Over at ZDNet, I’ve just posted a review of Windows Home Server, which is now in beta. Here’s a snippet:

Microsoft hits a home run with Windows Home Server

Almost without exception, the first reaction when people hear that Microsoft is working on Windows Home Server is, “Why would I want that?” After they see it, the first reaction is much simpler: “I want that.”

So set aside that first skeptical reaction and take a close look at the image gallery I’ve assembled showing the most recent beta release of Windows Home Server in action. The April 2007 Community Technical Preview (CTP) was released to the public last week. I’ve been running it and its previous beta release for more than two months now. In this post, I’ll provide a high-level overview of why this new product has such potential for home Windows users who are drowning in digital media and typically unprepared for sudden data loss.

Go read the rest, and don’t miss the accompanying image gallery, which lets you see why I’m so excited about this product.

I’ll be on the road today and in Redmond for meetings Wednesday and Thursday, coming back on Friday. So expect light posting until the weekend.

If you’re at Microsoft and you want to show me something new or cool, I still have some openings in my schedule on Thursday. Send me an e-mail (ed-blog [AT] edbott [DOT] com) or leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you.

I just stumbled across the Intel Capabilities Forum for the first time. Some really nice stuff there if you’re interested in performance testing of PCs. I like their test scripts and input files to evaluate PC platforms using real-world applications, and thought their post on best practices for benchmarking Windows Vista had lots of good ideas in it.

The forums are awfully quiet, though.

How many people are stupid enough to publish their Windows XP Professional product key to the web? You know, the unique ID that allows them to activate their software?

As of this afternoon, the number is at least 103. [Update: Less than a year later, on March 21, 2008, that search pulls up more than 28,000 pages. Even granting some of those pages are like this one, warning people not to do this, the majority still appear to be product keys that people published to the web. Damn, that’s a lot of stupid.]

If you use the Belarc Advisor tool, you might want to do some judicious editing before you actually post its raw results to your website. And it appears that more recent versions of the advisor don’t include the actual key, just the product ID that it generates (and which can’t be reverse-engineered to produce the key). Do no, you won’t be able to find any Windows Vista keys this way.

I’m kinda guessing that not a single one of these keys will actually activate for anyone except the original owner, given that close to 5000 people have flagged this story on Digg already.

Still, dumb doesn’t even begin to describe it.

(via David Berlind)

Tags: product+key, Windows+XP

This Nigerian scam spam, which I received in the overnight mail, takes first prize in the chutzpah Olympics:

ATTN: Sir/Madam,

SCAMMED VICTIM BENEFICIARIES.
REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654

This is to bring to your notice that I delegated from the United Nations to Central bank Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $100.000USD each,You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the scammed victims,get Back to us as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $100.000USD compensations funds.

[snip]

You can receive your compensations payments via any of the both options you Choose, DRAFT PAYMENTS or WIRE TRANSFERS, I shall feed you with further modalities As soon as I hear from you.

Send a copy of your response to official email:
[redacted] @ yahoo.co.uk

Yours faithfully,
IYAMAH SYLVANIUS.
SCAMMED VICTIM/REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654

Who falls for this stuff?

In the last post I noted the kerfuffle over Vista Home Basic and Home Premium keeping backup copies of deleted data files. In Business and Ultimate editions, these backups are accessible via the Previous Versions feature. In the two Home editions, the Previous Versions feature is turned off.

So, you don’t want Windows to waste CPU cycles and disk space backing up copies that you can’t get to? Fine. Move your data files to a separate volume (instructions here). You can use a different partition on the same drive or a separate drive – the key is that it have a different drive letter than the volume that holds your Windows and Program Files folders.

By default, Vista enables Shadow Copies (the feature that snaps those backup copies) only on the boot drive. It’s disabled on other drives. (Look below for the way I have my drives partitioned, with the E: drive for all data files and F: for backup images.) So, with data out of System Restore’s way, you have no worries that you’re going to waste space, squander CPU cycles, or compromise your privacy.

The side benefit is you have a cleaner, neater backup solution as well. Do an image-based backup of the C: drive, which you can restore as needed to recover from driver or application problems, and back up your data files in any way that makes sense to you.

You’d think someone had given Chris Pirillo a Super Atomic Wedgie, judging by the amount of yipping in this post.* He’s bemoaning the fact that Windows Vista has a feature that keeps backups of all deleted data files but doesn’t allow you access to those automatic backups if you’re using Vista Home Basic or Home Premium editions. (For a more complete description of the issue, see this post from Dave Methvin, a longtime friend and trusted colleague, which was Chris’s jumping-off point.)

Anyway, in mid-rant, with the subtlety and savoir faire that characterizes everything from Pirillo World Headquarters, Chris tosses a gratuitous insult my direction:

My guess is that Ed Bottand the other Windows apologists will have a completely logical explanation for this “feature” before too long. After all, why would a Home Basic user ever want to recover data? It’s a well known fact that Home Basic and Home Premium files aren’t as important as Ultimate files.

Who are these other apologists? Did I miss a meeting? Do we have t-shirts?

Actually, I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember that the existence of three separate backup programs in Vista is stupid and user-hostile. What Chris doesn’t mention (probably because he was too busy measuring the thickness of borders in the Backup dialog box), is that Home Basic users have it even worse than he thinks. Although they can perform a backup manually, they can’t schedule a file-based backup, so they can’t have their files automatically protected. Home Premium users can. And Ultimate users get the ability to do image-based backups.

Nothing, but nothing will buy you user loyalty like saving someone’s ass. Microsoft knows that, so whoever made the design decision to cripple the backup utility for home users was not thinking clearly at all, and the decision they wound up making (bare-bones backup in Home Basic, slightly improved backup in Home Premium, full access to all features in Ultimate) was bad for Microsoft and bad for its customers.

Hey, Chris, you have my e-mail address. In fact, you even have my phone number. Next time you could ask the question instead of assuming you know the answer. Hey, you could even use The Google(TM), where you would have found me saying this back on October 31, 2004 (I highlighted the interesting part for you):

The Windows XP Backup program is installed by default with Windows XP Pro. Based on user surveys, Microsoft decided (incorrectly, in my opinion) that anyone using Windows XP Home Edition wouldn’t be interested in the Backup program. That’s why you have to manually install it.

Now go back up and read what Chris wrote and compare it to what I wrote, two and a half years earlier.

Ironically, the Backup tools in Vista Home Basic are better than those in XP Home, and the ones in Home Premium are better still. But neither one can hold a candle to the full-featured Backup program in Vista Ultimate, and some third-party developers do even better still (Acronis True Image Home is my current favorite).

And for added irony, Chris (who shows signs of developing at least a small Mac dependency if not an outright addiction) throws in this reference to a feature in Apple’s upcoming Leopard:

To be completely fair, Time Machine only works in *ONE* version of OS X. Then again, there’s only one version for users to buy.

Oh, those pesky verb tenses. Chris, you mean there’s only one version OS X that Time Machine will work in and only one that users will be able to buy. In October, now that Leopard has been delayed till nearly a full year after Vista’s debut.

If I’m going to play the apologist role, I guess I should say, “Sorry about that.”

* I’ve updated the link, which broke some time ago when Chris redid his website. He also, for some reason, removed the dates from every post. This one was originally from April 10, 2007.

Apple delays Leopard; blame the iPhone

Apple said its operating system upgrade Leopard won’t be released in June as planned. … Apple also added that Leopard’s features will be complete by June, but the company couldn’t guarantee the quality.

So many punchlines. So little time.

Update: Delayed “until October,” says Dwight, who quotes Apple’s announcement:

[W]e will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

I’m getting flashbacks. A lot of Mac book authors just had their summer vacations ruined.