PhatBoyG.com

I’ve been keeping an eye on Apple notebooks for quite a while. While I currently have a 17″ Dell XPS Gen 2 gaming laptop, I find myself using it more for web surfing and software development than I ever do gaming. When you talk about the performance and size of notebooks, the small MacBook and MacBook Pro jump to the front of the pack.

Nothing that Dell offers is as thin as the MacBook line of notebooks.

With the upgrades from Intel coming soon, I’m thinking when the platform reaches the following level I’ll make the change.

• Santa Rosa Platform (DDR2-800)
• 4 GB RAM
• LED Backlight on a 15.4″ display with at least 1440×900 resolution
• Hybrid Flash Disk Drive
• Dedicated Graphics Card (nVidia 8400 or something similar)
• Leopard and Boot Camp
• 2.4 GHz+ Core 2 Duo with 4MB Cache

That would be enough of an upgrade to convince me to switch to the MacBook Pro. I would of course run Windows on it (hopefully 64-bit Vista by that time, if it is ready) most of the time.

So why buy a MacBook to run Windows? Because nobody else makes a 1″ thick, slick looking notebook with the support network of Apple.

Okay, this is in the seriously cool zone. I was working in Visual Studio, when I did a check for updates. It showed that a new video driver for the 6800 Ultra was available (released mid-December). So I figured, what the heck, I could use the FPS, go ahead and install it.

I went about my business in VS2005, working on a project, when the screen blinked to black. I waited a few seconds, then it came back on. I figured it was the driver update being applied and that it was now time to reboot. What? Install successful? No reboot required?

Too damn cool! I gotta give props here MS, that’s a seriously way-cool feature.

The Microsoft Expression suite of tools seems to be coming along. Of course, I can’t make heads or tails of the names since some crack whore seems to have taken over the marketing department and renamed all the products. Blend? That’s something you do to a daquiri, not a user interface (well, unless it’s Corel Draw from the 80′s, that blend feature was cool).

Nonetheless, these tools are going to get your designers into your Visual Studio 2005 workspace directly tweaking the next-generation XAML for your web/application designs with .NET 3.0 so you better figure out how to speak pretty and functional at the same time.

Just another tool in the VS2005 workspace belt. It’s pretty much a known fact in the developer world that anything this is not user-space is VS2005 from here on out. Everything that builds/manages the OS/network is being worked into the VS2005 framework since it is so friendly and easy to use (did I say that?).

Well, since Vista is available, it would only make sense that .NET 3.0 should also be available. It seems that it can be installed on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 in addition to Windows Vista.

No compatibility for Windows 2000, but that might not be a big deal anymore.

Looks like all the .NET 3.0 stuff continues to use the Visual Studio 2005 platform for development so it might make sense to consider .NET 3.0 in your future SmartClient ambitions to get that next generation interface design today.

.NET 3.0 Framework Details Page

You can activate your Quick Launch icons by using Windows+1, Windows+2, etc.

Perfects for those of us that don’t like to grab the mouse unless it’s time to grab the mouse.

Okay, another really cool find in Vista today. Instead of trying to look for the program you want in the Start Menu, you just click the windows key (to open the start menu) and start typing the name of the program you want. The built-in search features of Vista will narrow down the start menu options to include only those that contain the string you typed.

You want to run Word, “type Word” and it lists Word as the default and Wordpad as another option. Just smash the Enter key and you’re loading Word.

It seems to work pretty well, I’m very glad they added that as it’s a great feature for us keyboard cowboys.

Add this in the column of really cool features that you didn’t expect. When you double-click the volume icon, you get a lovely set of mixer pots. These let you adjust the volume of all the running applications, in addition to a master fader. Talk about sweet, you can finally silence IE without diminishing the volume of your iTunes library.

Audio as a whole seems to be handled a lot better in this new version of Windows. It seems like the OS does high-quality audio internally now instead of the nasty KMIXER sampling we had before. Time will tell, however, and more advanced tools come out to check into the details.

My new flash drive showed up today, it’s so much faster than the old one. This one averages around 24 MB/second compared to the old one that was well under 10 MB/second. This one averages under 1ms for access time as well, compared to the very fluctuating values on the old one. I’m pretty happy with it.

PowerToGo sucks though. Not only does it crash under DEP (Data Execution Prevention), it seems to not play as nicely with Vista as it should. It worked fine on the AMD system, but crashed on both Core Duo, Pentium-M systems. So I removed it and replaced it with the open source PortableApps.com launcher and we’re 100% back in business. I just copied the install from my old drive and everything works great (and runs fast as hell too).