Today was my second day with my spankin' new Psystar Open Computer. Following are some observations....

This machine is almost silent, folks. In fact, I opened the case and put the sound meter about an inch from the main exhaust fan and the highest reading I could get was 52 dBA, barely. The shutter of the camera (Nikon D80) made it jump to 57 dBA, as a comparison. The fan over the CPU registered <50 dBA.

When an optical disc is inserted the sound level (about four inches from the front of the optical drive door) ranges from 52-54 dBA. While louder than when it's not running (<50 dBA) it's not obnoxious either.

If the Psystar Open Computer is of any interest to you at all, you might want to know that Macworld has now tested one of these things and published the results, as promised.....

If we had our way, and the honkin' huge machine could fit inside one of those blenders, we'd have been describing a very different type of test right now and it would have been accompanied by an amusing YouTube video.

In any case, if you've had enough of the Psystar coverage to last you a while, we assure you that we share your pain, so we're hoping there won't be any more Psystar stories from here on out - unless something really important happens.....

When I saw the recent spate of newspaper and web headlines about germs on keyboards I thought they most likely originated from a study performed by or on behalf of a company that sells cleaning products. But that wasn't the case.

The research was performed on behalf of UK consumer organisation Which?, so that blows away my suspicions of vested interests at work.

Which? officials said tests on keyboards from a typical London office (no jokes about Londoners, please!) revealed the presence of bacteria that could cause diarrhoea and other stomach upsets.....

An accompanying Which? report on cleaning PCs suggests using a damp cloth to clean keyboards, followed by alcohol wipes to kill the bacteria.....

Imagine if you had a bedroom full of CDs and decided to buy a new player one day, only to discover that none of your albums would play on the new system. That is more or less what has happened to people in America who bought music downloads from Microsoft. Last month the company announced that from August 31 this year songs bought from MSN Music, its online music shop, would no longer be transferable to machines other than the ones the files were registered to.

This means that, come September, if you want to transfer songs from your main PC to a laptop or a new computer you haven’t registered, you won’t be able to. If your computer dies, your painstakingly assembled music collection dies with it.

This gadget tip comes to you by way of the resplendent Andy Ihnatko, tech hack for the Chicago Sun Times and lover of Internet Pants. It turns out that some MacBook USB ports are more equal than others. Only one of them offers a full powered, full speed bus.

....the rear USB port, the one nearest the screen, is in fact already on an internal hub, shared with everything USB inside the case...

One of the greatest products to ever make its way out of Cupertino was also one of the coolest and most practical. Which product am I talking about? The eMate 300, put out by Apple in the doom and gloom days of 1997....

What do you get when you put 10 or more of these little green monsters in the classroom? You get a guy who saw the potential in the eMate, so much so that his classroom uses them every day.

Allen Pepper was kind enough to grant me a little of his time in an interview to tell the story of how he stumbled upon the eMate and what led to the phenomenon of having them in the classroom.

Apple has agreed to give US and Canadian customers two separate settlement offers to make charges of faulty and misrepresented products go away.

Canadian owners of older iPods can get a CDN $45 (credit) rebate over claims the battery life in its devices were much shorter than advertised.

Americans who purchased replacement power adapters for Powerbook and iBook notebooks will get cash refunds betweeen USD $25 and $79 over accusations the device did a fine impersonation of a Morning Glory sparkler on Independence Day.

Assuming they kept the receipts....

Apple Inc. agreed to pay refunds of $25 to $79 to as many as 2.3 million Macintosh computer owners to resolve claims that some of its power adapters were prone to spark.....

In 2001, Apple recalled about 570,000 adapters sold with PowerBooks after reports of overheating. Apple advised customers to stop using the adapters and offered free replacements.

The adapter "dangerously frays, sparks and prematurely fails to work," the plaintiffs said in court filings.

Mac OS X's force quit mechanism can be a boon when an applications freezes, often consuming a large amount of system resources as it flails. However, force quits do not always execute properly, leaving hung or stalled applications in their problematic states.....

Fortunately, Apple's "Force Quit" dialogue box is only one of the many ways to approach targeting a process to kill it. Alternative Approaches include:

Activity Monitor....

The Terminal....

Scientists looking to build a supercomputer to model cloud conditions and help them better understand climates have looked upon the humble processors found in iPods and other small devices for a solution. A conventional supercomputer that could do what the researchers want could cost up to $1 billion; using millions of smaller processors could cost only about $75 million and save power.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have suggested building a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors to improve global climate change predictions.

Using the embedded microprocessor technology used in mobile phones, iPods and other consumer electronic devices, the boffins propose a cost-effective machine for running complex computational models.

As part of its recent Zune update, Microsoft has revealed that it has sold two million of the music players since their launch in November 2006, revealing relatively flat growth for the device lineup. Although the company originally promised and slightly exceeded a target for its first million sales between the original launch date and June 2007, the company has largely remained silent on its data for its players in nearly a year.....

The results nonetheless leave Microsoft with just a fraction of Apple's US share and with comparatively slow development.... Apple in its latest quarter sold 10.6 million iPods, or more than five times Microsoft's cumulative sales to date.

LCDs and plasma screens may be the dominant choice for TVs today, and LCDs the displays of choice for almost every other application, but a pair of upstart technologies is vying to replace them. Organic LEDs, which have already made inroads in the portable display market, are threatening to move into the living room as a new TV display. Electronic paper, meanwhile, is carving out a share in portable devices, consumer electronics and electronic signs that demand particularly low power consumption and long battery life.

Users continue to report an issue in which various iMac models randomly shut down during routine operation. As described by one user: "...it randomly has shut down on me at least 12 times since I turned it on. I can restart it and it'll stay on for a long time. But then, randomly it'll shut itself off again."

This problem has been reported by several other users, but one user has a unique situation in which his computer restarts at the slightest vibration, indicating a hardware fault of sorts in the power system, potentially due to faulty wiring.

Mighty Mouse comes with a software CD in the box; this software is only supported for use on Macintosh computers with Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later. If you're using such a system with the in-box software installed, Mighty Mouse will have the following functionality....

One of the most interesting features of the new Penryn iMacs is the addition of the GeForce 8000 GS as a CTO option. We wanted to see how much "fun" it brings to the "party."

ASPYR PREY

MACSOFT HALO

ASPYR ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS (ETQW)

STONE DESIGN IMAGINATOR

LEGEND of GRAPHS

The GeForce 8800 GS option for the new Penryn iMac is a welcome addition -- especially for 3D OpenGL apps like games. At 1920x1200 High Quality on the 24" iMac, it doubles the frame rates for most games.

Last weekend, in the course of a column about Steve Ballmer, my colleague Larry Dignan tossed an offhand shout-out in my general direction:

When Ed Bott has a series on how to fix–or at least cope with Vista–you know this OS isn't so hot. Why should this thing need so much fixing?

And the TalkBack section of my series on Fixing Vista (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) has drawn the same sort of comments, usually from diehard ABMers.

To which I say, give me a freakin' break. I've made an entire career out of helping people become more productive with Windows, which includes explaining how things work, how to customize system settings and features, and, yes, how to fix problems. And here's a news flash: I have peers on the Apple side of the universe who make their living exactly the same way. In fact, maybe the real question should be, Why does the Mac OS need so much fixing?....

I think Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune, the author of 140 Million Copies of Vista Sold. How Does Leopard Compare?, needs to read my recent column, The Mac's 'Troubling Low' Market Share. If he would, at least he'd have some estimate of PC computer sales to expect through 2008 - around 310 million if there is a 15% increase over last year.

Looking at that, Bill Gates grand announcement of 140 million copies of Vista sold over the past 56 months doesn't mean much. Sure, every new PC has a copy of Vista installed (not really all of them - several companies are still selling XP but will be counting those copies as Vista sales), but at this rate only the new machines will have Vista while the installed base is sticking with XP for another year.

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