SkyDrive Upgrade to 25GB of Online Storage

Microsoft seems to be getting generous - which is a cause of concern.  But let's take advantage of it while we can.  You can get these beautiful 25 gigs of storage just by having a Windows Live account.  If you have an MSN account, Hotmail Account, Passport Account, or Xbox Live account, those are all also Windows Live accounts.  How thoughtful.

Online Storage: SkyDrive Will Upgrade to 25GB of Online Storage

Ravaging a Netbook

Image by Cambridge Cat via Flickr

I received a gift from some friends of an Acer Aspire One netbook computer. The computer is from a new breed of computers just hitting the market that are small, inexpensive (relatively) and designed mostly for internet use and light computing tasks. They are about the size of an average hardback book, have a small screen, and either a hard drive (like mine) or one of the new SSD, which is a solid state drive, a replacement for hard drives and silent. They do not come with a CD or DVD drive, so if you need to load something it has to be done either over the network or plug in an external drive.

They purchased this netbook for one of their children for school, but it turns out it just isn’t capable enough for what the child needs, so as a thank you for all the technical support I’ve given them for years and years, they gave me the netbook as a gift. Thank you very much.

So I did what any good geek does, I looked on the internet for the hacks that are out there for the netbook.

There are a few, but I decided to take a 2.5” 160GB SATA hard drive I already had, and replace the hard drive in the netbook with it, so I could install and run Windows Vista. I did this for three reasons. First, I’m a geek, this is what we do for fun. Second, I wanted to see if Vista would install and run OK (the netbook came with Windows XP Home), and third, I actually prefer Vista over XP.

I know that the netbook is not ideal for Vista. It has a relatively slow 1.6 GHz processor (although it is hyperthreaded), and only 1 GB of RAM (Vista really prefers 2 GB, but will run on 1).

So I went over to tnkgrl’s website where she has a video up of disassembling the Aspire One and saw how it goes. (Mind you, I started about 9 p.m. one night)

By midnight, I had swapped the drive and had Vista booting and looking for driver updates on the net. It ran fine except I didn't have sound.

I figured it was a driver issue, so I spent the next few days or so using the netbook but also looking for new drivers, getting frustrated, installing some stuff that didn't work, etc.

It turns out that in reassembling my ravaged netbook, I forgot to reconnect the speaker wires.

Goog-World vs. Micro-Side

OK, so I've had a few days of living with and checking out the offerings of Google vs. Microsoft around my blog-life.  Here's what I've found.

Google, through Blogger (www.blogger.com) is much more of a pure blogging site.  It puts up a place for you to blog away, but not much else.  They have powerful tools available where you can modify your site to a large degree and make it look like either a standard blog, or you can add in things from Google and from all over the web to make it almost anything you want - within the limits of their tools.  You can drill right down to the html code and modify to your heart's content.

Microsoft, through Live Spaces (http://spaces.live.com) is more of a social site with blogging abilities and it ties in pretty well with a Microsoft based computer (which is what got me so excited to start with).  I don't have a My Space page (gasp!), and I don't have a Facebook page, nor a Twitter account, nor any of the myriad of other social site opportunities that are out there.  So I don't really know the social site phenomena, so I can't judge Microsoft on how well they've pulled this off.  I do know they offer some great ways to share your personal or professional life with folks.  With a few clicks, the photos you've stored in your Windows Pictures folder can be zoomed up to the web.  You can make blog entries, have your photos, and a LOT of other stuff all appear on your Spaces page.  But for customizing the blog in the ways that Google can, you're out of luck.  You can get to some of the html editing, but I've had nothing but problems doing things with Spaces that I've done with Google's Blogger - but they are aimed (I think) at two different markets.  (By the way, I am writing this post with Windows Live Writer, which I LOVE for being able to write posts and such without signing into Google.)

Google's different products, like Blogger, Analytics, Reader, Gmail and Adsense do integrate together (which is what started my journey to see what Microsoft offered), but on a pretty lean, technical level.  Google's interfaces are pretty simple and sparse, which I'm lead to believe is a purposeful thing.  All these products share a single login name and password, which is nice, but they seem to have trouble remembering that you are signed in to other products, making you sign in again, and again, yet other times, not have to do so.  I'm probably not using them right, but I'm using them as I use them.  You have to understand how the blog works internally, and use the customize feature to add/integrate features from their other products.  I know from experience, that one of my sisters who also blogs would never, ever be able to navigate and understand what she needs to do to add things to her blog.  She might not want to do the things that I do, but when she does, I'll have to do it for her.  For example, I've added the Google gadget to my blog where I can add with a single click, a link to an article I like that I've found in Google Reader.  However, to do so meant I needed to add the gadget to my blog layout, and that would be beyond my sister's abilities.  I don't mean to pick on her, but she represents the vast majority of computer users out there.  She is to computers what I am to automobiles - I turn the key and it does or doesn't work - but don't ask me why.

So for my needs, I'm going to stick with the Google world.  I'll keep the Microsoft side of things for exploring capabilities as they are added.  But since I like technical things, and pushing the technical limits of the blog - Google is where I'll stay.  But maybe I'll talk to my sister about how I see the Microsoft stuff being able to help her in her work (but after I finish my vacation).

One major thing - controlling the advertising.  On Google, the only ads that appear are the ads that I place there and can share in the revenue from Google.  With Microsoft, the ads belong to them and I haven't found a way to make sure that things I don't want (mature subjects, etc.) appear.  I don't share in the revenue.  They did ask for my Amazon affiliate name, but I've been scouring Microsoft and the web to find out how to possibly earn from that relationship - and I can't find anything that seems to make sense to me.  I'll never get rich from my blogging, but Google does offer the chance to make a few coins.