With the release of Windows 7, companies looking to replace aging Windows XP PCs have an opportunity to use a variety of new tools to run a virtual machineversion of XP co-exist inside the newer operating system.
The trouble, however, is that each virtual machine option has its advantages and disadvantages.
In my latest article for Datamation, I look at using Laplink’s PCover, Zinstall.com, and Microsoft’s own XP Mode solution as ways to bring up a virtual XP machine.
Ever wanted to send someone a text from an email message? Those of us of a certain age that don’t want to do a lot of typing on our phones and are at our computers can use these simple gateways. Just enter the phone number and the rest of the email address here, and it will be sent to the appropriate phone.
ATT number@txt.att.net (no leading 1, just ten digits)
Sprint number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T Mobile number@tmomail.net (start with the number 1 and then use all ten digits)
Verizon number@vtext.com
Amazon may be the world’s largest bookstore, but in the past eight years it has quietly built up a series of more than a dozen cloud-based computing services as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) product offerings.
You can read more about them in my article for ITworld.com here.
So the big news last week was the latest “occupation” for Barbie is a computer engineer, whatever that means (I guess let the perennial hardware versus software debates begin). Maybe it is time to retire that “math class is hard” speech chip once and for all and replace it with some often-used Linux shell commands. Or maybe this should be a lesson for our daughters: persevere past the polynomials, and you too can code. Or design circuits.
Personally, I am glad to seek Geek Barbie, with her hot pink netbook and matching Bluetooth headset. (And what is up with all the different Bluetooth headsets on 24, anyway? Didn’t anyone at CTU’s IT department get involved?) It is about time. We need role models wherever we can find them in the popular culture. And while you might have issues with Barbie’s unrealistic and unobtainable, ahem, dimensions, the fact remains that she has paved the way. Just take a look at the history books:
Barbie joined NASCAR twelve years ago, now we have that hot GoDaddy babe Danica Patrick racing at Daytona this past weekend. And as an astronaut in 1965, she was certainly ahead of Sally Ride nearly two decades later, who incidentally was at Stanford just before my time there. She has already run for President, twice. And last year she came with her own tramp stamp, what could be more hip than that? So she is a bit behind the times in the tattoo department.
Back when I went to college and grad school, in those dark pre-PC days of the 1970s, we didn’t have any girls, let alone ones that looked like Barbie, in the nerd classes. In my dorm at Stanford, it was 297 guys, 3 gals. This was the fabled Crothers Memorial engineering dorm – the dorm that played such a significant role in the early PC era that a Silicon Valley company was named after it (Cromemco Computers). I mean, how pathetic and nerdy can that be? But I digress.
I realize that the male/female engineering mix is changing – at the recent iPhone app dev class that I attended, there were two women out of a class of 20. This semester the breakdown is 4 out of a class of 45. Still not great. So how can we get more women into the computing field? Certainly not by offering hot pink computer cases, although there is something to be said for that.
I think it goes back to elementary school, where we need to encourage basic math and analytical thinking for girls early on. People that turn into great engineers love to take things apart and put them back together and have a natural curiosity about how the world works. I remember when my brother and I were growing up, we were constantly breaking stuff (the difference was my brother could actually fix things (who went on to become a EE) doing this all the time. Let’s destigmatize girls doing this. Barbie is a great first step.
Using an alternative DNS provider, such as OpenDNS or Google’s Public DNS, can improve performance and increase security. It’s worth taking the time to compare your alternatives.
You can read more in my article published today at eSecurityPlanet.com.
Usually, I write about interesting trends and technologies but today my focus should have a lot wider appeal. I have a solution for our economic woes, and it doesn’t involve big taxpayer bailouts of fatcats, misguided tax cuts, or any really big effort to overhaul our financial systems requiring legislation too thick to comprehend by your average Congressperson. It is something that can appeal to Democrats and Republicans, Tea Partiers and Tree Huggers alike.
In fact, it is so simple that you can get it in a sound bite. Here goes:
Let’s ask all businesses to get rid of their payables, and go to net 15 days. Get rid of lengthy payment cycles, and we can stimulate the economy in a matter of a month or two.
When was the last time your company paid their bills quickly? I am thinking somewhere around 2007. We have turned our creditors into lending institutions, unregulated, unwilling and unwary ones at that.
One of the first things that In-Bev did when they took over Anheuser-Busch here in St. Louis back in 2008 was to institute 120-day payment cycles on all bills. They basically turned themselves into the In-Bev Bank, keeping their suppliers’ cash for an extra quarter. It was a neat accounting trick, but it was a dirty one. In one move, they took millions of dollars out of the economy and put it in their new “bank.” That money has disappeared forever. Until now.
By accelerating payment, we move money back into the economy at a time when it is needed. We eliminate our receivables and we can spend more to expand our businesses, or at least make payroll, or build more widgets and deliver more services.
We don’t have to rejigger the already too-complex tax code. We don’t need lots of lobbyists running around telling us what to think. There are no Senators from Midwestern states to hold us hostage for their pet programs or businesses. We don’t need new regulations to prohibit credit swaps and new securities that ten people on Wall Street can only understand. We just need the force of will and determination to make us all a great place to do business once again.
As someone who runs a small business, it hit me that I have no payables to speak of. Of course, receivables are another matter entirely and in the past year I have seen the average payment times get longer and longer, as my clients hold on to their cash. I pay my bills promptly, not that I have much choice when the rent is due or my cable bill arrives. My biggest payable each month for my business is my credit card, and I choose to pay it off when it arrives. Call me a dinosaur, but that’s the way I want to do business. I just wish others would follow.
Call this my hopey-changey kind of stimulus. It might just work.
If you are looking for in-place migration of XP desktops, you could use Laplink’s PC Mover. But if you want to be able to preserve your XP desktop and switch back to it when you need to run an application that doesn’t work on Windows 7, then you should consider Zinstall’s XP7. It creates an XP virtual machine with all of your old apps and files that is just a mouse click away.
This sounds a bit like what Microsoft supports with its XP mode for Windows 7, but not quite. The problem, as you can see from
this Web page on Microsof’s site is that XP mode is only supported with limited “V-chip” CPUs. You also need to reinstall an entire XP desktop on the virtual machine from scratch.
Zinstall works by taking the “windows-old” directory that the Windows 7 installer creates and uses it to rebuild your original XP desktop. It is a neat trick, and I really wanted it to work. But no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get a stable machine from the product, and so I can’t recommend Zinstall until they do some additional quality control.
If you want to experiment, make sure you use a drive imaging tool (I use Acronis or Symantec’s Ghost) to create a backup copy of your XP desktop first. Next, you need to disable your firewalls and uninstall any anti-virus software. Now you install Windows 7, making sure to boot from the install CD and choose the custom in-place install option where it copies the Windows OS and all your applications to that “windows-old” directory.
Once that is done, you can start up Windows 7 and install the Zinstall software. Zinstall actually supports two different migration scenarios: besides the in-place one, the other is to migrate between two different computers. Choose the “only have this PC” and that you are doing an in-place migration and then hit the big GO button as you can see in the screen shot below.
The process will take several minutes to an hour to complete, depending on how large of a hard drive you have. Speaking of which, you want to make sure that you have plenty of extra room to install Windows 7 as well as the working copies of Zinstall’s files too. I would estimate a spare 30 or 40 GB should be enough. You can filter out particular files – like videos and mp3s — that you don’t want to migrate if you are tight on space.
Once this process is done, you can switch back and forth between XP and Windows 7 by clicking on an icon on the taskbar. Booting up your XP desktop will initially take some time – after all, you are loading a new VM here. But once that is done, switching between the OSs takes a second or two. If you have used VMware or something similar this will be very obvious. You leave your existing XP desktop unchanged, with its existing apps (that may not run under Windows 7). Everything on your old XP machine is still preserved, including files and applications. These aren’t migrated to Windows 7 – you have to install new apps now just as you would for any new OS install. This differs from PC Mover, where you give up your older XP machine and migrate it completely over to Win 7. You can even view and access the files on the other OS too, again by clicking on the taskbar icon.
Too bad this wasn’t quite my experience. I began this review trying to migrate the oldest PC that I had in my office, an old XP without any service packs. I couldn’t get the migration to complete without errors, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of my three drive partitions or unused video driver for a card that I no longer had in the PC or some other gremlin. Next I set up my Dell Dimension desktop with a virgin copy of XP with SP2, and got a fresh version of Windows 7 installed on top of it. The Zinstall setup worked just fine until I tried to reboot the PC, and then I somehow trashed the master boot record so all my efforts for the day were lost. After I jiggled my BIOS battery, I was able to get a working drive again and I could start taking complete breaths.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offers both big promises and big challenges for IT managers. On the plus side, the idea of running some of your desktops inside a secure data center has a lot of appeal, particularly to the generation that grew up during the mainframe computing era and wishes to return to those simpler days. Data and applications can be better protected; endpoints can be more easily patched, cloned and supported; and users can access their desktops from anywhere there is an Internet connection and a Web browser.
You can read more about this in my article in this month’s issue of Baseline magazine here.
Remember when your office phone was a solidly built multi-line key system with push buttons for the different extensions? And you had a secretary who would answer all of your calls? It seems so quaint now, like something out of a Tracy/Hepburn movie like the “Desk Set.” (Which for those of you that haven’t seen it, features a plot about a room-sized computer that replaces human workers at the TV station. Amazingly, 50 years ago too.)
The biggest change for office telephony these days is the separating of incoming and outgoing calling plans and how we will use computers instead of an actual phone instrument. Maybe, if we all can get our softphones to work properly.
I am not talking about some Claes Oldenburg sculpture, but the software running on your PC that enables you to make and receive calls. Softphones aren’t new – I recall writing about them in the early 1990s. Sadly, the quality of software development is still akin more to this era than the modern day.
Voice over IP has made calling almost too cheap to meter, to recall a phrase from the 1950s (then it was about nuclear power, and we know what happened to that). That’s why many vendors currently offer unlimited monthly calling plans for their VOIP Service – Vonage ($25), Skype ($3), Google Voice (Free!). What is important to note is that these are all outgoing calling plans. Anyone can call you without any plan, you just need a phone number. Here is where things get tricky.
I have been a happy customer of Vonage since around 2002 or so, using their phone service in three different states and for both home and work. The best part about using Vonage (or any other VOIP phone with a reasonable feature set) is that I can set up what happens when someone calls my number. Right now I have it ring both office and cell numbers simultaneously. This way I just have to give you one number to call me, and I can change cell numbers, or add a new location if I am working someplace for an extended period of time. The next best part about Vonage is that I can do all of this with just a couple of mouse clicks, without having to wait on hold for a Bell business office service rep to try to upsell me with services that I don’t want.
But I don’t really get that many calls anymore, not that I am complaining. Most of the time when I am on the phone it is to interview someone for an article I am writing or to listen to a conference call briefing. Those are calls that I initiate and I don’t really need a physical phone anyway – I much prefer to use a headset connected to my computer, to free my shoulder so I can type in my notes. (Yes, I could use a Bluetooth headset for my phone, too.)
I started thinking that perhaps I could eliminate my office phone line, and swap it for a Vonage softphone, and perhaps save some money in the process. That led me to searching for a softphone that will run on my Mac, connect to my Vonage account, and be reliable. Getting all three criteria has turned into A Project over the past week.
The softphone costs $10 a month. A call to Vonage customer support set up things, and moved my office number over to the softphone account. I thought I was doing well.
Alas, it wasn’t so easy. First of all, while Vonage has its softphone app on both Windows and Mac, the Mac version is a poor cousin and I couldn’t get it to work properly. After spending some time with Vonage tech support, I found out that there are “issues” with it running on Intel-based Macs (which are all recent Macs for the past several years).
Vonage does have a softphone for the iPhone (and Blackberry too), but you need to set up another $25 a month subscription plan. It really is designed to call internationally from your phone and save you on these charges. So it really isn’t the softphone that I am looking for.
There are numerous softphone VOIP software companies, and some even have Mac clients. I have tried a few, and tried to get them configured for my Vonage account, but with no success. There is a lot of poor quality information online, and many of these are smaller companies with no tech support.
What about Skype? Yes, Skype can be considered a softphone (and more, since it does video calls too). The monthly unlimited calling plan is $3, but you also need to purchase an online number for another $3 a month if you want people to call you. All of a sudden, my expected savings are evaporating. I like Skype and have used it for years, mostly for the IM features, and the voice quality is terrific.
How about MagicJack? This is a pretty cool USB device that you can connect to both Macs and Windows PCs, and it will set up a softphone (or you can use a regular phone and wire it to the USB device directly). All for $40 for the first year, and $20 a year thereafter. My one problem with the Jack is that I keep getting people calling me who are calling wrong numbers. Not sure what that is all about. I do get the occasional Skype from someone I don’t recognize but not as often.
And then there are Google Voice and eVoice, a new service from J2 Communications, the people that are behind eFax and jFax. These aren’t quite softphones, but do offer some interesting communications features to manage your telephony, and if I didn’t keep my Vonage number I would probably be more interested in them. Google has also purchased Gizmo Project, which had a really nice softphone that came with a built-in voice recorder, so who knows what will happen to that.
Not having a traditional land-line phone can be an issue, I will admit. But it isn’t usually a problem. So as I transition to a phone-free desk, I think back to the days when I had one of the old Western Electric phones. Maybe I should buy one and just keep it on my desk for old time’s sake while I keep fooling around with my softphones and headsets. If you are interested, check out this site which has all sorts of great info on the golden era when people had to rent, not own their phones, and they still had dials instead of buttons.
As virtualization becomes more mainstream, there are many anticipated developments and advancements on the horizon. Here’s a brief lay of the land, in addition to players you should watch for in the coming year. This was published in Virtualization Review.