Category Archives: microsoft and google

Mediablather: Are Google’s Best Days Behind It?

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Has Google’s time passed? A recent article in Forbes Magazine suggests that it may have. Google has been unable to combat the Facebook threat with a social strategy that has captured users’ fancy, despite its recent attempts to acquire knowledge in this area.. The company’s stock has been stagnant for nearly three years and its growth rate is slowing. Does this mean Google is over the hill?

In our MediaBlather podcast this week with Paul Gillin, we talk about this and how Google has failed to capture any juice with social media.  You can download the show here.

I have a dream (c. 2010)

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Nearly thirty years it has been and our desktops are still not free. For thirty years, our lives are still sadly crippled by the manacles of frequent crashes and by numerous security problems. Thirty years we have lived on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. We are still languishing in the corners of American society and find ourselves exiles in our own technological land.

So I have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. Windows has to go from our desktops. It is time for Linux and Apple’s OS X to play a more major role, and for Microsoft to get with the program and fix this broken buggy whip.

I say to you today, my readers, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of productivity. I have a dream, that all PCs will live up to their original marketing potential, and free their owners from the devils of DOS and frequent application crashes. I have a dream that one day our desktop PCs, sweltering in the heat of their overclocked CPUs, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and reliable operations.

I have a dream that one day all of my applications will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood and play nicely on my PC, no matter what version of drivers, browser add-ons and video adapter is inside my computer.

I have a dream that your and my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the version of operating system running on their desktop computer, or by which browser they use to access the Internet, but by the content of their Web sites and emails.

I have a dream today.

This is my hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day from frequent reboots, free from infected bot nets, free from crashed applications and inexplicable blue screens and error messages.

How I wish most of us could free ourselves from the tyranny of Windows and have a desktop operating system that didn’t crash frequently, could support our legacy browsers, were easy to install and wasn’t a security sinkhole. Dream on.

Maybe some day we will be able to say “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free of Windows at last!”

I first penned this column eight years ago, in honor of Dr. King’s famous speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial back in August 1963. I thought you might enjoy the column, as my way of showing my respect for his memory and fantastic oratory. Sadly, I had to change very little of the text between then and now.

Tom’s Hardware: Visual Studio 2010 for Serious Web-Based Apps

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After parts of it were in>beta for almost a year, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 is now available for download here and purchase in a variety of versions. Visual Studio 2010 runs on all versions of Windows since XP with SP3. It contains a long list of innovations and improvements, not the least of which is full support for multiple monitors. The full kit takes up more than seven gigabytes on your hard drive, and installing it is very easy, almost a one-click process as it loads the dozens of supporting tools and interfaces.

You can read the entire review here on Tom’s Hardware.

ITworld: XP to Windows 7 migration: 6 tools to help you make the move

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If you skipped the big upgrade to Vista you can now consider yourself fortunate that a number of vendors have stepped up to help you migrate your desktops from XP to Windows 7. Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to make the move from XP without some pain and suffering, but does have one tool that can automate the process, along with at least five other vendors.

In a story I did for ITworld, I review the tools here.

eWeek: SmartDeploy Eases Windows 7 Migration

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If you’re looking at better ways to automate your Windows 7 deployment, you might want to consider Prowess’ SmartDeploy Enterprise. This is one of numerous tools that enable collections of PCs to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. You can see other articles that I have written about this and other tools on my Windows 7 page here.

And you can read the full review that eWeek published here.

Making the move to Windows 7

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If you are still running XP on your desktop, like me, you may be thinking about upgrading to Windows 7. XP is getting long in the tooth, many newer programs (especially those from Microsoft) aren’t easy to run on it without a lot of effort, and you can’t upgrade Internet Explorer if you are interested in sticking with Microsoft for your Web browsing.

Of course, you may just want to stick with XP until your aging PC emits its last dying gasp and then just buy a new PC with Win7 already on it. That can be fine for some people.

But if you do want to upgrade, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy. The only way you can install Windows 7 is to wipe your disk clean and start with a fresh install. While this is appealing in a spring-cleaning sort of way, it may not be what you want to do. What they call an “in-place upgrade” – meaning that you can preserve your files, your applications, and your other customized settings – will only work if you are upgrading from Vista.

I have tested six different products that enable this migration directly from XP to Win7, and each has its good and bad points. Which product will work for you depend on a few different factors. Two of them are ideal for single PCs, or maybe up to ten individual PCs, but not for bulk migrations if you are planning on doing this across your entire corporation. These are Zinstall ($89) and Laplink’s PCmover ($20 to $60). I was initially attracted to Zinstall because it offers a very elegant solution: you create an XP virtual machine that can be summoned at the push of a button while running Win7 on your desktop. Inside this VM, you can add new apps or do anything that you would do with your regular XP PC. The only problem is that instead of running two operating systems I ended up running a useless piece of metal with no operating systems, because of something that was wrong with Zinstall’s install. Laplink’s software converts things as you would expect, so you can’t go back to XP once you have done the upgrade.

The other four tools are Microsoft’s Windows Automated Installation Kit (free), the Dell/Kace Kbox 2100 hardware appliance ($4500 for 100 PCs), Viewfinity User Migration (free while in beta), and Prowess’ SmartDeploy ($2000 per enterprise-wide license). Each of them has similar processes, because you aren’t really keeping XP around, just the hardware it is running on. The trick is preserving enough of your user’s footprints to make it feel like home. They work as follows:

• The tools start out with a fresh copy of Windows 7 as a master image.
• The entire machine is reimaged with Windows 7 — just without you having to sit in front of it while the bits are put on the machine from a standard install DVD.
• Next, they stir in the particular applications that you want to deploy across your enterprise. This gives you the opportunity to clean house and create a more managed environment, which may not be what your end users want to hear, but gets back to that spring cleaning sentiment mentioned earlier.
• Each tool has ways to deal with the variety of hardware configurations that you place the image onto, and some make it easier to copy the user application settings and data files over to the new world of Windows 7.
• Finally, you send forth the image to your desktops and have them reboot with the new copy of Windows 7.

Sounds complicated? Yes, it is harder than jamming a DVD into your drive and letting it do its thing for an hour or so. But if you get the tool working properly, you can do a massive upgrade in a matter of a few hours, no matter how many PCs you need to touch.

What do I recommend if you have dozens of PCs to upgrade? I would start with either SmartDeploy or the Kbox. Both handle things somewhat differently, and you are going to want to read and watch my reviews to understand some of the issues.

If you are in Chicago next Thursday evening May 20th, you are welcome to come by the Chicago Windows User Group meeting where I will be speaking about this topic and showing how to use each product in a little more detail. Email me privately if you would like to meet up.

If you want to read more, go to a page where I have links to the various articles and video reviews that I have done for sites such as ITexpertVoice.com, SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com and CIOupdate.com. You can go to links on each of the reviews on all six products here.

Don’t worry, the videos are just a couple of minutes long. Good luck with your own migration.

SearchEnterpriseDesktop: Understanding Windows 7 migration tools

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Many businesses that skipped upgrading to Microsoft Vista are considering moving to Windows 7. While migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 is no easy task, there are several tools — from Microsoft as well as third-party vendors — that can  help.

In this story and accompanying screenshots, I review the options.

ITExpertVoice.com: How to Use Microsoft’s RemoteApp:

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Windows Server 2008 introduced a series of programs called RemoteApp that appear as if they are running on a local computer, even though they are accessed remotely. With Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, these programs can be grouped along with entire virtual desktop sessions, and both can appear in the local Start menu of your desktops. It is a pretty neat trick.

You can read the full story here.