CNET Live: October 23, 2008

[ music ] ^m00:00:09 >> Coming up on CNET Live: violent awakenings. Plus we're gonna sex up your Windows log on screen. >> Hmmm, sex and violence ... now we're talking! >> Plus Google, what more do you want? Christa Bona's in the house. CNET Live starts now. ^m00:00:23 [ music ] ^m00:00:29 Hello gang, welcome back. It's another week of CNET Live. I'm Brian Cooley. >> I'm Tom Merritt. >> And he is Brian Tong. >> What's up boys, how ya doing? >> Hello BT! >> I'm good, I'm good. >> I like what you've done with the nook. >> The nook? You like it? That wolf statue thing is freaking me out still. >> That thing's eyeing you. >> Me too. Alright so we're all here, the 3 of us ready to take your calls at triple 8-900-CNET. >> When you do Christine will pick up the phone, don't get freaked out, she's just there to tell you all the things you need to know. Make sure you get your volume turned down and all that stuff, so they can get on the show. >> You're kidding, they just want to talk to Christina. >> No, no I don't want Tom or Brian or Cooley! >> Okay, before we get to those calls that you don't really want us to take, let's look at a couple of things we Crave. ^m00:01:07 [ music ] ^m00:01:11 These are some of our favorite things from the Crave blog; Crave dot CNET dot com. And since presidential election is surprisingly not been talking about guns much, figured I'd show you a gun today. That's my screen, there we go. This is ... what is this called? Gun o'clock, 40 bucks, Japanese product, makes you shoot the target to turn off the alarm in the morning. >> That takes half a second. Then what do you do? >> So you get out that anger at the alarm, plus it wakes you up and you can even set it to make you have to shoot it like 5 times. >> Sample or real gun on the damn thing? >> Well that is a danger in some quarters I suppose. >> I haven't thought about that. >> Flips up and beeps and squeaks and then it makes all kinds of noises? >> That's pretty cool, it's just your normal alarm clock but it has a laser target. It's like playing laser tag. >> Is it expensive? >> 40 bucks. >>That's cheap! >> Well I think I'd pay in the Yen just to feel like a big spender. >> And it's coming out in November, November 15. >> It's really affordable. Okay I've got something that's in the automotive realm. Check this guy out - this is the, let me show you this USB stick first. This goes into a Fiat car, this is going on in Europe. That's a special USB stick that comes with these Fiats, notice the Windows logo right by the cigarette lighter, so we're looking at a console here. >> That's explosive. >> You take the data that this thing reads off your car and then you go put it into this eco drive software which has 3 screens: one - I would have a graph here showing how greenly I drive in terms of how I use the accelerator, how I shift, how I rev the engine. >> Is this the thing that's gonna make you turn into that guy who goes 20 miles an hour on the on ramp? >> Yes, that's him! >> You know, you're saving every drop of gasoline, >> This is interesting though. This is very socially networked. This is called Ecoville. Right now this shows 2001, and this went up too since we've been rehearsing. We have 2001 Fiat owners in Europe who are now using the system and you watch them all as they drive around. >> Yeah, see there's little cars moving around. Is that actually ... >> Yeah. This is how they're running ... this is how they're driving to a higher level of greenness in their own personal behavior, and it shows you real time who's using the system and how well they're driving. So it's a community sort of system. It's really weird. >> No way. >> I think it's more of a only in Europe thing is my hunch, but this is Microsoft technology, it could come to the U. S. via the sync system which I think ... >> It might, it might ... >> Well one saves the planet, one makes me crazy, there's one difference. >> Alright let's get right into our first video question. You can submit your video question to CNET Live at CNET dot com. This one comes from Jacob in Bakersfield California. >> Hey guys this is Jacob Wells from Bakersfield California. I have a Gateway MX6455 laptop I purchased about 2006 with Media Center addition on it. I want to know if it's a good idea to upgrade up to Vista. I was given a copy of it for my birthday and ... want to know should I even bother with it or should I just stick with what I've got? I still want to be able to stream this show and everything else I got, to my Xbox 360 using my Zune software. So if you have any ideas, I appreciate it. Thanks. Bye. >> You could also use T-versity. >> Right, rather than the Zune software unless he just wants to. Short answer ... you can go to the Microsoft website and actually look up your specs and find out if it's Vista capable, what they call it. I would say no. I would be hesitant to upgrade 2 year old machine to Vista. >> Yeah, that's part of the problem is the age of your machine plus doing an upgrade to Vista versus buying an OEM install, you know a new computer. We really like the latter because Vista's been so damn buggy that way. >> I'm not saying it's impossible. >> No, not at all. It's just gonna give you more headaches than you may want and we also have, if you look back when Vista came out, a lot of folks realized in great shock it didn't work with the Zune. Hello, same company! But the Zune did not talk; the software did not talk to the Zune through Vista. That's been fixed, I'm just saying on the off chance that the gift you were given was like a re-gift of some stale, old disc of Vista, you might have an early pressing of it and it might not have the Zune driver updates in there. You gotta go fetch those, also want to show you something else real quick - when you do do your Zune ... let's go to the screen on this, there are a couple of places where you may have problems - you may lose your album art or your album data, it's real common on the Zune I'm afraid to say. >> If he does the update right? >> If he does the transfer to a new machine, Vista or not, go into your Zune software. On the right hand upper corner of this screen, you're gonna find a place under your account purchase history where there's a button called - right over on the right here - restore all. They let you go back and re-grab all your purchased music. I don't know that iTunes does this, I think that's more of a case by case basis and the Zune it's a built in repurchase of all of your DRM stuff from the Zune store. That may be real handy if you lose or get corrupted files and licenses. >> Yeah, iTunes will do a onetime only. >> Okay, one time. I think this is a continual thing so it's a pretty good tool, and also in that same software here's where you go to fix your album art which could also get delinked when you move to a new machine, you just right click on each album cover and go down to find album info. >> Hey folks we need more video questions, so webcam yourself, upload it to your favorite video host You Tube, Vimeo, whatever you like and then send us the link; CNET Live at CNET dot com. Shall we take some calls? >> Calls - let's do it. Let's go right to line 1, that's Bill Osh in Georgia. Hello Bill Osh! Hope I'm getting your name right. >> Yes that's right, thank you guys, really appreciate all the work you guys do. >> Sure. >> Quick question for you guys. I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop and it's 2 ... 205 S4787. I'm really having problems for a couple of days, where everytime I turn on the computer it's only thing it's saying that ... smart failure, my hard drive name, please back up your files and replace your hard drive, and there's another word, it said [ inaudible ] - I think it's some word for it's gonna crash anytime and what should I do? It's not doing anything else. >> Be afraid, be very afraid. That is the self monitoring analysis and reporting technology. That's what that smart is, and that means it's catching your hard drive before it fails but it's about to. So do what it says, don't back away from the hard drive, back up the hard drive, get all your files off there onto an external drive, and you're gonna have to replace that drive. >> Yeah, because when you start getting those messages and that's I believe, and industry wide used technology now where they have built in diagnostics and it usually means there's a physical failure going on, not some kind of corruption you can just go through and rebuild the drive, burn it down, reimage it, it's usually a physical or a motherboard controller - the motherboard or the drive, having some kind of failure that's not quite 100 percent yet but it's going there. I've never been able to recover a drive when it gets into that state. >> Yeah and once you got it backed up and replaced, you could take that old drive and try to work on it and you might be able to get it fixed and up and running again, but the safest thing to do right now is to make sure you get all those files off of there. >> Okay another thing ... >> I don't anything, important files because that's my second computer actually, it's my cousins or my brothers ... >> That's lucky, that worked out. >> Alright Bill Osh good luck with that one! >> Another thing when people get these weird errors, if they want to look them up there's a great new site called Bug dot GD. Bug dot GD is a error search and collaborations, kind of like a Wiki for errors. >> Yeah. >> So you search to find out if anybody has reported an error, and then if you figure out what the error means or how to fix it you can post your solution to that as well. It's a great idea. >> What the world needs now is that. That's a cool idea. >> Yeah, seriously. >> Let's get one more in here, we've got Tommy in Kingston Ontario - question about ... >> Tommy! >> Hello Tommy! >> Hi guys, how's it going? >> Good, thanks for calling! >> Oh no problem. >> What's on your mind today? >> I have thousands upon thousands of pictures in shoeboxes and albums that I'd like to digitize, and I also happen to be in the market for a new scanner so I was kind of looking at combining the two projects into one. Do you have any ideas? >> Okay if you want to do this yourself, if you have several thousand ... I mean how many photos do you think you have? >> I'm guessing at least ... 2,000, 3,000. >> Are they all prints, negatives, slides, or a combination thereof? >> Mostly prints. >> But some slides and negatives? >> A few handfuls of negatives but most of the ones I have negatives of I have prints of it. >> Okay so we're talking about prints. Well you can go get a scanner, just go look at our reviews for scanners that have an automatic feeder. That's the key thing - you don't want to do these one at a time, I don't think. That's an awful lot of work. When you get into several thousand like this, a manual scanning project, I start to think that you want to go to a service like Scan Cafe is one. I haven't used them, I'm not vouching for them directly, but I like their interface. Scan Cafe takes your prints, you send them to them, and they do them. It's 24 cents, I believe, for negative in bulk or they'll charge you, I think it's a little bit more for a ... no 24 cents for a negative, 29 cents for a slide, 27 cents for a paper photo. That's per image. If you look at that times the amount of quality they give you, it's 3,000 dpi delivered on an optical disc, yada yada ya - they turn it around pretty quick and there are other services like this. That's the way I would go looking at thousands. I would not do a 3,000 scan myself because I'm not a scanning expert. It's not just scanning - cleaning every photo right, cleaning the plate of the scanner each time. Otherwise you're going to get mediocre scans and you're still gonna take a weekend to do it. >> Okay. >> Alright? >> Alright Tommy thanks for calling. Tell Dave I said hello. Coming up - we'll be talking to the open source program manager from Google, Chris DiBona, but first batteries. We have a first in rechargeable batteries for you. ^m00:10:13 [ music ] ^m00:10:17 >> Hi I'm Elsa Wenzel, senior associate editor with CNET. What's so special some double A batteries? Well with USB cell double A batteries, this little green cap hides the secret - just pop it open and there's a little USB connector. You can plug these into a laptop or other USB enabled device to charge the batteries without having to pack a clunky recharger. A pair of these costs around 20 dollars, which is twice as much as other rechargeable nickel metal hydroid batteries, or even 10 times as much as some alkaline disposables. Unfortunately USB cell double A's don't store as much energy as other rechargeables, but we took about 600 pictures with a digital camera and more than 5 hours with a small video camera before needing to recharge. Another downside is that these take around 5 to 7 hours to recharge, but that's fine if you plan on plugging them in before going to bed. You can also plug these into a regular double A charger, just not into a fast 15 minute recharger. Another quirk is that we couldn't plug in two USB double cell double A's next to each other on some USB port arrangements. Still, USB cells and M batteries come with some green benefits. USB cell double A's could last several years or around 500 cycles, and you can recycle them along with traditional batteries at stores such as Office Depot, IKEA, or Radio Shack. Check out the call to recycle website for drop off centers near you. The packaging of these batteries even includes recycled cardboard printed with vegetable inks. Overall we really like the sturdy design and convenience of USB cell double A batteries. They're really great if you're short on luggage space. Moixa Energy of London started selling USB cell double A's in 2006, but they're getting easier to find at more online stores. Watch out for different types and sizes of these batteries coming soon from the company including triple A's and batteries for mobile phones. I'm Elsa Wenzel and these are USB cell double A batteries. ^m00:12:12 [ music ] ^m00:12:17 >> Alright, we have an actual user of that product as well as the open source program manager for Google, Chris DiBona joining us now. Hey Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming. You said you use the little rechargeable thing? >> You know I've got a little box and we gave them out as gifts for our ... so we have like tons of these things. >> Of course the thing we're excited to have you on to talk about is Android, which is now officially out this week. You've got one there. You're chewing off the Google street view on it. >> Yeah, yeah I don't know that they can see it in the camera there but ... >> But it's sort of a ... it knows the way that you're pointing it and could show you based on how it turn it off? >> Yeah, it's got an electronic compass so when you're in street view mode you can ... it's like you're looking through your window into another world. >> That's really cool. I don't know if we can get that or not. >> Yeah. >> But yeah, so if I turn right it turns right and all that sort of thing. Lots of cool stuff on the Android platform, you've got a lot of open apps out there. In fact I was gonna ask you about the open sourcing of the project ... >> Sure, yeah. So that happened on the 21st, we basically released the whole stack of the code here. There was about 8 and a half million lines of code, we open sourced ... and we did it the day before the phone itself launched to sort of not be on the same day kind of thing. But it was pretty exciting actually. It's not often you get to release that much code. >> Of course one of the reasons you do this is so people will work on it and help you guys improve it in the open source community, but what else can people do with it? >> Well so ... if you're creating an app for an Android based phone or device, you'll be able to have better access to code for debugging and for ... and that kind of thing. Also if you want to have it work on another device, and so suppose you're making ... a personal need device - a phone, whatever, you could say well maybe Android's a really good start for me. Right? So it's not really like the average user's gonna be downloading the whole thing and building their own phone. >> Right. >> But those who do do that are gonna be able to start from a much better baseline now, and it's important to point out, when we open source things we're not screwing around. They can do whatever they want with it. Right, some of the Apache license, we use the Linux kernel right - like it's the most capable, and yeah so people really have a lot of freedom to go forth with the platform. >> Some people were criticizing that it wasn't open sourced from the get go and they're like, they're worried that other projects like Mozilla for instance, with proprietary code took a long time to catch up. Are you worried about that at all? >> So we're in this period right now where we're sort of refocusing the team from being inside the company to being sort of outside the company and focusing on the outside world, and that's gonna be a little bumpy sure, and it's gonna be a little funny at times. But I'm not as stressed about sort of not having the first commit be open source from the get go 3 plus years ago; as I am, as making sure this transition works. Because that's where most ... when companies go from proprietary open source they screw up in the transition, and if we can just make that be as bumpless as possible from the perception of the outside developers, so we're taking patches which we're already doing, we've already gotten like 3 or 4 patches. And people are really seeing we've released everything they need to ship a phone, that's pretty cool. That's sort of the difference between this and something that's more encumbered upon launch. >> Everybody's comparing the Android to the iPhone. >> Oh sure. >> And they always tend platform on mobile, what can this do that the iPhone can't? >> So apps can run in the backgrounds, so they can run services. >> Which the on the iPhone, apps can't run in the background so once you switch from one app to the other it has to close out. >> Exactly, it destroys the app and has to restart from scratch. And that I think is kind of hard on application developers, it's kind of ridiculous in some ways. And with us we're just like listen, if you have an app that's gonna run we have controls in the operating system to make sure it doesn't go crazy, and run them wild by taking up all the memory and all the CPU and we're happy to tell you that it's time for us to quit this right? As a user, if it's an application that's going crazy but we're not gonna just surreptitiously shut off your program. >> Now you've got a kill switch built in though right? >> Well so the market place stops, so this is a funny phone in that if you trust where the app is coming from, I suppose if you've got a private app for your company or something, whatever. >> Something you whipped together yourself. >> Then you just say that's fine and you say, I know what I'm getting into here, you say okay and you can install it. But if you're loading it from the market place which goes through Google, then we have the ability to say, you know what we think this app is actually malicious, insecure, or whatever, so ... and we're able to kill those kinds of apps. >> You want to show us one of the apps in action? We can hold it right up to that camera right there and take a look at it. >> Okay ... if it's boring for you guys, you've already seen them on the iPhone ... what's a good one here? Pac man's easy ... maps is nice ... well we have Amazon MP3 store, that's not on the other phone. >> There you go, show us the MP3 store. >> I'll put it down here, can you focus on that? >> Yeah. >> Or am I holding it too far away? >> Alright we're coming in on it. So there you go. >> We're gonna go with ... let's just go to .... >> This is the Amazon MP3 store, it's totally DRM free. >> Yes, which is awesome and it downloads to the ... downloads to the SD card you can then copy it on your laptop or whatever so ... I have no idea what I'm about to purchase here. [ laughing ] So ... >> We're seeing a blind purchasing in action. >> It's hard to do ... so ... >> It's easy to do when you're actually holding it in front of you, it's harder to do ... >> So you get a little preview, that's nice. ^m00:17:25 [ music ] ^m00:17:27 >> And then you can buy it and it asks for your user name and password. I have no idea what I'm trying to buy so I'm not gonna buy it for ... and it just downloads it over the Wi-Fi onto the machine, you're good. >> Anything you wish that it did ... maybe the iPhone or some other phone does that you're planning on or hoping to get in? >> Sure. Well it's funny because before we launched there was no exchange syncing for people who have exchange and we know that's a big thing that people want. But we just heard yesterday that that company is uploading to the market place an app to do that. It does contact syncing. >> You can already do mail syncing with any iMap server so ... >> Are you hoping that that will happen more where the folks out there in the community will develop these apps to kind of pick up this stuff? >> Absolutely, I mean ... >> Frankly you just sit back and eat bon-bons and ... >> Yeah, I like ... I'm not a smelt man so I like my bon-bons. No, but like you're gonna see this in that when you really give true freedom to people to develop software, they do ... they do. They say, you know what it's actually important to me that we have support on our phone for X, Y, or Z. And so they just write it. And the way that this is written, you can actually take parts of the operating system and sort of put your own in. So suppose you don't want Google authentication in here, which is how we do contact and calendar syncing and the rest. You know Yahoo could decide, you know what - we actually think this platform's going somewhere, we're gonna make our own Yahoo authentication. So they could do that, no problem and we're totally happy to have them do that. And that's pretty remarkable in the phone space, and it's actually what we were going for by releasing Android. We were trying to say listen, we want the phone market place to not look like a 97 percent monopolized desktop marketplace. We want it to look competitive; we want it to look free like the internet is. >> Chris thanks so much for coming, I wish we had more time; I'd talk to you all day. >> Yeah, me too. >> Chris DiBona, open source manager at Google. Time to take a quick break! When we come back, new word presses out, it's our download of the week right after this. ^m00:19:17 [ music ] ^m00:19:52 >> Hey everyone I'm Molly Wood, host of CNET TV's Mailbag. Here at the Mailbag, we love to read your letters and emails - the lover mail ... even the hater mail. And apparently you like it too because when we tried to make the show biweekly, boy - did you raise a stink! [ crying ] So we're back to every week and you can all just calm down. But don't stop writing in, because I need you ... bad! Look for the new edition of Mailbag, every Wednesday at CNET TV dot com. ^m00:20:18 [ music ] ^m00:20:22 >> Welcome back to CNET Live, I'm Tom Merritt. >> Good to be here, I'm Brian Cooley. My prompter's out, so I have no idea what to say. That's how stupid I am. >> Phones, phones, phones. Oh call triple 8-900 CNET to call us right now. But first ... >> Aha! >> Save me! ^m00:20:37 [ music ] ^m00:20:40 There we go. >> Download of the week is brought to you by our good friends at CNET's download dot com, purveyors of spyware free, free software. I don't think that's actually their tagline, but I sure like saying it. >> It sure is. >> We're taking a look at the latest version of Word Press, Word Press 2 point 6. Now this is blogging software, you can go to Word Press dot com and they host it themselves and do everything and it's on a Word Press dot com domain, but if you want to have it on your own domain like Tom Merritt dot com for instance, you install Word Press on your webhost. Word Press 2 point 6 is the latest version of the software to do that, so I'll show you here. This is one of the podcasts I do, uses a blog to match it, and this is the interface here. This is the dashboard, kind of gives you a real brief, here's how many posts you got, here's how many comments you got, you got some incoming links - I love this part where it tells you who's linking into your blog. >> That's nice. >> So you can check it out. Shows you all the recent comments and then you can go in and manage your pages, you can just go right in and write a post, you can write pages. So if you don't really want to do a diary type blog, you just want to build a site, you can kind of adapt it to do sort of the basic site using this page. >> I was gonna say, it can step into being a basic web development ... >> And if you want to get into cascading style sheets, you can go in and you can edit the themes, you can upload different themes to make it look how you want us to look. >> It's nice. And it's a nice clean interface. >> Yeah people always equate Word Press with blogging. The important thing here is ... >> Actually what it does the best ... >> But it does more? >> Yeah, but it absolutely can do more. >> A lot of people today - blogging is the core of their site so this could be their core development tool for their site. >> Alright let's get to some calls. >> Let's do that - at triple 8-900 CNET. We're going to George, Chicago Illinois and standing by patiently with a very tenuous hard drive question. Today's a fiesta de hard drive. Hello George, what can we do for you? ^m00:22:22 >> Today's a ... >> Turn down your volume. >> Oh, got your volume turned up! Turn down your speakers there buddy. We're gonna come right back to you ... are you there? >> Yes, I'm here. >> Okay, what's your question George? >> My question is I have a Western Digital My Book studio edition, it's a 500 gig hard drive similar to 100 rpm and unfortunately it tipped over and now I apparently cannot access any data - so my question is, is there any way to recover this without spending thousands of dollars in clean room? >> Couple of quick questions - when you try to access the drive, when you turn it on do you hear it spin up? >> No it does not spin up, it just ... a little ... >> It just goes click, click, click, click, click? That's the click of death as we call it in our business. Yeah, you're dead in the water at this point. So all you can do is a couple of home brew solutions that have been known to work: one is tap it firmly but not hard on the table. It might just rattle something loose that got stuck in either the platter bearing, this is really kind of voodoo stuff but it might help you. Give it a little sharp crack on the table, try powering it up again, if that doesn't work wrap it up in a sealed Ziploc type bag, put it in the freezer for a couple of hours ... try it again. That's been known to salvage drives that won't kick up. You're getting power to it, it sounds like. It just can't get the platter spun up at least, and that's the first thing you gotta get done. >> Yeah, these aren't 100 percent solutions but they might work long enough to get you to be able to mount the drive and copy the files off ... >> Quickly. >> Or even do a recover delete files with a recovery program or something. It's just buying you some time though. When you start to hear that click that's always bad news. Sorry to hear that. >> Yeah, sorry about that. Otherwise like you say, it's clean room time, you get to go to one of the drive recovery companies. Let's go to Nathan in Pennsylvania, he has one of the timeless chestnuts of CNET Live -iPod v Zune. Hello Nathan, welcome to the show! >> Hey. >> What's on your mind? >> I just wanted to let you guys know I'm a huge fan, but ... I am a visually impaired person and have a question about the iPod versus Zune. Which one would be better? >> Big question. How do we summarize that quickly doctor? >> iPod. >> iPod! [ laughing ] >> And then you'll answer it. >> I'll say Zune so Brian Tong is the tie breaker. >> Now one thing that we just did a video of, [ inaudible ] actually did a video on the iPod, specifically the Nano. I'm not sure, do you know which Zune versus which iPod you're actually looking at or potentially thinking of getting? Or you're just curious about either platform? >> Well myself, I want ... I did see the video on the iPod but I want one that's sort of a lot like that ... Zune 120. >> Okay, so you're looking for one stores a lot. They both do store a lot, you did mention though you're visually impaired. Is that correct? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so the thing is the Zune menus are larger in text. That's one of the things that I do like about the interface that would help you with your situation. Storage wise, they both will be able to hang with tons of storage space so I don't know if that's gonna really make a difference but if your main priority, because you're visually impaired, is to just to be able to see and navigate those menus better, that's great. Otherwise if we're talking about features specifically, we know about the iPod but some of the stuff that people aren't talking about on the Zune is some of their wireless features like you can now buy music directly through the Zune. Oh yeah, we did ... I know you did see the video about the iPod text to speech, that's what you were referring to earlier is that correct? >> Yeah, but like Edward said, that one's only for the Nano which runs a 16 gig. >> Yeah, so storage is really your priority and as well as being able to see the menus properly correct? >> Yeah. >> Okay so in that case, those are your main two priorities I won't go into all the crazy features that they both have, I would tend to push you towards the Zune. You still can get podcasts through the Zune which is really cool, and they do have a extensive library of music, just not as much content as the iTunes store offers. >> Okay, good stuff, good stuff. >> Excuse me? >> Not that we know of. >> No. >> The Zune text to speech, I don't think we have that set up anywhere on the Zune yet. No, sorry Nathan. Thanks for the call though. >> Thanks. >> Alright a common question on the CNET forums, forums dot CNET dot com, is how to customize Windows. People want to do all kinds of things to it - take the log in screen for example. Want to put your own touch on it? Molly Wood shows you how in today's quick tip. >> Hi I'm Molly Wood and this is a Windows Vista log on screen. Boring. But thanks to John Wilkinson, a CNET Forums moderator, I've got a quick tip on a cool way to sex up your Vista Welcome screen. ^m00:26:58 [ music ] ^m00:27:00 Check out Stardock's log on studio Vista, which you can find at CNET's download dot com. It's a free program that lets you choose from tons of different log on screens which are also all free. Some are preloaded with the application, and the software takes you to more at Stardock's site, Wincustomize dot com. And of course you can upload your own jpeg's to share with the community. Log on studio, also available for Windows XP. So there you go - inject some life into that log on screen would you? I'm Molly Wood for CNET dot com, and you're welcome. ^m00:27:30 [ music ] ^m00:27:33 >> Thanks! >> Alright. Well she's getting kind of snippy about the interface there. Wow! Boring. Wasn't that boring, what do you want for a log in screen? >> Alright we got time for a few more calls, let's go to line 5 - Travis are you there in Great Falls Montana? >> Yes I am. >> Hey, thanks for calling CNET Live. What can we do for you? >> Thanks. I was wondering if I bought an 80211N draft router, would newer firmware update it's capabilities efficiently when the final specs came out, and then also when are the final specs coming out? >> Well they hope to finally have the 80211 N specs, and for those who don't know - 80211 N is the next faster version of Wi-Fi. We've had 80211 B, 80211 G, an 80211 N has been kicking around forever. They finally hope to have the standard out this month. Time's running out, but hopefully by the end of this year they're thinking for sure they'll finally have the standard. Now as to buying a draft N router, which is what they're calling the routers now, a lot of router manufacturers have pulled those down temporarily because they're waiting for the standard to finally get approved. If you find a draft N router or you already have a draft N router, the vendors are not making any promises about being able to upgrade that to the standard via firmware. It all depends on what kind of radio is in that router, and they're not talking because they don't know what the final standard exactly is gonna be, which ones will be upgradeable and which ones won't. So I can't give you a more definite answer than that, but it's possible ... but probably not likely. >> Okay. Well thank you a lot. >> Yeah, sure Travis. Sorry I didn't have a better answer for you. >> Okay that's all for that call ... one email we got here from Kurt Fisher at the Porsche Club of America, our region here just north of San Francisco, big fan of CNET car tech and they want to set up a big LCD monitor at their auto cross events so the drivers can quickly see what they're times were on the course, either looking in some CNET reviews at LCD panels and saying, they don't rate what's called nits which is what he's always heard is the brightness rating you have to get nice and high to be seen outdoors. So we checked into this a little bit Kurt, one thing you want to look at are monitors that are made for outdoor use because A - they're gonna be moisture resistant and some days you do those auto crosses in the wet, I know that, also they are very bright and rated in nits - these outdoor specialty monitors. The big thing is though, they're a different technology. They're often what's called a transflective panel which takes advantage of the sunlight to make the image pop and not just relying on backlight which can never compete with the sun. So it's a different kind of an illumination technology for outdoor panels, there's a couple of companies - there's Sunlight LCD dot com, they sell these kinds of monitors. Also Sun Brit TV dot com, B-R-I-T by the way, companies that specialize in these kind of monitors. You're gonna find they're more expensive though, than the ones you'd watch for your home theatre. So hope that helps out. >> Alright, that's it for today but Russell in Jamaica, we wanted to get to you. Call back on it Russell. We definitely wanted to take another Jamaica ... you're Jamaican? >> It's a long story. Email me, email me. You know the address. >> Next week we're getting into some scary stories - Halloween frightening stories of our own, we'll tell you the worst things that have ever happened to our tech and we want your videos as well. Send your video questions, put them up on You Tube or Vimeo and send them to us at CNET Live at CNET dot com. >> So we'll talk to you next week. Remember the phones open at 12:30 p.m. Pacific next Thursday. The show starts at 1 Pacific. >> Of course 4 p. m. Eastern time. >> And 5 a. m. Friday Tokyo time. >> There you go! [ music ]