People just don’t seem to like Vista. I don’t get it, I use Vista everyday and could not go back to XP. Microsoft announced recently that they are going to lower the prices of Vista to hopefully jump start slow Vista sales which in my opinion are not too bad. Looks like the full install of Vista Ultimate will be $320, down from $400, the upgrade is going to $220, down from $260 and Home Premium upgrade is going to $130, down from $160. This is all the pricing I have from Engadget but I’m sure we might hear drops from other versions too.

I recently purchased a Blu-Ray Player not for my home theater system but for my computer and there are some things people should know before they try to tackle adding Blu-Ray to players to their computer. Luckily, I had been planning this so I was not as unprepared as some might be.

First HDCP which stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection and it is the new wave of copy protection added to Blu-Ray movie discs. The key to remember is that all devices in your computer that a Blu-Ray movie’s data will transfer through needs to be HDCP compliant or the movie won’t play. This means the Blu-Ray drive need to have HDCP but that should be included in all Blu-Ray players, your video card must be HDCP compliant, and finally your monitor must be HDCP compliant. If you have a computer with none of this, it can be very costly to add a Blu-Ray player and it might be cheaper to get a dedicated player for your TV. One last part you will need is software to play it on like Power DVD Blu-Ray edition which may be included with your Rom drive.

Seriously, this copyright junk really makes life miserable for honest people but it is necessary given all the people who steal movies and music over the Internet. HDCP is no joke, I have an nvidia 8800 GTS which is a high end HDCP compliant. To test HDCP, I connected my 8800 to two monitors, one HDCP compliant, and one not. I decided to move a playing Blu-Ray movie between the HDCP compliant monitor over to the non-compliant and as soon as I moved the window, it stopped playing and threw an error message at me. No exceptions, HDCP needs the Blu-Ray player, special video card, special monitor, and Blu-Ray player software. There is a possibility that there is some other HDCP compliant hardware that may be necessary which I have and have not heard of. This was tested on Windows Vista, I have no clue if XP will support Blu-Ray even with compliant hardware.

Everything I say goes for Windows computers only, all of you Mac people have to wait till Apple decides to add the functionality.

Microsoft is competing for more online email users for their free email service so they are adding some cool features to their "Live" services. One feature, called SkyDrive, allows you to store up to 5Gb of files that you can store privately, share with the world, or share with select friends. This is a great way to ensure you don’t forget a file you are working on at home when you go to work. Forget homework assignments, try storing copies of your homework on SkyDrive. Oh and the best part, SkyDrive is free! Once in beta, SkyDrive looks like it is official and here to stay. If you would like to try SkyDrive out for yourself, go to: http://skydrive.live.com/

Just goes to show, when I buy technology, the new model is on it’s way. Just over 30 days ago I purchased a MacBook Pro and now Apple is selling MacBooks with more Hard drive space, updated processors, and with the new touch interface. That is right! The new MacBook Pros come with the Touch interface that is the main selling part of the MacBook Air. Well, to me it is since I think the MacBook Air is pretty useless with no expandability.

Also updated: The MacBook with no touch but bigger hard drive and faster processors. There was a firmware update to the iPhone that so far from what I can tell is just for bugs and a 2GB Shuffle is available.

This tip assumes you have successfully installed your new hard drive and the jumper settings are correct.

Most people think they have to use the software CD that comes with their purchased hard drive simply because they don’t see the hard drive in Windows when they turn on the computer. This is simply not necessary because Windows has a tool built in to add a hard drive. All you need to do is right-click on My Computer or Computer depending if you have XP or Vista respectively, and select "Manage." This will bring up the Computer Management console. From there, click "Disk Management" in the left column. All of your drives will load. You will see your newly installed disk, right-click on whatever number it is and select New Volume and follow the steps. My mind is fuzzy at this point, but after this, you may need to right-click again to the area of the right of the disk number and select format.

I don’t like to admit it, but I am a Coca-Cola drinker. Yes, I know it is not exactly healthy but in moderation, drinking Coca-Cola is something I can’t live without. Not too long ago, my girlfriend and I purchased two bottles of Coke from an Electronics store when both of us were disgusted by the taste. I could not believe it! The taste of the Coke, in combination with it not being cold enough was just bitter and gross. Since I like Coke so much, I decided to let Coke know about their little mishap. I never had any intention of getting a free coke, I just wanted to let them know that they may have had a bad batch and I did it via email from their web site.

Today, in the mail I receive a letter from Coke apologizing for the the incident. Enclosed was two coupons for 2, 2 Liter bottles of any Coca-Cola product. I originally bought 2, 20 oz. bottles so this is a little nice bonus. You can click on the image to view a bigger picture of the letter.

I have to say, hearing Hitachi and Toshiba announce a 500GB laptop hard drive is amazing and just impressive but they can’t be used in today’s laptops. Hitachi’s and Toshiba’s just add and additional platter which makes the drive thicker so it won’t fit in most of today’s traditional laptops by adding about 3mm. I don’t think this is the wave of the future but this could be a step to smaller desktop computers and for specialized smaller computer. I could see HP putting this in their super small desktop business and home computer or servers. Not entirely useful but seriously amazing to to see how far we have come. We are probably a year away from seeing standardized 500GB drives in most laptops.

Just as I told how to rip music with iTunes, Windows Media Player has some options that make ripping CD’s to your computer much easier than traditional methods. Sure everyone can do this but I want to make your life easier and more efficient with software, computers, and technology.

There are many many ways to do this but this is my method for when you have stacks of CD’s that you want to copy to your computer.

What you want to do is click options in Media Player. When you open up Media Player, there are buttons at the top called Now Playing, Library, Rip ect. What you need to do is click "More options" in the drop down menu that is found when you click a very small arrow under any one of these buttons.

When the options windows opens up, click the "rip music" tab. The first option you can change is the place where you rip your music. If you have a special place for your music, change it here otherwise the default will be the My Music folder. Next, under rip Settings you can select the format for the music and more. The rip settings is a place you want to pay attention to because it is where your life can get a lot easier if you have a stack of CD’s to rip. Click "Rip CD when inserted" and check "always." This basically means anytime you insert a CD in Windows Media player, it will copy the music to your computer. The other thing to do is check "Eject CD when ripping is complete." With this selected, you will notice the CD tray open after the computer finished copying the music. Now you can go about doing whatever you need to do and not worry about copying the stack of CD’s, just insert a CD when you see the tray open. Finally, the last part you can choose the the audio quality. The best level is the level you cant notice and change in your music so I would do a trial and error rip to make sure you are happy with the audio quality before you rip your entire collection.

One other thing I would suggest is clicking the privacy tab and check "Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet" which will update your music track names automatically to their names.

See the coolest, most advanced screen saver here. Clean your screen and have a cool screen saver! This is Chief Geek approved and suitable for all ages. Found this little guy from Raincitystory.com.

I was out yesterday with my girlfriend at Sephora, a place we go to get her makeup just about every week when something caught my eye. What did I see? "blu_ray High Definition Makeup!" I wonder if Sony knows about this. I would expect Sony would know and allow it since this is an obvious rip off of the Sony Blu-Ray High Definition brand but if not, this company Cargo is really asking for it. I see a Trade Mark logo so I ask the question: Who coined Blu-Ray first? And does Blu-Ray vs. blu_ray make a difference for trademark purposes? I’m not trying to trash the company Cargo but I would like some explanation because I don’t get it.