Nate's Gadgets, Tips and Reviews

For anyone out there contemplating buying a smartphone, and thinking about an iPhone versus buying a Windows Mobile based phone, I'd thought I'd give you some of my decision factors: The iPhone has no physical keyboard. Once you type a text message with a real keyboard, you can't go back. Can't cut and paste on the iPhone with built in software - and I like cutting and pasting. No GPS software that can give voice guidance. I use GPS software that gives me voice prompts on my phone, and it works great (Currently using iNAV 4.02). No Voice Command. Nothing beats being able to just say what you want when you're driving, and not worry about voice tags to record, etc. Microsoft Voice Command actually works. Most of the useful apps that aren't toys require money with the iPhone. There is an incredible library of free, useful applications for Windows Mobile (mainly found at XDA Developers website). No Video built-in. My camera can take videos as well as still picture...

My wife gave me a video game for Christmas - a game called Crysis from electronic arts / Crytek. I must say, it was a blast playing through the first person storyline. Games and movies are starting to intersect - the last game that I got hooked on like this was Half Life 2. The graphics in this game were actually more intense than Half Life 2, but my hardware and video drivers certainly weren't optimized for the experience. I could run Half Life 2 at 1600 x 1200, 32 bit color, max detail with no problems. (my main rig is a Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz, 2GB Ram, Win XP Pro, GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB video). But I had to run Crysis at 1024 x 768, medium detail, and it still stuttered on me from time to time. My two criticisms of the game: I got to one point near the end of the game where I kept dying and having to go back to a saved state. The 30 seconds that I kept repeating had one of the other game characters it in saying "F!#k" really loudly ... there were people over at my house do...

Well, now that I've purchased Windows Home Server OEM edition, and am 1 week into using it, I thought I'd post some of my thoughts on the software, as well as some of the things I've had to work around. Installation went pretty well. I installed it to a Hitachi 500GB IDE drive, in an Intel motherboard, with a Pentium 4 2.6Ghz processor, 1.25GB of RAM. After updating and patching (required downloading a bunch of security patches) and three reboots, I was ready to go. I have a backup hard drive that has a huge 450GB encrypted file on it that I use for back up of several computers in my house (mine, my wife's, our music studio computer). Prior to using WHS, I was using a windows XP box with this drive attached via USB, and Truecrypt to encrypt the file. With Truecrypt, I can open the file up and mount it like a drive, and then share it with specific password protected privileges for network based backup over my home gigabit ethernet lan. Getting TrueCrypt to Work with Wind...