I’ve downloaded the prerelease candidate of Windows 7, the version of Windows many tech-gurus claim to be the best Windows ever! I’m not a fan of Windows systems, though I’ve got used to it during all these years beginning with Windows 3.11, and tend to like it. Now it is said to be the most responsive (!), polished version; it’s Vista done right. And it’s completely free for one year! That’s a big change for Microsoft to make such a move in testing out new OS.

So, here is ISO of Win 7. Right beside it here is Virtual Box by Sun, a free and reliable virtual machine for Mac. There are also free versions for Windows and Linux too, but I’ve got the one for the Mac. That’s right I’m going to put Windows 7 on a free Sun’s virtual machine on my Mac Mini!

At this point I’ve installed Virtual Box, marked up a virtual hard drive, allocated memory, and… failed! The roots of the failure were hidden in RAM and video memory customization. I’ve given up too much RAM to the virtual machine, that my host OS (Mac OS X) just stalled!

My second try, however, was a complete success! I started from scratch, left the default options decide on how much memory the guest OS needed, and it was done in a matter of minutes! A few additional tweaks, like installing Virtual Box add-ons, sound support, etc., and I’m able to register the Windows 7 over the Internet, download updates, and have fun!

So far so good. To be continued…

I’ve never been a Star Trek fan. In fact, I’ve never seen a complete episode or movie of this series. What a shame, now I think.

I went to see Star Trek because of all the talks about it from people I trust to be… m-m-m… trusted! The movie was out for about a week when I’ve finally got to it. And it was a blast! Again, I’m not a trekkie, but now I just have to watch at least a TV season of it, or a few original movies.

The story got me interested. I do agree that this is a huge accomplishment on the part of screenwriters and producers. The whole thing is quite enjoyable, be you a trekkie, or just an ordinary man.

I do recommend watching it on big screen, the effects are great and even those camera ‘flares’ add to the atmosphere. The plot is intrigueing, twisted, captivating. The cast is perfect, everyone is so great in doing what he/she is supposed to do (peace, the redshirt). And if you’re new to Star Trek this is the best trampoline into the series, you’ll want to see all of the rest badly!

I feel like I’m going to need more Internet connections running at the same time pretty soon!

The speed is ok, the connectivity is fine, but now that I’ve got Mac Mini it’s obvious, that one more device would help. I don’t want to switch back and forth, sharing also not an option especially with Vista Home Basic. And most of all, there are times, when I need both desktop Mini and Packard Bell netbook to be on the net. One is downloading stuff from iTunes, another helps me to update blogs.

There is also a great offer going on right now. My Internet provider, SkyLink, has put some modems for sale, and the odds are I’m buying one of those! The only thing to consider is time…

I’ve installed Google Gears couple of days ago, and now it’s time to check out the results.

But first a little intro about the Gears. Google Gears is a tool, which allows for off-line work with a web-site or a page. It stores some or all the data from web-site locally, and when there is no Internet connection the page would still show up to sync later on.

That’s how Gears work with Gmail. For WordPress, however, full Gears functionality is limited to speeding up the connection/download wp-admin pages process. No offline work, unfortunately.

Nonetheless the speed is great, especially over the cellular network, everything loads much faster, and I can actually start working almost right on. That’s really nice feature for those with slower internet connection.