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Interview: JABstone founder Joe Bureau

icesnake — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:05:24 +0000

Due to a recent stroke in the family, I recently was motivated to look for a method of helping non-verbal people communicate without making everyone around them learn sign language, or play charades. There are a number of apps available for smartphones and tablets, notably the iPad and the Android platform. After comparing features (and prices), I settled on a AAC (Augmentive and Alternative Communication) app for Android called JABtalk (which I plan to review here also, Real Soon Now ™). I was able to reach the developer, Joe Bureau, directly and he graciously consented to an interview.

Without further ado, here’s Joe:

Q. Tell us about yourself and your company.

A. My name is Joe Bureau. I’m a software engineer living in the Seattle WA area. I’ve been working in the software industry for the last 15 years working primarily with early-stage startups. In 2011, my wife and I started a software company called JABstone, which specializes in speech communication technology for Android. Our first product is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) application called JABtalk. We currently have over 20,000 active users in over 70 countries around the world. Our website is www.jabstone.com.

Q. What motivated you to start developing smartphone apps?

A. I first started developing smartphone apps for one of the early-stage startups I was working for in 2010. My initial experience was writing a location based application for the iPhone. I then ported that application to Android. Prior to building smartphone apps I spent a lot of time doing java development so stepping into the Android world was very straight forward. My experience with iPhone development was much more challenging since I had to learn a new language (objective C), new development tools (xCode), and was working on an unfamiliar operating system (Mac OS).

Q. Where did you get the idea for JABtalk?

A. In 2009, my wife and I took our five year old son, Wyatt, to a speech communication evaluation center to be evaluated for a speech communication device. Wyatt has Down Syndrome and struggles with verbal communication. The speech center we visited had an array of speech communication devices ranging from $8000 dynavox machines to $600 iPads. We tried several of the top communication apps for the iPad and spent a couple months evaluating the $8000 dynavox. After witnessing our son’s frustration trying to learn the various speech systems, it became clear he needed something much easier and intuitive to use. Having spent the previous year building iOS and Android applications, I knew I could build an app tailored to his specific needs that would give him a much better chance of communicating with us without the frustration he was experiencing with the other AAC applications he had been trying. Our son’s need for an easy to use speech communication device was the driving factor that led to the development of JABtalk.

Q. Why did you choose Android instead of iOS?

A. I get this question often. When we first started JABstone, our goal was to provide the most affordable speech communication app available. We also believed that a child needing a communication device should have access to the device at all times. This means taking it to school, to the playground, and anywhere else they may need it to communicate. At the time, the leading AAC app on the market was only available on the iPad and was $200. By the time a person purchased an iPad plus the application, they were looking at a minimum investment of $800. The idea of sending Wyatt to school with an $800 piece of fancy technology didn’t seem like a wise strategy. Being involved in the technology industry, I knew the market would soon be flooded with inexpensive Android tablets and would be a much more practical solution for the problem we were trying to solve. From my own software development experience, I also knew developing an application for Android would be much faster and cheaper than it would be for iOS. As of today, over 70% of JABtalk users are running the app on devices that cost less than $200 so I think Android was the right decision for our particular needs and goals.

Q. How long was the development process for JABtalk from idea to Google Play and Amazon’s App Store?

A. Building software is a very iterative process. The first version was pretty basic and only offered a few fundamental features like importing a picture and audio files from an SDCard. The first version probably took a month of mostly weekends to create and publish to the Google Play store. During 2011, we released 11 updates to JABtalk and now have dozens of features as listed on our website. If you were to ask how many hours have been spent working on JABtalk over the last year, it would probably be a couple hundred hours.

Q. What are the challenges of developing for the Android platform?

A. There are two main challenges with Android in my opinion. The first challenge is the fragmentation of Android versions available in the marketplace. Apple has the advantage of controlling what versions of iOS are in use by automatically pushing new versions of the operating system to iOS devices. Android users are at the mercy of device manufacturers or cellular carriers to send them updates. Unfortunately, making sure users have the latest and greatest version of Android isn’t always a priority or even in the financial interests of cellular carriers or device manufacturers. If you want your app to be available to the largest number of users, you have to write your app in a way that is backward compatible with versions of Android that may be 2 or 3 years old. This means you can’t take advantage of the latest Android features. For example, one of the features I want to provide JABtalk users is the ability to control the speed of a scrolling window. The API to add that functionality is only available in Android 3.0 and higher. Since more than 70% of JABtalk users are running Android 2.3, I can’t offer that feature unless I want to create a different version of JABtalk specifically for Android 3.0 or greater.

The second challenge developing for Android is the number of Android devices in the market that look and work differently. For example, the Nook Tablet, Kindle Fire, and Samsung Galaxy all run a flavor of Android but all look radically different from each other and have different hardware capabilities. Since each device has different capabilities, JABtalk has to detect the hardware capabilities of each device and suppress or enable certain features on the fly. While this isn’t a challenge from a technical perspective, trying to describe the features and capabilities of JABtalk can get complicated since the features available are completely dependent on the capabilities of each Android device. The wide variety of devices and capabilities can make reproducing and debugging a problem very challenging as well.

Q. If you had known all that before starting on JABtalk, what would you have done differently?

A. I’m not sure I would have changed anything if starting over. I still believe Android is the best platform for our particular needs and goals. Android owns 50% of the smartphone market now and I personally believe that trend is going to continue going upward. The iPad currently dominates tablets, but it’s hard for me to believe Android won’t overtake the tablet market as well over the next few years unless Microsoft can pull a rabbit out of their hat with Windows 8.

From a development perspective, I wish there were one set of tools or a specific technology available to allow you to create truly native applications for all platforms. If you want to create an application today that performs well and can take full advantage of Android or iOS features, you need to use tools and frameworks unique to each platform. That means if you want to write native Android applications, you’re typically going to use Java for your programming language and Eclipse or IntelliJ for your development environment. If you’re writing a native iOS app, you’re going to use objective C for your programming language and Xcode for your development environment. If you’re writing a native Windows phone application, you’re going to use a C# for your programming language and Visual Studio for your development environment. There are tools available today, like PhoneGap, that do a pretty good job of providing a cross platform framework using web technologies, but since no native user interface widgets are used, the resulting app look more like web app than a native Android or iOS app.

Q. What advice would you give to someone wanting to develop Android apps?

A. The first question they should ask is if the app really needs to be an Android app. In many cases, an app could just as easily be implemented as a web app optimized for smartphone sized screens and accessed via a web browser. If the app doesn’t need to leverage native smartphone features (i.e. camera, microphone, GPS, etc…) and doesn’t need to have a native look and feel, it may make more sense to build a smartphone optimized web app instead. If the obvious choice is to implement your software as an Android app, visit the Android developer website http://developer.android.com so you can get the free development tools necessary to get started and begin learning best practices for designing your app http://developer.android.com/design. I would also caution people away from using third party tools like Adobe Air or Mono for Android when getting started. It’s important to acquire strong fundamental skills when learning any new technology so you fully understand what you are doing and can troubleshoot problem when they arise. Once you understand a new technology and are competent with the native tools provided, using third party tools to speed up development isn’t as much of a concern.

Q. Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

A. If you know anyone who could benefit from a free speech communication application, please direct them to www.jabstone.com.

Quick Review: Google Docs Unleashed (video)

icesnake — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:33:19 +0000

I subscribe to the daily email newsletter from How-To-Geek and often find it informative or amusing, and sometimes it saves me some money. Today it saved me some money. It offered a link to AppSumo.com for a free video tutorial, entitled Google Docs Unleashed.

This video is apparently geared towards the Marketing type, or an App developer. Frankly, I’d have been pretty angry if I had paid $99 to find that out. I did not find the video useful or interesting, and the faces seen in it are a little off-putting as well. Production values are good for Web video, but the clearly-amateur actors would be better left as disembodied voice-overs.

Overall, I would be quite interested in the tutorial if I fell into the narrow audience it seems to be aimed at. Since I am not (I’m the get-your-hands-dirty, PC-technician-buried-to-the-elbows-inside-a-tower-case type), it left me feeling… Well, meh.

I’ll be going back to AppSumo a bunch though. We Gnomes love deals!

How to Create a Digital Distribution System for Video and Music

icesnake — Tue, 24 May 2011 17:16:47 +0000

Unless you’ve been living in a cave since June of 1999, you know that most people like the convenience of digital music and movies. You also know that the record labels (RIAA) and movie studios (MPAA) have been falsely claiming for that entire time that piracy is cutting into their “legitimate” sales. I’m going to tell you (and them, but I already know they won’t pay any attention) how to make piracy unattractive, improve their public reputation and customer relationships, and (probably) increase sales.

A system to do all this must be easy to use, convenient, and safe.

In order to do this, you need to create a digital distribution system that is easy for the consumer to use, allows the consumer to access his purchases on every device that has the hardware capability to play the media you have sold him (convenience), make it affordable, and maintain tight security over the consumers’ personal and financial information (to maintain trust).

How to make it easy to use? Web-based rentals and purchases, without any proprietary garbage like iTunes, etc.

How to make it convenient? Eliminate DRM (or as I believe it should be called, adhering the the truth-in-advertising principle, “Technology Users’ Rights Denial Systems,” or TURDS for short). Make it possible to access music and video on every device that is capable of playing the media; PCs, Macs, and Linux systems can all handle Web-based media, smartphones can download files and play them locally (this is preferable to streaming over 3G/4G/LTE because of both reliability of the signal, and bandwidth caps by cell carriers; most smartphones also have Wi-Fi capability), set-top boxes like the Roku and Patriot Box Office can stream like a PC, and other portable devices can sync to a desktop or laptop computer system through USB, bluetooth, or Wi-Fi.

By making it affordable, you play to the consumers’ sense of fairness and allow him to feel smug about buying your product, instead of pirating it. According to a study in 2009 (and many others since then), music pirates actually buy ten times as much as they “steal.” If you make it easier to buy, and price your product fairly, you can increase that ratio quite easily; people want to obtain music and videos honestly, but the RIAA and MPAA have made it difficult. Personally, I think under a dollar per track for MP3 music (the “gold standard”) is fair for music, and the same for a one-time rental of a video stream. Purchase of the a video should be less than ten dollars for newer releases, and five dollars or less for older ones. It’s also important to ensure that the one-time rental actually can be watched all the way through, with fast-forward and rewind capabilities, even if the consumer gets all the way to the end of the video. The easiest way to do this is to not start the rental period until the consumer actually starts the stream, and not terminate it for 24 hours after that. That way, if he’s interrupted during the viewing, he won’t feel cheated, because he knows he can go back later that day or the next day and pick up where he left off. Rental periods should *not* arbitrarily start when the purchase transaction is made. If you allow me to rent a movie today and watch it later in the week, I am more likely to rent several movies when I have a couple of spare bucks, rather than buying a candy bar or other snacks. Netflix, of course, is the way to go for the consumer; “all you can eat” for under ten bucks a month. With that price, there’s no incentive to pirate videos that are available on Netflix. Of course, the movies that aren’t on Netflix remain as piracy targets.

Purchased music and video should be downloadable in a customer’s choice of formats; MP3, FLAC, and OGG should be available for music, and video should be accessible in MP4, WMV, DivX, and possibly other formats, in a variety of resolutions, to accommodate different playback devices. At the very least, 720P and 1080P formats must be available. Ideally, the purchaser should be able to log in to his (Web-based) account and download the video in any format at any time, on any computer or device, once it has been purchased, and continuity of access plans MUST be made; the consumer needs to know that, in the event Blah Studios goes belly-up, whoever purchases the remains will continue to provide access to content the consumer has paid for, or else the consumer will feel a lack of trust, and probably choose to obtain the video another way – one which will not gain any money for Blah Studios.

Finally, the consumer needs to know that his information will not be sold (other than as part of the necessary baggage to ensure continued access) nor easily stolen; Sony’s PSN and SOE are perfect examples of what you should *NOT* do. The bare minimum of security consists of:

Require a secure connection for rentals and purchases (HTTPS: or whatever comes after it)
Encrypt usernames
Use a one-way hash to verify passwords, and never store the actual password at all.
If you absolutely must store credit card information, store it using strong encryption, and in an electronically-isolated way so that an intruder can’t gain access to both usernames and cred card data with a single intrusion. It’s better to not store it at all; consider using a third-party payment processor, so that you don’t ever need to “see” the actual method of payment.
Keep all of your servers up-to-date with security patches

And that’s the basic business plan for digital music and video. Let me know if you start one up; I’ll try it out!

How to uninstall Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant from Firefox

icesnake — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:27:21 +0000

Microsoft is still up to their old tricks, installing unwanted software that’s bundled with other things you might need (or possibly even want – who knows). If you use Firefox, you not only don’t want the .NET Framework Assistant, you don’t need it (and it’s not compatible with the latest Firefox anyhow).

Rather than re-invent the wheel here, I’m going to send you over to Wyatt O’Day’s blog to get a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to remove this particular bit of bloat from your PC. If you aren’t comfortable editing the registry, get a geeky friend to do it for you; you can buy her a pizza or something as payment.

I have used this method for Windows Vista (64-bit), Windows 7 (both 32 and 64 bit versions) and Windows XP; it works. Which is more than can be said for the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant.

So you want to be a podcaster?

icesnake — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:44:57 +0000

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Well, if you don’t care about growing a regular audience, don’t worry about publishing regular webisodes, and don’t have to worry about your Web hosting bandwidth, it can be. If any of those matter to you, however, it’s going to be serious work, no just fun and games.

To make it a lot less painful, let me recommend the single most important tool in a podcaster’s arsenal: the freeware audio editor called “Audacity.”

Audacity is an open-source multi-platform audio editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Development is supported by donations, and by purchases from the Audacity Store (and after all, who doesn’t have a use for another coffee mug, or a nice polo shirt?).

Some of the most important Audacity features for podcasters are:

Live recording from any source (mic, Skype, line in, etc.) that your computer supports.
Automated “noise removal.” I record in a room that has a lot of ventilator fan noise. Audacity removes all that noise with just a couple of clicks.
Clipping, splicing, and mixing of audio tracks.
Pitch and speed changes.
Special effects, such as flanging and phasing.

And if you’re smart enough to “save early and save often,” you can try things out and if you don’t like them, revert to the prior version almost instantly.

Finally, Audacity can export in a number of different file formats; MP3 is probably the most important for podcasters, of course.

Try it! If you don’t like it – well, it was free.

How to get fired in one easy step

icesnake — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:43:52 +0000

Lifehacker.com often presents useful and informative articles. This isn’t about those; it’s about the other articles they sometimes present, like this one:

Bypass Heavy-Handed Web Filters with Your Own Proxy Server

Your IT Department installs filters for a number of reasons, including (but not limited to):

The lawyers told them to.
HR told them to.
Your manager would rather that you work while you’re getting paid for it, and browse random Web sites on your own time.
Many thousands of Web sites contain malicious code that will silently install itself on your computer – and your employer’s network – simply by you visiting the wrong site (which could be the New York Times or Wall Street Journal – both have had third-party advertising banners that contained malicious code).

So, while it may be fun to think you’re “getting away with it,” you probably aren’t (the IT Department keeps logs, and the proxy won’t protect you from that), depending on your employer’s policies, you may be putting your job at serious risk by circumventing the filters IT put there.

Just do something smarter, OK? Like, maybe, work at work, and play at home.

“Fix” your Windows 7 laptop battery problem

icesnake — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:45:39 +0000

By this time, I am sure everyone has heard about the problems with Windows 7 “destroying” laptop batteries. I’m not going to go into the truth-or-fiction aspect, and I’m not interested in assigning blame; I just want to explain what you can do to fix it if you have this problem.

First, take a look at the Spanish language version of the fix. I suggest you open it in a new tab.

Now, here’s the English translation, courtesy of Google:

Spanish to English translation

Problems with laptop battery Windows 7: workaround
Many users of Windows 7 are taking warnings related to problems with their laptop battery when in fact there is no problem.
Microsoft is currently investigating this issue with hardware manufacturers. Apparently the problem is related to the BIOS and look for an immediate update of firmware.

Consider replacing your battery “Consider replacing your battery” is the annoying error message that appears frequently in Windows 7.

As Microsoft releases the final solution for this error, then a temporary solution is to disable the error:

- Open the Control Panel Device Manager or write in the search box on the Start menu
- Select the Device Manager
- Expand and select Battery with Battery control method for ACPI Microsoft
- Right click and select Disable

And there you have it!

Beer is good for you! Woohoo!

icesnake — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:52:03 +0000

Beer: Now A Health Food!

According to BBC News, drinking up to three ounces of alcohol daily can reduce a man’s risk of heart disease by 35%; drinking 3 to 11 shots gives a man a 50% lower risk of heart disease!

If you haven’t already yelled out to the Little Woman about this discovery, show her the full report!

Source

The Germophobe’s Guide to ‘Con Cosplay

Daniora — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:22:37 +0000

In spite of the reputation of the geek as a solitary creature, there are times when we must gather en masse at various conventions. We are not content to meet in groups of 3 or 4. No! We must pack thousands of us into a hot, crowded convention center. Geeks from all over flock to these gatherings and, as a result, the likelihood for the passing of germs is high.

Rare is the person who comes away from a ‘con unscathed. In light of the recent events regarding PAX and the presence of an uninvited guest (Swine Flu), I thought the topic should be discussed. Sure, you could walk around in a surgical mask and a pair of latex gloves to protect yourselves from germs, but the ‘con is the perfect venue to be a bit more creative. I’ve compiled a list of the top 5 costume genres you can use to keep other peoples’ germs at bay.

1. Ninja/Power Ranger/Snake Eyes/ Cobra Commander

The key feature here is some type of cloth facial covering that could easily hide a surgical mask and make you look quite dapper as well. The requisite pair of gloves also protects your hands from germy game demos. All these costumes are fairly readily available from various costume retailers or are simple enough to put together yourself.

2. Storm Trooper/Darth Vader/ Boba Fett

Again with this genre is the mask to hide a less aesthetically surgical one, but this time they are hard masks. Plus, the odd sound your voice will make coming through the various layers will only serve to enhance the cosplay experience. And, again, the gloves are part of the outfit. These, however, are probably better for the more die hard fan, as purchasing one or making one yourself can be quite daunting.

3. Steam Punk/WWII Soldier/Psycho Mantis from MGS

The big draw here: Gas mask. Rather than use a fake one, get a real mask and outfit it with a couple of filters rated to keep biological microbes and you’ll be all set. All in all, it’s fairly simple to put together a decent outfit from thrift or army surplus stores. A pair of thin leather gloves will make button mashing easier and safer.

4. Transformer/Gundam

While certainly not the easiest costume to move around in, you could probably hide an entire respiration system within a good cardboard robot. Make sure to bring a friend, though. Maneuvering by yourself could prove quite hazardous.

5. Mascot-style Characters

While this is certainly something I would never encourage, there’s certainly no better way to keep everyone away from you than by dressing up as a terrifying large headed stuffed animal.

I hope that now before you head off to your next convention that you’ll remember what you’ve learned here and will take the necessary, geeky precautions.

Breaking the cable habit

Patrick — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:57:47 +0000

Why, you might ask, would this be a suitable topic? Because it’s the technology that we have now that inspires this post. I believe we’ve got a confluence of things occurring right now that make it entirely plausible for a reasonably tech-savvy individual to completely replace their cable box:

Netflix: missed your favorite show? Who cares, just queue up the season DVDs to be mailed (or, if you’re lucky, it’s available to watch immediately)
Hulu: Why not just stream the show for free? Hulu will even let you build up a queue complete with subscriptions
Over-the-air HDTV: pull in those local channels, for free, using a simple antenna and your fancy new flat-screen (or an older TV with a converter box)
BitTorrent: plenty of ways to find espisodes of shows for download as well, though this is, at best, a bit of a grey area when it comes to the legality.
Digital stores (Amazon/iTunes/etc): just purchase your favorite episodes to watch at your leisure

Now, admittedly, a lot of these require you to have high-speed internet (any digital download or streaming) and/or pay (Netflix, digital purchases), but the options are varied. However, DSL is reasonably priced ($20-30/month); slap a Netflix subscription on top of that for another $15 or so, and you’re still coming out cheaper than anything the cable company (well, that I’ve seen from Comcast) has to offer – plus you’ve got high-speed internet to boot.

I guess what remains to be seen is how the cable companies will adapt to the new technology. Yes, cable internet is most likely the fastest that most people can get ahold of (unless they’re in a FIOS market), but that doesn’t give you any discounts on your cable bill. Will the Comcast’s of the world fight back against the pressure of free HD and online programming? Only time will tell, but I’m not holding my breath.

Twitter Down: DDoS Attack

missiondeep — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:34:31 +0000

Is Twitter Down? The answer is YES. http://istwitterdown.com/ as of 10:30 AM EST on Thursday August 6, 2009

According to twitter’s status page they are in the midst of fighting off a Denial Of Service Attack. http://status.twitter.com/

What is a DDoS Attack you may ask.

Well according to Wikipedia:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.

So there you have it. I’ll let you know more when I know more.

Update: It appears Twitter is back up for the moment. 11:48 EST

San Diego Comic Con ’09

missiondeep — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:08:08 +0000

The following pictures were provided by our man Tom “On The Scene” Racine from Tall Tale Radio as he struts his stuff around San Diego Comic Con ’09

James Cameron’s “Avatar”

Star Trek DAC

District 9 Truck

The Green Hornet Car

Dalek

I hope everybody is having fun out at The San Diego Comic Con and thanks Tom.

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland

missiondeep — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:32:20 +0000

Tim Burton brings us more wacked out wackiness with his teaser trailer for the 2010 Alice In Wonderland movie.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Download HD 720p

Steve Ballmer comments on Google’s Chrome OS

icesnake — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:48:40 +0000

On Reuter’s Web site today, it’s reported that Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has commented on Google’s Chrome (and Android, the Google mobile platform OS):

“I don’t know if they can’t make up their mind or what the problem is over there, but the last time I checked, you don’t need two client operating systems,” said Ballmer. “It’s good to have one.”

So what are you saying, Steve? That Windows 3, NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, CE, and Mobile never happened, and that Windows 7 is the only product Microsoft has ever produced? Or that none of them are client systems? I guess that means my “Windows Remote Desktop” client is imaginary, and that the Windows CE thin clients and Windows Mobile smartphones in the building are likewise figments.

Apparently Wall Street is smarter than Mr. Ballmer thinks they are. The final line in the article reads:

“Microsoft shares fell 15 cents to $23.08 on Tuesday afternoon on the Nasdaq.”

(Reuters Reporting by Bill Rigby, editing by Matthew Lewis and Gerald E. McCormick)

Upgrading from Windows Vista 64 to Windows 7 RC 64

icesnake — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:20:18 +0000

Upgrading from Windows Vista 64 to Windows 7 RC 64

Or, How I Learned to Believe Some of Microsoft’s Advice

I’ve just finished resurrecting Ursula, my Frankenputer. She was originally an HP Pavilion a1747c, with a nice dual-core AMD Athlon 64 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, 250 gig hard drive, and reads-and-burns-everything-but-HD-DVD-and-Blueray Lightscribe optical drive. She was “debranded” when HP discontinued the model, and I was able to buy her brand-new from geeks.com for less than $200 (with only 1 gig of RAM at the time; I fixed that immediately, you betcha!). She came without an OS, so I installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit (because I have seen Windows XP 64, and brother, it ain’t pretty what it does and doesn’t run).

I thought it might be nice to try out the Windows 7 RC 64-bit OS, so I shut her down, planning to connect a second 250 gig drive and make a clone so that I can revert to Vista 64 if I decide to do so. Sadly, that was the moment my power supply decided that it didn’t want to play any more, and when it died, it took the motherboard along with it. My dear wife came to the rescue with her credit card, and I now have a brand-new 680W power supply and an Asus M3A76-CM motherboard. The video card onboard is actually halfway decent, but of course I kept my Nvidia GeForce 9600. The keyboard is a Logitech G15, the mouse a Logitech G5, and there’s a Logitech webcam as well.

If you’re going to try the Release Candidate (or even wait for the final release and buy the final product then), do yourself a favor and make a backup of your existing hard drive. It will save you from certain disaster if anything goes wrong during the upgrade process, by simply being there, ready to pop in and instantly restore your system to the pre-Windows 7 state. A good way to do this is using DriveImageXML, which comes with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. UBCD4WIN is something you should have anyway if you tinker with Windows PCs. A health plan that includes psychiatric care is also advisable.

After moving the memory and CPU to the new motherboard and installing that and the new power supply in the case, I hooked up a spare drive I had lying around and installed Windows 7 64 in a “clean install” manner, as if this were a brand-new PC with a blank drive. Total install time was about 45 minutes, and all my hardware “just worked. So far, so good!

All of the foregoing is to give you background on what happened when I started the upgrade. The next step after cloning the drive (which I had done on another PC, using USB 2.0-to-SATA adapters, and taking almost 20 hours to complete) was to set aside the clone, carefully marked, and install the proper Vista 64 drivers for the new motherboard. Once everything was working normally again, I downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta and ran it. Honestly, it was practically useless, as you will see further on in this article, but it did assure me that there were no glaring compatibility issues. I’d recommend using it simply to cover all your bases. It also told me that Magic Disk/Magic ISO would not work with Windows 7. Well, that’s no problem, they hadn’t been used in so long that I had forgotten they were installed, so out they went!

So, having been assured that all my hardware was supported under Windows 7, and having all my new drivers working and the latest updates to Vista 64 installed (I lost track of how many reboots that was somewhere around thirteen, by the way), I popped the Windows 7 RC 64 DVD into the drive and eagerly chose “upgrade” from the 2-item menu (the other option is “Custom.” We’ll come back to that later).

Apparently not all my installs had completed; Windows 7 required me to reboot yet again and restart the upgrade process, which I did. This time things proceeded well, and after about an hour and forty-five minutes, and several reboots and auto-resumes, Windows 7 RC was ready to use.

Except for one thing. Windows Explorer was crashing as soon as I logged in, so I had no desktop. CTL-ALT-DEL brought up the Task Manager, and I could relaunch Explorer (if I wanted to see it crash again) or any other application (all of which, including my beloved World of Warcraft, ran perfectly). Booting into Safe Mode (which incidentally is much harder in Windows 7) worked well. So I launched Chrome and started Googling for a solution. Eventually I found some advice that told me to run MSCONFIG and disable all non-Microsoft services and startup items, and reboot. That worked. Of course, now I had the “plain vanilla” Windows 7 desktop, totally unacceptable to a dedicated geek. I started re-enabling one item at a time and rebooting. Luckily, I started wondering what “Process Monitor” was in the list of Services before too many reboots. A little more research showed that it was actually “Logitech Process Monitor.” I re-enabled everything else, disable that, and rebooted. Viola! The Eagle has landed! Er, I mean my desktop is back!

But now, although my sound system is working, the mixer panel is the default “We’re not sure what hardware you’ve got, but we think this will work” version from Microsoft. Since the onboard audio is a Via HD Audio system, off I went back to Google to find the right drivers. Without too much trouble, I located a beta version of a Windows 7 64 driver. Downloaded and installed that, and finally, after about 2 hours, the system is completely functional and running Windows 7 RC 64.

Obviously, this is why Microsfot recommended a clean install. They didn’t want to support millions of baffled Vista users who were trying to upgrade (and frankly, who could blame them?).

I do not see any significant performance improvements, though. Still, Ursula has always been fairly responsive, so I’ll allow that Windows 7 is no worse than Vista, and maybe some things are better.

So, lessons learned were:

Make a full backup of your hard drive before starting an upgrade (or clean install).
If at all possible, perform a “clean install” and then reinstall your software; you can copy your data files back from the hard drive clone you made.
Don’t expect to get away with less than 2 hours from the beginning of the upgrade or install process to the end; you might get lucky and finish sooner, but it’s a bad idea to count on it.