Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Installing Windows 7 from USB

I wouldn’t believe it is so simple… Just download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from Microsoft. Have the Windows 7 ISO file on your computer and a USB Pen drive with more than 3.5GB.

The tool will format the USB stick and then just cope over all the required files from the iso. Then you insert the USB stick, boot from it and go through the installation screens… Installs in 30min and you are done!! Didn’t expect it to be this smooth…

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Google TV has Android running on Intel x86

While we have seen till now most Android products running on ARM, including the $35 tablet and other tablets, Google TV is a product that will be running Android on an Intel Atom processor and that makes me super excited!! Google TV is Google’s bid to get into the TV market, but installing its Android OS on set-top boxes and then also doing deals with broadcasters. Think of Apple TV, but on an open-platform

You can check out Google TV blogpost here. Google TV is good and there are already many such devices, but what is more exciting to see that Android has been ported to x86. Google TV is supposed to run apps, search media as well as play many types of media. Thus, this means that the whole suite of stuff is running on x86 processors.

It begins with the Logitech Revue, which is insanely price at $299 compared to Apple TV, which is priced at $99. But again, something which is niche product at the beginning of its lifetime is a high-margin product. The thing runs on Intel's CE4100, an Atom-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) and is supposed to become very popular chip for a lot of consumer electronics products. The SoC’s core will run the operating system and the applications, while the other media stuff will run on a different chip.