HardwareGeeks.com along with Ask The Admin and Absolute Windows are giving away 3 (1 on each site) dx9000 TouchSmart PCs provided by HP.
All you have to do is create an application that will work on the dx9000 or other TouchSmart PC’s from HP. The application can be of anything, I personally would like to see an app designed for hospitals where you can pull up a patients chart and view their files and even x-rays and are able to zoom in and out using your fingers. But your application does not have to do that, it can do anything.
It can be like the Time 100 Application for the TouchSmart, or something similar to what is set up at O’Hare airport in Chicago. Just create something useful and fun and have fun doing it.
The Upgrade for WIndows 7 is available on Amazon.com for Pre-Order and it will only cost you $49.99 for Home Premium a savings of $70 from the suggested $120 or $99.99 a savings of $100 for Professional.
From my understanding the upgrades available for pre-order on Amazon.com are for both 32bit and 64bit versions of Vista. So if you feel like ordering your copy upgrade of Windows 7 now visit Amazon.com.
You may also notice that the Microsoft store is down as well, we can only assume it is being updated. (may be live and updated when you read this post)
Update 2:07 am EST:
Microsoft has updated their store, and are offering Windows 7 at 50 and 58% off. Visit the Microsoft Windows 7 Section here.
On Tuesday I attended a press event and FujiFilm was in attendence, and for the first time I got to see their new Instax 200 camera, which by the way I found out I won today in a contest they were having. For those of you who miss good ol poloroid, check out this little or shall I say big beauty.
Last week we received the 2TB model of the MyBook World Edition II which has two 1TB Green edition hard drives in it formatted in mirrored (redundant) RAID1. The advantage of RAID1 over using both drives as a single volume (RAID0/JBOD), is that if and when a hard drive does fail you still have a complete copy of your data and can ensure your data is safe and secure. The World Edition II makes disaster recovery for small business and home offices simple and cheap. In the event that disaster does befall, the World Edition II has a very simple method for swapping out the dead drive for the new drive and then will automatically rebuild the live drive onto the backup drive making a complete disaster recovery solution.
Today HP announced the new HP Mini 5101 a netbook so sexy and stylish, once you see it you will want one. HP gave the Mini 5101 a look and feel similar to their ProBook line, and because of that the Mini 5101 looks bigger than what it actually is. HP also introduced the new ProBook 4310s and at 13.3 inches the smallest ProBook available from HP.
HP is combining style, durability and power to deliver what I think its the perfect line of notebooks for any type of business user.
So my Blackberry Curve 8350i for the second time in the 5 months I have had it is not getting service, the first time they swapped my phone and told me if it happens again to call Tech Support that they may have a fix for the issue in the future since it was an unknown issue then.
I call Tech Support and was told they will call me back in an hour, after 8 hours I call back and get transfered to a porn ad several times. I have multiple videos to post if you guys don’t believe me but I just posted one.
HP today announced the HP Photosmart Premium with Touchsmart Web, a printer that essentially eliminates the need for a computer to print.
Via the touchscreen on the HP Photosmart Premium with Touchsmart Web (yes I know a long name). The printer from a video I saw on it during the products annoucement is an elegant black and similar design to other HP Photomsart Printers. It does look 10 times better than the HP C8180 their previous touch screen printer.
The printer will basically allow you to install apps, such as apps for coupons.com or fandango and essentially allow you to print coupons and movie tickets with out ever having to power up your computer.
Over the past several months I have seen commercials from Kodak, where they target HP directly claiming you can get more prints from their product than from an HP product. One of the commercials that stuck in my mind was one where they are at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles and they are on a ladder and drop a wallet of pictures showing how much more prints they got with their printer in comparison with the HP printer.
Kodak in my opinion has issued a direct challenge at HP, some of their commercials fell short of guaranteeing you and I will save over $100 dollars in ink a year if we were to use their printers, ink and paper. Recently HP has fired back with their own commercials claiming that people who use their printers, ink and paper save more money. But whats the real truth? Who will I really save money with? So I decided to put both HP and Kodak to the test, I purchased two printers one from each company, both costing $199 and I used their value packs (Ink Paper combo). The value packs depending on where you buy them range in price from $24.99 – $32.99.
Microsoft on June 8th started a somewhat admirable thing, for every complete download of IE 8 from Browseforthebetter.com Microsoft will donate 8 meals to feeding America.
The promotion will run until August 8th 2009. However what is confusing is Microsofts Math. They claim they will donate 8 meals per download, however their fine print reads “ Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000”
While I could never afford to give 1 million dollars to any charity, I for one have no idea how $1.15 equals 8 meals unless they consider a meal a piece of bread and water. But never the less the donation itself is admirable, but I wish companies were a bit more honest when it came to these types of contributions.
This post is nothing but a rant about how incredibly backwards update priority using Windows Updates is. I just did a fresh install of Vista x64 on my development machine yesterday, and I had it go ahead and download updates off of our local WSUS server. Now I’d personally expect Windows Update to go and install the Service Pack first, since all updates up to the point of SP1’s release are included in SP1. No, I’d be wrong. Instead it grabbed roughly 3.5GB of updates and addons (86 in total), none of which were the service pack. So I went and spent the next 3 hours letting those install. Reboot and run Windows Update again. 34 new updates show up, again, no service pack. I would just go onto the WSUS update share and grab the service pack there, rather than download the 700MB+ x64 edition service pack off of Microsoft’s website, but WSUS uses near random GUID’s for the filenames of every update rather than the KB# with version. So I’ve now spent about 4.5 hours waiting for windows to install updates and I haven’t even gotten to the service pack I wanted to start with!
Is it really so hard to give priority to roll-up packages and service packs?