Hmmcast #130 mp4

When we bought our Gateway Vista machine in February the out of the box Windows Vista Experience Index was 2.6. Since buying Shadowrun and Halo 2 for Vista we have successfully increased it from 2.6 to 4.7 by making the following changes (spending around $250 extra):

- 2 GB DDR2 RAM. Since there were only two slots with 512MB each, I had to buy two 1 GB RAM sticks which cost $140 USD
- new graphics card. This had the biggest impact on performance. Started first with an ATI 256 MB RAM card ($133) and then found the nVidia GE Force 8500 GT selling for less $$$ and with 512 MB RAM. Yesterday, took the 256 MB RAM graphics card back.

Speaking of Vista, we bought our son an HP computer over Christmas that came with a free upgrade to Vista Home Premium (”Express”). We were supposed to receive that upgrade within 6-8 weeks of Vista launch. It arrived today, June 11, about two weeks shy of being four months since Vista was launched. The packing list shows the order date as May 18 at 06:32:29. The following is what the CD looks like:

Note that it’s marked: Windows Vista Home Premium Express Upgrade. I’m curious about the ‘Express’ part. Does that mean it just updates to Home Premium faster or does it mean it’s a handicapped version of Vista Home Premium? Anybody know? I did a small bit of Googling on the term and saw a FAQ for Gateway that said it differed from Windows Anytime Upgrade.

I asked my son, age 17 and an avid World of Warcraft gamer (he’s got a level 70 tank), what he thought about upgrading to Vista on his computer. He has seen first-hand what has gone into getting our newer Vista machine more game-worthy and has also seen upgrades from Windows machines take longer than expected before. “Think for the time being,” he said, “I’ll pass.”

Important note to Bloglines RSS readers regarding weekday Hmmcasts
If you are checking out the Hmmcast in Bloglines the enclosure won’t play directly, this is a confirmed issue (thanks Kent) currently without an in post workaround. Unfortunately the Bloglines RSS Reader strips out embedded Google Videos and doesn’t play mp4 enclosures. It does play mp3 enclosures without problems. I saw that some (not all) YouTube video embeds show up and I’ve checked against RSS feeds from other publishers with video enclosures and have experienced similar problems so the problem is not isolated to our RSS feed. I’m still gathering information on the issue and researching what other publishers are doing about it.

Solutions: if you click on the mp4 link it will play in your browser if you have the Quicktime plugin (free) activated. Otherwise you can use the download link and use any player that supports MPEG video files.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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