Can you hear me now? I didn’t think so.

I downloaded Internet Explorer 9 Beta yesterday. Today I discovered that when you open a site that you’ve pinned to the taskbar, you can’t display add-on toolbars, such as Roboform. I wanted to send you this information through the “Send feedback” option within IE9. But when I click that, I get this:

So I clicked the “Get” link, and it brought me to the Windows Live ID Sign-In Assistant 6.5 download page. I downloaded the setup file and ran it.

Oh, well. I tried.

As I thought about replacing the tablet, I thought to myself, “Hey, what about a Mac?”Macs, after all, are celebrated for their multimedia management, and I thought I might be able to shift my a/v editing tasks from the desktop to a new MacBook, thus extending the life of the desktop for another year or two.

I was concerned, of course, about compatibility with Windows systems. After all, my primary use for a notebook is to run my IT consulting business while I’m out of the office, and that’s a Windows world. Not only are all my clients using Windows, but some of the cloud services I use require Internet Explorer for full functionality. Some quick research convinced me that this would not be a problem. Not only does the Mac OS have a bunch of features designed to facilitate networking with Windows – including BootCamp, which allows the Mac hardware to boot into Windows — but by using Parallels, an inexpensive software program, I could easily switch back and forth between Mac and Windows environments.

With my compatibility concerns assuaged, I started looking at pricing. My wife is a college professor, so we’d be eligible for an educational discount from Apple. I spec’d out the following system:

• 15-inch MacBook Pro (Hi-Res Antiglare screen)
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
• 4 GB RAM (2 DIMMS)
• 500 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM
• DVD +/- RW
• Aperture and Final Cut Express (photo and video editing)
• AppleCare Protection Plan
• One year One-to-One membership at the Apple store (figuring I might need some help with the OS transition)

Total price: $2,875.00

That’s a good chunk of change, so I started wondering what it would cost to solve my performance problems while staying on a Windows platform. First, the laptop, a Dell Studio 14 running Windows 7 Home Premium:

• 14” Hi-Def screen (including facial recognition for logging on – cool!)
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7 (2.8 GHz Turbo Mode)
• 4 GB RAM
• 500 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM
• DVD +/- RW
• Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements
• 1 GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD video card
• 3-year warranty with on-site support

Total price: $1,328.00 … and that’s street price. As a Dell reseller, I should be able to get a better deal.

Having halved the cost of the laptop, it occurred to me that I might be able to replace the desktop as well. I priced out a Dell Vostro 430 running Window 7 Home Basic (as a Microsoft partner, I can upgrade the OS at no charge):

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
• 4 GB RAM (2 DIMMS)
• 160 GB SATA drive, 7200 RPM (I already have two 250 GB 7200 RPM drives that I can re-use)
• DVD +/- RW
• 1 year warranty

Total price: $890.00

So if I got a new Windows laptop AND and a new Windows desktop – both of which should be crazy fast compared to what I have now – I’d spend $657 LESS than if I bought a comparably spec’d MacBook Pro.

Can anyone make a compelling case for why I should go Mac?

The most common problem people encounter, from what I can tell reading various blogs and forums, is that the special boot CD does not contain the correct drivers for the PC’s network card. Without the drivers, the network card won’t work, and without a working network card, the PC can’t talk to the Windows Home Server.  If that happens, you’re supposed to put the drivers on a USB hard drive and scan the hard drive for the drivers during the restore process. The drivers you need are supposed to be found in the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder that is part of each computer’s backup on the Windows Home Server. Yeah, right.

I recently had occasion to restore a Dell Optiplex 755 running Windows XP (32-bit). The network card was an Intel 825xx-series Gigabit ethernet card. The boot CD did not include the necessary drivers. I retrieved the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder, copied it to a USB drive, and scanned the drive for the drivers at the appropriate point in the process. No network drivers were found. I solved the problem by downloading the correct driver package from support.dell.com, extracting the files from the downloaded .exe file to a folder called “drivers” on the USB drive, and then scanning the drive again. Fortunately, the restore program is smart enough to look through the entire USB drive, and not just the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder. This time the correct drivers were located and loaded, the Windows Home Server was detected on the network, and the restore process proceeded successfully.

(Note: I mentioned above that I was running a 32-bit operating system because many people seem to get stuck when trying to restore a 64-bit operating system. The restore CD runs in a 32-bit environment and will not use 64-bit drivers if that’s what’s contained in the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder. I just wanted to point out that it’s not only 64-bit drivers that can cause a problem in the restore process. Sometimes plain old 32-bit drivers turn out to be a pain, too.)

Some things that caught my attention during the install and setup process:

• The upgrade advisor indicated I would have been OK doing an upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. Still, it gave good and clear instructions about how to prepare for and what to expect after the upgrade.
• I was able to extend an existing partition and format the resulting larger partition all through a GUI in about 5 seconds, with appropriate warnings along the way. Nice!
• From boot-to-CD to Windows 7 desktop took less than 40 minutes.
• Tablet’s stylus and touch screen were recognized immediately, as was WLAN adapter. Sweet. Handwriting recognition in Windows 7 is excellent.
• Pop-up alert told me I needed antivirus software and took me directly to an Internet page showing multiple brands offering Windows-7-compatible software. I’m starting with the 60-day trial from Trend Micro.
• Remote desktop connection to a Vista Professional desktop: no problem whatsoever (although I did have to sign in as domain\user instead of just user).
• I live-docked the tablet and it froze. Not so nice. Had to hold the power button to get it to turn off. (This didn’t happen the next time I live-docked, and hasn’t happened since.)
• Roboform works fine on Windows 7. With a browser and Roboform, really, what else do you need? (One weird problem: sometimes when I Alt-Tab between IE8 windows, I get a User Access Control prompt and Roboform brings me to the identity settings screen. I can cancel and get out of it, though.)

Bottom line: When computers from Dell are available with Windows 7 preinstalled, that’s what my clients are going to start buying. Whether they’ll bother to upgrade any XP machines to Win7, I’m not sure.

Having spent lots of time eradicating “Personal Antivirus” from computers that should have been protected from this sort of threat, I wasn’t going to take any chances with any of the buttons (not even Cancel or Close). I used Task Manager to shut down all Internet Explorer windows.

Never, never install software that offers unsolicited advice that your computer is infected. There are plenty of legitimate antivirus / antispyware programs on the market. If you need one, do your homework and go get one of your choosing.

And if you ever see a window appear that looks like the ones above, and if you’re not sure how to get rid of them safely, it’s better to just cut the power to your computer rather than clicking things in an attempt to get away.

I wish this had happened to me on a test system so I could see how well my Trend Micro software and/or Vista’s UAC defended me against Personal Antivirus, but on my production system I just didn’t have the time.

The easiest way to change the expiration date for your server’s SSL certificate is to re-run the CEICW. When you get to the page asking about the web certificate, create a new one:

Obviously what you put in the “Web server name” box should match what you had there before – the external hostname of your server. SBS will generate a new certificate, whose expiration date will be five years in the future.

Because third-party SSL certificates from GoDaddy and others are so inexpensive these days, there is little reason to continue using self-signed certificates in SBS. However, if you want to stick with a self-signed cert for more than five years, now you know how.

ChannelWeb has published a helpful and accessible comparison of Windows Vista with Ubuntu, a version of Linux that is gaining acceptance among personal computer manufacturers and users.

Although it sounds like many computer users could make the switch to Linux, I’m not one of them. There are too many web sites that I use on a regular basis that require – or at least, work much better with – Internet Explorer. Most of these are Microsoft sites, but not all of them. When IE for Linux comes out, or when Firefox manages perfect emulation of IE, I’ll give Ubuntu another look.

I have to say that on the basis of spending half an hour or so with this new software, my answer may just be yes. It’s been several years since I actually played around with voice recognition software, and my memory of it was that the transcription was filled with errors and that it took a ridiculously long period of time for the computer to figure out what I was saying. But even with the most basic of training, and using the simple microphone that was bundled with the software, I have found Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 amazingly accurate and responsive.

The programmers of this software have clearly gone well beyond simply trying to recognize what you’re saying; they are trying to figure out what you’re meaning. For example, in the previous paragraph I said the words "Dragon naturally speaking." The software must have realized that I was talking about it because it combined the words naturally and speaking into a single word with the S in speaking capitalized. And yet two sentences ago when I said "naturally speaking" it realized that I was not talking about the product.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of NaturallySpeaking’s capabilities. I’ve been using it to dictate e-mail and, of course, this blog entry. What I haven’t done yet is figure out how to do things in Windows like opening and closing programs or switching between them, and within programs like selecting items from menus.

It’s immediately clear that anyone who has to transcribe a large amount of text would benefit from using this program. Let’s say you had to transcribe the Gettysburg address. It’s about 270 words and if you type 50 words per minute that’s going to take you about 5 1/2 minutes. I’m going to try it now:

four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal now we are engaged in a great civil are testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure we are met on a great battlefield of that war we have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this but in a larger sense we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground the brave man living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to aggregate tract will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth

That took one minute and 45 seconds, and only a few words (in red) were misunderstood. Note, however, that there is no punctuation. My understanding is that the program can figure out from your speech patterns where to insert commas and periods but I haven’t gotten that far yet. Now we’ll try it with punctuation marks – in other words, I’m going to speak aloud the words “comma” and “period.”:

four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us to living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who for here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That took two minutes and 10 seconds and had even fewer mistakes. I can’t imagine that proofing and editing what I just spoke would take much longer than if I had typed it and then had to fix my typos.

I’m eager to keep experimenting with the program to see exactly what it can do. I’m thankful that I work alone, because I can imagine that the initial thrill experienced by my coworkers upon hearing me talk to my computer would quickly wear off.