By JR Raphael
December 18, 2009

Susan Boyle may not have won the top spot in “Britain’s Got Talent,” but the big-voiced Brit has just achieved a far more impressive feat: Her video has taken the title of most watched clip on YouTube in 2009.

YouTube released a list of its most popular videos of the year, taking into account aggregated views from all over the globe. And while Boyle’s inaugural television appearance was the most harmonious of the bunch, the other hot commodities were no less theatrical.

Here’s the full list of YouTube’s most watched videos of 2009.

5. Evian Roller Babies With more than 27 million views under its belt, this creative commercial for Evian water certainly grabbed the world’s attention. No word yet how many diaper changes were involved.

4. New Moon Movie Trailer Surprise, surprise: A lot of people watched the trailer for the Twilight saga’s New Moon movie. Thirty-one million, to be exact. Granted, even more people probably gazed at the assets in Christian Serratos’s revealing PETA ad — but that’s another story altogether.

3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance YouTube helped a small wedding make a big splash this year. Jill and Kevin, a couple from Minnesota, busted a move as they walked down the aisle — in fact, the entire wedding party got pretty jiggy, nuptially speaking. The wacky dancers went viral, attracting thirty-three million eyeballs over the course of ’09.

2. David After Dentist A drugged-up little dude soared high on the YouTube charts, pulling in 37 million views worldwide. David, a seven-year-old boy, spouted off all sorts of nonsense following a trip to the dentist. Do his amusing antics warrant the massive merchandise and public speaking business that’s sprung up since the video’s success? God no. But at least they kept that Fred guy from being in this year’s top five.

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent As promised, the saucy Miss Boyle belted her way into YouTube’s most-watched spot for 2009. The clip of Boyle’s first appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” garnered a whopping 120 million views across the world. Who’s the master of the house now?

By JR Raphael
December 18, 2009

Photo: Courtesy of Flickr.com

11. Cantaloupe Hunting
“I thought cantelope was an animal!? i always thought that a cantaloupe was that animal that has the horns and they live in Arizona and stuff, but i was shopping for groceries yesterday and i saw they had cantaloupe meat on sale. so i was like yeah sure i’ll try it, but what i saw, wasn’t a cantaloupe. it was some white and green fruit thing! whats up with this?”

The store is guilty of mislabeling. The term it was looking for is “jackalope”–which is a cross between a jackfruit and a manilla envelope.


12. Hey, Babby
“How is babby formed????? how girl get pragnent?”

On the one hand, I kind of hope you never figure it out. On the other, maybe your parents don’t know either–and it obviously didn’t stop them.


13. An Academic Inquiry
“Why are there school? is a point to it?”

There are school so you can learn how is babby formed, silly.

Photo: Courtsey of pthread1981 via Flickr.com

14. Canine Law
“Is it illegal to name a dog after a movie?”

Only if that movie is Air Bud 2. As a practical matter, though, you might want to avoid calling out to your pooch on a crowded bus if you decide to name it “Bang Bang You’re Dead” or “I’m Going to Explode.”


15. Lost in Space
“What is the best place to ask questions online? i mean, or there any QA forums like on yahoo or anything?”

Hmm…a forum-like place to ask questions on Yahoo. Nope, haven’t heard of anything like that. But if you find something, be sure to let us know.

Photo: courtesy of trekkyandy via Flickr.com

16. Mathematical Matters
“Is there any possible way of making 2+2=5?”

The easiest way is to flip the positions of 4 and 5 on the number line. Another method is to use LSD (Least Sequential Denominators).


17. Sandwich Sensations
“Is it possible to feel like a sandwich?”

Sure. It’s called LSD (Lettuce, Succotash, and Dill-pickle). It feels, like, weird…


18. About Those Drugs…
“How do you ask a question on yahoo answers?”

Hey, don’t ask me. I’m still trying to find out if there’s a forum-like place to pose questions there. Anyone? Anyone?


19. Spelling 101
“How do you spell government?”

Most of the time.

Photo: Courtesy of daviddesign via Flickr.com

20. Turtle Trouble
“I was bitten by a turtle when i was a young lad, can i still drink orange juice?”

This is why old lads should be barred from Yahoo Answers. Seriously–where do they come up with this stuff?

By JR Raphael
December 18, 2009

God bless the Internet. Where else can you assume a fake identity, pose the most inane question imaginable–like “Why can’t I see my reflection in the mirror on a television?”–and then sit back and watch the answers pour in?

Crowd-source advice sites like Yahoo Answers have become a bit of a magnet for the maladjusted. Sure, there are plenty of average Joes just looking for ordinary information. But among the sites’ many mundane queries, there’s a sea of jaw-droppingly dumb discussions guaranteed to amaze and entertain.

I spent some time surfing through Yahoo Answers to find the worst of the worst, and boy did I find it. The spelling, grammar, and punctuation are all as found in the original queries–because why put lipstick on a dodo?

So let’s take a look at the vital questions of our time, as posed by some of the deepest thinkers out there, along with the best answers I could come up with…

Photo: Courtesy of hyku via Flickr.com

1. Backward Thinking
“I sold my only car to help pay for gas money, but now gas has come down in price. How do I get my car back?”

I tried to contact this guy, but it turns out that he also sold his computer to help pay for his Internet connection.


2. It’s Caps Lock–Capisce?
“HOW DO I TURN OFF CAPSLOCK? I ACCIDENTALLY TURNED IT ON YESTERDAY AND I DONT KNOW HOW TO TURN IT BACK OFF.”

Note to self: Register howtoturnoffcapslock.com; make millions.

Photo: Courtesy of garethjmsaunders via Flickr.com

3. Credit Crunch
“I wanted to see if my computer would read my credit card so i put it in the cd rom and it got stuck, how do i get it out?? I tryed toothpics but lost them in the process?? also the drive is making noises”

Oh, that’s normal. Your system is just waiting for you to pay the required $1 processing fee for scanning the card. Simply fold a greenback into a tiny square and insert it into any USB port.


4. Mousin’ Around
“My mouse stop working every time i lift it up from the table why is this? this is not just OS .i have linux and vista both same thing so its not drivers”

Yeah, no big deal there, either: Insert your credit card into the CD-ROM drive and tell your computer–slowly and distinctly–that you need the Air Mouse 3000 upgrade. You’ll be good in no time.


5. Technical Difficulties
“I’ve been asked to write an application in my own handwriting….? is there a computer programme that will do this for me? they also want original ideas. do you know any?”

This reminds me of a letter to the editor I once read years ago: “Are there any undiscovered islands left in the world?” The response: “Not that we know of.”


6. It’s All in the Details
“I have an assignment about computer.. What is unimportant details about computer?”

Wait a minute–does this assignment also require original ideas?

Photo: Courtesy of www.jwcaketops.com

7. Unknown Nuptials
“Am i married in any state? have i been divorced?”

I’ll take “questions asked after a night in Vegas” for $500, Alex.


8. A Sticky Subject
“Where can i buy a really big jar of peanut butter?”

If this is from the same guy who asked the previous question, I’m getting concerned.


9. Fruit Frets
“I have ate two whole tangerines in about two hours what will happen to me?”

That all depends on whether you swallowed any seeds. If you did, be very careful not to eat any dirt or drink any water for the next two weeks.


10. Fat Chance
“How do i become obese fast? I want to look good by the end of the year.”

You can start by eating two tangerines in two hours. Then run around in circles until you figure out what “obese” means.

By Rick Broida
November 25, 2009

Now that I’ve finally finished migrating to Windows 7, I’m enjoying it. This week I’ll talk about three new features that I find really useful: Aero Snap, Sticky Notes, and thumbnail previews–and I’ll tell you how to get the most from them.

Use Aero Snap to Simplify File Management
In my early computing days (I’m talking Commodore Amiga here), I grew accustomed to file managers that used a side-by-side approach: Your complete file system was represented in two adjoining windows. That made it very easy to move or copy files and folders.

Consequently, I’ve never liked Windows Explorer, which uses a single file-tree structure. To me that complicates something as simple as moving a file from one folder to another. It’s not intuitive.

If you’re a Windows 7 user, you can take advantage of two new additions to make file management much easier: addition #1: Windows Explorer’s new home on the taskbar; addition #2: Aero Snap.

See where I’m going with this? All you have to do is open two instances of Explorer, then drag one to the left edge of the screen and the other to the right. Aero Snap will “dock” them on the left and right halves of the screen, respectively.

Now you’ve got a side-by-side file manager! By the way, if you’re not sure how to open that second instance of Explorer, right-click its icon in the taskbar, then click Windows Explorer.

Create Sticky Notes in Windows 7
Forget pasting paper sticky notes to the sides of your monitor. They look terrible there, and they always fall off anyway. Instead, paste digital stickies to your Windows desktop. If you’re a Windows 7 user, it’s a snap: Just run the new Sticky Notes app.

You might recognize it from the ol’ Vista Sidebar. In Windows 7, Microsoft ditched the Sidebar but kept the gadgets, allowing the latter to reside anywhere on your desktop.

To run the app, just click Start, type sticky, and press Enter. You’ll immediately see a new note; just start typing whatever it is you need to remember.

Need another note? Click the plus sign on the first one. Want to delete it? Click the x in the opposite corner. Prefer a different color. Right-click in the body of the note and choose from six options.

Remember that Sticky Notes is an app, so your notes will stay on your desktop only as long as the app is running. If you close it (by right-clicking the taskbar icon and choosing Close window), Sticky Notes will restore your notes the next time you run it.

This is a decidedly barebones program. You can’t change the font size, adjust transparency, or force notes to stay on top of other programs. If you want that kind of functionality, try Stickies for Windows.

Still, Sticky Notes can really come in handy when you need, well, a note that sticks to your desktop.

Control iTunes from the Windows 7 Taskbar
One of my favorite Windows 7 amenities is thumbnail previews, which appear when you mouse over any running program in the taskbar.

In fact, each thumbnail has a little red x in the upper-right corner, meaning you can close that program without first having to maximize it.

Apple’s iTunes takes this a step further by adding player controls. The thumbnail sports three little icons: Previous Track, Play/Pause, and Next Track.

These buttons work just like the controls in iTunes proper, but they save you from having to actually switch to the program whenever you want to, say, skip to the next song or temporarily pause playback.

Of course, savvy users know that you can add an entire iTunes toolbar to the taskbar in both Windows 7 and Vista, but that just adds clutter. Here you get basic playback controls without consuming extra space. Nice!

When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.

By Dan Tynan
November 4, 2009

4. Installed Software and Extra, Unwanted Apps
Apple has a history of taking advantage of its iTunes-iPod/iPhone headlock to promote its other products and services. For example, in March 2008 many Windows users were surprised to find Apple’s Safari browser installed on their systems–a little gift left by the latest iTunes update.

At the time, Mozilla CEO John Lilly lit into Apple for the practice. “It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad–not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web,” Lilly wrote.

After enough people complained, Apple made an infinitesimal change, creating a “new software” category in its update app but leaving installation as the default.

In July 2008 Apple’s iTunes update began quietly installing the company’s MobileMe online data-sync service without any notification to the user.

In September of this year, Windows blogger Ed Bott noted that again Apple tried to use updates to an existing software program (Boot Camp) to install an iPhone Configuration Utility, even though he had never used an iPhone. Apple subsequently removed that program from its Windows Update utility. To this day, if you update the QuickTime video player, it will also look to install iTunes, regardless of whether you’ve ever owned an Apple device.

With the exception of MobileMe, none of these software programs generate revenue for Apple. But they do serve to pull users further into Apple’s ecosystem.

4. Shoes and Spies
In March 2007, Apple applied for a patent on technology that allowed it to pair a garment with an electronic sensor, as it had done with the Nike iPod Sport Kit. That kit allowed owners of Nike shoes to track their speed, mileage, and other data on their iPods. Apple’s objective in the patent: to prevent users from removing the sensor from the Nike shoe and putting it into shoes from a different manufacturer–what New Scientist’s Paul Marks called “DRM for your wardrobe.”

Two months later the company filed for a patent on technology that would prevent Apple devices from accepting a charge during certain circumstances. This tech would prevent a thief from recharging your iPhone or iPod, but it could also keep you from charging the device if you tried to sync it with an “unauthorized” PC. And last August the company filed for a patent on sensors that would record “customer abuse events” on Apple products; the data from these sensors would presumably be used to deny warranty repair claims by documenting damage that was the customer’s fault.

Apple is certainly within its rights to patent such technologies; what these applications show, though, is that there is seemingly no limit to what the company wants to control.

Many such lock-in examples exist, to be sure, and we’d like to hear yours, in the comments below.

The question is, do Apple fans care? Widman, for one, says, “Choice is overrated. As a consumer, I’m more interested in something that works.”

It’s a reasonable argument–but also a costly one. Is it really worth it?

When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.

By Dan Tynan
November 4, 2009

2. iPhone and the App Store
It’s sad but inescapable: if you want a sexy iPhone in the US, you also have to make do with AT&T (or Globe Telecom here in the Philippines — ed). Your alternatives? Take your chances with iPhone unlocking software (and hope that Apple doesn’t release an OS update that turns the phone into a brick), or move to Europe, where you have a somewhat broader choice of carriers. Locked (though heavily subsidized) phones are an unfortunate fact of life in this country, a situation not unique to the iPhone.

The iPhone’s software shop, on the other hand, is a dictatorship. Apps for the iPhone are available only from the App Store in iTunes. And North Korea’s Kim Jong-il has nothing on the people who run the App Store, whose decisions about what apps may be sold seem more capricious as time goes on. Apps that duplicate (or improve upon) features available from Apple or AT&T are strictly forbidden–hence the ongoing controversy over Google Voice, an application that would allow VoIP calls over the iPhone, if only Apple would approve it.

iPhone owners have had the option of jailbreaking the handset, which allows them to install apps not approved by Apple while voiding the warranty (see the dangers of unlocking, above). With changes that Apple has made to the iPhone 3GS, however, jailbreaking may no longer be possible.

Apple claims that jailbreaking the iPhone violates its copyrights and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Digital-rights organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation beg to differ.

The EFF’s Fred von Lohman argues that iPhone owners should be free to tinker with their phones, especially when they can add capabilities that App Store programs don’t yet provide. He notes that “the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse-engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.”

By comparison, things are slightly different for the open-source mobile OS Google Android, whose owners can buy apps from multiple online stores (including AppVee, Handango, and MobiHand). Android apps also undergo an approval process; Google says about 1 percent of apps are rejected. Still, according to Wired, several iPhone developers booted from the App Store are opting for the friendlier environs of Google’s mobile OS, which some say allow them to be freer with both the OS code and the phone features when they’re creating apps.

With each major mobile platform developing its own app stores, more differences may emerge. As its competitors grow in popularity, the iPhone App Store may have to relax some of its restrictions or risk driving away more developers.

3. Mac Computers and the Mac OS
Ever since the Second Coming (aka the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997), the Mac has been a tightly controlled, closed system. The result? High prices and limits on the options you can get with Mac hardware.

For example, you still can’t buy an Apple machine with support for Blu-ray drives. And although Apple has cut prices–in part due to some aggressive Microsoft marketing–the average Mac still costs more than the average Windows PC, according to the latest figures from The NPD Group‘s retail tracking service.

“The Mac showcases the traditional lock-in method of tying software to hardware,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst with The Enderle Group. “This is the act of making the OS and certain core software inexpensive or free, and subsidizing it by high-margin hardware. It’s a classic misdirection, and it works as long as there isn’t a third party who can compete with a more reasonably priced package (which is what Psystar is trying to do).”

Psystar’s attempts to market hardware capable of running the Mac OS have resulted in an ongoing legal battle between it and Apple; few observers give Psystar much chance of winning that fight.

The main advantage to the marriage of Apple hardware and software is “a unified source of service,” notes Jake Widman, who has written about Apple for two decades, most recently for bMighty’s blogs. “You made everything in this box; you fix it.”

Reopening the Mac OS to third-party manufacturers, as Apple did in the mid-1990s, might lower prices but increase support pain, Widman adds. “I recently compared the cost of a Psystar with that of a Mini (and the old Mini, before the recent bump), and ended up wondering how much hassle one was willing to put up with in order to save $120.”

Has the closed Apple ecosystem resulted in more-reliable, better-supported systems? Apple has traditionally fared well in consumer hardware-reliability surveys (including PC World’s). This year, however, Apple fell to a distant second behind netbook maker Asus in reliability data collected by Rescuecom, an independent customer-support vendor. Recent glitches with the Snow Leopard OS and performance problems with the newly introduced iMacs also suggest that the Mac platform could be losing its purported quality advantage.

When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.

By Dan Tynan

November 4, 2009

Art by Luis Anthony Oliveros

Once you enter the Big Tent of Apple, it’s exceedingly hard to find the exit.

Over its 33-year history, Apple has consistently elected to limit consumer choice, creating a situation known as “lock in.” As soon as you start buying stuff from Apple, you’ll find it difficult to move to products made by someone else without losing everything you’ve already paid for.

Of course, many people don’t want to leave Apple’s tent. After all, it’s filled with iPhones and MacBooks and other cool stuff. And Apple is hardly the only business that tries to lock in customers–wireless carriers are probably the worst offenders. Nor is Apple the only vendor to use one product as leverage to push others onto consumers (let’s declare Microsoft the champion there).

But no other technology company exercises the same amount of control over what its customers can and can’t do with the things they bought. Part of this approach is due to Apple’s deep belief that a closed digital ecosystem with limited options benefits both Apple and its customers. Part of it is due to an all-consuming desire for control on the part of the ringmaster, otherwise known as Steve Jobs.

The bottom line: Apple makes great products, but its marketing practices limit your choices and cost you more money. Here are five classic examples of how the company has done it.

1. iPod and iTunes

When the iPod arrived in fall 2001, followed by the iTunes Music Store in spring 2003, few early adopters realized the commitment they were making by buying their media player and their media from the same source.

Due to Apple’s digital rights management setup, until April 2007 any music you bought from iTunes could play in only three places: on an iPod, within registered iTunes software on a limited number of computers, or on certain Motorola phones (that nobody bought).

If you wanted to move the songs you bought at a buck apiece to a cheaper player from a competing manufacturer, you had two options: an onerous process in which you burned your songs to a CD and then reripped them as MP3s, or quasilegal software that essentially did the same thing using your hard drive instead of a disc.

The last vestiges of DRM-protected music vanished from iTunes two years later. Apple offered to remove the DRM from the music that iPod owners had already bought, as well as to bump up the sound quality, for an additional 30 cents a track. (Gee, thanks, Apple.) Of course, movies and TV shows sold on iTunes are still copy-protected and cannot be legally converted to a DRM-free format.

Locking content to hardware cost consumers money–especially when first-, second-, and third-generation iPod batteries began failing. Consumers could either shell out the cash for a new iPod or pay Apple as much as $100 (plus shipping) to put a new battery in their existing device. In June 2005 Apple settled a class-action suit filed by iPod battery victims, offering a $50 voucher toward future Apple purchases (excluding downloads) and another year of warranty support.

Over the last three years, consumers have filed multiple antitrust suits against Apple alleging that the tight connection between the iPod and iTunes constitutes a monopoly; these have been consolidated in a federal class-action suit currently under way in Northern California [PDF].

Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber acknowledges Apple’s lock-in advantage with iTunes, but echoes what many Apple supporters often claim: The company’s hands are tied by content providers.

“When you buy a movie through your Apple TV, and the movie is in a DRM-protected format that will not work on home theater systems from other companies, it makes you less likely to switch,” he says. “But what choice does Apple have? They can sell DRM-protected movies, or they can sell no movies at all.”

Actually, Apple has at least two other choices. It could license its Fairplay DRM technology to other hardware manufacturers and allow multiple devices to play media purchased on iTunes, as Amazon does with its video-on-demand service. Or it could use its market power to push for one of the industry-wide DRM schemes proposed by Disney, Sony, and other parties. (Given the close ties between Steve Jobs and Disney, though, Apple might eventually endorse the digital rights scheme that the Mouse House favors.)

By Roman Loyola
November 3, 2009

People have strong opinions about computer mice-after all, a mouse (along with a keyboard) physically forms a personal connection between you and your Mac. Apple‘s new Magic Mouse has a creative new design that, upon first impression, you’ll either love or hate.

The Bluetooth Magic Mouse has no visible buttons. It is a two-button mouse, but there’s no visible separation between right and left. I’m right handed, and I use my middle finger for right click, and my index finger for left click, and in my five hours of use, I never accidentally clicked the wrong button.

The buttons actually click; when you press down, you can see and feel the button depress, and there’s an audible click that sounds authentic. You don’t have to take your finger off the mouse to double click. When I simply rested my hand on the mouse, however, I clicked it.

The Magic Mouse has only two buttons. There are no side buttons, like on the Mighty Mouse (now called the Apple Mouse), nor is there a scroll wheel or scroll ball button. In fact, the Exposé or Dashboard functions found in the Apple/Mighty Mouse are no longer in the Magic Mouse.

Perhaps the most innovative feature about the Magic Mouse is the Multi-Touch support, which effectively replaces a scroll wheel or scroll ball. To scroll a document up, down, left or right, you glide your finger on the mouse in the appropriate direction. Your fingers don’t even have to be at the top of the mouse; you can swipe the area just above the logo if you want, and the scrolling works.

The two-finger swiping, however, wasn’t so easy for me to perform. Two-finger swiping can be used in iPhoto, for example, to move between photos. I found it difficult to keep the Magic Mouse still as I swiped two fingers left or right.

The Magic Mouse has a plastic top, and aluminum bottom with two plastic rails. Moving the mouse on my desktop with and without a mouse pad wasn’t smooth at all-it was a grating sensation.

Below is a ten-second video of the Magic Mouse System Preference, which has built-in video tutorials on how to use Multi-Touch.

Following the Magic Mouse’s launch, Apple has also released software updates for Leopard and Snow Leopard to support its Multi-Touch features.

By Jared Newman
October 29, 2009

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

Leonard Kleinrock. Photo from his own personal history page.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Today, 40 years later, life without the Internet seems unfathomable. In those rare occurrences where your Internet service provider has trouble, and you can’t connect, it’s as if the power is out in your entire house. Over 1 billion people are online, and last year, Google announced that it had detected over 1 trillion pages.

How did we get from Kleinrock’s anti-climactic, yet historic, “lo” to a society that lives and breathes on the ability to transmit data? Over the years, more computer terminals connected to the network, hosted by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and known as ARPAnet.

Vint Cerf. Photo courtesy of The Brisbane Times.

In the mid-70s, DARPA engineers Vint Cerf and Yogen Delal and Carl Sunshine developed Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, abbeviated as TCP/IP, a means for networks to “internetwork,” hence the name “Internet.” You could, of course, call the development of TCP/IP, or its uniform adoption by ARPAnet on January 1, 1983, birthdays of the Internet as well.

Over the years, the number of connected terminals bloomed, and new networks outside of ARPAnet popped up. All of this set the stage for the World Wide Web, proposed by Tim Berners Lee in 1989 as a collection of Internet documents viewable in a browser. Five years later, we had the first Web browser in Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Then came “Web 2.0,” a term for participatory sites like Digg, Facebook and Flickr that becomes more of a cliché as the way we communicate over the Internet advances further.

And to think it all started with a truncated bit of text. Even then, the Internet was a work in progress.

By Ian Paul
October 28, 2009

It’s been almost a week since Windows 7′s official launch, and a ton of information and opinion is out there surrounding Microsoft’s latest operating system. On the one hand, you have positive reports of Windows 7 helping extend battery life, installed on new PCs with less crapware, and offering a more intuitive interface. But users are also complaining about annoying issues like delayed driver support for peripheral hardware and upgrade bugs.

Here’s what people are loving and hating about Windows 7:

Longer Battery Life

Microsoft — and users — are talking about claims of improved battery life when using Windows 7. Joakim Lialias, Intel’s Microsoft alliance manager recently wrote a blog post discussing the chip company’s deep involvement in optimizing Windows 7 performance on laptops. Lialias claims that Intel and Microsoft were able to extend the battery life of an unspecified laptop by 1.4 hours.

PC World’s own Windows 7 performance tests, however, did not find such a dramatic increase in laptop battery life. Fifteen minutes was the best performance improvement we found. That may not be much of an improvement, but it might give you time to finish a movie before your laptop dies on you.

Crapware Begone!

One of the more annoying points about buying a new Windows PC is presence of annoying crippled programs called craplets or crapware, which are often preinstalled on a new computer. Crapware can include trial versions of software and special offers thrown onto your new system by computer manufacturers. While harmless, getting these applications off your new system becomes an annoying and unnecessary chore. Apple even made a “Get A Mac” commercial touting the Mac’s lack of crapware.

Microsoft has finally decided to take matters into its own hands when it comes to these annoying programs. Microsoft’s online and new retail stores sell a line of computers called “Signature PCs” that come crapware-free, according to Tech Flash. CNET is also reporting that Microsoft worked with manufacturers to get rid of any crapware apps that were slowing down the overall performance of Windows 7 computers. That doesn’t mean crapware is gone for good, but Microsoft may be trying to bring this annoying habit under control.

The new crapware policy may also be improving startup times on a system that PC World found to be a little bit faster than Vista.

Tastes Like Vista

XP users may have difficulty upgrading to Windows 7, but once everything is up and running many people are saying the transition to the new user interface isn’t that bad.

CNET’s Ina Fried’s personal experience illustrates this best when she took her 92-year-old Aunt Hilda to get a new computer. Aunt Hilda, according to Fried, has made the transition quite easily and the nonagenarian says the experience isn’t that different from XP. That was not the common experience of users upgrading from XP to Vista.

Dang Drivers

Compatibility was a big complaint when it came to Windows Vista. Not wanting to repeat that experience, Microsoft has made the process more stringent for approving third-party drivers for peripheral hardware like printers and scanners. That’s good news in the long run, but in the short term, some users are still waiting for Windows 7 drivers to run their existing equipment.

Endless Reboots

Starting last Friday, some Vista users trying to upgrade to Windows 7 found their computers stuck in an endless reboot cycle. Computerworld reports that as of Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft engineers still didn’t have a fix for the problem. However, some users are suggesting you might escape the endless cycle by booting your computer off your old Windows Vista install disk, and following the instructions posted by forum user “su airodump-ng -c” towards the bottom of this forum thread.

Upgrade Issues, MIA E-mail, Gamers

Rounding out the complaints are other well-documented upgrade problems like the Windows 7 Student Edition issue that has been resolved. A new complaint that has popped up is the fact that Windows 7 does not come with Windows Live Mailpreinstalled. Windows Live Mail was a replacement program rolled out in 2007 to replace Outlook Express in XP and Windows Mail in Vista. To get the program, you must download it directly from Microsoft’s Website. It’s admittedly a minor issue, but some people were unhappy enough to write about it.

Finally, there are the gamers who say they have been left out of the Windows 7 hoopla. PC World’s Matt Peckham and Darren Gladstone have both noted that Microsoft needs to pay more attention to the world of PC gaming under Windows 7, as it did with Windows Vista.

So that’s the first seven days in the life of Windows 7. How has your experience with the new OS been? Positive or negative?