Having been out a couple of hours today in the snow with my Canon EOS 350D, I discovered that Windows 7 x64 was unable to detect the camera. After some research I found out that if I changed the camera's USB connection mode from "PC" to "Print/PTP", Windows detected the camera without any problems and I had no problem whatsoever copying my images over.

A few of the images…

I’ve just ordered a (cheap) 64GB SSD from Kingston for my HP Notebook which was “born” with the factory 5400RPM drive and it’s sloooooooow – however it’s nice to see that prices of SSD’s are finally dropping to a level where it’s affordable to say “bye bye” to those awfully slow HDs that most notebooks ship with.

You can find more info here (in danish)

Gizmodo has published the first details about Microsoft’s upcoming “booklet PC” and if the video holds true, it seems to be awesome .. and I for sure want one!

Check out the (unconfirmed) facts here: http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet

As the *VERY* happy owner of a HTC Magic phone, I use Google Calendar to sync with my phone. However, I also use Outlook a lot and found this cool article about how to view your Google Calendar in Outlook 2007:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/microsoft-office/view-your-google-calendar-in-outlook-2007/

Update: I forgot to mention the Google Calendar Agenda Vista Gadget – to view, edit and add event to your Google calendars from the sidebar.

René from work is currently testing out how much SSD will speed up the compilation process. In order to compare the SSD he is testing, I gave it at go at my Vertex SSD and the numbers it quite pleasing :)

The test is “raw” I/O read and write and does not test the access time of the SSD, which actually is the most interesting property of an SSD disk compared to a normal 7200RPM harddrive.

If you want to test your own SSD / Harddrive, you can download the ATTO Disk Benchmark from the TechPowerUp website.

My new 60GB OCZ Vertex Solid State Disk arrived the day before Easter so of course I had to spend some time installing it during the holiday. It's installed into my Lenovo R61 Core2Duo laptop, replacing the standard (and very slow!) 160GB Lenovo 5400RPM drive.

My plan was to use the "Complete PC Backup" in Vista Business to restore the original OS onto the SSD. Unfortunately it seems that it's not possible to restore to a smaller drive eventhough I made sure only to use about 50GB diskspace on the old (larger) drive - so I had to re-install the entire OS.

Installing Vista x64 was done without any problems. The SSD was found by Vista Install and everything during installation worked as expected.

When the OS booted for the first time (which took about 12 seconds) I knew that I was going to love my new OCZ Vertex SSD. It's immediately apparent that this drive is awesome fast. OCZ states that the drive speed are.. Read: up to 230 MB/s, Write: Up to 135MB/s, Sustained Write: Up to 70MB/s .. and best of all: 64MB Onboard Cache and Seek Time < 0.1ms .. which is about 50x times faster that the WD VelociRaptor and 150x times faster than the original Lenovo 5400RPM drive.

The best way to describe this hardware upgrade: It's like getting a new computer!! Everything is lightning fast and it really makes you think about how big a bottleneck the harddrive is on a modern computer. I havn't done any drive performing- or benchmark tests (I leave that up to the profs), but I can give some examples: Installing Visual Studio 2008 Professional was done in 8.5 minutes (which took more than an hour on my 5400RPM drive), cloning a 200MB .zip file placed on the desktop took under 1 second (actually first I thought that I missed the Ctrl+V key and did it again .. only to realize that now I had 3 copies of my 200MB .zip file), programs launch at unbelievable speed, to mention my favorite: Visual Studio takes about 1 second to appear.

I can highly recommend this drive to anyone who wants to speed up their computer. Forget all about upgrading your CPU and RAM (as long you have at least 2-3GB) - you simply can't buy anything that will speed up your computer as much as an OCZ Vertex drive for the same amount of money.

For more information about the OCZ Vertex Series of SSD visit the OCZ Technology website. A good review of the Vertex SSD can be found at BenchmarkReviews.com.  If you want to see the drive "in action" take a look at the many Vertex SSD vidoes on YouTube. Should you decide to buy one, make sure to check out the recommended performance tips/tricks on the OCZ Forum.

I've bought an Acer Aspire One - got it with a 5% discount, which amounts to 2655,25 DKK (including VAT), at ComputerCity in Aalborg.

Let it be stated: It's really, really small!!  It may come to no surprise, that I bought the Windows edition which contains everything a "real" notebook does: 8.9" (1024x600) display, 120GB Harddrive, 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom CPU (dual core), WiFi, VGA connector, 10/100Mbit LAN, 3 x USB 2.0 ports and a card reader.

If you're attending the AANUG startup meeting, you'll get a chance to see it, as I'm planning to use it for our PowerPoint show :)

I've got a new PC, and it's really really fast!! :-) .. so - of course - I'm running Vista Business, 64 bit and installed Virtual PC 2007 on it a couple of days ago and was blown away by how extremely fast my virtual machine was running - in fact I could'nt tell the different between 'the real one' (host machine) and the virtual one!

So .. I set out to measure the difference. Using SuperPI mod v1.5 - download: super_pi_mod-1.5.zip (60.44 kb) - Here are the results: 

As stated above - this is the "real" machine, which in short is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 8GB Memory running Vista Business, 64 bit edition. 

The above result is my IBM ThinkPad T60 laptop at work with a Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory running Windows XP SP2, 32 bit edition.

And now .. the cool thing!!

The above is a Virtual PC 2007 (64 bit edition) machine running Windows XP SP2 with 1GB of memory - again running on the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 8GB Memory running Vista Business, 64 bit edition.

Note the performance!!! - It's much much faster than my high-end T60 laptop!! - Why is this?! - Well it's due to the fact that my new PC supports Hardware Virtualization, which is then enabled in the Virtual PC 2007:

So.. if you're planning to use Virtualization on your workstation / desktop pc, make sure you get a motherboard / CPU which supports hardware virtualization.

Update!!

In order to make the test complete, I also ran the 1M test on my VMware image, running on my T60 notebook:

The VMware machine is 6.42x times slower than Windows XP running in Virtual PC using Hardware Virtualization.

I'm in the process of creating a "Mobile PC" using a 1GB USB key and my favorite applications. When I'm done I'll put the entire key on the blog for a free download. The plan is to have a USB key which I can use on any computer and still have all my favorite browser (and favorites), email etc. - If you think this sound interesting take a look at http://opera-usb.com/ and http://portableapps.com/

The above screenshot is Opera@USB v9.25 - The browser runs entirely from the USB key, no install or any other footprint left behind on the host PC.