Windows

Blogging on My Mac with Windows 7 and Live Writer

Posted on January 20, 2010

Windows-7-parallels So I have taken to doing more blogging lately after a very long hiatus. As apart of my step back into blogging I did another search for desktop blogging applications that would work on the Mac as well as Windows Live Writer works on Windows. Unfortunately IMO there is still nothing that comes close.

My love for Windows Live Writer has pushed me to what may claim to be an extreme work around, but never the less, it is what works for me and I am happy.

What I have done is installed Windows 7 in Parallels and run WLW in it. My Macbook runs great with 1GB of its 4GBs of RAM allocated to Windows. It only begins to slow down if I happen to be running Parallels, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop at the same time (DM and PS are running in OS X). I usually do not have those open when wanting to blog though so I really do not run into trouble.

Some may ask what would push me to run a completely different operating system just to do the occasional blog post?

There are several reasons for this.

Desert The first would be that WLW actually downloads the images and CSS from your blog and you are typing your post in the exact format that you blog is in. This is really helpful when you are doing formatting items such as H tags and images. It truly is WISIWIG and it makes for faster posting of more attractive posts.

Jellyfish Speaking of images WLW has the best image editor of any other desktop blogging tool I have seem. All you do is drag and drop the image into your post. From there you can resize the image by grabbing a corner and dragging. Once you are done dragging the corner the image is resampled as opposed to just being resized. I have not seen any other blogging tool do this.

Lighthouse Also available are a whole bunch of effects you can give the images such as drop shadows, photo frames, and reflections. Along with that you can set custom margins for the images so that your text does not run into them. Finally you can set the images to link to pages, the original size of you image, or to nothing at all. It really does make incorporating images into your posts easy.

There are several other features that WLW has but the above mentioned ones are those that I use the most. They make it worth it to run Windows on my Mac ;-) .

Blogging From Windows 7 in Parallels on the Mac

Posted on January 30, 2009

Windows-7-in-Parallels This morning I was doing a fresh install of Windows XP in Parallels on my new MacBook and decided to go ahead and try to install Windows 7 on my iMac at the same time. At the time of writing this I have finished the install of Windows 7 but am still doing all of the updates on XP to get it running. Windows 7 installed incredibly fast in Parallels 4.0 and the installation of Parallel tools went without a hitch.

I have not had too much of a chance to play with Windows 7 yet, but from what I have seen so far it blows the doors off Windows Vista and XP.

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New Respect for Windows Vista

Posted on October 28, 2008

Windows Vista Home Premium My brother-in-law text me yesterday asking if I could come by his house and take a look at his computer since it was acting up again. I went by his house and both DVD drives had died on his 6 year old Sony Vaio desktop. I convinced him to go to Best Buy and get a new computer. He ended up with a pretty nice Dell Desktop for ~$750 with the following specs:

  • 2.6GHz Intel 2 Quad
  • 6GB memory
  • 750GB Hard Drive
  • A dedicated ATI video card
  • Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit

If you know my history you know that I have not always had the best opinion of Windows Vista but there wasn’t really the choice to get anything else. XP isn’t available anymore and a Mac was just too expensive. Besides, he likes to do some gaming on his computer so a Mac really does not fit the bill for that.

So we got the new Dell home and I unboxed it and got it setup. Out of the box this thing was a tiger. Everything loaded up nice and quick. I was also surprised that their was minimum crapware on the system and I only uninstalled a Dell/eBay application.

Next it was time to install his wireless Linksys card and 6 year old HP printer. Both the Linksys card and the printer installed without having to download any drivers. I was shocked.

From there we setup his 5.1 surround sound speakers which sounded awesome and loaded a couple of games. Games played nice and smooth and looked great on the new 22” Westinghouse LCD Monitor he picked up with it. He may want to upgrade to a better video card down the road as new games come out but he is more then set for the games that he plays right now.

I have to say that I was really impressed with what he got for the price and the performance that it has. It has definitely caused me to have a new respect for PC’s and Windows Vista. Who knows, maybe a Vista machine (or maybe a Windows 7) will be in my not-so-distant future.

I Dumped My Dell with Vista for a Mac Mini

Posted on May 30, 2007

It is official. I have replaced my Dell Dimension that is sporting the latest and greatest OS from Microsoft (Vista) for a Mac.

As you may know I have been using a MacBook at work for the last 2 months and have really liked it. I was messing around with installing OS X on my Dell “to Test” and decided that instead of messing around with something that is not supposed to work that I should just buy a Mac.

So 2 weeks ago I bought a 1.83Ghz Mac Mini with a Gig of RAM.

I was a little concerned at first that the Mac Mini would not be able to completely replace the Dell in the area of video editing. This concern quickly melted away as I edited and burned a 1 1/2 hour video of my kids for my mom without a hitch. I can only imagine the hoops that I would of had to jump through to get Vista to do the same thing.

I would have to say that the nicest part of having a Mac for the last 2 weeks is my time has been spent discovering the various programs that are included with the Mini instead of trouble shooting issues with Vista.

It is so weird that only a year ago I vowed never to buy a Mac because they were overpriced. Now that I have used one I realize that you get what you pay for. It is the same reason that I drive a Japanese car instead of one from a U.S. automaker.

I already have the plan to pass this Mac down to my kids so I can score an iMac ;-) . 

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The More I Use OS X, The More I Hate Vista

Posted on April 13, 2007

index_ataglance20061108.jpgGod, I think I am becoming a fanboy. But it is true, I prefer OS X over Windows Vista ssssssoooooo much. Why? Because it work without all the little stupid stuff that windows does.

Here are a couple of the big things that I have noticed:

First, on my windows box with my fresh install of Vista Business Premium it still takes a long time for windows to boot up. Also, while booting the screen will black out several times while it transitions from one screen to another. My MacBook boots up in a fraction of the time and has nice fading affects between screens.

Second, OS X is just smart when I am not. I was working on a file in Photoshop the other day. Not thinking about it I noticed that I had misspelled the name on the file while browsing the folder in Finder. I clicked on the file and renamed it. Then I realized that I wanted the file in a different folder. I clicked and dragged it to the new folder.

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After a Week of Vista – I’m Switching Back

Posted on February 12, 2007

I was pumped. I was excited. I went out and bought a new TV tuner card to take advantage of the Media Center in Vista. After a week of researching out why the video was poor quality, why it would not play AVI files that I made in XP, and discovering that it would not install my Adobe Acrobat.

My Configuration

I have a Hauppauge WinTV To Go + TV Tuner card. This card comes with it’s of TV software and gives you ability to record programs. It works great. What it doesn’t do is work in Vista. It is recognized but there is no Audio driver (should be out soon) but even when it comes out even though Vista will recognize it the Media Center in Vista won’t. So I bought one that Vista would like at the tune of $120 at Fry’s.

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Switching to Windows Vista

Posted on February 4, 2007

So I am making the plunge to switch to the new Windows Vista.

It is not such and new thing for me though. I have been playing with it since it was in beta 1. But now I am dual booting with Windows XP as I test it out for the final switch.

So far things have gone pretty smooth. The only issue that I am having with my hardware is that I have a Hauppauge WinTV-GO+ card that is recognized by Vista but is not recognized by the media center in Vista. Also, the WinTV2000 program that comes with the card does not play any audio.

This is pretty much the only thing that is holding me back.

Things that I really like about Vista are:

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A Good Windows Vista Beta 2 Review

Posted on June 1, 2006

In contrast to my post – The Worst Review that I Have Ever Read – Gizmodo has semi redeemed themselves be referencing a Windows Vista 2 Beta that is worth reading.

This review is very good in reviewing the individual features that are new to Vista and their performance. Let’s hope that Gizmodo doesn’t get out on line again or I might have to place them on a time out .

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The Worst Review that I Have Ever Read

Posted on May 24, 2006

I have just read the worst review that I have ever come across.

The review was of a guy that was trying to install a “near” beta 2 of Windows Vista (you can read the review here). The reason why this was bad was because the guy is obviously an idiot. The first things was that he was trying to install the OS on a laptop which anyone knows is 10 times hard (driver wise) then on a desktop.

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