I’ve had my Mac for a couple of days now, and I’m having fun with it. Since it’s a laptop, it is often more at hand then my main PC. That, coupled with a somewhat intriguing calendaring and address book application, has convinced me to migrate my email.

I pondered simply using my existing POP email account with my MacBook, but decided that the experience I was having with the .Mac service 60 day trial was something I wanted to continue. .Mac is basically the Apple equivalent to Windows Live services: online mail, website hosting, net-based disk, and calendar sharing.

The approach I decided to follow to email migration was intriguing. I have an archive of several hundred megabytes of email that I wanted to retain, so getting it on my Mac was an important milestone. I first subscribed to .Mac so I would have the 10 GB of online storage you get with that package. .Mac supports IMAP email, where the mail messages are stored/persisted on the server rather than on your personal computer. I connected to .Mac with my Windows Vista PC and Windows Mail. Windows Mail is able to create folders and copy emails to an IMAP service and, since everything is stored on Apple’s servers, when I connected my Mac those same folders were available. Voila- email migrated.

The address book migration was also fairly simple. I don’t have very many entries in my address book- 50 or so. The address book in Vista is completely different from Windows XP and previous versions of Windows- instead of a single .WAB file, each contact exists in its own file in the Contacts directory. The Macintosh doesn’t recognize these files, but it can recognise vCard formatted contacts. If you create an email in Windows Mail and drag the contents of your Contacts folder to it, Windows will automagically convert your contacts into individual vCard files and attach them to the email. Just put those attachments in a directory on your Mac and use the Address book File=> Import Vcards option. Voila- addresses migrated.

I’ve forwarded my old email address to my new .Mac email address. I even received my first half-dozen emails today, so things appear to be working as planned. It’s a miracle!

I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives.  The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine.  The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely.  There is a story behind their banishment from my computer.  It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.

I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine.  First I built a RAID 1 array.  Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ).  The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista.  I was wrong.

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I’ve spent another fun day banging my head against a brick wall.  The light I’m starting to see is from the cracks in my skull…

I downloaded Battlefield 2142 via EA Link yesterday.  Being a good little user, I also downloaded and installed the v1.20 patch before even trying the game.  I figured that one of the main reasons for a patch on a game that was released late in 2006 would be to improve Vista compatibility, so why bother even trying the unpatched game.

After three or four hours of downloading, I started the game up.  The usual intro movie played, and the game menus appeared.  I selected single player game, instant action.  The screen went dramatically black, then popped back to the desktop with this error:

Some digging through forums (forii?) revealed many, many people complaining of this problem.  Most of them seemed to have Vista, and the general response from the happy-fun forum denizens: BF2142 isn’t Vista compatible, so install Windows XP. 

Well, that’s not going to happen here.  So I went digging deeper.  Many theories focused around the PACE anti-piracy features of BF2142, and involved removing the offending code in various ways.  I tried all the legitimate ways: removing registry entries and code folders, but BF2142 would consistently re-create them and presumably re-install PACE.  Other theories were related to various rights issues (I.E.: assigning the program admin rights).  None of these seemed to work either. 

The last thing I tried was based on this post in a GameServers.net BF2142 forum.  The excerpt that caught my attention (original spelling/formatting errors included for free):

EA Link
Cannot install 2 thing ather eatsother, if you have installd something, you must EXIT the programm and re-login to install the next thing.

…

Battlefield 2142
runs in 32 and 64 bit mode

So, BF2142 works, but EA Link has a problem installing 2 things one after the other, at least according to this fellow.  I uninstalled, and re-did my install just of BF2142.  It worked!  Then I rebooted, and carefully installed the 1.20 patch.  After installing the patch, BF2142 failed as before.

So, the simple solution is to *not* install the 1.20 patch if you have Vista.  Unfortunately, without the 1.20 patch, you almost certainly won’t be playing online games with anyone.  Most multiplayer games require all players to have exactly the same version. 

Ah well, at least I can play single player…once I uninstall and install it all over again.

Update: The version 1.25 patch also causes Battlefield 2142 to fail as noted above.   It appears this problem occurs under the following conditions:

• EA Link is used to download/install BF2142
  • If you use EA Link Battlefield 2142 uses different copy protection than if you install from a CD/DVD.  Instead of reading encoded information off of the physical media, the EA Link install “phones home” over the Internet
  • If you have the CD/DVD version of Battlefield, your main executable is named BF2142.exe; the EA Link version is BF2142Pace.exe
• Windows Vista 64 bit (the same problem might occur with 32 bit Vista, but seems to be less common)
• > 2 GB of RAM (I have 4 GB)
• may be related to video card, although I doubt it
  • I have an ATI X1950XTX; I’ve read of folks with NVidia 8800’s getting exactly the same error

If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that this is yet another instance where legitimate purchasers of licensed games get shafted by broken/disruptive copy protection schemes.  I suspect that, if I downloaded a warez version of BF2142, it would work just fine.

[tags]battlefield, battlefield 2142, BF2142, Vista x64, Vista[/tags]

ATI released their “production” Vista driver on January 29th. And it apparently has native OpenGL support, at least according to this extract from the release notes:

This release of Catalyst® introduces the following new features:

• Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback
• CrossFireâ„¢ support under Vista
• Native OpenGL Vista support
• Catalystâ„¢ Install Manager for Vista
• New Catalystâ„¢ Control Center

This looks very promising. Unfortunately, I’m away from home at the moment and likely won’t have a chance to try this out for a couple of weeks. I’m still shaking my head, though, about ATI waiting until pretty much the day of release for Vista before making these features available for folks to test out.

Microsoft has been working on their next generation operating system, codenamed “Longhorn”, for several years now. Its been delayed several times, had features stripped … and now has been given a poofey sounding name: Windows Vista. That name smacks of desperation, as in “dammit, this is so late we can’t use a year, and it has no really compelling features that suggest a good acronym, so we better come up with some buzz or spin that will get people to buy it without any practical reason…”

And apparently a company also known as Vista is contemplating legal action to prevent use of the name. So not only is Microsoft unable to pick a name that actually tells you something about the OS, they can’t even pick a name that someone else hasn’t already used.

I am kind of torn here. New operating system releases have the potential to be kind of fun, and its been a while since Microsoft has had one. But Vista? First it was version numbers, then the year of release, and then, when the year of release became “the year we originally wanted to release it, kind of, but that we missed”, techy-sounding acryronms. But Vista? What the heck is that, other than a really kind of juvenile play on words?

Sticking with the word-play thing, they could have called it “Windows Storm”, or “Windows Aluminium”, or maybe “Windows Cleaner”. If you want to break away from the play on words, maybe try truth in advertising: Windows CashGrab, Windows KindaLate, Windows OSXFeatures, or Windows BetterSecurityPatchThis.

Okay, I promise: that’s where I stop with the dumb Windows names. Until the next time Microsoft decides to come up with a new naming convention. And the bad thing here is that I actually *like* Microsoft products…