Adam's Interweb

I noticed Amazon had a $0.99 sale on a couple of new movies I had been wanting to see (Ghost Rider, 300, Shooter) so I decided to give it a try – after all, no shipping, no tax, means you can’t beat the price.  My setup is Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit and an Xbox 360 with wireless adapter (I stream the movies to the HDTV via the 360).  My initial impressions:

The Good

Install and movie purchase was quick and simple overall (however, it is a tiny bit less simple for 64-bit users…more on that later).  It was dead simple to stream to the 360 – if you already have the media center connection setup, then you’re ready to go.  The quality is on par with DVD – it’s certainly not HD, but I was watching on a 56″ HDTV and it looked as good as any DVD I have.

The Bad

When I first installed the software, I got a message saying something was wrong with my computer’s DRM configuration.  My only guess is that it has something to do with being on a 64-bit – but I really don’t know.  The Unbox software offers to help troubleshoot – so I did that and it found a patch to automatically install…after that, everything went fine.  The download speed is a bit slow – I rented 5 movies the first night (you can keep them for 30 days) at around 10pm.  By 8am or so the next morning, 4 of the 5 movies were downloaded.  The files are between 1.5GB – 3GB – so it’s certainly going to take a while to download them, but the speed could be just a tad better…but it’s not a huge issue – just realize that you’ll need to wait about an hour or so after you rent the movie before you can start playing it.  The biggest issue I have with Amazon’s Unbox service is the lack of 5.1 channel audio – the audio quality is decent, but it’s certainly not on the same level as a DVD and there is no true surround sound.

Conclusion

There’s no question that Unbox is a great deal if you find a movie you’d like to see for $0.99 – it’s the way to go at that price.  I’m not sure I’ll be using it for full price rentals though ($3.99) – for that price, I can get NetFlix or Blockbuster Online (and better sound quality).  If Amazon can drop the price to $1.99 for a one day rental, I’d be doing a lot more Unboxing.

Files needed:

1. iTunes 7.4.1 installer (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download)
2. iTunes 7.3.2 installer (http://filehippo.com/download_itunes/?3005)
3. GEAR Software 64-bit Driver (ftp://downloads.gearsoftware.com/updates/windows/drivers/Driver_Installer_AMD64_EM64T.exe)

After you have the above software downloaded, follow these steps:

Step 1 – Uninstall iTunes 7.4/7.4.1 if you have it installed already (if not, skip to step 2).

Step 2 – Install iTunes 7.3.2.

Step 3 – Using Windows Explorer, copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\CD Configuration to your desktop (or anywhere you’d like – just make a backup copy).

Step 4 – Uninstall iTunes 7.3.2.

Step 5 – Install iTunes 7.4/7.4.1.

Step 6 – Install GEAR Software Driver (link above).

Step 7 – Copy the backup of the CD Configuration folder back to the iTunes directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\).

You’re done!  Launch iTunes and you’re good to go again until something breaks in the next update.

One of the things that has been hugely frustrating about my move to Vista is that the backup tool is “dumbed down”.  It only copies files it wants to copy and it requires that you backup C: whether you want to or not.  All I wanted to do was schedule a daily backup from my data drive D: to my archive drive V: – I want any type of file copied…just a basic mirror type copy.  Apparently this is impossible in the standard windows backup application.  Enter Robocopy – a small command-line utility from Microsoft (included in Vista) that does exactly this.  Robocopy can take a source and destination and perform a mirror copy without a problem – and since it’s a command-line application, you can schedule it to run whenever you’d like.  It has tons of options to exclude certain files/directories based on name, attribute, date, etc – but the basic command to do a mirror copy is just this:

robocopy d:\ v:\ /MIR

Nifty huh?