… of Macintosh users.

… press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.”

These are dreaded words for Windoze users and they appeared on my machine this morning. This message is a brick wall to booting the machine. I spent 50 minutes chatting with HP’s tech support to no avail whatsoever. The techie was very nice and genuinely interested in solving my problem, but neither he nor the second techie I spent another 30 minutes with gave me any useful solutions at all. They did keep asking whether I wanted to buy a new hard drive and I kept answering that that was option number last.

However, Mr. Google was great. I did not retain all the links I perused, but here’s the skinny. The NTLDR file is a key boot file, along with BOOT.INI and NTDETECT.COM.

This post specifically applies to Windows XP, but a similar (maybe identical) procedure applies to other Windows OSes. What you have to do to fix this error is boot from the Windows CD. If you have a Windows boot floppy, you can boot from that. Start the computer and start pressing the ESC key right away to divert the bootup to the Master Boot selection screen. Use the up and down arrow keys to select either your CD drive of floppy drive, depending on which you want to boot from. Your original Windows installation CD disk is fine. If you have a recovery disk or set, then use the first disk of the set. My HP recovery CDs include eight Windows install CDs and one “recovery” CD, which is the one I used.

Anyway, boot from your selected boot drive and the screen will go through some hardware-checking gyrations. Let it continue until you are given the choice of directories to select for DOS command-line. Choose C:\Windows (selection 3). Then type these commands in sequence. Be careful since DOS commands are error intolerant! Include the spaces.

Type cd \ then press enter; this returns you to the top directory, the C:\ drive itself. CD .. does the same thing.Then type the following commands exactly, pressing enter after each one in sequence:

ATTRIB -H NTLDR
ATTRIB -S NTLDR
ATTRIB -R NTLDR

ATTRIB -H NTDETECT.COM
ATTRIB -S NTDETECT.COM
ATTRIB -R NTDETECT.COM

Then type exit and press the enter key. The computer should start to reboot. If it doesn’t, press CTL-ALT-DEL and when the machine starts to reboot, remove your CD from the CD drive (or floppy from the floppy drive) and let the conputer boot normally.

This procedure completely fixed my computer. I presume this error is pretty rare since I have never suffered it before, and I’ve been computing with Windows machines since 1991.

I discussed some features of Palm’s smartphones, focusing on the newly-announced Treo 680. Some more useful information is here.

Early last month I ditched my very conventional LG VX6100 cell phone and transferred my nmber to a Palm Treo 650 smartphone.

Converting to the 650 was one of those “why-didn’t-I-do-this-months-ago” moments. It was always a pain trying to yank out my Palm Tungsten while driving, look up a number, then dial it on the cell phone. Obviously, it’s not very safe, either. My habit was to wait for the car to be motionless when manipulating the devices, but sometimes that wasn’t possible. The real nuisance, though, was answering while driving, since the 6100 isn’t bluetooth enabled, requiring me to take a hand off the wheel and open the clamshell to answer.

The Treo is bluetooth enabled. I use the Plantronics Voyager 510 bluetooth headset, which I bought on Amazon cheaper than I could find on eBay. To answer, you merely press the button on the side of the mike, same to hang up. I hear callers more clearly using the headset than wthout, and they seem to understand me better as well.

The advantages of having my PDA and phone combined in one unit are enormous. Before I switched, I never forgot my cell phone but forgot the Tungsten more than rarely. I don’t have that problem now.

There is a later, more expensive version of the Palm smartphone called the Treo 700, available in either Palm or Windows OS. While the 650 has 32 MB of native memory, the 700 has 64. Both take an SD card (I have a 1GB card in mine). Apps can be installed onto the native memory or the card in both. Other than native memory, there’s little difference between the two models.

But wouldn’t you know - now Palm just announced a new model, the Treo 680, that sort of splits the difference between the 650 and 700. While both the older models were designed expressly for business users, the 680 is meant for a wider market.

During the DigitalLife show in New York this week,

CEO Ed Colligan emphasized … Palm wants to capture what Palm labels the mobile accomplisher market, which it said is 9x the size of the traditional smartphone target audience.

Palm defines mobile accomplishers as college-educated cell phone owners who are frequently on the go and away from their PC, but still want to strike a balance between their work and personal lives. They’ve thought about getting a smartphone before, but haven’t because of fears it would be too complicated to use or expensive.

Although Palm didn’t give any price specifics, Colligan said that when the 680 starts to enter the market in a month so, it will be the company’s lowest-cost Treo yet. It will also be the easiest to use.

“Suffice it say, with more functionality and more capabilities, it will be very competitively priced in the market than any other smartphone product today, relative to the kind of capabilities this product will bring,” Colligan asserted. “We really tried to push the design to make it more phone like too, so that after using the product, [you’ll find] it’s really a no compromise phone as well as an incredibly powerful computer.”

At 0.8 inch thick, the 680 is less bulky by a tenth of an inch than the 650 or 700. The WaPo reports,

The Treo 680 targets today’s media-hungry consumers. It comes with music, video, and photo slide-show players, and Palm says for a limited time it will sell unlocked versions of the phones with a Yahoo music bundle that will include a 1GB SD Card, a stereo headset, and a 30-day free trial to Yahoo’s music service. Colligan said Palm expects 20 or more carriers around the world to offer the Treo 680 by the end of Palm’s fiscal year next June 1.

Fashion-conscious Treo 680 buyers will be able to choose from four colors: copper, arctic, crimson, and graphite. The Treo 680 has an internal antenna and is smaller and sleeker than previous models. The phone runs the new Palm OS 5.4.

Like the 700, the 680 will have 64MB of native memory, vice 32MB for my 650. Except for the lack of an antenna, though, all the capabilities mentioned above are available, though not all standard, on the 650 or 700, and most of that with freeware. There is a freeware download, VEMode, that converts computer movies or DVDs into small files sizes that can be viewed on the Treo using another freeware download called TCPMP. MP3 playing is standard on the older models.

Among other bells and whistles is the ability to respond to an incoming call with a preset text message such as “I’m busy now.” The bundled Dataviz Documents To Go productivity software now supports viewing Adobe PDF files as well as editing and creating Microsoft Office files.

Okay, the response by text message back to a caller is pretty neat (but an extra-cost service on most carriers). As for PDF docs, there is a freeware program called PalmPDF that works extremely well. Documents To Go is not freeware, but is often included in software kits - I used to use a Sony Clie PDA and DTG was part of the package. I never used it myself, since editing files on my PDA isn’t something that I need to do or that was much fun when I did try it.

All three Treos can browse the web using an extra-cost data plan from carriers. I don’t use such a service because I’m never so far from home, office or notebook computer that I need to. Also, the screen is so small that when trying the demos in the Verizon store I found it pretty impractical.

There are other smartphones out there, of course - Blackberry, HP and Nokia make their own versions using their own OS’s. Cingular offers the 8125, Windows OS model that features a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a screen that displays either landscape or portrait. I may convert to Cingular in April, when my verizon plan expires, because Cingular offers deep discounts to students, staff, faculty and alumni of my alma mater, Wake Forest University (where my son, Thomas, is a freshman, as well).

You can download a full quality version here:
http://www.rc-cam.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1066&st=20
music: Enigma - Lord Of The Dance - Celtic Dream

I posted on Aug. 2 that I had bought a Slingbox, a device that integrates your incoming television signal with your broadband internet connection to enable you to watch your own television service on any computer, anywhere, connected to the internet. I noted that the “picture and sound quality are excellent, just take into account that resolution drops if you make the picture full screen.”

Sony produces a similar device called LocationFree, that lists for $1,500 or so, including a 12.1-inch television with wireless receptivity. The unit without the TV is about $200. Unlike Slingbox, LocationFree has 802.11a, b, or g protocols built in for wireless communication with your computer’s wireless router; sending a receiving units for ZSlingbox are extra cost.

Now, “AT&T Launches Live Broadband TV Service.”

AT&T Inc. is launching an Internet TV service where subscribers can watch live cable channels such as Fox News on any computer with a broadband connection for $20 per month.

The AT&T Broadband TV service announced Tuesday features about 20 channels of live and made-for-broadband content. The channel lineup includes the History Channel, the Weather Channel, the Food Network, Bloomberg and Oxygen. Additional channels will be added soon, the company said without elaborating.

The content is being provided by MobiTV Inc., a company that has specialized in delivering live cable channels to cell phones through wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) and Cingular Wireless, which is majority owned by AT&T.

As compared with many Internet-based video services, where the viewing window is considerably smaller than most computer monitors, the new AT&T offering will allow users to expand the picture to full screen. The service requires Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Windows Media Player for playback.

IMO, traditional box televisions are going buh-bye. Internet speeds for consumers will increase a lot in coming years, as will wireless connection speeds for home networks. I think Sony’s model will become the next phase: a home-broadcaster unit receives the cable signal and then transmits it to viewers and computers on a home network, no computer necessary to set up just using viewing units. Will that will drive the price of viewing units down from present TVs? Too early to say - it depends whether consumers will want a screen in almost every room or whether they won’t think twice about picking up a unit and taking it with them. Handheld viewers, integrated with Palm-type PDAs, will also receive television.

(In fact, they already do. In addition to the monthly-subscription MobiTV service, Slingmedia, maker of the Slingbox, offers software for Windows Mobile Smartphone devices that, coupled with a wireless-carrier data plan, enables the Smartphone to receive TV over wireless internet. One advantage of SlingMedia’s offerings is that there is no monthly fee because you’re viewing your own home cable service. I do not use handheld TV, so I can’t report on its efficacy. I do know that the quality of the Slingbox’s reception is highly dependent on the speed and quality of the internet connection, which stands to reason. If you don’t have at least a 3MBPS connection, you’ll probably be very frustrated.)

AT&T’s service may well augur the post-Sony-scheme of things. In fact, I can see how it could displace the Sony scheme altogether. Wide-area wireless connectivity will become more pervasive than today. If AT&T’s promise of full-screen quality (on a computer,m not a TV set) bears out then it will be a big plus for them. But its severest competition will still be from companies such as SlingMedia that charge the consumer only once, for hardware. A Slingbox’s purchase price is paid back in only 10 months of AT&T fees.

In any event, I think the days of every TV being fully equipped to receive cable or broadcast will come to an end. One way or another, we’ll move to homes featuring a master data reception station, serving television viewers and internet for very-high-speed, home multimedia networks.

Update: Apple computer is on it, announcing iTV, to be released next year. iTV will send television sound and audio from a computer to a television set. But there’s a catch that The Guardian summarizes well: “… why [do] we need an extra intermediary to get films to our television sets …”? As I said, unless there is a consumer cost benefit to any of these setups, they won’t fly. By itself, the iTV holds no attraction for me. But suppose Apple released also a (relatively) low-cost, 42-inch iTV viewing screen along with it?

As things stand now, iTV is intended to be part of a system whereby users download a full-length movie from Apple’s newly announced movie download service. Then customers use iTV “to watch those movies on their TV screen.” Well, maybe. But why couldn’t I save the $299 cost of the iTV box, since I already have a notebook computer that will drive my TV’s screen and sound? And since Apple’s movie downloads will cost $10-$15, it’s certainly no cheaper than Netflix, although it is quite a bit quicker. Apple’s price is competitive with buying a new DVD, but ISTM that DVDs remain more flexible for the user.

The market will sort all this out.

With no TV in my office, I have been forced to listen either to radio or MP3 files. Gets old day after day. Yesterday I bought a Slingbox, a, well, box that integrates your incoming television signal with your broadband internet connection to enable you to watch your own television service on any computer, anywhere, connected to the internet.

I shopped on eBay but discovered that Circuit City’s price is lower; CC dropped the price not long ago by $100 to $149. This is not a rebate deal (don’t we all hate rebates, really?). That’s also $30 cheaper than Amazon.

How does it work? The picture and sound quality are excellent, just take into account that resolution drops if you make the picture full screen. But it does fantastically well what it is really designed to do, give you real television in the corner of your computer screen. There the picture is sharp and clear and does not jerk - it’s full-motion video. The sound is just like hearing it at home.

I use cable internet at home but DSL at work. Bellsouth’s DSL service is slower than cable and the data stream is not very consistent. In the office I do get some dropouts; fortunately the software includes automatic synchronization. On my home wireless network all is excellent.

You must use a router to use Slingbox. Factor that into costs. Slingbox will connect to your router via included ethernet cable or wirelessly at extra cost for a wireless device, see its site for details.

For some reason, Slingbox has a cable input connection, but no cable output. You have to use the included S-cable or composite RCA cables to send the TV signal through Slingbox to your TV or VCR or DVD recorder. Or you can use a cable splitter; these cost a few bucks but degrade the signal some.

Another thing to consider is that only one remote computer can draw the signal at a time, so both you and your spouse cannot watch the TV signal from your respective offices. Nor can you record the remote signal coming in over the internet.

Overall, I am very pleased so far with the device and am glad to see the price dropped.