I just got a note from Gregg Cannon of Cannon PC informing me that ATI has now officially discontinued its line of digital cable tuners. That’s no surprise—when the external ATI devices reappeared in sales channels briefly last December, it looked like a good old fashioned inventory clearout.

The good news is that Ceton’s long-awaited quad-tuner cards are only two weeks away from being available. (You can pre-order at Cannon PC now.) At $399, they’re pricey, but on a per-tuner basis that’s actually half the price of the ATI models.

I’ve got three ATI external tuners here that have been working well. I’ll probably order a Ceton tuner and test it this summer, after I read the first wave of reviews from early adopters.

Wow. Tony Stark protecting your PC? Does this mean those stupid Geek Squad cars are going to be upgraded to Audis, too?

This strikes me as a last-ditch attempt by Symantec to prop up a failing consumer franchise. I hope I’m right.

(Thanks, AB!)

One of my most underrated gadgets is a Dymo Turbo 400 label printer. I bought this model about three years ago to replace an old Dymo EL60 that had given me five good years of service. Its main purpose is to print address labels, but it also does labels for file folders, electronic postage, and just about anything else that will fit on an adhesive label. Printing addresses directly on an envelope is a PITA, but spitting out a perfectly formatted label complete with USPS-compliant bar code is easy. (That model has since been replaced with the DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo [1752265], which is the same price but has a few extra bells and whistles.)

The Dymo Label software has evolved over the years and includes three pieces:

• A set of printer drivers
• An application that is both a form-filler and a label designer
• Add-ins for Outlook, Word, and QuickBooks

I hooked up the printer to a new PC today and couldn’t find the printer drivers, so I decided to check Dymo’s support site. They had up-to-date drivers for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, including both x86 and x64 versions. And in one of those nice little accidents of timing, I discovered that the company had just released an update to its Dymo Label software yesterday.

The software is 32-bit only, but it installed perfectly on my Windows 7 x64 system, and when I checked the readme file I was surprised to see that the new version supports Office 2010, which was released to manufacturing last month but won’t officially be released to retail customers until June. It also has a modern layout that uses the Office Ribbon interface:

If my records are correct, this model was introduced in early 2006, nearly a year before Windows Vista was formally launched. I’ve run into plenty of hardware companies that have abandoned their pre-Vista devices completely or did a half-hearted 32-bit update and then moved on to new stuff (yes, Fujitsu, I’m looking at you). So the fact that this device has new 64-bit drivers and updated software designed for Office 2007 is admirable. And it was a free upgrade.

The other impressive part of the whole setup was the way the Windows Homegroup feature detected that a new printer had been added to the machine and offered to set it up on the other Windows 7 PCs in the Homegroup. I had tested this stuff last year when writing Windows 7 Inside Out but hadn’t added a new printer to the network lately. It literally took two clicks to set up the shared printer and add it to the Windows 7 Device Center.

Props to Dymo for taking care of its longtime customers. I wish more hardware companies did that.

I just ran across this yesterday and figure it’s worth sharing. If you have a Hotmail or Windows Live Mail account and you use Microsoft Outlook, you really need the Outlook Connector. That’s doubly true if you’re using Office 2010.

Version 14.0 was just released, and this post on the Outlook Blog lists additional features that “light up” when you use Outlook 2010:

• Junk filter settings. Your safe sender, blocked sender, and safe recipient lists are synchronized between Outlook and Hotmail.
• Integrated Send/Receive. Send/receive works just as it does for your other Outlook accounts.
• Integrated connection status. The Hotmail account status appears in the Outlook status bar.
• Rule support for secondary accounts. Rules can be applied to the Hotmail account in Outlook, even if that is not your Outlook primary account.
• Synchronize your drafts. The Outlook Drafts folder synchronizes with the Hotmail Drafts folder.

It was a very easy install, and highly recommended.

For Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 (32-bit): 
Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 32-bit

For Outlook 2010 (64-bit): 
Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 for Outlook 2010 64-bit

By the way, this release is following the same pattern as Office. Office 2007 was version 12, and the previous release of the Outlook Connector was version 12.1. Office 2010 is version 14, just like the new Connector. Triskaidekaphobia is alive and well in Redmond.

Everyone knows Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of the month, right? That’s when Microsoft releases its security updates for Windows and other products. But the fourth Tuesday of the month—that’s today—is the other Patch Tuesday, when additional updates, typically non-security-related, are released. (The "other Patch Tuesday" is documented in a Windows Help article, which says "Microsoft typically releases important updates on the second or fourth Tuesday of the month.")

Microsoft pushed out at least one interesting fix for Windows 7 today, via Windows Update and Microsoft Update. You should see it on any Windows 7 machine. The April 2010 stability and reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is available for 32-bit and 64-bit versions and is rated Important. Here’s a list of the issues it fixes:

• Windows Explorer crashes and then restarts when you access a third-party Control Panel item.
• You cannot connect to an instance of SQL Server Analysis Services from an application in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 after you install Office Live Add-in 1.4 or Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant 6.5.
• Windows Explorer may stop responding for 30 seconds when a file or a directory is created or renamed after certain applications are installed.
• The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds when you try to log on to a computer if you set the desktop background to a solid color.
• You are not warned when you delete more than 1000 files at the same time. Then, the files are deleted permanently and are not moved to the Recycle Bin.

That third fourth issue—the 30-second delay in boot times when a solid color background is selected—was extremely annoying. Glad it’s been fixed.

If you’re running Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, you might also be offered an update that resolves an issue with BitLocker. This one is described simply as Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB975496). It resolves a nasty-sounding issue: "a computer stops responding during shutdown if BitLocker is enabled on the system drive on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2." The KB article has more details.

After the latest colossal error, maybe it’s time to switch.

This is a world-class screw-up, but it’s not the first. See A pox on McAfee (2004), and the comments on this post (2007), and this post about McAfee’s sloppy response to the Conficker worm (2009).

If you’re a McAfee customer, are you considering a switch? Hit the comments below and tell me why—or why not.

Looking to jazz up your Windows 7 desktop? One easy way is to install a custom Windows 7 theme. Microsoft’s Personalization Gallery has an extensive collection, which is being updated regularly. A recent addition, currently featured, is the new NASA Hidden Universe theme.

Download the installer and follow the prompts to add the theme to your system (sorry, doesn’t work with Windows 7 Starter). In all, the theme includes 14 amazing pictures taken from the Spitzer Space Telescope at CalTech. The pictures are all provided at full HD WUXGA resolution, 1920×1200, which means they look great on large monitors and don’t have to be blown up. Here’s one example:

When I posted this link on Twitter, one person asked where to find details about what each picture represents. There’s a short answer and a long answer to that question.

The long answer? Details about each picture in any theme you download are there, thanks to tags embedded in the image files. You just have to know where to look.

Continue reading “Put the universe on your desktop” →

A reader asks an interesting question about Windows apps and the compatibility issues that come along with upgrades:

I have a Windows XP Home Edition machine on which I have installed and used several Windows 98 programs with which I am perfectly happy and do not want to pay to upgrade … Will these Windows 98 programs work if I upgrade to Windows 7 Pro with Virtual PC and XP mode added?

The full message contains a list of programs: Mathematica, AutoCAD LT 98, and Adobe Illustrator 8, among others. Those are indeed some seriously ancient apps. Adobe Illustrator 8, for examp,le was released in 1998 (and was apparently code-named Elvis, for those who pay attention to such things).

Unless there’s an absolutely compelling business reason, I don’t recommend keeping any software around for that long. Upgrades typically involve bug fixes, support for newer hardware devices, and security issues. All of those things are worth paying for, in my opinion. And in many of these cases there are modern alternatives that are free or cheap and will open files created with the old program. The alternativeto.net web site is a good starting point for this kind of search. Here’s a list of alternatives to Adobe Illustrator, for example, and another list of AutoCAD replacements.

If you’re hoping to install older programs on Windows 7, you’ll have to check each one individually. Some will work, some won’t. Microsoft has an official Windows 7 compatibility list, which is targeted toward IT professionals. It’s a good starting point, but for any critical application you should also check with the developer of the application to see whether there are any known issues or mandatory patches/upgrades.

The most interesting part of this question involves Windows XP Mode, which is available as a feature of Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise. In general, if a program will install and run on Windows XP, it should work in XP Mode in Windows 7. The big sticking point here involves any hardware requirements. You can only connect to USB devices from a virtual machine, which makes it difficult to output CAD drawings to a device that connects to a serial port. And if this version of AutoCAD requires a dongle as part of its copy protection, I’m not certain whether it will work.

The bottom line? General guidelines for app compatibility are a good starting point, but the only way to know the answer for certain is to test.

A funny thing happened last week. My wife’s PC should have downloaded and installed an update from Windows, plus yet another iTunes update. Yet neither update was installed, and when she logged on she was unable to check for new messages at her Gmail account. Outlook complained about a security certificate that couldn’t be verified. Specifically, the error message said, "the required certificate is not within its validity period.

Really? Here’s what the certificate in question looked like:

That’s odd. The certificate was issued last July and is valid for another three months. So what’s wrong?

A quick peek at the system clock in the lower right corner told the story. Somehow—and I have no idea how or why—the system clock had been reset overnight. To the year 7510.

Not surprisingly, the Windows 7 calendar doesn’t go quite this far into the future. A quick reset of the date to the correct year allowed e-mail to begin flowing again, and it also allowed the updates to install properly.

Although this problem was extreme, it’s actually a good illustration of a common issue you’ll encounter in Windows and other operating systems. If the system clock is off (as can happen if the mainboard battery dies or if someone tinkers with dates for any reason), some secure websites will fail. Checking the system date should always be part of a basic troubleshooting protocol for this type of error.

If you use an iPhone, help me with some research.

How many third-party apps have you installed? Which of them do you consider essential—the kind you use regularly and would miss tremendously if they were to disappear tomorrow and couldn’t be replaced?

Leave your answers in the comments here. Thanks!

Update: apologies in advance if your comment gets caught in my spam filters and held for moderation. That’s the default for anyone who hasn’t previously posted a comment here. I usually approve them as soon as I see them, so the wait might be a few minutes or hours depending on whether I am AFK.