Carl Drescher: December 2009 Archives

The first Broadband Technology Opportunities Program awards have been announced.  The list of the first 10 can be found here.  More first round awards will be announced through February 2010.  I am hopeful that the next round of applications will focus primarily on municipalities and public safety. 

As the FCC continues to work on its National Broadband Plan it appears that existing networks will play a large role in this effort.  A presentation from the FCC's open meeting on December 16th can be seen here.

The City of Philadelphia will purchase the assets of what is left of the Wireless Philadelphia initiative.  Appears that the City will be investing approximately 17 million dollars over the next five years to build out the network with the major focus on providing connectivity for public safety and municipal use.  More information can be found here.

About a month ago I upgraded my laptop OS to Windows 7 from Windows XP.  I originally had Vista on my laptop, but after frustrations with some of the 'new' features I scrapped it in favor of the predictable XP.  Since the upgrade to 7 my user experience with my laptop has never been better.

A bit of information regarding the type of user I am.  I use my laptop mostly for pure business purposes.  As such I have Office 2003, use Firefox as my browser, AVG for anti virus protection, and most of the 'standard' plug ins and tools you would expect to find on anyone's computer.  I do not use my computer to run games or any application that would require - or run best in 64 bit mode.  In summary I do not consider myself a power user, but I would say I am an average user.  My expectation is that any software loaded on my system should work without a lot of hassle or  intervention on my part.

I will echo what most others have said about Windows 7; it is what Vista should have been.  At first glance there is nothing really extraordinary about it - it just works.  My laptop takes about 20 seconds to boot up as compared to over a minute when XP was installed.  All of the applications that I was using under XP installed and work without a problem.  I have decided to run the Defender anti-spyware application that is included in lieu of SpyBot.  So far it has worked well and I will continue to use it.  There is a free anti-virus application that can be downloaded called the Microsoft Security Essentials (works with XP, Vista and 7) that I have decided not to use, but instead stay with my trusted AVG.  Our security staff have been testing it for the past few months and they have been impressed with it.  We are seriously contemplating using it as our enterprise anti-virus solution.

Generally I am conservative when it comes to major upgrades with software applications and operating systems - I usually wait until the first upgrade is released and allow others to identify any issues etc.  With Windows 7 I would recommend to most anyone running Vista or XP to consider upgrading now and not wait.