Happy Birthday, Mr. Zuckerberg

This isn't a story about me but my context to it seems amusing. Your mileage may vary.

I attended a class on Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week. The PRE-class homework assignment was to create an account on both Facebook and Twitter so that we class members would know what the heck the instructor was talking about.

I remembered this assignment late Monday evening. Certain that I couldn't claim that the cats had eaten my NetBook, I had at it for about an hour. I found several folks I knew already on Facebook and willing to "friend" me. I spent four minutes trying to discover HOW to turn off the "year of birth" field from my birthdate (I'll get to how I knew I should do this in a moment). I didn't get angry, but, well, four minutes seemed like a LOT. I knew this thing was bigger than I understood, complex in ways I hadn't yet guessed, and clunky to use.

I got to class on Tuesday, and I was the only one who had done the homework. So, we didn't look at the class members' Facebook pages.

But what a week to be introduced to Facebook. In the previous weekend, one of their executives had spoken with the New York Times about the "charges" that Facebook handled user data in an indelicate fashion. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/facebook-executive-answers-reader-questions/ They also had launched a new partnership through which your Facebook friends' experience on several other sites would be visible to you.

[Here is new how features are generally introduced in the business world. THEY TELL YOU about the feature. THEY DO NOT TURN ON the feature. THEY TELL YOU HOW to turn on the feature. If possible, they charge you for the new feature first.]

By mid-week, there was chaos about how to turn the new links off. And the "where am I" moment was when the most straightforward, simple and fundamentally easy-to-follow set of instructions was HERE - http://franken.senate.gov/press/?page=news_single&news_item=Facebook_Privacy_Instructions

Yahoo Finance borrowed a small sidebar from the amazing and useful four-page feature Consumer Reports has in their June issue about social media tools and their privacy/security issues. Consumer Union should give an award to whatever editor came up with the title, "9 Things To STOP DOING NOW on Facebook!" (Number two - "Leaving Your Full Birth Date")
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109538/7-things-to-stop-doing-now-on-facebook

The New York Times created a truly fabulous graph of exactly HOW MANY PLACES in Facebook there are where you NEED to set security settings. ("Joe, I've been looking at this design document you just sent me, and, well, YOU'RE FIRED.")
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html

Thursday night, an all-hands meeting at Facebook Central was held to address the current "bad press."

Friday, a story surfaced with an email in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said unpleasant things about his college colleagues who had entrusted their private data to him and his electronic student directory. Very unplesant things. The implication being that he has not matured and gotten more sensitive in the past six years.

THIS IS UNFAIR.

But, you DO realize that Facebook started as an elaborate prank Mark concocted by which to humiliate a girlfriend who had dumped him? Do you want this man controlling access to pictures of YOUR grandchildren?

Today is Mark's birthday. In case you want to go into Facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001100291957&ref=profile#!/markzuckerberg?ref=ts and send him a greeting.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to earn more blood in Vampire Wars and am suddenly immune to religious icons. So, as Carl said in "Caddyshack," "I've got that going for me."

THE COMMERCIAL IS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE - Today's edition

Google Chrome, in my rarely-humble opinion, is a dog so far. I tried seven or eight versions before I even could get it to install. It still is very difficult to configure to do things that other, more mature products (Firefox comes to mind) can do immediately. Although it does fewer things while occupying fewer hardware resources.

BUT - the Googles have done a dramatically wonderful commercial for Chrome that you will not want to miss. The commercial is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&feature=channel

The too-short, not-really-satisfying look behind the scenes for the commercial is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI

An older, charming Google commercial is also available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrDHrwLUtvk&feature=channel

AND ONE MORE THING

What do YOU have scheduled for 10/10/10? The reason I ask is in my next post.

Join up so you don't miss it.

No Tech Today - Object Lessons and Ambiguity

iPads are sold out. We might have to think about something other than new toys.

Early in his book, “Orthodoxy,” G. K. Chesterton makes the case that zealots generally reduce their world to the size of their particular issue of passion, making themselves a sort of king of the reduced kingdom in which they live. Someone who believes the government is eavesdropping on their phone and monitoring their comings and goings, by example, becomes the sole center of their world because suddenly everyone is an enemy and a co-conspirator. This resembles nothing so much as the old TV show, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which depicted a city in which every shoe-shine provider and newsstand attendant was either an agent or a retiree-on-pension, providing service and regular reports.

There are church bodies whose entire approach to ecumenical activity revolves around whether the other denomination absolutely and completely has the same position about abortion; only with that agreement in place can they work together to provide food and water to non-aborted children in Haiti and Chile.

But in a Northern Virginia conference room on a recent Wednesday night, I got another example of how this “small world” works. The event was a non-partisan presentation on the terrific book, “The Checklist Manifesto,” which tells of a surgeon working with the World Health Organization to create a checklist for operating rooms (if this sounds like a 2009 episode of “E.R.,” you may be watching the same too-much-TV as your correspondent).

The presenter went off-slide for a moment to say that he had learned a lot about medical procedures in the book (which also covers gourmet dining, high-rise construction and rock and roll along the way). He asked the group, “For example – do you know why they put a sterile gown over the patient instead of just putting a dressing on the area in which they're working?”

A quick, haughty response replied loudly, “Because Medicare pays more for a whole gown.”

All the air left the room.

The speaker, significantly startled, tried to bypass the outburst.

“It's because the wires and tubes can catch on the patient's skin, they can touch non-sterile surfaces and then contaminate the patient, and they can get stuck. With a full gown, there's a smooth surface without drag and less chance of contamination.”

Nothing anywhere approaching insurance fraud. How dull.

The person answering the question didn't comment further, but he had made his philosophy clear:

• All health care is crooked.

• Hospitals conduct health care.

• Hospitals are crooked.

• The recently-passed health care bill is as crooked as Medicare.

A strangely simple world, that. Believe one premise and the rest falls into place.

I was startled when a friend began arguing, with remarkable precision and an evident mastery of facts, why the health care bill is insanely bad for the country. I learned later that she has made her living as a writer and research for a conservative lobbying organization, deeply entrenched in fighting the health care bill. Sad to think that for some parties, perhaps including her, the passage of the health care bill could severely reduce income.

She brought up the amount of money the government would spend on health care. I mentioned some of the pallets of cash that had “gone missing” in Iraq and Louisiana. She snapped that she rejects my comparison because there has always been government graft but there has never been so severe an entrenchment of government control over extraordinary debt levels. A nice try, and I allowed her to take the point for the moment as I saw no chance she would understand why I thought there was - is - a difference.

Even Michelle Bachman on the Fox Sunday talking heads admitted that (“unfortunately,” she whispered) the deficit preceded Obama. In fact, Michelle was so far out there that the soulless Chris Wallace had to express some concern about her casual attitude about facts.

This cultural chasm is the reason I'm becoming more and more engaged with ambiguity. P. J. O'Roarke told NPR that the British are better at cognitive dissonance than Americans, and I think we will need to get much better at it if we're going to go through mid-term elections and what is already being identified by most as “an enormous fight” over a Supreme Court justice.

Why not simply nominate Hillary Clinton, get it over with and double all the deals made for health care?

You'd have to be a master satirist to devise the Tax Day scenario where Tea Party attendees were complaining about paying the lowest taxes in 50 years, or a few days later when folks who want to carry guns around (all the better to shoot themselves in the calf, as one athlete recently discovered) said that the state laws are too variable, and demanded a nationwide law from the government they despise. But irony died quite a while back, and the hatred that dare not speak its name is ranting in all directions at once, as usual. Jon Stewart thinks they're mad because they lost an election. Bill Maher is much closer.

But back to ambiguity. In a world that is round and thus has no sides, ambiguity is the large majority point between the rather thin “black” and the equally-thin “white,” the lovely gray middle-ground. Where there is no “either”and no “or,” just a lot of really interesting “possibles.”

There is a risk, of course, that within the wide, uncrowded space of ambiguity, we might actually be discussing with reason instead of emotion. We might become so preoccupied with facts that we are again startled when a public official says two different things on two different days while being filmed with two different cameras, all the better to see through them with. Perhaps we can even help some of those officials retire, and have more time to learn about the 24-hour news cycle and how easy it is to re-run footage over and over and over.

There is the risk that we might not be able to snap our fingers and have emotional mobs attend to our hyperbole.

There is the risk that our stakeholders will expect us to deliver on the promises we make.

But, to borrow a phrase from Orwell, standing in the narrow confines of “black” or “white” seems too much like allowing others to think our thoughts for us.

And for some of us, predictability is overrated.

PS - Happy 87th birthday to rock's longest-working drummer, Spirit's Ed Cassidy on May 4th.

Happy New Year - Your 2010 Resolutions

Sigh...some romances are too good to last, and lo and behold, both my ancient eMachine and my acer laptops died on me during the holidays, both apparently with power issues. So...there I was in the lovely Shenandoah mountains enjoying what I expected to be a week of catching up with certain computer-based activities, and...no computer. Suddenly, my complaints about the slow "free wifi" offered by my host disappeared.

The first machine I found with a built-in WiFi modem was a Dell Inspiron 15-inch, perhaps soon to inherit the nickname of "the AntiWebBook." But dual Intel Pentium processors and Windows 7 built in are not to be sneered at (not to mention at least a dozen applications showing up in the Belarc Advisor scan that I can't yet identify). And that cool processor/memory gadget in Windows 7 is running below 50% a lot more often.

What did this new year disaster teach me?

My gradually-increasing anal-retentive tendencies were rewarded generously. What I had saved, whether on thumb or external pocket drives, was extremely useful in building up the new machine to "my standards," including Firefox, MediaMonkey and a host of other necessities. What I didn't have, I managed to download. Slowly. So - new year's resolution #1? Save everything INTO the Documents folder ("Downloads," "My Music," "My Pictures," ad infinitum), then copy THAT folder off to SOMETHING before bedtime.

On arriving home, restarting the household network and getting a week of clothing into the washer, some vague nagging voice said, "You haven't run the anti-virus program thoroughly on the new machine - and hey, when was the last time you did a full scan on the old workhorse desktop?"

Guess what I found? Half a dozen trojan horse files in the BROWSER TEMP FILES! Hmm...and these didn't trigger an alert when they arrived because...why? Because. Deal with it.

So, resolution #2 - even with all those snappy commercials with the PC customer who wants faster start-ups in Windows 7 - we're going to begin EVERY log-in with a quick scan, and run a full scan every week, preferably during early a.m. snore-time.

Boring resolutions? You betcha. But now is not a moment too soon for you to actually DO what you know you should do.

So (I hope) - the NEXT time I need to rebuild a machine, having a "Downloads" file FULL of up-to-date necessities will save time. AND keeping the machine clean will be worth the daily exercise in patience.

The cynic in me is wondering what will break next. The pragmatist in me is interested in fixing my desktop sound card and figuring out how to deal with a thumb drive (with no switches) that magically seems to have decided it is now read-only. Wish me luck.

Your ever-lovin' Unclejack
UnclejackDC@Yahoo.Com

Quick Notes - eBooks as movies / eBooks as CDs

Our "Catch 'Em..." story about technologies designed to lock you into a single Web site rather than allow you Web browsing (http://olddognewtricksreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/2009-in-review-catch-em-and-keep-em-net.html) addressed eBook readers as one example of the phenomenon.

Now we have a new paradigm for eBooks - "they're like the movies."

NOW PLAYING

Many of us are used to seeing the tiered approach by which films are marketed:

1. in theatres,
2. pay-per-view-and-airline,
3. home video,
4. cable TV and
5. network TV

Well, apparently eBook marketing is going to follow a similar path.

"The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback," according to the chief economic officer of Simon and Schuster publishing, quoted in today's Wall Street Journal article, which also states the current publisher of the former Time-Warner Press will be scheduling similarly.

This news comes in time for some people to cancel their orders for the Kindle/ nook/ Papyrus/ Cool-er/ Reader/ Readius/ Bookeen/ Astak/ iRex/ eSlick/ WISE that won't arrive by December 25th. [Gee - is this vertical market getting crowded?]

Audio book customers know that audio books - with no standard digital rights management imposed - typically arrive in stores (or on Amazon's Audible subsidiary site) concurrent with the release of the title, be its first release hardback or paperback. Whether this continues or the digital delays begin impacting audio equivalents will be an interesting issue to watch in the New Year.

PIRATES!!!

The Quill & Quire blog quotes several sources in an interesting story (http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/30/as-e-book-sales-soar-so-does-piracy/) suggesting that book publishers are going to start playing the prediction game that is doing SO WELL for the recording industry.

• Dan Brown's latest thriller, "The Lost Symbol" has "been illegally downloaded more than 100,000 times"!!!
• Publishers lost SIX HUNDRED MILLION in 2008 to piracy!!!
• Top pirated books - sex, do-it-yourself and Twilight (more or less in that order)!!!

In the record industry (one more time, the book is "Appetite for Self-Destruction"), the game is played like this:

• Performer X sold 250,000 copies of their first CD
• Performer Y is "just like Performer X"
• Performer Y only sold 112,000 copies of THEIR first CD
• PIRACY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 138,000 SALES LOST

We await more scintillating logic, embarrassing exaggerations and the occasional just-plain LIE, while noting, sadly, that magazines are publishing more and more of their content on line RATHER than in the pages, and subscriptions are getting cheaper and cheaper as they grow more and more desperate for subscription sales to add to their newsstand sale totals.

Giving books for Christmas, I remain your mostly-trustworthy and ever-lovin' Unclejack

2009 in Review - Buy your favorite music (AGAIN)

Where were you on 9-9-'09?

A friend of mine was standing at BestBuy's doors at 9:59 a.m., wearing a Beatle cap and a Beatle T-shirt, having decided that "Number nine, number nine, number nine" was a holiday. He also reports that he got through the entire "The Beatles: Rock Band" story mode before dinner.

But if 2009 did not quite generate the banner sales that the debut of CDs provided (again, the book is called "Appetite for Self-Destruction," and almost anyone with more than a dozen CDs should laugh wildly while reading it), there were a whole lot of reasons why you probably found yourself re-purchasing music you already owned.

Beatle re-releases

Your correspondent has the memory of dozens of articles about the effort by EMI (aided and abetted by Beatle producer George Martin's son Giles, who was the primary force behind the wonderful "Love" CD packages last year) to re-engineer the catalog to 2009 standards. I still haven't seen anyone do a review of how it turned out.

My own rock-and-roll-damaged-ears find little difference. Here and there, there is the sense that someone has applied a Chorus pedal to a guitar, or added echo. And oh yes, "Help" is now in stereo. No, wait...the booklet says George Martin re-engineered the mono recording to stereo BACK IN 1988, and THAT is the release included. Huh?

Meanwhile...the MONO versions of the Beatle catalog are also back. How does this make sense? Well, Beatle fans who have yet to read Geoff Emerick's memoir, "Here, There and Everywhere" are advised in this as-yet-unpaid-unpolitical-announcement to get 'hold of a copy; in that valuable volume, the talented and innovative engineer unashamedly admits that no one at EMI anticipated that Stereo would make Mono recordings obsolete, and that the main effort ALWAYS was on the Mono version, with Stereo an afterthought.

But the most interesting bit of reengineering I've found so far is the Rock Band remix of "Dear Prudence," where a George Harrison crescendo near the end of the song is turned up to assist the guitar player in following the melody. Louder than on the 1988 OR 2009 CDs, it sounds better in the game than anywhere else; why they buried it in the mix is a mystery. But this leads us to...

On-line downloadable content

"Guitar Hero," "Rock Band," "Band Hero," "DJ Hero," and even the PSP-only "Rock Band Unplugged" continued to thrive this year (despite at least one first-person-shooter that used the tag line, "Because YOU'RE TIRED of music games"). Not only were there new song packs adding Metallica, the Beatles and (by year's end) Van Halen to Aerosmith and AC/DC's band-specific titles, there were several multiple-artist titles as well.

But the real action was on-line. Too much classic rock? Download songs by the Dixie Chicks. Too much testosterone? Rediscover the Breeders. Two Beatle album downloads were finally added to the successful game's original lineup, and lots of "mini-album" packages were available for about $2 per song or $6 in combination. Even the Faux Four, Spinal Tap got into the game with a few titles from the reunion album that preceded their not-in-costume tour.

You've heard Steven Tyler's proud claim that the Guitar Hero game made Aerosmith more money than they've made from any album release? No reason to doubt it, which means this is going to keep going for a while longer.

Extras

This didn't begin in 2009 (the Black Eyed Peas' 2006 release was a remix of their 2005 release, after all) but it reached new proportions this year. With DVD-added versions, extra-track versions, remixes and the rest, it was tough to buy only one copy of a new release this year. Self-proclaimed supergroup Chickenfoot put out a decent CD, then attached one additional song to their "album only" iTunes release, then for good measure, they released the album on vinyl.

21 seven-inch vinyl "singles" from Green Day? Hey, they sound better than bobble-head dolls, whatever the eBay resale value.

As I write, the #1 album in the country is...Lady Gaga's reboot of "The Game," with 8 or 9 new tracks (reports differ) and for all I know, a do-it-yourself mask-making kit. And the beat, like the marketing, goes on. [FYI - the "Nano Video" commercial is not Gaga but a Swedish artist named Miss Li. And if you think the song sounds like "Count Me In" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys - gee, you're older than you look!]

SNL

This didn't require an outlay of funds once or more than once, but a very positive trend was the good use of musical performers for the 2010 edition of the soon-to-be-Verizon-Night-Live franchise. Taylor Swift showed charm and a startlingly broad sense of humor, probably finishing ahead of all competition, but anyone who can get Madonna to show up and wrestle has my attention - well done, Gaga and well done, Lorne Michaels.

Kudos, before I end, to Green Day for not only following up "American Idiot" with a solid "21st Century Breakdown," but perhaps even topping themselves. Sneers, though, for giving iTunes the note-for-note remake of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away."

Happy listening from your ever-lovin' Unclejack

2009 in Review - Catch-'em-and-Keep-'em Net

{FD for "full disclosure" - This is version 1.1. Yesterday's report was updated following information from a gracious correspondent and the coincidental terrific article on eReaders in the 12/3 Wall Street Journal. Visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704328104574519851557848662.html quickly, as WSJ is securing their articles for pay-per-view quickly these days.}

I have talked to people in computer networking who do not sneer at former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens' analogy that the Internet is "not a big truck" but "a series of tubes." Many other computer professionals think that Stevens is an idiot, with that figure of speech being near the top of their list of reasons why.

But this year has seen a strange proliferation of oddly-shaped tubes designed to hold onto the user and keep them inside as long as possible. AOL was never like this.

Even iTunes is gradually bowing to the will of its users and is becoming a less-authoritarian environment [a WONDERFUL history of iTunes can be found in Steve Knopper's amazing book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction," which chronicles the almost complete absence of thought in the record industry, circa 1970-2008]. Admittedly, you have to pay MORE for digital-rights-management-free tunes, and they still have that weird MP4 suffix making them difficult to use in some MP3-friendly hardware, but it's a step forward.

But the "not-quite-Internet of the year" is probably Amazon. The outrageously-successful Kindle includes "free" connectivity to the on-line Kindle store, where you can buy newspapers, magazines and books for your Kindle.

But let's back up a minute. Do you realize that {FD - in addition to buying and killing CDNow and Egghead, WITHOUT learning anything from their better elements} Amazon already owns:

• AbeBooks, the Canadian used/rare bookseller AND its major competitor, LibraryThing,
• Audible, the near-perfect audiobook sales Web site,
• Box Office Mojo, the near-perfect guide to movie success tracking,
• Brilliance Audio, the US' largest independent audiobook publisher,
• the Internet Movie Database,
• Mobipocket, the ebook software company known especially to Palm users,
• PlanetAll and Junglee, a Web-based reminder service and data mining company,
• Reflexive Entertainment videogame developer and on-line gaming portal (Maximum PC magazine shills their games regularly as "free trials" on the DVDs),
• Shelfari, the "social network for people who love books," and
• Zappos, the online shoe and apparel store.

{B}ook-related acquisitions, audiobook companies, movie-related acquisitions, an epublisher, a gaming site and a shoe store. Exactly what sort of syncronicity that provides is not totally clear, but there could be a master plan.

Now Amazon has a device that provides an on-line bookstore, access to non-password-protected PDF files, MP3-playing capability (only "in order that the files were entered into the Kindle") and a rudimentary Internet access to "text-based" sites and WikiPedia.

If it seems strangely stupid to you that the Kindle network does not link to Audible directly, you are not alone. And, of course, searching the FULL Internet provides lots of commentary about Kindle digital rights management. {FD - Sony's DRM appears to be dissolving in favor of EPUB files in what appears to be a fluid situation.}

And, of course, Barnes and Noble has their own product and THEIR own direct-download network. {And DRM strategy.}

Sony, of course, was the first offering in this vertical market. It handles PDFs, EPUBs, Adobe's Digital Editions software, RSS feeds and has its own Web store, but so far, no special network.

{FD - Oops -

1. As late as 4 p.m. yesterday, Sony's site did not contain details about it, but the WSJournal report mentioned above states that a wireless version is available, but with delivery backlogged to mid-January.
2. Wiser sages than the WSJ reporter who wrote the article mentioned above, or myself, are going to have to untangle the relationships between Mobipocket and EPUB. I didn't mention it, my sources tell me the WSJ got it wrong.
3. If I understand my new source, you can now move a Sony file to a Kindle but not vice versa. Maybe? What's the phrase - "your mileage may vary"???}

Then there is the strange issue of the Microsoft Zune, an obvious iPod clone with a remarkably terrible on-line store in which you can buy, or borrow, music and audiobooks. You may think it would be hard for anything to get you to appreciate iTunes, but ZuneNET will do it. (This month's Esquire, featuring weird webcam games and Robert Downey Jr. on the cover, includes a review by over-eager film director and gadget columnist Barry Sonnenfeld, who likes the new high-definition Zunes but hates the online store.)

Considering that the first generation Zune has the most sophisticated support for Audible audiobooks I've yet encountered, the question again comes - WHY doesn't ZuneNET include a link directly to Audible? How would that interfere with an MP3-playing book reader that can't go back and forth on a song list, much less handle albums?

Gamers know Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony maintain their own networks for on-line game play. More and more, these portals support on-line game purchase. Sony's new shrunk-down handheld gaming platform, the Go, doesn't even have the disk drive of its big brother, the PSP, and downloads new games directly from the Internet. Fans of the various music games, the dance and guitar and turntable "Band" and "Hero" titles, realize that new tunes are available on-line. One minor embarrassment of the Beatles Rock Band launch was that none of the expected album packages were available for the game on the 9-9-09 release date (at least two have hit Sony's on-line store as I write this). And while all three Sony game consoles promise Web access, lack of hardware support for add-ons like Flash limits the experience significantly - making it all the more tempting for the user to spend more time at the Sony store.

[Note to game store owners - keep an eye on the Blockbuster stores in your neighborhood, and notice how the number keeps dropping. The hardware vendors are working to eat your lunch. Booksellers can smile tolerantly, for the moment.]

Where, in any of this, is transparency, or portability? To say nothing of user interest?

Then again, why would you pay $300 for a device that allows you to hang out in one little corner of the Internet rather than picking up a WebBook that enables your voyage to the whole Web, where you can read almost anything (except proprietary book formats for the proprietary book readers)?

Still, I suspect we will see much more of this in the next few years, as the urge to attract eyeballs increasingly becomes the urge to hold people hostage in our store, so they never go to anyone else's store. {With that nasty browser trick of making the BACK button non-responsive as well, I presume.}

Catch 'em and keep 'em. At least until the {non-replaceable, rechargable} batteries {die for good}.

All the best from your ever-lovin' Unclejack {still in release 1.0, sadly}

2009 in Review - Windows 7

Okay, while the bandages and salve are healing my bruised knuckles, I am pleased to offer a few ideas about how best to make your own, less-painful, journey from Windows XP (perhaps the best Windows to date) into the brave new world of Windows 7.

#1 - Don't just do something, sit there!

Sit there and open Control Panel, do the required wiggling and get to your hardware settings. VERY carefully, make note of every single thing Windows XP is telling you about your hardware. WHO MADE your hardware? Are they still in business? Do they still have a Web presence? Are DRIVERS for your hardware still available from that source? WRITE THIS DOWN because I promise you it will be helpful later.

Collect, as best you are able, drivers and installation packs for your current hardware. Microsoft has not empowered Windows 7 to find them for you. Yet.

My acer WebBook camera has been out of service for about a month now because I don't have drivers and software for it any more. One is hoping that acer will address this SOON.

#2 - Copy your install disks

Especially if you are working with a WebBook without a CD/DVD drive, this step is useful. Even if you have an external drive available, this step is STILL recommended, as a single read error can cripple your install process. The 64-bit version of Windows 7 is 3.9 GB, the 32-bit is 2.3 GB. They will fit comfortably on any thumb drive 4 GB or larger.

This is also recommended for "essential" other software installs like OpenOffice (or its Microsoft superset), antivirus protection, etc. etc. etc. Anything you believe is a "must-have-immediately" item should go on the thumb drive. It'll work, I promise.

#3 - Plan "busy work"

There is an almost-invaluable ~5 MB file waiting for you at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/windows-easy-transfer And when WAS the last time Microsoft gave you something useful for free?

Easy Transfer will allow you to back up your Windows and "Documents and Settings" folders to an external drive, along with anything else you tell it to archive (Windows 7 will put those two folders into a Windows.old area of your install, but you may be well-advised to think of that as a last resort). Obviously, this goes on that thumb drive you're working with. Make sure you get the right version, as Easy Transfer (like Windows 7 itself) comes in 32- and 64-bit versions.

The problem with Easy Transfer is that it is PAINFULLY SLOW on both the backup AND restore end. My mileage was ten minutes per GB, so that backing up the 37 GB of data on my acer 100 GB drive took, yes, more than six hours. This is easy if you remember to do it before leaving the house for work...not so much if you start at 9 p.m. and expect to finish before dawn. Happily, external drives are remarkably cheap these days and there have been enough news reports (even the Wall Street Journal got into the story!) warning you that you should already be prepared.

#4 - How much memory DO you have?

I have a delightfully large, heavy, cumbersome eMachines laptop with a wide monitor. It's great to watch movies with while traveling. However, I learned two interesting things about it during this process - 1) the memory chip it contains cannot exceed 2 GB and 2) the machine can't address more than 750 MB, so even the 1 GB chip in it now is careless overkill.

Yes, I tried to install Windows 7 into this sweet monster, which I love for every one of the 49 minutes its battery can provide without the AC cord. The "are you ready for Windows 7" application cautioned me that it MAY NOT function optimally without more memory, but didn't say "Don't even try."

After install was completed, I clicked the new and much-better respected version of Windows Explorer to open a window. It took TWENTY MINUTES. Happily, I still had the eMachine repair kit, and Windows XP continues to work fine on this aging beast. I believe Linux looms large on its horizon.

#5 - Final check

Okay:

• Hardware data, drivers and useful information links?
• Install disks tucked onto a speedy USB drive?
• All your good data stored externally?
• Several good movies from Netflix waiting to help you while away the hours?
• ABSOLUTELY sure you have at least 1 GB of memory (the acer hums nicely with what appears to be this minimum requirement)?

Oh, yes - is your Internet service provider account in good standing? It may be possible to install without the Web waiting and ready, but it is not recommended. Many ISPs accept on-line payment and/or offer 24-hour telephone support; certainly all of them accept credit cards.

So now, go for it. There will be a few interactions with the install along the way, as 7 is a bit more user-intensive than XP, but not tediously so.

Best of luck - and here's hoping SP1 arrives soon.

Happy holidays from your ever-lovin' Unclejack - UnclejackDC@Yahoo.Com