Windows Vista Inside Out, Deluxe Edition will probably head off to the printer this week, and Amazon.com is now taking pre-orders for it. The deal is actually a very good one: You place the order and you get 5% off the current (discounted) price of $37.79. If the price changes between now and then, you get the lowest price. Your credit card isn’t charged until the book ships, presumably in June, and you can cancel any time.

Full disclosure: I get a commission from Amazon when you order through this link. I think this is an excellent deal, but if you can find a lower price somewhere else, I won’t be offended if you order from that source.

Update: I’ve mentioned this edition before, but I guess it’s unfair to expect people to sift through the archives to find those older posts, so here are some details about this update:

It includes about 300 pages more than the original edition. The main difference, of course, is that it incorporates full coverage of Service Pack 1. It also includes more than a year’s worth of details we’ve learned about Vista that we didn’t know in December 2006, with double the coverage of Windows Explorer and Search, as well as a greatly expanded chapter on performance. And it includes coverage of some advanced features that we left out of the first edition, like speech recognition, Tablet PC support, and Group Policy.

Sadly, I think this momentary display is probably inaccurate:

Sure enough, it displayed a mere 5 hours of estimated remaining battery life just a few seconds later. Which actually isn’t that bad, if it’s accurate.

For the past six months, my main Media Center PC has been a Dell XPS 410 with a pair of CableCARD tuners. How’s this fully digital, cable-compatible, high-definition configuration working out? Let’s just say you’d have to pry the Media Center remote from my cold dead fingers. In this new post at ZDNet (with accompanying image gallery), I give you a peek under the hood. I also tackle the question of whether this type of system is right for you.

Windows Media Center meets Cable TV in HD

See the full Media Center/CableCARD image gallery

Questions? Ask in the comments here or over there.

If you’ve fallen for the latest round of breathless posts about how you can save a lot of money by buying an upgrade version of Vista and using it for a clean install on new hardware, please go to ZDNet and read my latest post:

The Vista license "loophole" that isn’t

I wrote about this way back in February 2007, when the same sources issued the same breathless reports. Nothing has changed since then. If you qualify for an upgrade license, this technique allows you to do a clean install, legally. If you don’t qualify for an upgrade license, then doing a clean install with this technique is technically possible but violates the terms of the license agreement. That distinction seems to be lost on the folks who are dredging up this old story. So allow me to explain, again.

Short version: How you do the install (clean versus upgrade) is a completely separate issue from the license you purchase:

• If you have a PC with an old version of Windows that qualifies for an upgrade, you can buy an upgrade version of Vista and do a clean install. Legally.
• If you are setting up a new PC (or a virtual machine) that does not currently have a Windows license that qualifies for an upgrade, you need either a full retail license or an OEM copy. Although you can use an upgrade version to do a clean install in that circumstance, in that case you are violating the terms of the license agreement.

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

The editors of PC World have some April Fool’s fun at the expense of their InfoWorld cousins. Savedos.com takes you to this very elaborately constructed special site:

Save DOS: The Ultimate Antidote to Vista’s Bloat

I love the image gallery. The scary thing is, I remember this cover, because I was Managing Editor of PC World when it was published.

$149 for PC Tools Deluxe? Wow.

Don’t miss the feature comparison: DOS Trounces Vista

Even scarier, a year or so later, when I had jumped to PC Computing, we did a I (Heart) DOS bumper sticker and bound it into every copy. To the best of my knowledge, that one is not on the Internets. Yet.

Windows supersleuth Long Zheng hooks up with an “anonymous and disgruntled Microsoft employee” and uncovers a new Windows Vista sound scheme that will ultimately be released as an Ultimate Extra.

Very cool. Sounds like something Robert Fripp would have done 10 years ago when he was still cool. I have no idea whether it will sound as good tomorrow, though.

The mysterious Shipping Seven blogger* reappears after an absence of more than two months. And I was about ready to assume that he or she had been sent to Area 51.

[* For those who haven’t been following, Shipping Seven is a reference to the development process for the next version of Windows. Despite the name, this blog doesn’t actually contain much about Windows 7. At least not yet.]

Engadget HD reports:

While the rest of us wait for the mythical DirecTV Windows Media Center tuner, some are apparently lucky enough to be a part of the beta program to test the HDPC-20.

About time. This was announced in January 2006, fer cryin’ out loud.

I gave up on DirecTV two months ago in favor of a dual-CableCARD system with Comcast, so I’m not likely to get an invite. Of course, the dish is still installed on my roof, and reconnecting it wouldn’t be too difficult…

I mean, it’s not like anyone would actually want to compare the cable and satellite alternatives side by side, would they?

WordPress released version 2.5 today. In the past, I’ve put off upgrading because it was such a hassle. Unfortunately, that makes a site vulnerable to security exploits. But I just upgraded both sites running on this server, and it took a total of about two minutes each, thanks to WordPress Automatic Upgrade. From the description of the plugin:

allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

Really, really simple. I used version 0.8, which was already on my servers, and I had to go back in after the upgrade was complete to enable a few other plugins. I suspect if I had downloaded WAU v 1.0 first, that would have been a non-issue.

If you use WordPress, this plugin is a must.

Ian Dixon asks an excellent question: How do you organize your music library?

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a while, especially now that I have my hardware and Media Center setup quite nicely tweaked and tuned.

My Media Center music collection consists of 18,625 songs in 1479 albums from 529 artists. That “album” count is an interesting one. It encompasses mostly traditional albums – i.e., ripped CDs as well as entire CDs I’ve purchased (DRM-free only) from online music sources or downloaded through a subscription service (more on buying versus subscribing later in this post). The second biggest category of entries on the album list are live shows from sources like Archive.org, and I have a smattering of single tracks that were part of online collections or were downloaded individually that are nonetheless assigned to the album they appear on.

I went completely digital in late 2004, ripping my entire CD collection over the space of a couple of weeks in 2004. I used Windows Media 10 for the job, and as I noted at the time, tagging was a bigger hassles than ripping:

The more tedious part came later, when I went in to review tags. There were a fair number of errors and omissions that I wanted to fix. I found the eMusic Tag Editor indispensable for this task.

These days, I find that Windows Media Player 11 does a more than adequate job of tagging as you rip. The Windows Media database has improved dramatically in the past three years. The first thing I do when I get a new CD is to rip it, either to Windows Media Lossless Audio format or to 320KB MP3. I rarely have to change any tags when I do that, and the editing tools in the Media Library are fine for the job.

Continue reading “How I organize my music library” →