It follows a lengthy legal battle in Europe which has seen Microsoft accused of anti-competitive behaviour because it bundles Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. This means that many computer users don’t realise there are alternative browsers available — amusing given that many users don’t really appreciate what a ‘browser’ really is.

Us geeks have been switching in droves to alternatives such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, but most ‘standard’ users have stuck with IE out of ignorance.

It’s interesting that Apple, though having a significantly lower market share, hasn’t been officially questioned over its bundling of the Safari browser with OS X.

Windows users who have already switched to another browser won’t be presented with the list of options, which includes Avant, Chrome, Firefox, Flock, Green Browser, K-meleon, Maxthon, Opera, Safari, Sleipnir, Slim — and Internet Explorer of course.

Who’ll benefit the most from this? Browser manufacturers, most likely, and IT helpdesks. For those of us who are unpaid technical support for friends and relatives, it may be a potential headache but at least it forces the issue that it’s generally a good thing to switch away from Internet Explorer.

Whether my mum and dad are going to suddenly dive into using Firefox is another matter — I doubt it somehow.

Interestingly, the list of choices will be randomised to a certain extent, with the big five (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE) appearing in random order on the first section and the other seven randomly spread out below.

What do you think of this move?

Via

Having been subjected to various personality tests in the past, I was glad to find this simple chart that shows you what type of person you are based on the operating systems you predominantly use.

It looks like I’m an “Artsie” (be careful how you pronounce that) though at one time I could have been a graphic designer, or just a plain loser.

Do you fit with this diagram? Pity the Windows users it seems (and just think, you invented it)

Via

Seems that the following graph, though not comprehensive, arrives at one stark conclusion: your choice of operating system is irrelevant when it comes to…

…watching porn:

Via

This reminds of my bitching every time I need to restart Windows Vista on my gaming desktop, and think ‘What part of _only download but let me chose when to install the updates_ don’t you understand when I see that exclamation mark on the shutdown button.

I don’t particularly follow the mobile phone market unless they are made of Lego blocks, but yesterday I followed the releases over at MWC. Mainly to see what Windows 6.5 would look like and in the hope of more information around the Palm Pre.

For once I must admit that the Redmonders finally got something right with WM6.5. The honeycomb setup for the phone’s homepage looks attractive and most of all usable. That must be a first for Microsoft!
Even though the background of choice too dark is and Windows Mobile still fugly looks with the humongous status bar and its icons, it certainly looks thousand times better than any open source attempt, because no matter whether as full blown distro or on a phone, Tux products always manage to look horrible thanks to their love for thick borders/line on everything.

Obviously nothing beats the looks of today’s most popular and loved phone.

Much has been said about the 7 different editions Windows 7 will be released in. As usual this was a typical example of bloggers complaining just to complain. Things actually are much simpler and we here at Forever Geek will simplify the choice for you and explain why Windows 7 needs different editions.

There are only 3 versions that matter for the consumer

And one probable nuisance for most bloggers.

The most important editions are Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Home Professional. Microsoft has decided to drop the Business label for the XP-known Professional label in a try to simplify the choice for the customer. Differences between both editions are almost the same as in the XP era with Professional having all the features from the Home edition, plus network capacities (join a Windows domain), group policy based management tools, Remote Desktop host capabilities, network-based backup features, and support for the Encrypting file system.

As with XP you will decide for any of those depending on if you run a small network or not. These two editions will be the ones you find on the shelf (in the Western world) and more than 90% of the users will opt for any of those. It’s that simple.

Home Premium edition will be installed on almost all of the PCs you buy at the retailer. I certainly hope that thanks to the Windows Anytime Upgrade program there will be the option to buy your PC with Home Premium or Professional for a supplementary fee. I can perfectly imagine a first login screen with ‘Did you purchase the Professional upgrade? Enter your key here‘ option.
That probably just is wishful thinking from my part.

As with Windows Vista there will be an Ultimate edition. This version is only available on the OEM market or as an upgrade and is nothing more than the Enterprise edition (mainly better encryption options) for the home or small business user.

These are basically the only versions which the regular user will have to work with, chose between. If it weren’t for one edition which will be pushed on users with netbooks.

Windows Starter. Windows starter is restricted to the OEM market and comes with features such as missing Aero UI tweaks and limited to 3 simultaneous applications. For most netbooks users this will be enough because most of time all they need is their web browser, Outlook in the background and maybe an Office program or a media program. But bloggers will grab the occasion to complain about the restriction to 3 programs and the incompatibility with our NADD. Still I think for a majority of the netbook market this edition will be good enough and will have to be good enough as it will come with almost every netbook with Windows.

The last two editions are actually of very little concern for the Western market as they won’t be available to the consumer. Windows 7 Home Basic will only be available to emerging markets and Windows 7 Enterprise is only available for volume license customers. One surprise with the Enterprise edition is that it contains all the features of the Professional version, even the Media Center. As a former system administrator in a building with more than 3000 network clients I certainly wished Enterprise came without Media center, just like Vista Enterprise, because most employee procrastinate too much already. *big grin*

So is this line-up that difficult? Maybe if you can’t decide between these 3 versions, yes Home Premium is what you need or just stay away from the computer.

Should Windows 7 have gone the same way as Mac OS X, only 1 version?

Maybe, although I think there should be a difference between the enterprise and home market (see above). We have seen the disaster with Windows Vista and ‘Vista Capable’.
There is no doubt that for many older computers Vista Basic was the ‘saviour’.
In the era of multiple computers at home there should have been no Home edition and it is perfectly imaginable that the installation process has a built-in feature-checker, installing the appropriate version. But imagine the bitching! Mac users (and I have become one of those) are a special breed and they have a much bigger tolerance to errors than most other users. And I still want to see the first Mac network with 3+k network clients.

When I think of my own PC habits, rarely ever do I use less than 1.2GB of RAM in Vista (Enterprise). So yes it would be sensible for me to feature restrictions when on less powerful machines.
Actually I think there should be one more edition: Starter Professional. A Windows 7 version for netbooks without the 3 simultaneous programs restriction and with network capabilities, but without Aero and without Media Center. The perfect option to give to any employee, whether on a netbook or on their desktop PC.

So you might be wondering who would be so mad that he would be willing to give that much money away…take a guess?  You probably didn’t have to think much.  Who else would be so affected by a worm?  The software giant, Microsoft, has always been prone to attacks from such malware and sees the Conficker as a “criminal attack.”  According to George Stathakopulos of the company’s Trustworthy Computing Group, “people who write this malware have to be held accountable.”  Hence the reward for whoever could find the person behind the worm.

I doubt that you have not heard of the worm before but for the benefit of those who might not have, Conficker takes advantage of computers which are not updated with regard to Windows security patches.  It is a self-replicating program and can infect computers via the Internet or those innocent looking USB sticks you use on a daily basis.  And once the worm has found its way to your hard drive, it is quite hard to remove as it immediately finds ways to burrow a hole and set up defences to keep itself safe.  Once set up, the worm can be used to steal data, among other things.

Now back to the reward.  Do you think that they will ever catch the perps this time?  Remember, they still have rewards up in the air for the creators of three other worms – Blaster, MyDoom and Sobig.

It’s “The Gurus” vs. “The Genius Bar” too in the customer-service representatives arena.  We can expect pleasant Microsoft smiles from BestBuy.  These gurus will be answering questions about PCs and Microsoft products, as well as giving demos of how the company’s products work together.  Basically like Apple’s “Genius Bar”.  

I hope this little game plays well into giving consumers the benefits of competition.  I like Apple, I admit, but sometimes it’s just too expensive.  If Apple could scale down it’s price, even for a little bit, I’m sure they’d securely grasp or even increase the pie they have.

The original EeePC also came shipped with Linux (Xandros, in the case of Asus), and that added to the novelty of it. Linux enthusiasts were banking on the popularity of Linux-based netbooks, which could supposedly bring Linux closer to the common user (a.k.a. the 90+ percent of us who use Windows).

A lot of things had happened since then. A ton of other manufacturers have come out with their own netbooks. Most of these other brands ship their units with Linux pre-installed. Acer Aspire one has Linpus lite. The HP mini note had SUSE. Dell has an Ubuntu variant. And so forth. However, how big really is the effect of the netbook on the desktop (meaning non-server) market share of Linux? Has Linux gained a foothold on the mainstream market with the popularity of netbooks?

The netbook market was thought to make Linux an attractive option, given the limited resources and lower price. And because users buy netbooks mostly for light tasks that run on web browsers, it was thought that the choice of OS would not be a big issue. However, recent news says that this may not exactly be the case. According to MSI (as featured on LaptopMag), WIND netbooks preloaded with Linux had been returned four times more than those that came with Windows.

Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.

LaptopMag went on to interview folks from Canonical (which publishes Ubuntu) and Canonical confirms this.

Well, when we touched base today with Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical (the creator of the Ubuntu operating system) we learned that MSI’s research extends beyond its own products. See his comments below, but it seems Linux’ future on the netbook is bleaker than we thought.

“We don’t know what the XP return rates are. But I will say that the return rate is above normal for netbooks that offer open-source operating systems,” Carr echoed. Carr highlighted a few reasons why Ubuntu-running netbooks are returned more often. “Unclear selling is happening, typically online. The customer will get their netbook sent to their home and they imagine to find something like a Microsoft desktop, but they see a brown Ubuntu version. They are unwilling to learn it and they were expecting to have Windows.”

Has Microsoft gained the upper hand in this game? Windows XP was supposed to have been rendered obsolete last June, but Microsoft changed its mind, and decided to continue selling and supporting XP, but only bundled with low-cost and low-powered PCs, which is essentially the netbook market.

That definition includes a screen that’s less than 10.2 inches, 1GB of RAM or less, a hard drive with 80GB or less, and no touchscreen devices. You’ll also need a 1GHz or slower processor, although Via’s C7-M processors which run up to 1.6GHz are allowed, as will be Intel’s new Atom processor.

As for me, since my 701, I’ve bought two netbooks–the EeePC 900 and an HP mini note, both of which were Windows variants. The 900 came bundled with XP, and the mini note with Vista Business (since downgraded to XP). I do consider myself an advanced user, and I’m very much a multi-platform individual (running OS X, Windows and Linux on my various computers). But on my netbooks, I find it easier to maintain the same OS, and all my work tools run fine on Windows on these netbooks, too.

From what I’ve been reading in forums (such as the Eeeuser forums, which is a really great resource for Eee enthusiasts), some users buy Linux-preloaded netbooks and install Windows XP anyway.

Force of habit, maybe? Or really just out of convenience, perhaps (no Evernote or Nokia PC suite on Linux!)?

What could really help Linux gain a stronger foothold on the consumer market, then?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

On laptops, it’s even worse, since you have the different Fn + function key combination, and you can also close the lid! Then there’s always the power button.

The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us.”

…

The fact that you have to choose between nine different ways of turning off your computer every time just on the start menu, not to mention the choice of hitting the physical on/off button or closing the laptop lid, produces just a little bit of unhappiness every time.

I guess it’s a conflict between empowering the user with more choices, and giving him ease-of-use, with a simplified (or dumbed-down) interface. But with an Operating System with as big a market share as Windows, I would think it’s better to give users fewer choices by default, since a good majority of users aren’t likely to know the difference between Sleep and Hibernate, or between Log Out and Switch Users, and the like. It’s probably best to hide these superfluous information from the eyes of the common user, and let the geeks find and activate the features themselves.

Joel suggests that Vista developers merge these options such that the interface is more streamlined. This way, the end user sees only a few choices, and the computer makes the intelligent decisions itself.

This is where the Mac trumps Windows (again!). You only get a few choices when shutting down OS X. It’s either shutdown, restart, sleep or log out (still a lot, but at least you don’t get superfluous ones!).

If you wanted more functionality, you’d have to get into the terminal and issue some commands–for instance, to turn on safe sleep, which is the OS X equivalent of Windows’ hibernate.

I think Windows XP is even better than Vista in this regard, as you only get three choices when you hit the Shutdown icon: standby, turn off and restart, and that’s apart from the log-off icon, but hey, that’s only four choices.

If you wanted to hibernate, just press the shift key and the “stand by” button turns into “hibernate.” Cool, huh?

Why does Microsoft have to clutter its interface with choices most people would probably just get confused with? Perhaps, it’s an attempt to make everyone happy. But remember than when you try to make everyone happy, you tend to end up pissing off everyone in the process.

Because it is a simple matter for a OS X user to increase the width of their browser on a case by case basis there is never a need to stretch to full screen. The button that most Windows people assume will expand a window to full screen instead, in OS X, expands or contracts to the documents dimensions. In the case of a browser it expands and contracts to the width of the web page.

In windows, there is no easy way to contract a window view. So, rather than jumping back and forth between window sizes a Windows person would just go full screen and stay there.

So in this case, the Mac user would be used to multitasking, with the slew of windows visible on the desktop, overlapping, and sometimes just peeking from behind the foreground window. The Windows user, on the other hand, tends to work solely on the current window visible in the foreground.

I’m both a Mac and Windows user, and I usually work on my Mac and Windows laptops side by side (each with their particular purposes). I’ve reached the point where I no longer get confused when I switch across the Mac and Windows interfaces. And guess what. I don’t usually maximize my Windows! Even before I started using a Mac, I never got used to maximizing. I always preferred having my Windows overlapping, with some peeking just behind the active window I’m currently working on.

A Workflow Issue

Yes, it’s a workflow issue. Having a window maximized has advantages, since this lets the user focus on the single task at hand. But having all your windows–or parts thereof–visible at all times (let’s not even mention Exposé) can also help in seeing the bigger picture.

Still, one has to consider that the human brain was not designed for multitasking. So it’s a question of productivity. Do you work (or play) better when you have a good grasp of the overall picture? Or do you need to be constantly focused on one thing?

Perhaps more interesting and intriguing with the restiffbard.com article is the reader discussion that ensues. There’s the Mac camp, and there’s the Windows camp, and there are the people that see things more objectively. Going beyond the My-OS-is-better-than-your-OS arguments, though, it’s really a matter of how effectively the machine can interface with the human. Both sides have advantages. And considering that Windows still has majority share in the world’s consumer OS market, how effective a UI may no longer be inherent in the operating system’s design. The Mac cult may argue about their’s being superior. But in the end, It’s about preference. It’s about user adoption. This is why some people still find it difficult to switch across platforms.

What about you? What’s your OS and what’s your preference in dealing with window sizes?

A guy named Matan Gillon has reported that he has successfully managed to boot up Windows 95 on his PSP by porting an open-source emulator called x86 to the portable system.

According to him, Windows 95 takes about 10 minutes to boot up but afterwards it’s pretty usable and you can even run some applications on it, however, for both Windows and Linux, he says you can only do so much with a mouse only, until someone makes a keyboard for the PSP both OSs are pretty limited.

If you’re interested in infesting your little beauty with Microsoft love check out his site and follow his simple instructions.

Original announcement on PSP-Vault.

Too bad the little processor will never be fast enough to handle Tiger…

I don’t know what CDs come with it or if the drivers are compiled with the OS one but I think I’ll be allright.

If there are any tips, or good programs for laptops like battery management and such you can give I’ll be thankful for them.

The test PC equipped with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 was an average of 0.5% faster than the same hardware with Service Pack 2 installed. The percentage difference between faster and slower is insignificantly small. Less than 2 or 3 percent in some benchmarks could be dismissed by most but when gamers are looking to squeeze every extra frame out of their machines…it may count.