Larry Braud, longtime subscriber, reader and friend, told be about the protective film he applied to his new laptop. The material was a light-weight, clear, colorless material which came with an anti-glare finish. It adheres to the screen using a built-in silicone resin adhesive.

It seems to be easy to apply and easy to peel off. More importantly, it protects the delicate screen from accidental touches (fingerprint marks are very hard to remove from most LCD monitors). Most importantly, if he hadn’t told me that he had the film on the monitor, I never would have realized it. The picture was bright, sharp without the shine of a high gloss LCD.

I’m not sure why so many manufacturers seem to be shifting to high-glare notebook screens. Perhaps the glossy finish is less susceptible to finger oils or easier to clean — but they’re awfully hard to read.

I haven’t tried these, but Larry has. I’ve seen his and it looked good, too. If you’ve got a glossy screen laptop — or if you’ve got an LCD monitor and have children around (or adults) who can’t be trusted to keep their fingers off the screen, this can be a lifesaver.

Another friend noted that he had managed to touch his monitor while he had a felt-tip pen in his hand - and now has a mark on it. A film screen protector would have saved him a lot of grief.

Continue reading LCD Monitor and Notebook Protection

DesktopLinux.com has a great multi-part article where the author is installing Vista and Linux on the same computer for a showdown.

A Vista vs. Linux Matchup describes the installation, issues and compares Vista Ultimate and SimplyMepis 6.1, which is based on Ubuntu Linux.

So far, the articles in the series are “Part 1: Leveling the Playing Field, ” “Part 2: Dual-booting Vista and Linux” and “Part 3: Hardware Wars.” The series has more to go…

TechRepublic.com has a great article about Microsoft’s most recent fiasco with the Vista Release Candidate 1 version.

It seems that the Media Center features stopped working on December 31st because it only licensed the MPEG-2 encoding technology until December 31st.

Those Vista beta users who decide to continue to trust Microsoft for media center functions are supposed to be able to get their Media Centers operating again when they upgrade to official release versions of Vista.

The official release is scheduled to be available on January 30th.  The Media Center functionality is in some, but not all, of the new Vista versions.

Welcome to the world of Digital Rights Management - Welcome to the world of Vista!

Kind of hard to believe, isn’t it?

The Windows Vista interface is the number one eye-candy item in Vista — and the only visible effect of upgrading that most people will see.

InfoWorld has an article that kind of takes Microsoft to task for such a blatant non sequitur. I say “kind of” since the article doesn’t quite go so far as to question how gullible MS thinks we are…
In classic MS style, an testing lab found that, despite Windows automatically downgrading the Aero interface to an interface like XP’s on computers that don’t meet their standards, this doesn’t mean that Aero slows PC’s.

Peter Gutmann has written a very disturbing analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection and has made it available on the web.

The article is available on the University of Auckland’s School of Computer Science web site and appears to be either a term paper or an article for publication.

Rather than get into the politics of DRM (digital rights management, a.k.a. digital restrictions management), the article discusses the Vista content protection specification and its impact on existing audio and video systems.

Hint: you won’t get high-quality output because Vista will downgrade the signal

I especially liked the “Executive Executive Summary,” which said:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.