Pickabar Blog

This is a post in my own self interest. I’m sure there will be another instance in the future where I cam connected to a company’s VPN, but I just can’t resolve an internal, that is intranet, resources. If the name doesn’t work by itself, try appending the appropriate DNS suffix in the advanced IP4 settings for the VPN connection.

This has been a note to my future annoyed self.

Sometime I post things here just so they are web search accessible. This is one of those times!

I’ve run into situations where the WAV files I export from Sonar have very low volume on several occasions. I’ve finished my new track, I’ve got everything EQed and compressed to just the right level and my track is peaking at exactly the volume I want. I’m excited to share the new song with the world (i.e. Sarah) and then the exported WAV file is as quiet as a field mouse.

Each time, I dutifully check my meters to confirm that the volume is peaking at a good level during playback of the song. Despite that, the exported wav files are much lower in volume than what I’m seeing on the master track’s meter during playback. I tear my hair out checking and double checking settings, adding and removing plugins, kvelling and kvetching.

Then I turn to the Cakewalk Forums looking for a solution. There are several threads there on the subject, but none of them offer anything that helps. People explain the basics of the metering system, the principals of compressing the master bus and other features of the DAW, but it’s always the things that I’m already doing correctly.

…and then I remember to check the Mains. Ugh! For some reason I don’t understand. the volume level of the main outputs is used to set the volume level for exports. It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how it works. Why would I want my exported file’s volume to be lower, just because I want to output sent to my soundcard to be lower? I’m also not really sure why the default level isn’t unity, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. Of course, the mains aren’t visible in the Console view by default, so it’s easy to overlook this when your exports are coming out with low volume.

Luckily, it’s a two second fix once you’re aware of the problem.

First, click the button to show the mains:

Then, make sure that the main output’s level is set to unity:

Voila! Normal export levels. Hopefully I can remember this next time and save my self some wasted troubleshooting time.

About a year or so ago, my here-to-fore perfectly working Samsung 225BW computer monitor started taking a very long time to turn on. At first it was only a few minutes and I could live with it. Eventually, a few minutes became up to a half hour and the situation became unworkable. I was learning about electronics and specifically capacitors at that time. My gut told me that the problem, slow warming up, might have to do with a faulty capacitor.

I contacted the service folks at Samsung and they informed me that the repairs might cost a couple of hundred dollars. At that point, it made more fiscal sense to just purchase a new monitor and I did. I got a Dell 2208WFP from NewEgg for a reasonable price and I was happy again. Well, pretty happy. It still bothered me to throw away what was an otherwise perfect monitor.

The electronics we use and throw away so easily now-a-days often contain toxic substances like lead and even the plastic that makes up so much of them requires petroleum AND will probably outlast our civilization. In my own life I’ve owned maybe 20 computers and eight or nine cellphones, not to mention VCRs, stereos and tons of other things that are sitting in a landfill rotting as we speak. More than that, I’m a die hard packrat and hate to throw anything useful away.

So, the monitor sat in our hallway gathering dust.

In the last few weeks Sarah and I have been making a real effort to clean up our apartment. We’ve got about ten things sitting in our apartment with no real purpose. We’ve talked about throwing these things out, or finding the right place to recycle them, or finding a place to donate them, but it’s never progressed beyond the point of talking. Then, yesterday, I decided to put the monitor on craigslist. I figured that it would be better to give it away for free to someone who might have the skills to fix it, rather than letting it go to waste.

Then it hit me. Maybe I could fix it myself! A quick web search for “Samsung power problem” brought up 13 million results. Obviously, this was a pretty common design flaw with many Samsung monitors. One particular article on the Earth Info site really made me think that this was a fix that I was capable of doing myself. I haven’t done much soldering, but I’ve been tinkering for about a year and this seemed within the range of my skillset. Anyway, what did I have to lose?

The biggest mental obstacle for me was opening the monitor’s case. I’ve been building computers since I was eighteen or so, but I’d never even seen the inside of a monitor. Like a lot of people, I tend to treat electronic things as sealed magic boxes. It was a little daunting opening up what could have been a Pandora’s box.

I needn’t have worried. Opening the case required only loosening a few screws and prying off the front with a butter knife. I took pictures as I went along in order to make sure I’d be able to put things back together. Unfortunately, I deleted the pictures from my camera before I realized how useful they may have been for the future. In fifteen minutes the monitor was in pieces on my coffee table. I was surprised at how simple the monitor actually was. Just a case and two pcb boards, really.

There were three blown capacitors on the power supply board just as I had seen in the articles and YouTube videos. It took about five minutes for me to de-solder them. Only at that point did I remember that I would actually need need replacements for the capacitors I removed. Some engineer I am! I contacted RadioShack near my house, but RadioShack isn’t really the same hobbyist friendly place that it used to be. I also contacted a place called Leeds Radio that was near my house. The curt person who answered the phone seemed completely uninterested in talking to me. He indicated that he didn’t have the appropriate capacitors and quickly hung up on me.

Note to business owners: Even if you don’t have the item I’m looking for today, you may have the item I’m looking for tomorrow. I’ve you’re not interested in talking to a potential customer, why are you even in business?

You can imagine how frustrated I was. How could it be so hard to find electronic components in NYC? I could have ordered the capacitors online, but I was heart set on completing the task that same day. I also wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Sarah why our mission to clean out our apartment had instead led to me having monitor components strewn all over the place. After some additional digging on the web, I found a place at 269 Canal Street called, imaginatively enough, 269 Electronics. They confirmed that they did have the appropriate caps. A quick subway ride to Chinatown and back and I was in business. I bought one extra of each type of capacitor and the grand total was $12.00. It took about fifteen minutes for me to install the new caps and a few more minutes to re-assemble the case.

I evidently forgot to take at least one picture, because I wound up with a small metal piece which I wasn’t sure where or how it re-attach. So, I just threw it in my junk drawer and crossed my fingers. I reconnected the monitor to my computer and I was back in business!

All in all, the repair cost me $12.00 and a few hours of easy work. The only tools needed were my soldering setup, a screwdriver and a butter knife. In the end, I feel incredibly satisfied to have been able to DIY it. I have a much better idea of what I’m actually capable of doing with electronics and I am even more interested in hardware hacking. I feel like the mental veil that I’d had towards electronic devices was lifted a little bit. Most of all, I feel like I contributed some small bit to fight the overwhelming air of disposability that’s infected our world these days.

America! Let’s get our hands dirty again.

p.s. Samsung, you should probably fix this. It’s pretty embarrassing.

Awesome fixed monitor on the right.

Everyone is biased, but it can be very hard to acknowledge those biases. That’s why it’s an incredible advantage in life if you can look past the vanity filters and special effects that your superego places in front of our mind’s eye and really see the truth about yourself.

When it comes to computer problems, I am biased towards suspecting software over hardware. It’s not hard to understand why. I am a programmer. I’ve spent an untold number of hours having a compiler or an OS tell me that I’ve made a mistake. I know how easy it can be for software to do things that neither the author or Ada Lovelace ever intended. Unfortunately, that bias sometimes delays my ability to solve problems.

About a year ago, my computer started acting odd and occasionally blue screening while I worked with large files or a large number of files. The start of the behavior wasn’t easily correlated with any new program installations or other software updates. I spent hours updating and rolling back drivers, disabling devices and even taking memory dumps for use with my debugger before finally deciding to re-install Vista x64. I remember having the issue arise while friends were over and getting the annoying “Vista sucks, get a Mac!” response from someone. I admit to feeling that maybe they were right after all. It was frustrating.

I back up my PC regularly and store setup files for older programs, so a re-install only costs me a few hours. Just as I was rebooting the PC to start the new install, I decided to run memtest, a utility which stress tests computer memory and can identify problems with RAM.  I did this on a lark, without thinking much about the fact that I had in fact bought two new sticks of RAM for the computer a few months before the problems started. I guess I just assumed that that couldn’t be the underlying cause.

Well, memtest identified a lot of errors, as you’ve probably guessed. I tested the PC without the two new sticks and it worked perfectly. After a little research into my order history on the Newegg site, I realized that I had in fact bought incompatible memory. I can’t explain how it happened, really. I try to be careful and use due diligence when deciding on what type of hardware to buy for my PC. I guess I just screwed up. It never occurred to me that the memory could have been the problem, because it had worked perfectly for a few months. I still don’t understand exactly how that is possible. I ordered new memory and never had a re-occurrence of the problem.

Fast forward to about a month ago, where I started noticing that my CPU usage would sometime spike to 100% while watching internet videos. Now, I freely admit that I work my computer like an unloved pack mule. I usually have tens of Firefox windows open, while working on music and playing chess against the computer. But there was no way I should be getting CPU spikes like that. After a while, it occurred to me that my computer just wasn’t snappy in general. I started checking Windows Update history again and updated all of my device drivers. Nothing helped. My computer would be running along smoothly and then for a minute or so the CPU usage would just go wild. Then, just like that, it would drop down to more normal levels.

I observed the pattern over and over again using a bunch of Flash videos and Resource Monitor and finally fingered “System Interrupts” as the problem. I did some web research and found a bunch of message board and blog posts suggesting that the problem could be related to DPC calls (ignore that part if you’re not a programmer) caused by a device driver. I had had some issues with the Nvidia drivers that my motherboard and video card use during the early Vista days, so I was all too eager to add them to the head of the suspects list. I’m definitely not going to use Nvidia hardware for the next computer I build.

The XPerf tool that comes with the Windows 7 SDK indicated that a large number of the calls were coming from the USB Controller. I looked to the ceiling and yelled “NViiiiiiiidiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaah!” in my best Schwarzenegger voice. Then, I started updating drivers and looking around for fixes or workarounds. I found a few KB articles concerning Nvidia USB drivers and considered whether my symptoms might be related.

At some point, I noticed that the CPU spiking also happened when using Ableton Live. Could it have been the drivers for my external soundcard instead? I’ve had some problems with the drivers for my Presonus Firebox. I visited the Presonus site and updated the driver to the (finally released) Windows 7 drivers, but still no luck.

I stumbled upon one message board post mentioned that the issue might be related to an overheating CPU, but I didn’t bother to do anything more than skim it. I was sure that wasn’t the problem, but I’m not sure exactly why I felt that way. Maybe it was ego, because I’d built the box? Maybe it was excess pride in the (count them) three case fans I’d used in the case? Could it have been unresolved anger towards Nvidia  or Presonus for the problems I’d had in the past? Maybe it was partially all of those things, but most especially it was my bias towards seeing things as software rather than hardware problems. In any case, I didn’t even consider that as a possible cause.

At some point, I got sick of having to open a bunch of Flash videos or Ableton Live in order to test possible fixes to the problem. So, I decided to use one of the CPU benchmarks included in Sisoft Sandra instead. Again, this was only to make the testing process easier, as I was sure the problem had something to do with bad drivers. The results of the processor arithmetic benchmark shocked me. My Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 CPU was scoring around the Pentium IV range, at something like 1/5 of the performance that would be expected. You can imagine that I wasn’t happy. The problem wasn’t that system interrupts were taking up too much CPU time, it was the the CPU wasn’t working at nearly the rate that it should have been.

I wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of having to spend $300 dollars on a new CPU. Now that I think about it, the fact that hardware problems often cost money to fix might be another factor in my tendency not to look in that direction when problems arise.

Eventually I thought back to that message board post about the CPU temperature and I checked using Core Temp. The CPU temperature was hitting 60 degrees at idle and spiked to 87 degrees under load. The Intel thermal specification for the chip is 62.2 degrees, so you can imagine how hot my guy was getting. My first thought was to remove and re-install the CPU cleaner, but I couldn’t find the thermal grease tube I had saved from the initial installation. After searching for a bit, I resolved myself to having to make a trip to a computer supply store. In the meantime, I dusted the (count them) three case fans and the CPU cooler and re-tested the CPU temperature. It had dropped back to 45 or so degrees at idle and maxed out at 67 degrees under load.

I went crazy opening Flash videos and the computer didn’t blink. Ableton Live running while watching Flash videos? No problem. I tortured poor Lord Vader^* and the CPU didn’t break a sweat. Problem solved. With five minutes of work with a can of compressed air. Seriously.

Anyway, that’s about twelve hundred words just to remind myself that I am biased. I always assume that computer problems are software related and not hardware related. In the future, I need to think like an engineer and run basic hardware tests before I head down the driver rabbit hole.

*Yes, that’s my computer’s name.

Microsoft has struggled playing catch-up to Google when it comes to search, but I actually preferred their map service. The killer feature for me, as a runner, was the ability to easily draw routes on a map and calculate the exact distance. This let me easily plan new runs from any computer without a lot of hassle. I’ve never found a way to do the equivalent on any other service. The feature was implemented well, required no special plug-ins and I was only beginning to learn about how much it could do.

There was one big missing feature in Microsoft’s map service (Virtual Earth, Live Local, Live Maps, Bing Maps, whatever you want to call it); there was no way to save a default location. With Google Maps, you can choose a default location from the main page and it stores it as a cookie on your machine. The next time you visit the site, the map centers on the location you chose. Microsoft’s product didn’t offer this feature. Instead, they touted the ability to automatically determine your location via IP address. That feature worked great in the demos that the maps team shared with us (I was a blue badge at the time), easily zooming in on the Redmond Campus or locations in Seattle. The feature never worked for me.

You see, in Seattle a map centered on a ten mile radius may work fine. People drive to things. A four mile trip to a restaurant isn’t a big deal. New York City isn’t a driving town. I personally spend the vast majority of my time within maybe a three mile radius. If I’m looking for a new pizza place, I’m looking for a place that I can walk to. A listing in Elizabeth, New Jersey might as well be in Timbuktu. Google’s default location feature allows me to customize the site so that it works for me.

At least 90% of the time when searching for something with Google Maps I just:

1. Open the site.

2. Type in what I’m looking for.

Compare with the Microsoft Map site:

1. Open the site

2. Search for my apartment.

3. Type in what I’m looking for.

I have to do that second additional step, adjusting the map so that it’s frame of reference works for me, every single time. Why would I bother?

I tried to share that feedback with the DL that was setup to receive internal feedback on the Live Maps and they responded with the ability to create collections. That was a really powerful feature that allowed you to store your own maps with custom pushbuttons, paths and other cool information. It really was a cool feature, but it didn’t address my scenario at all. In fact, it made it harder:

1. Open the site.

2. Sign in with my passport.

3. Open the correct collection.

4. Zoom in on the pushpin placed on my apartment.

That’s not even easier than just searching for my apartment.

The thing that makes this oversight even more annoying is that, as a developer, I know just how easy this feature would be to implement. It’s a cookie. In fact, it would probably take me five minutes to write a wrapper for the Live Maps service myself that would do this. But, why should I when I can just use Google? So, even though I considered myself a loyal ‘softee, that’s what I did. I just gave up and used Google Maps. Of course, that made it pretty silly to continue using Live/Bing/Next Code Name Search. So, I went back to using Google for search, too.

A few months later, a message was sent out announcing several great new Live Maps features. I replied, in a snarky tone I admit, that none of those features would convince me to switch as long as they were unwilling to address the default location problem. I was unsurprisingly flamed by the team and other employees on the DL. That didn’t bother me. What did bother me was, no one addressed my underlying concern! That’s something I learned from this whole process. Making a good product, any kind of product, means actively looking for good feedback and usage scenarios, even if the information isn’t delivered in the kind and friendly way you would prefer. There will always be a way to downplay negative feedback because the person who gives it is snarky, or used incorrect grammar, etc. In the end, is the feedback relevant? They chose to ignore my feedback, which meant losing me and anyone whose usage patterns were similar to my own as a customer.

Criticism should be sought relentlessly, especially criticism that casts doubts on the basic assumptions that you make during the planning of your products features. If you aren’t willing to dive into the mud to dig out the truffles, rest assured there is a competitor out there who will be. That snarky customer who shared the feedback you didn’t want to hear may just be the noisiest of many other customers who will just silently switch to your competitor’s products.

Part of the MSFT culture is a focus on eating your own dog food. That means using the products that you work on so that you can understand the product as an end user. Unfortunately, there isn’t as big a focus on being open and accepting of criticism, especially criticism that comes from outside of a given product team.  Without the latter, the former is really just a lot of empty hot air.

Despite that, I still occasionally used Live Maps for their cool drawing feature. It really was simple, powerful and met my needs exactly. I haven’t used it for a while, though, as I haven’t really had the desire to plot a new running path. I actually thought about using it a few times, but I had a little trouble figuring out how to do so using the new whiz bang Silverlight based Bing Maps interface. This morning, I decided to take a few moments to figure out how to use the feature and for the life of me, I can’t. I think they actually removed the feature. Unbelievable. They have finally convinced me to only use Google Maps.

A Google Search brings back nothing but developer information. As a developer, it’s exciting to see how much information is out there about using their API. As an end user, that’s incredibly disappointing. Why would I even bother to do further research, when I can just use the default selection that everyone else uses, namely Google Maps?

Now, I’m sure that Microsoft did a usage study and determined that only 5% (brown number) or whatever of users took advantage of this feature.  Hopefully they actually did a study, maybe someone on the team just said “oh, no one uses that”. Regardless, eliminating this feature eliminates any interest I have in their product. Even more, this makes me less likely to try any of their other products. Do they care? Probably not. Maybe they should. I’m a pretty influential person when it comes to technology. Lots of my friends are interested to hear what services I use.

So many of these decisions, like the decision to remove Find In Library from the Windows Media Player 12 playlist area, make me less likely to use Microsoft products. I don’t have any inside knowledge about how they make decisions, but they definitely smell like decisions by committee made by people who don’t actually use their own products. They result in products with lots of shiny features that look great on a whiteboard in a room in Redmond and on powerpoint slides, but they don’t delight the actual users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?

Anyway, I get the hint Microsoft. I’ll stick to Google Maps from now on.

Windows 7 still rocks, though.

This is why YouTube is great. If you’re a Star Wars fan and a grump, you’ll love it. Watch the whole seven part series.

Or, EasyCGI is a horrible web hosting company.

Or, EasyCGI sucks..

This site was previously hosted by a great little firm called Webstrike Solutions. They were responsive to any issues that arose, my site was decently fast loading and I basically never even thought about my hosting. Then, in March, the company was aquired by EasyCGI. There were lots of falling bricks, but I tried to be patient. I know how difficult migrations can be and I assumed that the move would be beneficial in the long term. I shouldn’t have been optimistic.

Right off the bat, my blog (then on the Movable Type platform) didn’t work. I contacted their tech support expecting the kind of friendly and helpful response I’d always received from Webstrike in the past. Instead, they basically offered no assistance. I wound up writing code to get the data into a format that would work for WordPress, their recommended blog platform. That should have been enough for me to move hosts, but I didn’t.

Since then, I’ve had multiple instances of downtime, none of which have been explained. The site eventually comes back, or the error message disappears and my tickets were closed with notes indicating that no issue was found. This kind of sweeping under the rug is a sign of an organization that has a really toxic culture. How do you build up institutional knowledge and prevent re-occurrences of problems if you just make believe they never happened?

BTW, in each circumstance where my site was down I noticed and contacted Tech Support. They seem to do no monitoring of their hosted sites. Unbelievable!

The folks I worked with in their level 1 support tried to be friendly, but they were completely non-technical. Basically, they were robots that read from the prepared script and had no real ability to understand specific problems or to provide advice. Usually chatting with them for a few minutes led to them promising to open a ticket with the level 2 support.

The final straw for me was about a week ago when PHP errors about a MySql module started showing up at the bottom of the pages of my blog. I hadn’t touched anything on the server, so it was obvious that something had happened on their end. The blog still worked, but the pages weren’t loading correctly and the admin pages were at best halfway functional. I contacted a chatbot and after much prodding they actually scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw the error. They escalated my ticket and I went on with my day.

The next day I received a message that they could not find the error message and had closed my ticket. I contacted them via the ticketing form to indicate that the error was in fact there and that they had just not bothered to scroll to the bottom of the page. They never responded. I contacted another chatbot and this gentleman saw the error and re-opened the ticket. A few days later, the ticket was again closed and a note was added that the error wasn’t visible. I checked the site and the error was in fact gone. More than likely, someone made some sort of mistake and then cleaned it up without admitting what they had done.

My blog has also been dog slow. Now, WordPress is known for being kind of sluggish, but this was ridiculous. I tested the site and often had 14 second load times. Personally, any site that doesn’t load for me in 2-3 seconds gets the back button and I never visit again. FTP was slow. Everything was just pretty slow.

…but choosing a host is hard. There are tons of them with slightly differentiated offerings and just as many sites offering “reviews” that are often just obfuscated ads. I kept dithering.

Then, while looking into my WordPress slowness problems I decided to look into adding the WP-Super-Cache plugin to my site. I stumbled onto a blog post by Jess Coburn with instructions for using WP Super Cache on Windows Hosting. It was well written, clear and most importantly it specifically addressed the idea of using WordPress on Windows without any religious platform dogma either way. It turned out that Jess is the CEO of Applied Innovations, a hosting company in Florida.

Well, I made the leap and you are now reading this on my new host. So far, without any changes to the blog, the speed problems seem to be a thing of the past.

The bottom line? EasyCGI sucks! Ask google, that opinion is pretty widespread. I highly recommend that you not do business with them.

Yet more proof that we’re living in the future. Talk To Me is a free translation app for Android that I highly recommend. You say a phrase in English and your phone repeats the phrase in the language of your choice. Sweet!

I’ve always been a big fan of Windows Media Player. It’s not the fastest program in the world, but it’s a Ferrari compared to ITunes, at least on Windows. I’ve never really felt the need to look into fancier third party media managers. Until now.

Here’s how I listen to music on my PC. I skim through my library picking different tunes from different albums and build a playlist on the fly. Then, if a song comes on and I decide I would like to listen to more songs from that album or artist I just click “Find In Library” and jump to the album.

Except, that feature was removed in Windows Media Player 12. Seriously? I can’t imagine the thinking behind removing that feature. “No one uses that, I mean they know what they are playing, right?” I swear, sometimes it seems like no one at Microsoft actually eats their own dog food.

I’ve tried to live without the feature, but it’s incredibly annoying. I can search for the song in the library manually, but it rubs me the wrong way that I have to. Why am I searching for a song that you’re already playing? Right click, “find in library” worked perfectly.

I guess it’s time for me to start looking for a new media player. Maybe Media Monkey?

[Disclaimer: I worked for MSFT for years and I’m still a fan boy. I also, as an alumni, got my copies of Win7 for a discounted price. YMMV, etc.]

I built my current desktop PC “Lord Vader”  in March of 2007 (yes, I’m dork). Since then, I’ve upgraded the CPU, added more memory and added more hard drives. With those small investments I’ve still got a pretty decent hot rod on my hands, without having had to buy a new machine. Next year I’ll probably swap out the mobo and CPU.

I’ve run Vista on the box since before it was released. It took until at least SP1 before the box ran decently and SP2 before I was completely satisfied. And I was completely satisfied with Vista, even if that goes against the accepted wisdom that Vista was rubbish. At RTM, I had lots of problems with poor or even non-existent drivers. I also made the mistake of upgrading the box from XP to Vista which was a bad idea.

I had enough trouble with Nvidia drivers (I bought Nvidia products for both the motherboard and the video card) that I’ll never buy anything from them again. The soundcard I was using didn’t get a usable Vista driver until months after the release. I also had trouble with MSN Music (I’m embarrassed to admit that I actually bought music from them) and even from Windows Media Center.

By the time the second service pack came around my computer was working pretty much flawlessly. I did a clean install of Vista SP2 x64 and the experience was night and day from my original upgrade. Even the Nvidia drivers were finally up to par!

So, I didn’t really need to upgrade to Windows 7, but I’m a geek. I live for running the cutting edge of everything. Of course, I pre-ordered. On Friday, I ran downstairs to get the package from the UPS guy and tore it open like a little kid on Xmas morning. I backed up my data, formatted my drive and performed a clean install. Sixty one minutes later I was reading Facebook and listening to music again. Everything except for my external soundcard just worked out of the box without me having to visit vendor websites for drivers. All of my programs worked without fiddling with compatibility settings.

The next day I re-installed my recording software and had no problems. Even my Presonus Firebox just worked when I downloaded the driver, without having to perform the workarounds that I’d used with the Windows 7 RC that was installed on my laptop. The biggest headache I’ve run into is getting some of the more piracy paranoid companies to re-authorize my software, but even that only took a few hours.

So far, Windows 7 has lived up to the good things I’ve heard about it in reviews and on message boards. Things are much snappier and more responsive. The new libraries feature has finally moved me completely from the exhaustively organize my files camp to the put it wherever and let search find it later camp. That said, my favorite feature, the feature that’s already making me more productive, is Aero Snap. Using the Windows Key and the direction pad allows me to easily move windows between monitors, to align them side by side, to maximize them, etc. without ever having to take my hands off of the keyboard. The ten minutes I invested in getting comfortable with that feature have already paid off handsomely for me.

The ability to have Windows automatically shuffle your favorite photos as desktop wallpaper every 30 minutes is totally eye candy, but I have to say I really dig that too.

All in all, I’m happy with the upgrade in a way that I’ve never been with previous installations right after product release. I’m even a little tiny bit bummed that I didn’t have to get out my engineer hat and start searching for workarounds and fixes. Not much, just a bit.

Of course, you may not be a geek. If things are working for you in Vista, you should probably wait for your next PC purchase to enjoy Windows 7. Operating System upgrades are no joke and my flawless experience doesn’t mean that you won’t run into a problem with a device driver or legacy program.