Sorry for the poor MIX08 coverage

So some of you might be wondering why there hasn’t been much posts from me at MIX, the hottest Microsoft conference around. There was IE8, there was Silverlight, there was DeepZoom and much more.

Simply put, my laptop died the second I arrived in Las Vegas Airport. CPR didn’t work. Mouth to mouth didn’t work. It did spring back to life for just a second when the director of Windows communications touched it, but the magic wore off pretty quickly.

As I’m typing this on Rafael’s laptop (owe him dinner or something), Daniel from Microsoft’s TSG (technical support group – geeks for geeks) is helping me install a fresh copy of Windows Seven Vista on it. In the least it means I’ll have notepad to write with, more might be pushing it.

Speaking of which, I also accidentally deleted all of my Flickr photos from this morning’s keynote because of the crappy hotel internet connection falsely not displaying any pictures. I’m now reuploading everything. Yeah, uploading 800MB of photos is pretty much the most exciting thing I’ve done in Vegas so far.

If you were looking for better MIX coverage, I encourage you to check out all these other great bloggers.

16 insightful thoughts

  1. should have bought a Mac… doing a complete backup to an external USB drive using SuperDuper only take a few minutes. If you Mac dies simply walk up to another Mac plugin the USB drive and startup from the external hard drive… voila. It’s like your computer never died.

    Actually, this is one of the main reasons why I got rid of a PC. If you still insist on running Vista you can still do that too… Bootcamp and Parallels/ VMWare are your friends… nice bonus: WinXP boot up in Parallels or VMWave takes about 10 seconds. Wake up from sleep is even faster.

    So what are you waiting for? Get a Mac and be done with it.

  2. @tom: Many have tried to convert Long to the way of the Macintosh before. All have failed 😛

  3. @tom: Thats not a Mac-only feature. Vista delivers excellent backup capabilities. But who takes an external hdd to a conference?

    @Long: Sh*it happens.

  4. It’s ok Long, we’ll wait for your point of view when you get back home, as tino said shit happens, and i must underline this “shit happens on every platform”.
    Anyway Long during the 800megs upload phone a girl for help 😛

  5. It’s ok Long, we’ll wait for your point of view when you get back home, as tino said shit happens, and i must underline this “shit happens on every platform”.
    Anyway Long during the 800megs upload phone up a girl for help 😛

  6. Why do Mac-fanboys always act like their “perfect” OS X or hardware never fails? Lose the attitude. No one cares.

    And, don’t I recall Long saying he owns a Mac, as well?

  7. I have a newfound respect for bloggers. The guy in front of me at the keynote didn’t so much as glance away from his laptop maybe 5 times. Eyes buried in Windows Live Writer or camera. Hard to enjoy it like that I bet. There is so much to do here, it’s got to be a real difficult job …especially when not getting paid to do it.

  8. i’m still trying to figure out why you didn’t just try booting from the DVD to run a repair or something.
    or maybe just boot from the DVD, pop networking and grab your data off.

    @tom:
    he could have kept his Vista notebook and done a Complete PC Backup, but as tino said above, who caries that stuff with them?

  9. That is why it is always wise to keep an image of your OS partition. If it fails, just back up the broken partition, and recover the clean one. Then recover the needed files from the broken partition image. Surely you can just recover only the good bits and bytes. I prefer a fresh copy. But still, backup is always a must.

  10. just to make one thing clear… I am NOT a Mac fanboy.

    I use a Mac because I believe it offers me the best of all worlds… I can use Mac OS as well as Windows and the Macbook pro I currently own is simply the best laptop I have ever owned. Period!

    BTW, yes I have had several laptops from Dell, IBM, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony… none of them come close.

    secondly, I never said Apple hardware doesn’t fail. What I did say was that on the Mac platform there is a quick and easy way to do a complete hard drive backup… operating system and all. You can then take that OS backup on your hard drive to another Mac and boot from the “external OS” just as it was your old computer.

    Last I checked this wasn’t possible with any Windows version (XP, Vista, whatever). Yes you can do a backup but you can’t hock up that backup to any old Windows PC via USB and boot directly into the external drive. Since the backup is on an external 2.5 inch drive it hardly adds a lot of weight to my luggage.

    Why would I take this travelling? Well, let’s see. I fly to the US on business… the little trip will cost me around AU$12K. When I get there my client expects me to hit the ground running because after all they are paying me big dollars to be there in first place. The last thing I want to tell them is that I can’t do the work because my crummy laptop died or because it will take two days to rebuild a replacement.

  11. @Tom : the point is, is that you look like another one of those Mac advertisers. Considering Macs had little (actually nothing) to do with this post, recommending people buy a product makes you look like a mini-salesman. Not to be gloaty, but my Sony Vaio is top-notch quality and hasn’t failed me for 3-4 years already. In fact, the Macbook line copied features that were on Vaio lines long before Macbooks were made. Not many people think about Vaio computers, but I can say they’re nice quality too.

    @Long : We forgive you.

  12. quickboy,

    the point I am making is that I believe the way the Mac OS/ hardware (and Linux for that matter) handles OS installations and external drives is a whole lot more intuitive than what Microsoft does with Windows. For example, the whole thing with running your Vista profile from a USB stick is just silly. What I really want to do is copy the entire OS to the stick and run it from there if I have to.

    All I advertise here is that there is another hardware platform which can happily run Vista and whatever else you want to put on it and provide a simple solution for worst case disaster recovery.

    RE hardware reliability, as far hard drives are concerned it very little to do with Sony, Apple, Dell or whoever sells you that laptop. None of these companies actually make their own hard drives and hardware failure has more to do with MTF and the “bath tub curve” than a particular laptop manufacturer.

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