Unfortunately, some of these technologies are going to be unavailable to most Mac users for some time. Its one of the disadvantages of Mac ‘s hardware being tightly controlled and locked down by one company, and the relatively slower approach Apple takes when deciding which new technologies are important and when.

Let’s take a look at some of these technologies, why they matter, and how Mac users – especially buyers of Apple’s latest iMacs – are largely locked out of them due to the lack of desktop expansion options common with PCs. In fact, several new models of PC motherboards are already in the channel which, when combined with Windows 7, include complete support for all of them on-board.

USB 3.0

The most important is USB 3.0 To date, modern hard drives have been severely bottlenecked by Firewire and USB 2.0 as convenient external drive connections. eSATA has been a help, but as many users know, eSATA (if Apple even decided to include such ports) can be fussy and its usually easier to just use USB 2.0.

USB 3.0 is about 10x faster than USB 2.0 in the real world, which really lifts the bottleneck off of common external storage. This is a big help especially for Time Machine users who allow Time Machine to back up their Mac frequently.

But there is another great benefit to USB 3.0 also – and that is the extra electrical power it supplies to devices, which makes it such a better choice for external storage over all other methods.

With USB 3.0, it is possible to connect much more power-hungry external drives without a separate power connector or y-cable. As every computer user knows, the fewer cables the better no matter whether where you are, but mobile users will especially appreciate this.

Now, if your notebook – Mac or otherwise – has an ExpressCard port, you will likely be able to add an awkward adapter to enjoy USB 3.0 down the road – but you will need an external AC adapter to supply the extra power it needs which it cannot draw from the ExpressCard slot.

The problem is, there are a lot of very popular MacBooks without an ExpressCard slot out there (mine is one – a 2008 Unibody MacBook) – and iMac users are sadly completely out of luck, as that machine has no PCI Express expansion.

SATA 3.0 6Gbps

SATA 3.0 6Gbps is less important to the average user, but will be a nice feature for power users very soon. The reason is that this month the new Micron C300 SSD will be released which will be the first – but definitely not the last – to exceed the real-world throughput of SATA II.

Since this performance boost is largely delivered by the drive controller, and not the quality of the Flash memory, it is not unlikely we will see more drives at reasonable (relatively, for SSD) prices over the next 12 months.

Again, if you have an ExpressCard slot you may be able to take advantage of this for external storage – but ironically, not for internal storage. In general, due to their price, most users (like myself) prefer to use SSDs as internal boot drives and traditional drives for external bulk storage.

And while we are on the topic of SSD’s…

High Performance Solid State Disks (SSD’s)

MacBook users are not completely locked out of the great performance advantages of the newer High-Performance Solid State Disks. I am writing this on a MacBook with an OCZ 120 GB Vertex SSD right now, its been in their for 9 months with absolutely tremendous performance and zero issues.

However, unlike Windows 7, MacOS is not ‘aware’ of SSDs and treat them as a normal hard drive. This has some drawbacks.

Most important is the lack of TRIM command support in MacOS, which is supported in Windows 7. The TRIM command enables the OS and SSD to negotiate the management of drive space to avoid specific performance issues with SSDs when they start to become full.

Whats important to remember is that the performance hit from not having TRIM support will vary from drive to drive, and will reach a certain point after which it wont get any worse. I have read few anecdotes from people who have observed such a hit that they sold their SSD. I personally have never really observed it on my MacBook, but I have never come close to filling the drive either.

My Windows 7 SSD *is* nearly full, and I haven’t perceived any issue with that drives performance either.

(This is potentially relevant however since most SSD’s are 120 GB or less and are very expensive. As a result, users tend to buy as little storage as they can tolerate, and as a result will typically fill it faster than a $75 1TB Hard Drive.)

Windows 7 will also make other adjustments in how it manages an SSD which involve the disabling of features which were only designed to overcome the performance profiles of a traditional hard disk which are not present on an SSD.

For example, an SSD does not need to be defragmented (and shouldn’t be since you want to avoid unnecessary writes). Other features such as Superfetch, boot and application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive – which are designed to overcome the access time variance with hard drives – are also unnecessary.

These steps are also important to the lifetime of the SSD, since fewer writes = longer SSD lifetime. (In the real world, however, SSD cell write wear is not going to be a problem for most users – and modern SSD controllers can reduce it’s likelihood enormously with wear leveling and write amplification reduction algorithms)

Note: Intel claims that the average user writes about 2-3 GB of data to their hard drive every day, and that in order to wear out an Intel SSD, you would need to write about 100 GB day for the drive to wear out over 5 years. Extrapolating, this means it is more likely you will die before you drive suffers a write-wear failure. So, although SSD cells do in fact have a limited write capacity, its relevance is largely mythical. Compared to the reliability of a mechanical drive, its nearly hysterical.

Finally, Windows 7 will avoid the unnecessary use of unused disk space, properly align the NTFS partitions, eliminate merge operations and prioritize garbage collection (PDF of relevant PPT Presentation).

So, Windows 7 users are going to get better performance and better reliability out of SSDs compared to other OS’s. It really is entirely up to Apple to start taking similar steps.

iMac and Mac Mini users have a special problem with SSDs however, and that is that neither allows the user to (easily) replace the hard drive themselves. I certainly would not recommend any user not familiar with building their own computer crack open their Mac Mini with a Spackle knife, or attempt the challenging and delicate disassembly and thermal sensor handling required to simply change the hard drive in a 27″ iMac.

Also, there is only one drive bay in most Macs, so the preferred desktop strategy of having an SSD boot drive and an HDD mass storage drive onboard is impossible (another reason the iMac would benefit from USB 3.0 – the HDD could be external without the performance penalty).

In Conclusion

Mac users seeking to upgrade should be aware of these new technologies and decide for themselves which are important to them over the lifetime of their next Mac purchase.

Unfortunately, unlike other computer manufacturers and OS’s, Apple keeps its roadmaps under its hat, making an upgrade decision frustratingly difficult compared to PC users. Which makes it the same old game of wait-and-see.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Apple Mac Users Locked Out of USB 3.0, SATA 3.0 6Gbps, and SSD Support

I have always used solid color backgrounds for my Windows desktop, usually something really dark, like a very dark green or blue or even black, to minimize distraction.

It’s also a habit left over from the days when a fancy desktop background consumed precious memory and boot time from Windows.

Well, for some bizarro reason, Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008) has this bug where if you use a solid color background, it stops and twiddles its fingers for a fixed 30 seconds at boot time.

When I read about it, I immediately benchmarked my Windows 7 box, and sure enough, my boot time was 50 seconds with my solid color background, and 20 seconds with Windows’ high-res wallpaper of a giant bale of hay.

Which answers a lot of questions I had about why it was taking so long for a quad-core computer with a high-performance solid-state drive to boot.

Obviously, this problem is easy to fix by using wallpaper – even if its an image of a solid color.

There is also a Microsoft hotfix – but I am not so big on installing a hotfix for something with such an easy workaround, and would rather wait for a fully-qualified update to fix it…

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Windows 7 Solid Color Background = 30 Second Boot Delay (!!)

The worst part of Windows for me is *activation*.

Activation is the secret mojo in Windows which gets all pissy if you change hardware in your computer too often and makes you disgrace yourself by literally making a phone call to Microsoft headquarters and asking their permission to keep using it.

First, you have to read off a painfully long sequence of numbers and letters to an automated voice system. Sometimes the automated lady is OK with the numbers you read off, and sometimes she’s not. If she’s not, then your’e going to get transferred to an call center and read some more numbers ALL OVER AGAIN to a tech. Chances are you will have to do this multiple times as you will be stepping on his words because of the phone delay to India (he’s trained how to avoid this, you’re not).

The third level of hell comes if this guy doesn’t like your numbers. At this point, statistically speaking, you are probably running pirated software. But there are tons of people who aren’t. There just isn’t anyway to be sure.

In my experience, he’s going to ask some questions, but depending on the version of Windows license you have (OEM/Vendor/Retail), how dramatically your hardware changed (reflected in the number sequence), and how often activation has failed before on that product key, he’s going to go ahead and give you a pass.

Which requires – what else – that he gives you another really long sequence of numbers and letters to type into the machine to allow you to use the software you paid for, now that you’ve lost an entire morning in productivity at a cost higher than the price you originally paid for the software.

This week I was swapping some drives around and I got hit with the activation message again. Luckily the automated lady was OK with my numbers and gave me a pass this time. But the fact that I even have to do that for any software is just really infuriating.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Windows 7 Didn’t Fix The Worst Part of Windows

I have used VMWare Workstation on Windows and VMWare Fusion on Mac OS for years.

VMWare an outstanding company and they have great products and support. If you are looking for virtualization software, VMWare is where its at.

Now, about VMWare Fusion 3 – its probably the only upgrade to a VMWare product I have not been immediately happy with.

When Windows 7 came out, I immediately installed the 64-bit version on Boot Camp under Snow Leopard on my MacBook, and then created a virtual machine for it with VMWare Fusion 2, configuring it as a Vista x64 guest.

This worked great.

Days later I heard Fusion 3 came out, with ‘official’ Windows 7 support and a slew of improvements. As a loyal customer, I upgraded immediately for $59.

After install, I converted the Windows 7 VM from a Vista guest to an official Windows 7 64-bit guest and installed VMWare tools (the special drivers you install in windows after you create the VM for better mouse, display, and network support, etc.)

The VM froze up.

Since then the VM has been hit or miss – sometimes it boots, sometimes it bluescreens, sometimes it locks up – sometimes it even locks up my entire MacBook and I have to hit the power button.

My recommendation is to wait and see before upgrading to Fusion 3. If there are issues, I’m sure they will be addressed quickly knowing VMWare’s customer support record.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: VMWare Fusion 3 for Snow Leopard Stumbles with Windows 7 VM Support