Scot’s Newsletter Blog

There’s no question about it. Last month’s Mac vs. PC Cost Analysis article struck a chord. I was praised and lambasted around the Internet for it. It was also republished by Computerworld, where it pulled in a lot of traffic. If you didn’t catch it, I recommend the Computerworld version of the story, which was lightly updated because of Apple’s release of its new MacBook Pro model line on June 5.

• Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up? (Computerworld)

It seemed to me that people who criticized this story missed the key points I was trying to get across:

1. This was a pure, hardware-based, speeds-and-feeds kind of comparison. I was comparing the hardware goods only, including CPU, chipset, RAM, video, display, hard-drive capacity and specs, ports and upgradeability, dimensions and weight, and so on. In other words, I was attempting to make an objective comparison that did not inject any evaluation about the hardware, anything at all about the software, or my personal experience with the operating systems and hardware involved. It was an on-paper comparison.

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Doesn’t it figure? I haven’t put out a call for monetary contributions to Scot’s Newsletter in roughly a year. In the last issue, I finally did. And, of course, that request ran into a snag.

There are two ways to send your donations to Scot’s Newsletter. All PayPal contributions reached me fine. But I can’t say the same about checks or cash sent via conventional postal mail. At some point in May or June, the UPS Store terminated my account for failure to pay the next year’s annual fee. I didn’t know about it because the company contacted me by sending the bill to my UPS Store box, not my address on file. Before the UPS Store bought out Mail Boxes Etc., I received notification if I didn’t pick up my bill before the due date. Not only had the UPS Store terminated my box, it had already re-rented it. When I walked in a week or two back to pick up my mail, the clerk handed me some other guy’s package.

In the end, the clerk found a small stack of letters to me in the back room that they gave me, all of which had June or very early July postmarks. If you’ve sent me something recently to the old address, I’m not going to get it.

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I have several bits of info for the hoppers of those following along in my quest to find the best software firewall for Windows.

For those of you new to the saga, you’ll need to catch up with the rest of us by reading (or at least scanning) these previous articles:

• More on Software Firewalls for Windows(June 2007)
• Update: Software Firewalls for Windows XP (April 2007)
• Kicking off a Software Firewall Comparo (Sept. 2006)

Or, to get an up-to-date story that covers the bases of the three links above, including updated information, see this Computerworld story: Review Roundup: Slim Is in for Windows Desktop Firewalls (June 2007).

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, on to the twists and turns.

Eset Smart Security Not So Stellar
Admittedly, I’m testing Beta 1b of Eset Smart Security, and rumor has it that Beta 2 is due out shortly. But I recently conducted a FirewallLeakTester.com-style leak test of Eset Smart Security, and the results weren’t good. For more information on the set of leak tests I used, please see my review of the free version of ZoneAlarm 7.0.337 in the last issue of the newsletter.

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Hey, if I were you, I’d buy it. But I’m me, and I have to get over it. I’ve bought one too many things of late. Worse, I was a total iPhone Luddite. What, no 3G? Gawd, who wants that! Besides, it looks huge on in the TV ads. Plus, $60 to $100 a month, for AT&T’s network? I … don’t … think … so.

And then my buddy Ken Mingis placed the one he bought — after pledging with me that he would not buy one, I might add — in my hand. The universe tilted. I entered an altered state of being. And my mouth dropped open. I had to have one. Had to!

So 3G or not, I’d probably be buying one. If I could. But my wife, Cyndy, would probably make me sleep out back in the shed (along with the mystery mammal that’s living beneath it). And she’d have cause. Apple’s iPhone is darn expensive when you consider the two-year contract. And as you’ll see, I haven’t exactly been frugal lately.

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I’ve already made my decision. For now, I’m sticking with Comcast for HDTV and cable. But I’m willing to admit that, very likely, some of my concerns about the potential to impinge on FiOS Internet bandwidth may have been unfounded.

Martin Heller, a past colleague of mine who reads the newsletter, wrote me to tell me that he tested FiOS TV related to my concern about erosion of broadband Internet performance while data-intensive, on-demand programming was being downloaded and played, and the results are very encouraging. Martin wrote:

“I did a controlled FiOS speed test using the Speakeasy.net speed test, with and without an on-demand movie playing. Internet bandwidth was not affected by the TV in my tests: I measured 20Mbps down and 4Mbps up whether or not on-demand programming was playing.

“I did notice some latency that seemed to correlate with the TV activity. Without any TV activity, the speed test dial jumped immediately to 10+, moving up more gradually from there. With the on-demand movie going, it took a second for the speed reading to go up, but by the end of the test it was at essentially the same value as the tests run without TV activity.”

Thank you, Martin, for performing this test.

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- Apple’s Safari for Windows and Mac
- Firefox 3’s Progress
- Camino 1.5 for the Mac

In the wake of Microsoft’s IE7 update, other key browsers are revving in the near future. Both Apple and Mozilla are planning browser upgrades, and as you by now know, Apple’s Safari will be released for Windows too.

It’s great to see Apple planning new things for its browser, but it needs to make its product more mainstream on the Internet. If nothing else, Web development teams will be able to test to the Windows version of Safari before they release their code to their Web sites. Although in these betas, the Mac and Windows versions of Safari don’t always render Web pages the same way. Perhaps even more important, Apple’s stance that the iPhone display the exact same Web as other computers, and the fact that its browser is, of course, Safari-based, means that the offering of Safari for Windows will help Web development teams the world over inadvertently make Web pages work better on iPhone. Score one for Apple.

That said, the current beta of Safari for Windows isn’t a great Windows product. Hopefully Apple will attempt to pay more attention to Windows conventions before it ships the product. My guess is that it won’t, though. I don’t think Apple is out to dominate the end-user browser market. It has set it sights on winning the mobile market with iPhone. Lower-priced phones are needed to make that a reality, but Cupertino has a chance to do just that. It has definitely leapfrogged the competition with the iPhone. So look at Windows Safari as a building block for that goal, not something that’s truly aimed at browser market share.

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Just as I was sending last month’s newsletter, Apple released a significant update to its MacBook Pro line. Among other things, the 15-inch model got an LED screen, which I’ve examined closely. It’s very bright, and consistently so across the entire screen. The MacBook Pro LCDs are almost as bright, but like all LCDs, they have minor anomalies, and they tend to fade a bit with age. The expectation is that the LEDs will be more consistent and won’t fade so much. I couldn’t find any downsides to 15-inch LED screen, but I’m interested to hear from readers who have it. If you do, please send me a note and let me know what you think of it.

The new 17-inch MacBook Pro also came with a surprising set of upgrades. Finally, the 17-inch model offers 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution. That had been a glaring omission in the previous MBP line. The new higher-resolution display is a $100 option. I vastly prefer this resolution for this size screen. It gives you a lot more screen real estate. Some people may find that some things are too tiny for comfort, but Apple does a much better job than Microsoft at creating UI structures that work well in multiple resolutions. So, for example, the tiny colored dots that let you close, minimize, and expand Finder and program windows appear to be the same size no matter what resolution you’re in. The only issue you may have is with the text of some Web pages. Safari has an optional toolbar button pair that lets you increase the font size of the current Web page up or down one notch. (The Command+ and Command- keyboard combos also handle this.) That was only the only adjustment I needed to make for my aging eyes.

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In the June newsletter I wrote that I was “picking plasma now,” and I asked for input on Panasonic’s 50-inch 1080p HDTV model TH-50PZ700U.

I didn’t get any comments on the specific model, but I was already sold on it. I took a quick look at it running a Blu-ray DVD in the store, and that was it. I got a pretty good deal on this model from Circuit City that included 0% interest and no payments until January of 2009. That gives me 18 months to pay it off, interest-free. I paid $3,050 about a month ago, and Circuit City now lists it at $2,999.

I couldn’t be happier with this purchase. I’m watching my favorite sports team as I write this in perfect, full-screen HDTV. It’s gorgeous. It displays conventional TV better than I expected, and the bright, saturated HDTV colors and crisp shapes continue to wow me. Comcast offers about 30 to 40 HDTV channels, including about 80% of the ones I watch the most. So I’m watching HD programming much of the time.

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Let me get Modomail out of the way first: Shortly after I wrote that I was giving up on Modomail, an inexpensive paid mail host, the service apparently gave up the ghost. The domain no longer responds, and hasn’t for over a month. It’s just dead. Several SFNL readers wrote me to tell me that they got burned, too.

Meanwhile, the company that bought MyRealBox, Messaging Architects, apparently did send out messages warning its customers that it was requiring them to respond or lose their accounts. Several SFNL readers sent me copies of the messages. I don’t know why I didn’t get mine. Apparently, though, the company used the BCC (blind carbon copy) approach to sending out what must have been hundreds of thousands of messages. It doesn’t surprise me, really, that they didn’t reach me. I was getting tired of MyRealBox’s frequent outages anyway.

In case you missed last month’s newsletter, here are the stories I’m talking about.

I continue to test and either reject or approve Mac software for The A-List of Mac Software. The biggest change since the last issue of the newsletter is the advancement of a very hot disk utility to the A-List. DiskWarrior from Alsoft came highly recommended to me by several IT pro readers who manage Macs. They were dead right.

It takes a problem to be won over by a utility product. And that’s exactly what happened. The problem was a disk error that Apple’s Disk Utility was able to identify but unable to repair. There was no apparent problem with my hard drive. No symptoms. SMART checked out fine. It didn’t appear to be a physical problem with the hard drive, but rather a corruption of the data on the disk. I tote my primary machine back and forth from work everyday, and even though I’m extremely conscious of how important that piece of hardware is, and I back it up, well — there are few guarantees in life. And none of them is related to computers.

So, that was the problem. It took me a while to warm up to the $100 DiskWarrior because you have to boot it from the CD, and it takes forever to load. But it’s worth it. Because once up and running, DiskWarrior’s Directory tool made short work of it. Afterward, Disk Utility happily reported no problems.

The next disk problem will be a job for TechTool Pro by Micromat, which is also on the scheduled-for-evaluation list.

Some other notes: I guess I’m becoming more of a Mac guy. I removed Intego’s VirusBarrier X4 from my two most-used Macs. I think it’s a great product, and I’m leaving it on the A-List. But like most Mac users, I just don’t feel the need for this utility right now. I’m not making a formal recommendation with that announcement — just owning up to a reality. There are no viruses on the Mac. It’s possible there will be someday. But I’ll worry about that then.

I’m also adding a program to the evaluation list. It’s called Yank, and it’s another Mac uninstaller tool. I really love AppZapper, but it occasionally misses things that get tucked into out of the way places. When I uninstalled VirusBarrier, AppZapper left behind a context-menu item. Yank doesn’t rely on search to find files left behind when you delete the main program file. It creates a log when you install. What about programs installed before you installed Yank? Matterform offers a file-sharing service for sharing Yank uninstall scripts for specific programs that you can download and run. Not sure that’s going to be a big help, though. The first three programs I searched for weren’t there. Still, I like the idea of a more complete uninstall. Could be I’ll use both AppZapper and Yank. We’ll see.

I’m having some second thoughts about skEdit as a text editor. It’s still my preferred HTML editor on the Mac. But I may go back and check out TextMate again. It’s been very heavily recommended by readers who have written to me with A-List suggestions. Even more so than BBEdit, whose UI I’m not fond of.