microsoft” post of the day…

A friend of mine in the Netherlands (thanks Wim) just sent me a great link to a tool on Microsoft’s site. Its a tool you can download called Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit. It does just what the name says, it keeps Windows Update from automatically installing new service packs as they come out. Now first I do think this is actually a good tool, it’s the why it’s a good tool that’s the problem. As readers here know we’ve definitely had our issues with Windows Update. It reboots you in the middle of work without much warning and the updates fail – a lot. It’s generally a pain in the ass. Managing corporate desktops you want to know everything that’s happening with them and have full control over that experience so I see that this tool could be great for many shops (including mine).

Here’s the problem. We shouldn’t be scared of a service pack. Microsoft, the largest software company in the known universe has had over a year to get Vista SP1 and XP SP3 out the door. They should be amazing. They should rock. It should have me posting “thank you Microsoft, Vista rocks now”. Instead they are already admitting they could fail. “Hey we know this might suck so here’s how you keep from installing it”. My guess is that Apple has never even contemplated such a tool. Why would they? People rush to install their updates yet are scared to death to install ones from Microsoft (me included in that). Why is this Microsoft, why?

Again I ask “Microsoft what are you doing to me”. Please stop making it hard for me to support you in our office, please?

Why Microsoft, why do you hate me? Why do you want me to switch to OS X or Linux? Why do you do what you do? Why am I here once again ranting about Vista? Well because you obviously hate and distrust me…

Everyone likes to bitch about DRM technologies and while I’m no different this situation is. Activation. Why on earth do we put up with this shit. We don’t have to from OS X or Linux but because of your monopoly position we have to with Windows. I’ve wasted countless hours on the phone activating Windows, I think I die a little bit each time I have to call. Why do I have to call? Well even though we bought a volume license edition of Vista we are still limited to the number of activations. I bought more licenses than we had computers so this would be easy for the future. But because of the number of times I rebuild PC’s I hit this limit extremely quickly, well over 10 months ago.

So why specifically am I ranting today? Well Brad brought me his new Macbook Pro so I could figure out what is wrong with Parallels on it. I boot into Vista using BootCamp and everything is just fine, Windows is all activated and everything works great. I boot into Vista from Parallels (same BootCamp partition) but I’m greeted with “An unauthorized change was made to your license”. I get two options, validate and continue. Validate takes me to a page on Microsoft’s site telling me my license is invalid (which it most certainly IS NOT) and gives me PAY OPTIONS FOR PHONE SUPPORT! What, I have to fucking pay to get you to let me use the software I already paid for?!? And it gives me some options to try to repair it – the issue is this all happens before Windows loads so I can’t do anything!!! Oh and that continue option, yeah, that just logs me off and starts the cycle all over again. So right now I’m pretty much screwed…

So to you Microsoft today I just say fuck you. I am not a thief, I am not a liar, why must you assume that I must be? Apple you must love these guys, they are making your life easier every day aren’t they? Now if you would just create a true Exchange competitor so we could get away from these assholes all together I’d appreciate it…

Here I am again bitching about Microsoft again, why this time? Because they have decided to add DivX support to the XBox360 – finally. Then why am I complaining? While they have added DivX support they’ve chosen not to support DivX inside Media Center extender on the XBox360. What? Huh? Why would they do this?

For those of you that don’t use Media Center (I’d assume everyone reading this) let me explain the issue here. There are 2 ways to use an XBox for video – the first is through the standard XBox360 interface. You can go to the media section and stream content from Windows Media Player on a XP or Vista box. This is very cool for people that just have a few photos, MP3′s, or video files they’d like to play on their TV. In the past DivX support wasn’t included here so you either had to per-convert your files or transcode them on the fly – neither a good solution. So the recent news that Microsoft was going to be adding DivX support was very welcome for someone like me who has tons and tons of DivX video (DivX is easily the most popular video codec on the net right now). The second way to get video/music/photos out of an XBox360 is to set it up as a Media Center Extender – this acts as a frontend to a Media Center PC by bringing that interface to your TV through the XBox360. They’ve been doing this for years and in general it works great, you get almost the same experience on the XBox360 that you would on a Media Center PC – with a few exception. One of those exceptions is DivX support (and a few other codecs and features).

So the news that Microsoft would support DivX on the XBox360 was very exciting to me as I could stop using my Media Center PC (that can be flaky, like most Vista boxes) and start using my XBox360 for all my video. Nope, Microsoft has screwed me again – they’ve, in typical fashion these days, done a half ass job of supporting the standards. Why would they do this? Why would they leave the early adopters, the ones that have shelled out the cash for a full Media Center PC/XBox360 out in the cold? Really, I’m asking? Microsoft care to answer? Nope, didn’t think so.