Comments

@TanMan: The device also does VGA. Agreed that bandwidth is an issue.

@Sadatay: Ha! I've been throwin that sign since Channel 10 days. 

@Algorithum: Ha! That's the last thing I want burned in to my LCD's at home. FWIW What I normally use for a 'screensaver' is R4 running through Winamp which I start manually when I'm not using my PC. 

@MagicAndre1981: The audio problem stemmed from a rewiring of the studio audio, we had a mix problem that was downstream from the audio console, so when our studio op listened to it at the board it sounded fine, but further down the chain where it was recorded it was not. It's since been fixed. Gov is so busy with Win8 work right now I couldn't make him come back over to re-record it. 

@CHfish: Forehead slap.   Thanks for pointing that out!

@JockStrap: Soluto is a monitoring app for PC's, it's good for maintaining the machines of family members you do tech support for. You can see it as the pick of the week for our "So You Got a New PC" show right after Christmas.

There is no list, just interesting Microsoft employees who lead us in various areas, in this case fontography. The next interview will be with Danah Boyd, who is a thought leader around social media. Stay tuned.

@Kevin: You're probably preaching to the choir here. We agree. As for your comment about 'come on Microsoft, don't you see this?" Sure, we are PC users too. That's why all the machines sold at a Microsoft Store come without third party installs. But we don't build PC's - OEM's do. I'm glad we allow them some liberties in their own sandbox. Sometimes the software they include on a machine is very helpful, look at the custom images that Newtek uses for their Tricaster. They couldn't do that if we didn't allow them to put together a custom image.

@dtower: HA! Sure. So it was a typical home PC that I had built myself. I had the case open and one of the drives was in the wrong spot so I I wanted to move it to the bay below where it was. I *knew* I should have turned the PC off, but I didn't. I unscrewed the drive, pulled it out, as I moved it to the spot below it, I saw the tiniest spark gap between the hard drive and the frame of the PC. It was fried and I was never able to recover anything from it again. I lost original files for logos, invoices, scans, all kinds of really critical data. It was such a loss of data that it really hit me hard.

I'm happy to say almost 15 years later I've not lost a single bit of data, knock on silicon.

@wkempf: If you want a machine like that, just buy one at a Microsoft Store. They use "Microsoft Signature" machines in the stores. (i.e. no "crapware")  [thanks Andrew Richards for the link]

To your statement about how you shouldn't have to uninstall apps; my full ascent. I absolutely agree, but the economics of OEM margins and the freedom allowed OEM's means they can do it if they like. Best practice is to speak with your wallet.