The Xbox 360 Elite was announced recently. It seems like a fine product, albeit pricey. In any event, it is not something that offers any real compelling advantage to me. Perhaps if I was more apt to use the video download service on Xbox Live Marketplace, my view my be different.

Conspicuous in its absence from this new model was builtin WiFi.

This seemed a little strange to me given that Sony's PS3 has builtin WiFi (at least in the lead $600 SKU) and seemingly so do most digital media players like the DLink Media Lounge, and the Roku Soundbridge Radio only has WiFi and lacks any ability to connect via wired Ethernet.

Microsoft explained that based on its surveys of its customers, most prefer a wired connection. This seemed like a strange response given that Roku has given the exact opposite answer-- that people much prefer connecting via WiFi-- to explain why the Soundbridge Radio lacks a wired Ethernet port.

Are both answers really true? Do people prefer WiFi for digital media, but not for their game consoles? That seems unlikely.

Thomas Hawk has three suggestions for how Microsoft should improve Media Center:

1. Fix the problems that MCE has with large audio mp3 collections.
2. Offer more robust long tail integration with online video offerings, like video podcast subscriptions.
3. A "discover" section in Media Center allowing you to browse for other Internet media. 

I don't disagree that any of these would be useful enhancements.

#1 has supposedly been addressed already in Vista.

I would bet that #2 and #3 will be addressed in short order by third parties to the extent that they have not already. Microsoft is first and foremost a developer of platforms. Third parties can create applications that will run within Media Center and appear on extenders. Nowhere is this easier than in Media Center and this capability has only been enhanced in Vista with its Media Center Markup Language that enables much "richer" applications to be used on Media Center and extenders like the Xbox 360.

These may not be "integrated" with standard Media Center menus in the way Thomas would like, but they are pretty close.

There are pretty good instructions on how to change the registry to allow this at VistaRewired.

A few thoughts on the above topic:

• Many of the old games that seemed so great at the time, and even now are considered classics, really don't fair very well in comparison to average contemporary games. Given the choice I think most people would prefer to play Assault Heroes on Xbox Live Arcade rather than Castlevania.
• Will the Role Playing Game and First Person Shooter genres merge? If you look at the games like Crackdown, the GTA series and even Oblivion things seem to be moving in that direction. In listening to an interview with the creators of Mass Effect, they seem to want to create a game that can be played with the emphasis on either aspect.
• There is tension between creating a game with a wide open world (sandbox) and a game with a good story. Most of the good stories force you down a certain path and that takes away from the notion of a wide open world. What if there was a compelling story happening in the background in the world, rather than directly involving the player, but having effects on the player's life? Wouldn't that be compelling storytelling without sacrificing the open ended nature of a players actions in the world. The downside would be that the player's character couldn't be such a big player in the world that it could conceivably influence events significantly.

The CDs for HP's Vista Express Upgrade for two of our laptops arrived in the mail yesterday and I was disappointed, but not surprised, that they do a clean install of Vista rather than upgrading Vista, installing drivers and upgrading applications.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that HP gave me a significant amount of freedom in choosing what applications I wanted to preinstall and what ones I did not want to reinstall. Skipping certain applications was as simple as unselected a check box.

If only getting rip of crapware were that easy with a new PC with the OS preinstalled!

Brian Livingston has done a nice job of documenting some really interesting ways to postpone having to activate Windows Vista for about a year.

Based on the facts in the article, this process only permits activation free use for about one year. (This is contradicted by some unsubstantiated assertions and speculation in the article and many headlines to the contrary, but as I write the results of the experiments in the article seem pretty clear.) The probable explanation for this behavior suggested in the article also seems to hit the nail on the head: Microsoft wanted to ease corporate licensees' transition to a system in which, unlike with XP, each copy of Windows at site requires its own product key.

Where I differ from the articles conclusions and those of other commentators around the net is in the analysis of whether this really permits widespread piracy of Vista. I think it probably does not, or at least is likely to have little effect on Microsoft's bottom line. Here's why:

• Postponing activation is relatively inconvenient and error (even which a script or other automation of the process) renders the OS neutered.
• Even an alert and savvy use does not appear to be able to postpone activation indefinitely. That means that anyone who wants to avoid EVER paying for Vista will need to wipe their C partition and reinstall from scratch. This would be really inconvenient and probably not worth the effort for any but an insignificant few, when OEM versions of Vista can probably be had for around $100.
• People can pirate XP relatively easily now, so we reduce the group this approach might appeal to even further to those who have a good enough reason to want Vista instead of XP.
• The likely result in each case is that those who have such a system will ultimately pay for a copy of Vista either by buying a new PC or by buying a product key from MS to activate their unactivated version when their version of Vista stops working.

Given the last bullet point, all MS is really losing is: licensing fees from the few for whom this is worth the trouble; and the time value of licensing fees from some others who delay activation for a long time before finally entering a valid product key.

I think those losses are probably outweighed by the advantage of having a more people get a free, extended look at their new OS. Or I could be wrong and this could just be a massive screw up by Microsoft... but I don't think so.

The SBS Diva writes to/of Robert Scoble,  "No sometimes all of us in the tech world need to step back and realize that this "buzz" we speak of is in reality only a few number of folks and the rest of the world are quite happy to continue to use whatever technology has served them well."

This quote (and, in fact, the whole post) struck a chord with me because I have had related thoughts about the many new sites and services that fill the postings of TechCrunch. For a while I tried to keep up with Tech Crunch, and thought that some day I might try some of the more useful sites. But a while ago I gave that up and moved TechCrunch to a less urgent corner of my RSS readers folders.

As a glance through TechCrunch will show, there are many Web 2.0 sites springing up everyday. But who in the real world has the time to actually look at them?

Even when something would pique my interest, I would almost never try it out. Why? Because the odds are that it would not integrate with the other applications and data sources that I use on a daily basis. The effort to integrate even a useful site into my digital life would likely not be worth the effort unless it offered something really amazing.

This is why despite all the talk of sites like Twitter, I think that a company like Microsoft or even IBM is could well add the needed structure and standards that are needed for all of these web applications and data stores to work together in some way that is both useful to the consumers and allows for easily adding additional services. Wasn't this supposed to be the promise of XML? Well conceived standards, like data structures in programming are what will could make the Web 2.0 explosion useful. Without them, it's the Internet bubble all over again.

Iv'e adapted this post from a comment I was inspired to add to a thread over at AVS Forum. There has been much complaining there about the high cost of Vista PCs with Cablecard tuners. I don't find the cost to be as exorbitant as many and this is why:

I've ordered one of the Velocity Micro boxes for about $2400: dual core AMD processor: 2GB RAM; and dual Cablecard tuners.

I have rationalized the cost by subtracting out the value of the PC it will be replacing (about $800) and then dividing the extra $1600 among the four Xbox 360's that we have in place as extenders.

So, it's really only about $400 per location for a nice upgrade to what I still consider to be the best (and most flexible) multiroom system out there-- even with some of the disadvantages of the restrictions on Cablecard recorded content!

That $400 per location dramatically expands the content I have easy access to and is a relatively small part of the investment in equipment for each location by the time you add up the cost of TV, receiver, speakers, wiring and cabinets.

I am under no illusions that this investment will last for 10 years, but I figure that by buying on the leading edge of Vista, this is a system that I'll keep around for about four more years. So the cost per year is about $400 (assuming minimal resale value at the end of that period). There is a net savings of $10/month from not renting the Motorola HD PVR ($15/month - $5/month for a second cablecard). That brings the net cost of this upgrade down to $280/year or $22.50/month.

This is $22.50/month isn't insignificant by any means, but when compared to the $300 we spend for communication and media services (2 lines of telephone, Internet, cable TV, 2 cell phones with data plans) in our household every month, it doesn't seem quite as big. It's also about the cost of a family meal at McDonald's!

I put it this way because I've made the draw that I would be willing to cut back on other expenses, to dramatically expand the quality and scope of video content available to me through my Media Center at home.

I suspect that many of the people writing off Cablecard Media Center PCs as being too expensive aren't considering the expense in this fashion.

I recently purchased the Gear Head Windows Navigator Keyboard from Amazon.  It was one of the more inexpensive USB keyboards with a conventional function key layout.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the the extra multimedia and shortcut keys were well laid out and useful. I was less pleasantly surprised to find that the keyboard lies flatter than I would prefer.

The most serious problem with the keyboard, however, is that it seems incapable of producing combinations of the Windows key with other keys. This is a problem in Vista. For example to get the Flip 3D effect required hitting Windows+Tab. Using that combination with this keyboard produces only a Tab.

I have written to Amazon to let them know about this defect. It will be interesting to see what if anything can be done about this as I can't seem to track down any information from the manufacturer (the keyboard indicates it is made in China) on the web.

Update: It turns out I had not enabled aero on this PC and that was causing the problem not the keyboard, evidently the default on a clean install is to have aero turned off. In contrast, the laptop that I purchaser with Vista pre-installed, had aero turned on out of the box.

I installed an extra GB of memory in my SBS 2003 box last night, hoping that this would alleviate the sluggishness I had experienced. It did help initially, but a fair amount of sluggishness returned. Page faults per second were running in excess of 1000 even though there was a fair amount of free memory.

So I experimented with disabling applications and found that most of the page faults disappeared when I stopped the Orb 1.0 service that I had been running.

This may lead me to try Orb 2.0 again. When I tried it several months ago, the experience was not good and my request for assistance on the Orb message board never garnered a response, but this issue with Orb 1.0 may cause me to pursue a another solution in earnest. Another solution might be moving Orb to my Media Center server.

I recently discovered that I did not really understand how to install our new network printer so that it (i) could be used independent of another PC and (ii) so that drivers for other PCs on the network would be installed automatically.

I had previously installed the printer drivers on a PC and published the printer to Active Directory. I learned that this only allows the printer to be shared through the PC tha published the printer, with the result that if the publishing PC wasn't on, no other PC could print to that printer.

Instead, I discovered that the best approach is to add the printer on the Windows Server 2003 box (in may case SBS 2003). This way any PC on the network can use the printer (although presumably only if the SBS 2003 box is on-- although it always is on). Similarly, the printer is automatically made available to all the PCs that are part of the domain.

Interestingly, Vista machines are able to use the printer just fine even though I never added any special Vista drivers on the Windows 2003 box. This appears to be by design.

In figuring out the correct way to install the printer, I found this information from Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Print Services page to be quite helpful.

I have been running SBS 2003 on a Dell PowerEdge SC 430 with 1GB of RAM and a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4. Since installing SBS, it has always been a little sluggish, but after installed Windows Desktop search, it became unbearably slow. I first noticed that requests from J. River Media Center from our Roku Soundbridges began to take interminably long to get responses. When I investigated this evening I found that UI on the server itself was unbearably slow.

Via Performance Monitor, I noticed that an amount of memory in excess of GB had been committed and page faults were running at about 4000/second. A reboot did nothing. So I have ordered another GB of memory turned off Orb and Windows Desktop Search to save some memory. It has since recovered to become merely a little sluggish. Page faults are down by an order of magnitude to about 400/second. Once I install the new memory, I'll go back to running Orb and Windows Desktop Search again.

Originally this box ran XP Pro and was fine for that purpose. The additional demands of the SBS server apps meant that the server had only a razor thin tolerance for additional memory usage and adding WDS appears to have pushed it past the breaking point.

At least I hope that's it-- otherwise I've wasted $125 on new memory.

I have figured out a way to use flash drives for Vista's Readyboost that would ordinarily fail Vista's fairly strict performance requirements for flash drives it is willing to use for Readyboost. Ed Bott has many details on how Vista tests for this performance. A database of flash drives and their suitability for Readyboost is being compiled by Grant Gibson.

I looked in Grant's database and Pricegrabber to find what I thought was the cheapest 4GB flash drive that would support Readyboost: The Kingston DataTraveler DTI 4GB, which I picked up for about $36 shipped. Only potential problem was that I noticed that there were conflicting reports of its suitability for Readyboost. As it was about $20 cheaper than a 4GB flash drive that worked consistently with Readyboost, I thought I would give it a shot.

The drive arrived today and consistently failed the read speed test, its write speed was about 1700KB/sec. So I formatted the flash drive with NTFS and then right clicked in the drive in Explorer, chose Properties, the General Tab and selected the Compress this Drive to Save Space checkbox. The reported write speed went through the roof to 141320KB/sec. and the read speed was a respectable 4764KB/sec.

Presumably the Readyboost test is writing a string of the same data that gets compressed to just a few bytes by the NTFS compression algorithm, which the Readyboost test interprets as a super fast write. I wouldn't think that the read speed would be similarly affected by this algorithm.

So the net result is that I get to use Readyboost on what would otherwise be a card that falls just shy of Readyboost's required specs.

I haven't done performance testing to see if Readyboost is really helping me that much under these circumstances, although I suspect, but don't know, it is helping me almost as much as a card that had a little faster write speed. I'll leave that sort of rigorous testing to others.

My new Brother MFC-7820N multifunction printer arrived today. Although I had never used a networked printer before (as distinct from a printer hooked to a PC being shared by a PC on a network), the setup went fairly smoothly. The only hiccup was when the printer wasn't autodetected. The problem was relatively easily solved by setting the printer's DHCP settings to "DHCP" instead of automatic. Printing and scanning both work fine from Vista. Once shared from Vista, the printer was also easily be added to any XP Pro machine on our home network.

[Note this update on printer installation.]

I had been having some problems with blurry fonts in some apps. That problem is gone today. I'm note sure whether its is a result of tuning the ClearType settings or installing the latest nVidia drivers yesterday, but after a reboot today, the problem was gone.

Thanks to a response to my post in the Vista newsgroup, I was told that Vista search can have access to indices of files on a network share by installing Windows Desktop Search on the machine hosting that share. Evidently Vista search and Windows Desktop search running on different machines all communicate with one another. The search service running on each machine is responsible for indexing the files on that machine and responding to queries that come in automatically from other machines. This seems like a great architecture. So I set that up on my BS 2003 box and set it to indexing. I haven't tried it out yet as I figured I would give it a while to index the my files first.

Following some advice from AVG and some additional work on my own, I was able to uninstall an AVG Antivirus installation that was corrupted as part of the upgrade to Vista and then successfully reinstall AVG. The uninstall was a mix of manual an automated steps. I had to perform a few additional steps beyond those specified by AVG to complete the uninstall, namely:

• Stopping AVG services manually to allow deletion of files being used.
• Doing a registry search for certain AVG .DLLs to delete their keys so that I could then delete the .DLLs.

I also discovered that I needed to uninstall and reinstall J. River's Media Center (version 11) to get it to run under Vista.

Startup of the Vista desktop doesn't seem much faster than XP, and in fact it is probably a little slower as it takes some time to loan Sidebar Gadgets.

I was able to successfully move a number of User files, e.g. Saved Games, Favorites to a different volume jsut by moving the files there in Explorer.

I also moved the Public folders to a different volume by copying the files there, changing a registry setting, deleting the old files, and sharing the new Public folder.

I am somewhat frustrated by the seeming inability to Vista's indexed search function to search network shares. If XP and Windows 2003 have this capability, why doesn't Vista?