Matt’s Desk: Editor’s Blog

I love Hulu.  But confined to a web browser, the service has somewhat limited utility. 

Now, Hulu is available as a stand-alone application on Windows and the Mac OS.  This app is not only beautiful, it’s very functional and makes it easy to watch full TV show episodes, clips and movies without bothering with a browser.

Connect your PC or Mac to your TV and Hulu Desktop really comes alive.  It works with remotes (assuming your computer has one) which allows you to move through menus, make selections and more, all without mousing or keyboarding.  It’s video on-demand in a user friendly package – and it’s 100% free.

I’ve been using Hulu app for a few hours and so far, not a single problem; if that changes, I’ll let you know.

If you’re a fan of the service, download the desktop version and give it a try yourself.

In a move that seems nothing short of madness, it looks as though Microsoft is planning to sell Windows 7 for a higher price than its current OS, Windows Vista. 

According to CNet, Darrel Ward, a Dell marketing executive, stated that the average price of Win7 retail licenses “are more expensive than they were for Vista.” What?!

Excitement for Windows 7 – due in large part to the myriad complaints (valid and trumped-up) directed at Vista – is pretty significant.  I had thought Microsoft would charge less for 7 in the hopes of bolstering the excitement, clearing Vista off its radar as quickly as possible.

But if this report is true and Windows 7 will cost more, it will keep a certain number of people from adopting the new operating system.  Mr. Ward thinks “it’s naive to believe that you can increase your prices . and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them.”

Uhhh. You think? 

Windows 7 is great; I’ve been using it for months and continue to be impressed.  But if Microsoft wants to push Win7, they need to wise up and offer it for not just less than Vista, with deep discounts. 

If you have an iPod, Windows Mobile Smartphone, iPhone or just about any other portable music player, you’ve undoubtedly seen a generic music note icon displayed when cover art is not available for the current song.  This may matter to you about as much as the number of molecules in a drop of water, but if you’re like me, that blank icon really annoys the heck out of you.

Even if it shows up in music software like iTunes, cover art isn’t necessarily embedded in your audio file.  So, if you take that file and play it in other software, or on another computer, smartphone, MP3 player, etc., you’ll get the aforementioned music note.  What you want is album art that lives inside the audio file itself.

Annoyed as I am by this, I’ve found a couple of useful solutions for embedding album art in your audio files.

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I recently wiped and restored my main office PC; I do this a couple of times a year to keep everything running quickly. One indispensable tool in the reformat-and-restore toolbox is the external hard drive.

But they’re not only fantastic for backup and restore; they’re great for adding portable storage to any desktop or laptop, providing extra storage for video, music, documents, and project files.

I’m looking for a bigger USB external hard drive to replace my WD MyBook 500GB model.  What I’ve chosen in the Iomega Prestige 34275 1TB drive, which is not only damn sexy (yes, I’m describing a hard drive as sexy) with its brushed aluminum case, but it’s also one of the least expensive 1TB models available.  Add to that its glowing user rating on Amazon and the Iomega Prestige is a real winner.

In case you’re new to the TB acronym, a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes or or 10^12 (1,000,000,000,000) bytes.  If you need a little more space, there’s also a 1.5TB version of the Iomega Prestige.

Now the only question is, do I order two?

One of the first things I did after I received my new MacBook 13.3″ Unibody notebook was upgrade the RAM and hard drive.  The 2.4GHz unit that is $1599 (MSRP) comes with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250GB hard drive.  I wanted to double each of these.

Upgrading your MacBook does not void the warranty; this is a myth. Apple provides, quite openly, instructions on how to perform each of these upgrades.  Just know that if you make some horrible mistake while upgrading, this will make Apple less willing to help you!

I doubled the capacity of both the hard drive and the RAM: 250gb -> 500GB hard drive and 2GB -> 4GB DDR3 memory.  These two upgrades cost $157 – from Apple the memory upgrade alone would have been $100 (I paid about $65 for mine), and Apple doesn’t yet offer a 500GB drive option. With the extra 2GB of memory and a doubling of the storage space, my MacBook is really rockin’. 

The upgrade components I used were:

• Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 2.5″ SATA Hard Drive
• Crucial CT2KIT25664BC1067 2×2GB DDR3 SODIMM

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I upgrade laptops every 18 months or so; I do this for two reasons: (1) so I can get the most money for my old laptop since it’s not too behind the times, and (2) so I always have a laptop that’s zippy and up-to-date. 

This year I chose the MacBook 13.3″ 2.4GHz Unibody. 

This isn’t my first Mac; I’ve had a 12″ PowerBook, one of the first Intel MacBooks and an iMac or two over the years.  But I chose the MacBook over the Dell XPS Studio 13 this year for several reasons.

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As you probably know, high-end versions of Windows 7 (due later this year) will support an add-on called “XP Mode,” a Virtual Machine which will  run applications designed for Windows XP right alongside  other apps in Windows 7.

This step was taken primarily to make Windows 7 more attractive to businesses, which often rely on years-old software that will run in XP, but not in Vista or Win7.  This is a welcome feature in itself, but I’m more interested in what this could mean for future versions of Windows.

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If you’ve ever sent multiple files to a single recipient, chances are you’ve created a ZIP file.  Even if you’ve never created one yourself, you’ve almost certainly received or downloaded one. 

I’ve downloaded thousands of ZIP files over the years, but in the past few months I’ve begun to notice more and more multiple-file downloads distributed not as ZIP files, but as RAR files (with filenames ending in .rar). Like ZIP archives, RAR files are mules, designed to compress multiple individual files into a single file for distribution or download. 

Unlike the ubiquitous ZIP format, however, Windows doesn’t have the native ability to open or extract RARs, and chances are, if you ever download one, you’ll have no way to open it without downloading new software.

WinRAR is the most popular utility for dealing with RAR files, but it’s $29.  If you’re not up for spending thirty bucks to open a single file, check out IZArc.  The software handles RAR files quite nicely, as well as ZIP, BIN, TZ, CAB, ISO and ARC files, just to name a few.

For users who are no stranger to archive file types, IZArc also offers useful features like drag-and-drop support, Windows Explorer integration, AES encryption, multi-volume split/merge, disk spanning, and more.  I like IZArc so much, I’ve made it my default Windows program for dealing with all archive files.

Matt