Dell announced that it would be offering XP again on home PCs. The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can’t do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled. [...] What happened is, the OEMs revolted in the background and forced Microsoft’s hand. This is a big neon sign above Me II saying ‘FAILURE’. Blink blink blink. OK, Me II won’t fail, Microsoft has OEMs whipped and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed.

First, let’s face it, no one’s marching towards Linux. We’re totally avoiding Linux by backtracking and using Windows XP. People don’t like change and that’s what this boils down to. This shouldn’t even be seen as a failure, it’s really a conflict of interests. Microsoft has an interest in pushing people to move to their newer OS, hardware manufacturers have an interest in seeing that you don’t move; a new OS means a new investment in development. Neither probably has your best interests in mind. Let’s not mistake someone else’s interests for our own.

The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled XP. [...] What did MS do? It dropped the price about 100x or so. I can’t say this is unprecedented, when it made Office 2003 hard to pirate it had to backpedal with the student edition for about $150. This time though, things are much more desperate.

Dropping the price of an OS in China seems like an obvious choice. Clearly the price of Microsoft’s OS was too high, why not drop it and continue to make a profit. Plus, we get people used to paying for software. It’s never really explained why the Inquirer sees this as a failure.

The bottom line; Microsoft is generating a ton of profit.

What you’ll need:

• cwRsync, download and install on your Windows computer.
• rsync, install and make sure it’s running on your linux box

1. Open a command prompt Start -> Run -> cmd
2. Add cwRsync to your windows ‘path’ so that you can run it. Just type this at the command line: path = %PATH%;c:\program files\cwRsync\bin
3. Create the Key ssh-keygen -f /cygdrive/c/ssh_key -t rsa -N '' (please note; this creates your keys in the C: directory)
4. Copy your public key to the server: rsync -e ssh /cygdrive/c/ssh_key.pub username@serverAddress:~/.ssh/authorized_keys You’ll need to enter your username and password
5. Copy your public key into your ssh authorized_keys file: ssh username@serverAddress cat ssh_key.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
6. Test your backup: rsync -avz -e "ssh -i /cygdrive/c/ssh_key" "Desktop" username@serverAddress:folderName This should copy everything on your desktop to the directory named folderName on the server
7. Download and edit the sample batch file
8. Once you’ve edited the sample batch file store it temporarily in the C: directory and run the batch file manually c:\data-backup.bat
9. Set your batch file to run automatically: Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks and click ‘Add a Scheduled Task’. Next -> Browse. Set the schedule and enter your account password to allow the software to run.

I’m successfully using the sample batch file to mirror a music directory on my media server with a desktop computer.

While music is the subject of our conversation; give Chris And The Other Girls a listen. They’re less popular than they deserve to be. I particularly like track 01 Let Go, download it here.

Okay, looks like there’s a freely available open source, GUI wrapper for rsync. Give it a try and let me know what you think. Download and documentation can be found here

Update:
Awesome/Useful comments be sure to read them.
Sorry if you’re comments don’t show up for a while due to spam I have to curate.

If you’re having problems with Windows 7 being unable to create a .ssh directory (see Richard’s problem below). It looks like has a work around.

A lot of long-overdue and much-needed technology has been put into the Vista graphics layer. If you’re developing software, that’s great. But what does it mean for users?

Link via Digg

• When recovering from a hibernate: “Cannot find uxtheme.dll” appears whenever you attempt to run (almost) any program. No matter what you do, you can’t even run Task Manager. What’s worse, a restart doesn’t fix it, and because Windows Explorer also fails to launch with this error, you need to boot from the DVD and use System Restore – Safe Mode won’t work!4
• Failure to establish a network connection. Everything looks OK, but you can’t connect to the internet. Your LAN signal will be there, but the internet just doesn’t work. You must restart to fix it.
• Poor performance: though Task Manager will show normal CPU load, some of the drivers (they don’t appear in TaskMan) will attempt to use 100% of the CPU, resulting in a very laggy PC. You need to restart to fix it.
• No DWM. For no reason, DWM just won’t re-appear. This happens on ATi and nVidia, with or without the latest official drivers from the companies themselves. Manually running “dwm.exe” doesn’t work, you need to restart to fix it.
• BSOD on recovery. This is usually caused by the video drivers, and may or may not indicate something wrong with the kernel itself.
• No sound. Vista goes mute. Nothing you can do about it, no way to revive it, you just have to restart and let the re-done sound-stack load-up the way it should.

See Neosmart for patches and more info.

Link via Slashdot

What does it really do? Long Zheng explains;

ReadyBoost does not improve performance, it only improves responsiveness. It won’t make your system or Photoshop run any faster, but it will make things faster to load and initialize to a working-state.

Skip here for some tests and further explanations.

At Microsoft, one good turn deserves another; Vista’s Complete Backup solution copies the whole drive. That means there’s the potential to overwrite a current XP partition with an out of date backup.

You can find it under Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Snipping Tool.

Looks like Lifehacker is way ahead of me.

Windows Disk Imaging

I’m no authority when it comes to disk imaging and Microsoft’s products. That is not to say that it isn’t needed, only that I haven’t used a Microsoft product in a serious enough environment to need to do that. Mainly I backup files and directories that I think are important and leave it at that. With my new Vista installation and all the trouble that it has been, I’ve decided to make a disk image of Vista’s current state and reinstall from that.

In this article drivesnaphot.de’s latest offering, Drive Snapshot for Windows Workstations Trial version 1.3, gets reviewed.

What’s in a name?

You might already be asking yourself; what’s the difference between Snapshot for Workstations and Snapshot for Servers? The difference, my friends, is in price, and price alone. In other words, there is no difference between the Server and Workstation versions. With the higher purchase price of the Server edition you purchase a license to use Snapshot on a server. You have the choice of purchasing either version as solely as a download for EUR 10 less. As intimated before, I’m testing the trial version which is good for 30 days. As stated on their web site all features are usable for 30 days, after which the ability to backup is disabled. Technically, after 30 days, if you want to continue using Snapshot you must purchase a license.

The Good

• Most notable is the ability to make an image of the partition or drive you are actually using. Meaning, you don’t have to boot from a live disk, or backup installation in order to make a disk image and your normal work flow remains uninterrupted.
• Also included is the ability to restore a single file or directory. You don’t have to restore an entire image just to recover one file or directory. In addition to the normal GUI, there’s a command line interface where you can automate backups.
• Drive Snapshot allows the creation of differential backups.
• Supported file systems include; FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2,EXT3, and ReiserFS. Unsupported file systems are stored in their entirety, ignoring any free space information.
• Since this is a workstation product the folks at drivesnapshot.de don’t expect you to have a server lying around. With this limitation in mind, by default the disk image is broken into several smaller CD friendly files. If the user wants to burn files to a DVD instead of a CD, the option of choosing a maximum file size is available.
• Supported Windows versions include Windows NT 4.0 Service pack 3, 2000, XP, 2003 Server, and even Windows PE. Support for Vista is planned for the near future. My tests confirm that Snapshot does work reliably with Vista.
• The installer is small in size, simple, and takes little time to get up and running.
• The 30 day free trial includes all features. This is a pretty big bonus, the only feature you lose after 30 days is the ability to make backups.
• Optionally, the image can be encrypted using the AES standard with a block and key length of 128-bits

The Bad

• While the program is easy to use, at times online documentation can be sparse and difficult to read.
• It’s not Snapshot’s fault, but for this review we’ll stick the following comment here. Before Snapshot will work in Vista, the program needs to be run with administrative privileges. To be fair, this is to be expected since Windows Vista is not yet supported.
• With Vista restoring to the same disk works well. Restoring to a new disk or partition requires restoring the partition structure. I spoke with the developer of Snapshot, and he is currently working on a fix for this.

Wrap Up

Drivesnapshot.de estimates average image size to be about 50% of the used disk space on a drive. My, quick and dirty test supports the claim of 50% of used space. A 24 Gig partition was split in to a total size of about 12.3 Gigs. Before running in Vista you’ll need to run the .exe with administrator privileges. If you don’t have an available Windows partition to reinstall from, options include DOS boot disks, Windows PE, and Snapshot’s own boot disk (currently you’ll have to pay EUR 10 extra for the disk). The developers are currently working on documenting this feature, but it is possible to create your own Snapshot like CD by downloading Snapshots’ disk image and running a few DOS commands. As a bonus, payment options include Credit or Paypal.

Vista refuses to remember the passwords to network shares. It doesn’t matter if I check the, “remember this password” box or not. Things just won’t work. Thankfully there is a solution; you can tell Vista to remember a password by: Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Manage Your Network Passwords. Addresses for Samba shares should look something like this: “\\MythTV” Enter in the address to the computer you’re trying to access. Hint, if you don’t know the address, access the computer via the “Network” shortcut on your desktop, right-click in the address bar and select “Copy Address as Text,” or “Copy Address.” Paste either of those into the address location field. After you’ve filed the address field, enter the passwords and save out. The next time you restart Vista it should remember saved passwords.