Snow Leopard Notes & Cautions – Part1

My Apple Snow Leopard disk came Friday via Fedex, just as Apple promised.

Upon getting home I started the install process.  The quoted time for install was 45 mins, and that was pretty accurate.  I did an install over the top of my existing Leopard 10.5.8 installation on my Aluminum iMac 24 Dual 2.8Ghz with 4GB ram.  All-in-all the installation went 100% perfect.

Here are some observations so far:

• The default desktop background image of the auroa star field is more purple than Leopard’s
• Quicktime icon is new and cool
• Quicktime video playback is borderless
• Observed a bunch of 64-bit apps in Activity Monitor
• Expose has some improvements, click-hold an app icon in the Dock finds the open window
• iTunes appears unchanged

Application Compatibility Notes:

• VMware Fusion 2.0.5 works fine wih Windows 7 RC1
  
• Adobe Lightroom 2.4 works fine
• Photomatix Pro 3.1.3 works fine
• Handbrake 0.9.3 works fine
• Firefox 3.5.2 works fine
• Plants vs. Zombies game works fine
• Drobo Dashboard 1.5.1 with firware 1.3.4 works fine

In part Part 2 I will provide more in depth observations.

HOWTO: Turn off Password Expiration in Windows 7

I found it annoying when Windows 7 one day told me that my password was about to expire.  If you are like me I would rather be the one in control of when I change my password rather than Windows dictating this.

Here is a quick easy way to turn this off.

1. Open the Local Users and Groups administration panel. Do this the easy way; Start –> then enter  lusrmgr.msc into the start menu search box. (or the Run box on XP)
2. Double click to select your user
3. Check the box next to “Password never expires”
4. Click OK, and your done.

Drobo Apps are here

I recently purchased a Drobo (Firewire 800 model) a month ago.  I primarily use this for my backups of all of my files on my iMac 24″ but it works with Windows/Linux PCs equally well.  I backup all of my files to the Drobo, which includes: documents, photos, home movies, itunes mp3, and ripped shows/movies.

The folks over at Drobo now offer DroboApps.  In case you didn’t know Drobo is basically a fancy storage solution for your computer,  you can check it out here.  DroboApps let you extend the capabilities of the Drobo.  I just downloaded Time Tamer, which lets you control the size of Time Machine’s use of the storage space.  This is vital if you have ever used Time Machine.  Basically Time Machine will grow and grow until it sucks ever last bit of free space.  Now I really don’t need to go back 3 years in time, maybe just 6 months would be handy.

In my next post I will go over my two forms of backup (OS X Time Machine and ChronoSync) for use with my Drobo and what each option brings to the table.

Vista drivers into a brick wall

My Internet speedtest

Here it is:

http://www.speedtest.net/

latest test on 05/03/08

old test on 12/7/07