The week of October 30th in My Digital Life (although it's now November 2nd)

This week has gotten away from me, it is already Thursday and no time for blogging. 12 days until Zune's goes on sale in the US. It will be very interesting to see what happens with Zune, the iPod seems to have such a lead and is now ingrained in popular culture. I am not sure that any product will be able to gain any substantial market share, unless Apple's falters in some way. Analyzing SanDisk's success with their mini player, if Zune's is able to garner a 10% market share over the next year, I think it will be a success. However, I would strongly suggest that Microsoft add WIFI syncing. Just about everybody connected to broadband now has a WIFI network, it is hard to believe they did not include this feature in V1.

I am getting my Windows XP desktop/file server ready for the imminent release of the corporate version of Vista. From my research, I found three critical components for a system to take to full advantage of Vista. They are:

• Current generation processor (Intel P4 or better)
• Minimum 1GB memory, 2GB is better
• Video card capable of running DirectX 10 (if you want the latest graphic capabilities - Aero) with a minimum of 256KB on board memory

I built my own machine a couple years back with a 2.4GHZ P4 on an Intel D865PERL mother board with 512KB memory, an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 AGP video card with 128MB on board memory and a 160GB SATA RAID 1 disk array. The system performs very well, I keep it on 24 x 7 sharing files and iTunes media with my wife's and my laptops. To prepare for Vista I have decided to:

• Add 2GB of PC3200 memory (from newegg.com for $224.99)
• Replace my ATI AIW 9800 video card with an ATI Radeon X1600 PRO AGP with 512MB on board memory. This was one of the few AGP cards certified for Vista. ATI currently has a trade in deal where you can send in your old video card and receive a $50 rebate. I am trading in an old RAGE video card. The X1600 PRO AGP sells for $199 minus $50 trade in will equal $149. I will then sell my AIW 9800 on ebay reducing my cost further. I am loosing the ability to encode analog video with the X1600, however I never thought the quality from my HI 8 and VHS tapes was very good. Could be the card or the source. My choice is to buy a video encoding card or have the conversion done professionally. Professional conversion has gotten so cheap and the quality is excellent, I might just convert a subset of my videos.

For less than $300 I should be ready for Vista. On the horizon, I will probably look to purchase a 3.2GHZ 478 socket P4 later on if Vista seems to be slow and replace my 19" tube monitor with a couple 20" LCD monitors.

I received Adobe's Photo Elements 5 with Premiere Elements 3.0. I had to uninstall the trial version of Photo Elements 5, but so far so good. It looks like I can manipulate the soundtracks the way I want. I will complete my evaluation this weekend.

pocketnow.com is giving away five copies of Fizz Weather I reviewed last week. This is a very useful Windows Mobile application and has become a standard part of my Pocket PC application library.

Comments

[Mathew]

Just been reading your comments about the tmobile mda. I have the mda vario and was wondering which version of total commander you used? I looked at the downloads page but didnt see one for win mobile 5 and omap processors. Cheers!

[Stephen Skarlatos]

I user the ARM version 2.0 of Total Commander http://www.ghisler.com/ce.htm. It works fine with Windows Mobile 5.0.