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It’s been awhile since I talked about gadgets. I have been super busy getting acclimated to Microsoft and Washington and it has left my blog posts a little geared towards topics I am encountering at work.

If you thought I had forgotten or lost some interest in gadgets, you would be sadly mistaken. To kick the topic back off, I thought I would give you my top 5 list of gadgets I can’t live without and why. Hopefully it will spark some interesting commentary and I can find out what you are using every day that keeps you living in the tech world.

1. My Macbook Pro: I really pained with wether I should put my cell phone here first. I definitely use the phone more, but the truth of it is, if I left my cell phone at home I would be ok, if I didn’t have my laptop for a whole day I would be lost.
2. My HTC Mogul Phone: A close second, without it I would miss meetings for sure. Add the ability to get my email right away and check my bank balance when I need to, it’s a super handy gadget.
3. Thumb Drive: The portable key makes the world go round. I am constantly having to shuttle files around that are just a little too big to email around or send to sky drive. The thumb drive is a must have.
4. Canon Digital SLR: When you are picky about photos, there is no replacement for a good digital SLR camera. I love taking photos and I want them to look just right. The digital SLR does the trick.
5. iPod: When I am driving around, I like to Jam. My super short attention span for music has me burning the click wheel like a DJ on vinyl. Having 160GB of music at my fingertips makes traveling super fun.

What about you? What gadgets do you use daily?

So you drop $2,000 on a laptop and it’s beautiful. Then 4-5 months in, the finish starts wearing off of the latch. Well, mine did. I took it into the Apple store this weekend. While it’s considered normal wear and tear, and not covered under warranty, the guy at the Genius Bar and his manager agreed that the laptop had been completely babied with not a scuff or scratch to show anywhere.

Hard to wear and tear the finish off of a latch so well kept. Without a single whine or complaint on my part, they waived the $196 repair fee and ordered the part to replace my latch.

That’s service folks.

UPDATE: My beloved Macbook Pro has it’s pristine sophisticated appearance again. I dropped it off on Tuesday afternoon, and it was repaired by Wednesday evening. Go Apple.

So very much to blog about, it’s been a very busy few days for me from a tech perspective. I will start with my adventures with running Vista on a Mac and then get to the mobile phone and gadget stuff.

So I joined a team at work. I am a Microsoft Vista Champion. So my new goal is helping promote usage of Windows Vista from a few different perspectives. I expect the "digital lifestyle" angle to be the most common but productivity will probably creep in from time to time. So with that I decided it was time I get Vista running on my Macbook Pro.

My initial idea was to go pick up a 250GB Hard Disk, perform major laptop surgery, Bootcamp Vista with OS X and call it a day. After getting laptop destruction fear, I decided to stick with the 120GB, remove parallels, install it in Bootcamp on a 20GB partition and use VMWare Fusion to share stuff between the two. So here is part one of my adventure…

Kill Me Now…
So, the first was removing my Parallels install, creating a Bootcamp partition and installing Vista. I selected 20GB from the Bootcamp Setup Assistant and off to the races I went, for a minute. That’s when OS X notified me that some files on my machine could not be moved and I had to back up my entire hard disk (over USB no less) wipe the entire thing, restore it, then run the Bootcamp assistant again. Sounds pretty simple, but the entire process took about four hours. After that Vista installed in a snap and I began installing all of the Bootcamp drivers. The installer bombed part of the way through and the trouble began.

Vista was acting really strange. For some reason the video drivers didn’t install properly, and something about the OS was hosed meaning I couldn’t get a Windows Experience Index, so I couldn’t permanently enable Aero. After getting it all set up and ready to go, I booted back into OS X to install VMWare Fusion. The install was painless, an update ran, and I saw something startling. Windows Vista Ultimate was taking up 14GB of my 20GB partition with absolutely no software installed. OUCH! That would never do.

The trouble with that is, there isn’t a way to dynamically resize the partitions. My only option is to remove the Bootcamp, resize it, and reinstall. In hindsight I could have backed it up, deleted it and restored it after I created a new one but with only 120GB to spare, I decided that OS creep could become a huge problem so I decided to just install it in VMWare and run it virtually only.

It’s a Virtual World Baby
Despite not having Aero eye candy, I am quite impressed with VMWare Fusion. I am typing this blog in Windows Vista running in a VMWare Virtual Vista Ultimate environment as we speak. I won’t dive into bench marks, but based on pure perception VMWare is faster. It certainly resumes a paused VM much faster than parallels. It also doesn’t suffer from the "I know your vm is restored but it’s going to stay locked up for a minute or so before you can use it" syndrome that Parallels does.

All in all, it’s up running and working quite well at the moment. It’s a drag that I can’t run Aero or play slick 3d games on it, but I probably wouldn’t do that anyway so it’s ok.

The VM is assigned 2 GB of Ram and seems to perform very well with it. The OS is snappy and I love being able to run it full screen on a spaces pane. That works exceptionally well. I am looking forward to getting my new office set up and I can visualize a 20" iMac with a 20" Cinema display running OS X on one screen and Vista on the other.

I will add a category for Vista Champs, stay tuned as I dive deeper into it and try to provide the best tips on getting the most out of Vista, even if you use a Mac