CNET Live: June 26, 2008 Video

CNET Live: June 26, 2008 Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:09 [ Background Music ]

>> Coming up on CNET Live, turn your car into KITT. You know, Knight rider or reasonable facsimile.

>> Yeah, looking forward to that. I'll also show how to buy TV and time via the web for your favorite candidate.

>> Cooley for president.

>> Yes.

>> And Technorati founder David Sifry is stopping by to show of a preview of his new project. Giving you a travel guide to anywhere you wanna go.

>> All that and more coming up on CNET Live. ^M00:00:33 [ Music ] ^M00:00:42

>> Oh, hi folks. We're screwing around.

>> CBS replaced us with animatronic versions of ourselves. But we don't know that we're not the same people. Welcome to CNET Live 88-900-CNET is the number.

>> Don't worry I hate us too.

>> You gotta call about a half hour before we start because lines are full up.

>> Yeah. And lines do open now at 12:30 p.m. Pacific, I know you're tired of hearing that but it's only been a few weeks that we've been doing it. So we gonna hammer it for a little while. And when you do get through because you called nice and early, here's who you who are gonna talk to, there.

>> Somewhere without ourselves loathing.

>> Where's Jamie?

>> Hey Jamie.

>> A new face and a new voice feed. Have a nice free conversation with before she hands you over to us. Again 888-900-2638. And before we get to your calls, we got a full slate right now. Here's a couple of things we crave. ^M00:01:23 [ Music ] ^M00:01:28 [ Background Music ]

>> This is a cool stuff we found on the crave blog.

>> Crave.cnet.com. My [unintelligible] another waiting since before I was born for.

>> Oh boy.

>> Mitsubishi is gonna bring 3D to HDTV.

>> I've been hearing about this.

>> All right.

>> There's a lot of buzz around it.

>> And ever since the Jetsons, we've been waiting for that three-dimensional television along with our jet-packs.

>> I know you're been waiting for it.

>> Ah, really you're not in to this?

>> No.

>> Not in to 3D TV?

>> Top 3 things Cooley doesn't get that everyone else in the Tech kits.

>> Okay.

>> Number 1 3D. Number 2, robots. Number 3, space--just laying that out there.

>> Really robots?

>> Robots, space, and 3D are like--shoosh.

>> Actually I understand robots, space I don't understand, 3D I definitely, come on.

>> All right.

>> I don't know, I don't get it.

>> You can see James Bond jumping out--

>> I don't care.

>> At you.

>> I don't care.

>> To dock. Well, you know what, it's not exactly as good as it sounds, anyway.

>> Oh, I hear you but I don't care.

>> Because it's not, it's not without the need for glasses.

>> Oh no.

>> These are the--

>> Still.

>> Positronic implants that you have to get. Now they're polarizing glasses. They're not the little red and blue glasses.

>> Those aren't them, are they?

>> Yeah, those are them.

>> Oh they're not even stylish

>> Yeah, so.

>> But they are in certain parts of New York

>> But they will, they're not as crazy as the blue and red ones from the 50's

>> All right.

>> These are polarizing glasses and they give you a--

>> Yeah.

>> Full on 3D effect

>> Interesting active sunglasses.

>> Of course you gotta people to broadcast in 3D and--

>> I get the right television, but it's a different type of screen.

>> Three 73-inch models.

>> Mitsubishi is serious about this.

>> Along with several 65 and 60-inch plasma models.

>> Yeah Mitsubishi is getting really serious about this. If you're in the 3D that's your brand as Mitsubishi is way out in front. I've been to some broadcasting conventions where they are hammering this idea. Now here's mine, not 3D its just 320.

>> Perhaps, oh whoa!

>> With a rhyme, ha? [ Laughter ]

>> Yeah, now I know why we hate us.

>> I'm trying. Anyway 320 gig, pocket hard-drive, so first of all it's a lot of capacity, 7200 rpm it's a lot of speed, so its gonna be usable for audio and especially video editing applications and its bass powered in most cases.

>> I'm actually gonna buy one of this for my wife.

>> This is cool.

>> Because she's a video editor--

>> That's right.

>> She needs this. FireWire, get the FireWire version.

>> And it's enough capacity to actually to have a couple of video projects and enough speed and like I say unless you go SATA which is one of the interface choices, it's bass powered, so FireWire and USB 2.0; OWC is the company. They're kinda like this cutting edge portable drive company-250 to 280 bucks depending on the interface choice, hot little portable drive.

>> Enough shopping for Ilene. Let's take some calls.

>> Let's go to line 1 because that's the number 1 on the list. Let's go to Max in New York. He's shopping for a laptop. Hello! Max welcome to CNET Live.

>> Hi guys, I'm 11 years old and I'm in the market for a new laptop.

>> Okay.

>> I want it to sync with my AT and T Tilt--

>> Okay, Windows phone, right?

>> Yes and I would like it to be...my campus is blanket and it'll do 11n WiFi so if it has n, that would be great.

>> Oh okay.

>> And ready

>> Yes, I plan to use it for Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, and probably also I'm going to monkey around with the inside like do some upgrades and stuff I really like to do that.

>> So what's your budget?

>> As long as it doesn't go over about 6000 dollars.

>> Oh! [Laughter] We can do a lot for 6 grand.

>> Wow! I wish.

>> Let me tell you.

>> I wish I was like you when I was 11. [Laughter]

>> That 200-dollar TI-99 looked really stiff back then, but anyway.

>> So I just moved from best overall laptops on our guide to best desktop replacement laptops. That's one way to go when you got that kind of money, now if you're gonna be logging and you don't want one of these, necessarily want one of these guys, but these are our best-loaded computers or what we called the best desktop replacements. I think you mentioned wide screen, the Acer Aspire 8920-6671 really sexy name.

>> What?

>> That guy has got a true 1080p display, blu-ray drive entered as well, 18" screen, did you here me there, 18-inch screen runs in the mid-2000s, but I don't know if it's got the 802.11 and do you know if any of these guys have n built-in yet?.

>> Yes, some of them get pre-n cards built-in.

>> Okay so.

>> For sure.

>> I'm gonna see if we got n, what's Tom got for you?

>> I'm thinking Lenovo ThinkPad X300.

>> Love Think X.

>> Because this is a real feature-packed lightweight laptop and plus Lenovos are good for monkeying around inside which she said she wanted to do. So, if you take a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 on CNET, you could see that you know, the bad is pretty much that it's a solid-state drive that is expensive and the touch pad location is annoying. Otherwise, it's got built-in DVD, WWAN, GPS, wireless USB, and I love the thing--

>> That's a hot choice.

>> It's our editor's choice, so it's a little more expensive than the desktop replacement you're talking about.

>> Right.

>> It's around 2800 dollars.

>> But it's a lighter weight.

>> But I think it's perfect for what he wants.

>> Yeah it's a very hot machine and a little smaller form factor or if you wanna go really big, this Acer by the way does have n also, so a/b/g/n all four specs. Bear in mind 802.11 n is still about 90 percent baked, so you may have incompatibility with your school campus n system because it's not totally set and stoned yet but I think it might be okay. Anyway just go to our guides, go to reviews, laptops and sort through our best list of best ultra-portables, best mainstream, best desktop replacements. That's' the way to go. That's our latest list there. So good luck with that Max and call us back and let us know what you buy. I'm always eager to hear about your new toy. Where do we wanna go next?

>> Let's go on to password and protecting. I believe that's what you wanna talk about, Steve?

>> Yup.

>> Steve, approach the microphone. He's across the game room from the phone.

>> Where are you Steve?

>> Yeah I'm here.

>> There you go. So you wanna password protect--a pdf file in particular.

>> Yeah and it doesn't be done particularly in Adobe pdf, you know Acrobat. It could be done in any folder.

>> Okay. I never see why he tries to protect the pdf file. What you know about this?

>> Well there are a couple of utilities that I've used. There's the...they're both recommended by Life-Pack or actually pdf info is one of them. It's a free download for the Mac and if you're on Windows, what's the name of that one that I used to use on Windows, I to find it now.

>> Yeah I'm on Windows

>> Correct. I had it up here. Yes it is PDFCreator for Windows. You can password protect in PDFCreator which is an alternative to Adobe and--

>> Yeah.

>> These are both free downloads open source.

>> Al right, thank you.

>> That's an easy way to go. Yeah try out PDFCreator. I think that's gonna work out well for you. Let's sneak in one more here before we take a turn to the break. This is kinda of a good one for everybody. We've got Stevie calling in from New York. Hello Stevie welcome to CNET Live. Battery issues, right?

>> Yeah, I have a HP Pavilion dv8000 desktop replacement?

>> Good machine.

>> And I remember like two years ago when I got it, it had like a 2-hour battery life, but now it's battery life is down to half an hour.

>> Yish.

>> And I read somewhere about conditioning or something and I tried that but when it got passed the point that the computer's thought limit was, it kinda stop working like the mouse would move every 30 seconds or something and I can't hear any sound or anything.

>> Yeah. Well my experience, once a battery gets a bad case of memory like you've got, I've got to be able to bring them back. They just flat-out, wear-out the current technology. I believe these are probably old nickel-metal hydride batteries you make.

>> Or kinda like lithium ion.

>> Or lithium ion. They have different behaviors.

>> Good question, yeah.

>> In terms of how they--

>> The nickel-metal hydride has that memory problem.

>> Yeah.

>> I think what he's talking about is the cycling, when you do lithium ion is you want to discharge and recharge. Sometimes you hear people say like, fully discharge and recharge the battery 3 times. Sometimes that will bring back its capacity. That's not the same memory problem that Brian is talking about with nickel-metal hydride with lithium ion.

>> Yeah.

>> It's just kinda, it gets confused almost. Let's say you do that full discharge-full recharge 3 times sometimes that brings it back. Sounds like you tried that already though?

>> Yeah, the computer just stopped working completely once that happens.

>> Yeah.

>> So you couldn't recharge it even?

>> Well, I could it like...it would still working, I could see everything. I just couldn't interact with it. And like...once I got to the point where it just shut down because the battery was empty, I recharged it and I tried to see if it had his battery life restored or even extended a little bit and it just had...there was like no difference.

>> Yeah you got it. Apparently you gonna do about 3 times to make it have any effect, even then sometimes you might not see an effect. And in that case, you're stuck and have to buy another battery.

>> Yeah, what's the battery cost for that machine? Have you checked it out?

>> No. I haven't.

>> All right. You know, that is gonna be the best way to go. I don't think reconditioning even if it works takes it back to a new state. It improves it a lot when it works but, you know, if you find a good price on a battery I would just do that because I'll guarantee you its gonna the best. Unless, you were taking about you know, a relatively little amount of power. If you get back to 90 minutes of battery life, it still isn't really much, you want the full. You're saying you had 2 hours initially, that was scorning to begin with. So you wanna go to full 100 percent capacity of your machine that's sounds a new battery to me. But good luck with that. Let us know if you find a trick that does work.

>> I don't know if you know instructables.com, they have a great tutorial on how to recondition your battery, I'll throw that in the show.

>> Oh good.

>> It's on blog.cnettv.com

>> Good.

>> All right. Coming up. David Sifry. You might know him as the founder of Technorati, is here with us to talk about the launch of a brand new website for traveled guys. But first, fans of the 1980s TV show Knight Rider may remember daydreaming of the day when cars could drive themselves and a soothing voice could help solve all, Michael. Well for now, you still have to steer the car yourself but you can have the voice of KITT as your co-pilot. Take a look. [ Background Music ]

>> I am Bonnie Cha, senior editor at cnet.com and today we're taking a very special First Look at a Knight Rider-theme GPS by Mio. It's not available yet. They just announced it today. It'll be available in August but it's for all you Knight Rider fans.

>> Catherine, where would you like to go today?

>> It's got a little light trait here.

>> Catherine, I'll power up all systems.

>> So it uses the original voice of William Daniels as KITT. And KITT will give you voice-guided directions. It'll tell you where to go [background music] and it will tell you lots of great things ^M00:11:45 [ Music ] ^M00:11:50 [ Background Music ]

>> I'll power up all systems. So very good to see you. Where would you like to go today? Tell me where I can take us? Where would you like to go today? Keep left and enter the freeway.

>> Oh, did that just happen? Did I say that out loud? As far its features, it's very much like a Mio Moov 300 which we reviewed earlier. Hopefully, the performance will be better since the other one wasn't so good.

>> Continue.

>> It should go about 300 dollars when it launches in August. This has been your very special first look at the Knight Rider-theme GPS by Mio.

>> I'll send you an E-mail

>> Okay.

>> I just found it.

>> All right David, welcome to CNET Live. I'm sorry you had to see that, Bonnie Cha with her Knight Rider love affair.

>> I love Knight Rider. What are you talking about Tom.

>> Okay. So you're good. You're good. You're cool.

>> Okay, last time we talked, you're with Technorati but you've left. You're now with the new company. Tell us a little bit about that.

>> Yeah, I know, having a ball and what we're doing now it's a company called Offbeat Guides. And it really started out with I think a problem that a lot of people have and I know I have as a regular traveler which is, you know, what's actually going on in the places where you are and where you're gonna be whether it's leisure or whether you're going for business.

>> Oh yeah, 'cause we went to Barcelona. And we get the Spain travel guide and it's good for Barcelona maybe. But you're paying for Madrid and the whole rest of the country.

>> Exactly and not to mention, you're also going to an entire lengthy publishing process where most of the staff that's in that guide was written 12 to 18 months ago at best.

>> Yeah, and if you don't wanna pay full price, you go and you find a used copy which is even older.

>> Yeah, exactly. So the idea though was, then I started asking my self, well you know, so here I go, I go on the web and I go and I pulled down my maps and go and I pulled in driving directions.

>> All right, yeah.

>> And I go and you know maybe I'll go to Wikitravel.

>> I always get a manila folder.

>> Bingo!

>> And I just stuffed it full of all the printouts that I got there.

>> I'm exactly...we do that every full big block clippings

>> Yeah [ Simultaneous Talking ]

>> And now you're going through it all. You printed it all out on this 8-1/2 by 11 paper and, you know, it falls apart in the bottom of your bag or, you know, you're just trying to figure things out. Or--

>> So what are we gonna do about it?

>> Yeah or you're getting a book that has 90 percent of these stuff that you don't need. And that's really ecologically unfriendly.

>> You're gonna solve this for us?

>> So yeah, so what Offbeat Guides does is we actually decided to look at the travel search problem and flip it on his head. And to make personalized spoke travel guides that are literally up to the day, up to the minute when you build them, and so [ Simultaneous Talking ]

>> Producers didn't realize this. You actually got a book out of this.

>> That's right.

>> You're using your website but you got a travel guide.

>> And you actually get a--

>> So this is tailored to you.

>> A beautiful tailored book. I'm not sure how well you guys can see this. But you know, so here it's actually got your name on the cover, where you're going, the dates that you're actually gonna be there.

>> It looks pretty nice.

>> And then on top of it, right, we've put in, you know, not just the regular, you know, your old traditional maps but we'll even focus it all the way down to, you know, the actual place where you're staying. And, you know of course, all of the traditional things that you would see in a travel guide, where to stay, you know, what if some of the interesting things that are going on, what to buy, and then here in the back, this is one of my favorite parts of the whole thing is we actually put in, from all around the web, different events. Things that are going on, right, so here's a ride for cancer or, you know, a stamped oddity or robots in those experiments.

>> So how do you get one of this setup?

>> You get to put in a lot of information yourself?

>> No, and that's what the whole point here too was, you know, travel and travel planning on the web is hard. It's just too hard for me. [ Simultaneous Talking ]

>> In San Francisco, let's try go--

>> Sure.

>> To my home town.

>> Okay, sure.

>> Greenville, Illinois.

>> Oh yeah.

>> Population 7100, depending on who you ask and how many you ask.

>> Okay here we go.

>> All right

>> Yeah we got it. Let's see what we can find on it.

>> Gotta be fair. I did prep David that we would be trying this out.

>> What 5 minutes ago, yeah.

>> Five minutes ago.

>> Not very long ago.

>> Okay. So and, you know, say you're from Oakland, right?

>> Yeah that's where I live.

>> So we can put in Oakland.

>> So you're gonna make a travel guide designed just for me going from Oakland to Greenville.

>> Right.

>> So, let's say that you're doing that and you're gonna be there.

>> Well I don't know, you know, I think we can pick a time here, so you know we'll just put my name, your name,

>> July.

>> July 4th weekend, why not?

>> So here we go, so say you'll leave on the 3rd.

>> Go down to Patriot's Park. Watch the JC's. Put on the fire works. Visit the family

>> Come on, good old time.

>> Okay, and if you know where you're staying, so if your house.

>> I'll stay at my sister's house, yeah.

>> We can put in there, oh we actually had it here, yeah, there we go.

>> All right. Now she's gonna get mail, okay.

>> All right.

>> And here's really where magic happens. So what you see here especially on the lower right.

>> So it came up with stuff.

>> Yeah, we're able to find some things about Greenville, Illinois. Let's see and you can actually preview, you know, the different pieces of it, right. So you can say.

>> So once you put in your stuff.

>> Yeah.

>> You get a look at what kind of travel guide you're gonna get?

>> Absolutely, so you know, we could look here and, you know, know some of the notable residents who lives there.

>> [Unintelligible]. Absolutely.

>> Right.

>> Hey wait a minute.

>> Anti-boxing activist.

>> What's this here at the bottom?

>> You got that plan, you put that--

>> No actually, we didn't believe it or not. This is actually there in the guide beforehand

>> I'm sorry.

>> But you know so could find out, you know, what are some of the different places of interest, right. All of these. [ Simultaneous Talking ]

>> So you get a really good idea, that you can try it before you actually buy. And then of course, because we're delivering you either a physical guide which actually cost 24.95 or you can just get a pdf and printed out yourself if you like, and that--

>> And if you buy the guide, you get the pdf along with that.

>> Absolutely.

>> Comes with it.

>> So you can have both one on your mobile device and then you got the book for when you're on the train or whatever.

>> That's exactly right

>> And we try to keep this as updated as possible, so you can come back over and over again be able to download the pdf as many times as you want, up until you're traveling.

>> So you try to keep it as up-to-the-minute as possible. David, thank you so much, this is awesome, combination of the web and print on the map.

>> Hey! Thanks so much.

>> I appreciate it. We'll definitely have to have you back. First repeat guest, David Sifry, and if people wanna find out more, where should they go?

>> www.offbeatguides.com. We're in private beta right now. But you can sign up for an invite and we'll get you in, first come-first serve.

>> Absolutely fabulous. All right. Next stop. The download of the week. It's gonna show you how to put even a little bit of that amount of a Mac in your PC that Brian Cooley can stand. It's coming up right after this. ^M00:18:16 [ Music ] ^M00:18:22 [ Commercial ] ^M00:18:36 [ Music ] ^M00:18:47 [ Station ID ] ^M00:18:51 [ Music ] ^M00:19:10

>> Okay, how you're doing everybody. How's our set look? Everything good, clean buttoned in?

>> But these wires

>> Our KVM has a like a cowlick put that damn thing down. All right. Anyway. [Unintelligible] in just a minute at 888-900-2638.

>> But first, hello.

>> You know what time it is? Time for the download of the week. [ Background Music ]

>> Download of the week is brought to you by our good friend at .cnetdownload.com purveyors of Spyware-free free downloads.

>> What's you got?

>> This one came out of the download blog. It's called ObjectDock. I think Seth Rosenblauch [phonetic] was blogging about this. It is in fact way down at the bottom, so Lynn you're gonna, by the way Lynn on the scan converter over there happy birthday.

>> Lynn!

>> Happy birthday to you.

>> It's your birthday [clapping] get that camera around Charlie.

>> Get that thing, sliding down there, Lynn.

>> All right. Now that she's distracted she can't even do her job.

>> She's planning how to get us both murdered.

>> No she's not. She's great.

>> Okay, there we go is a dock for windows. So, it works just like the other stand dock.

>> Looks pretty good too.

>> And, you know, does the little pop up so you can, you know, edit the settings and--

>> That's it set it to the three zones like Windows does with, you know, you start on the left and you're running things on the right?

>> No, it's just look like a little dock.

>> Okay, has Apple real estate logic.

>> Yes! Exactly.

>> Okay, now Windows real estate logic.

>> And if you notice, I can actually have my start menu still down here.

>> You don't know.

>> With all normal Windows stuff, I can have the dark one on tops so you could do it however you want. You can have this pop up like I do. You can have it down there all the time.

>> Yeah.

>> You can have this pop up--the start menu pop up.

>> If I auto hide the Windows Ribbon, what pops up when I drag my mouse down?

>> I don't know, let's find out.

>> Lets find out.

>> Auto hide the task bar we'll do a raise here.

>> If this is gonna be the raiser, which pops up? Okay.

>> So, they're both set on pop up now, nothing's there.

>> Both again.

>> Go down in the bottom here. Let's scroll them on the screen.

>> Hold on. Hold on.

>> Man, there we are.

>> Okay, let me auto...okay. Auto hide the task bar and I get to put it in here and--

>> Kill that and then--

>> And here we go.

>> Okay.

>> Come and down, come and down, come and down oops--

>> Okay. Windows first, all right.

>> Yeah.

>> Microsoft first please.

>> Okay, yes please. My lady, please yes.

>> All right! It's got a very cool that's all about the Mac I need.

>> They are. Done. It's perfect.

>> Its all the Mac I need right there

>> Okay, let's go onto your calls folks. Mateo has been waiting patiently in Ontario, California. Hello! Mateo welcome to CNET Live. What's your issue?

>> Hey guys! I just have a basic question. I'm going to visit my friend in New York State for a month. So, I'm just wonder if I can bring my first last top and I don't know share or use internet connection. He has just wired...he has his PC wired to his modem. He doesn't have a wireless router anything like that so, I was just wondering what's the best way for me to share?

>> Yeah, all right. So he's like the last guy on earth who doesn't have a wireless router display. So, the easiest way to go is get a wireless router 50-60 bucks for a name brand one that we like a lot. There's plenty of them because you have wireless on your laptop, right?

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> All right. So he would still be wired to the router when you get a router that has 4 or 5 ports on the back and you go wireless. That's the simplest way.

>> Well, the absolutely freeway will be to take his mode and plug-in it into to your laptop.

>> Yeah.

>> And then turn your laptop into sharing the connection.

>> Wirelessly...it's wireless router.

>> So that you're blog broadcasting IP internet connection to him. Thing is, he's got to have a wireless card. So, there's something you're gonna have to buy.

>> The other thing we are talking about of, I think, we have a definitive answer but what you can do is coming out his broadband modem. We thought you could go to a switch that would give you 2, well, for several ports, you could hard wire each your computer into a switch. But I don't think a switch is going to assign the IP address to each machine needs. I think you have to get a router to do that and while you're getting a router, you may as well get a wireless router. They don't have just that much money.

>> Like 50 bucks.

>> Yeah.

>> He doesn't happen to have two [unintelligible] in his desktop to ethernet connections, right?

>> I am.

>> That's odd! If the oddity--

>> He does?

>> If it has two ethernet jacks, we believe you can plug the laptop into his spare ethernet jack and then you can turn on internet connection sharing in his desktop. And we think it will send out another IP address to the secondary port. But this is a lot of screwing around compared to picking up a wireless router and being done in 30 minutes. So, that's the way to do it.

>> All right.

>> If the cost is not an object with 50 bucks, that's the way to go and he'll thank you because every time someone comes to his house, they are gonna be logging a laptop. He'll be glad he's got it.

>> That's the truth.

>> All right!

>> All right. Thanks Mateo. And good luck. Have a good trip there the New York.

>> All right! We've got an e-mail from Shawn. He says sorry to bother you guys again but I stumbled on a simple way to install Ubuntu in Windows. Maybe you know about it but it's my duty as a citizen of buzz town to let you know. Thank you, Shawn. If you don't know what he is talking about, it's Wubi and we'll show you how it works today's Insider Secret.

>> Ubuntu is a fabulous bistro of Linux that lets you boot it off a CD in case you're not ready for the full installed but it's an even simpler way. I'm Tom Merritt from cnet.com on this edition of Inside Secrets. I'll show how to try Ubuntu on a Windows machine without partitioning or burning. ^M00:24:16 [ Music ] ^M00:24:30

>> Normally, when you want to try Linux, you either have to overwrite your current Operating System, pain, or at least burn a CD and boot off that, less of a pain. Thanks to the folks at download.com for tipping me off to WUBI. It lets you try Ubuntu on your Windows XP machine without having to burn a boot CD or partition your hard drive. Let's show you how. First things first, check your system specs. The requirements for Wubi are Windows XP 1 gigahertz CPU, 128 megabytes of RAM and 4 gigabytes of free hard disk space. Now, that's something extremely important. Back up your data. I don't care if you use online storage or a movable hard drive or your iPod. Just make sure anything you can't live without is safely backed up. Back up. Did I mention backing up?

>> Yes.

>> I did. Good. Okay, time to install Wubi. You can down load it from Wubi-installer.org or from CNET's very on download.com. When you run the installer, the first thing you'll need to do is select the language of your choice and your new user name and password. Sounds obvious but make sure you remember your password. Next, Wubi will download the Ubuntu ISO file. This is the same data on the Ubuntu boot disc we showed in our other Insider Secrets on trying out Ubuntu. It's pretty much the whole operating system in one big file. You can get the installer to skip this step if you already have the file. Just place your .ISO file in the same directory as the Wubi installer that will really speed up the install. The installer then tucks the ISO file in a space on your hard drive and when you boot your Windows machine, you should now see an option to boot into Ubuntu, right under Microsoft Windows. The first time you boot into Ubuntu, you'll see a lot of set up activity--formatting, virtual disc, configuring DHCP, et cetera Installing base software like OpenOffice and Firefox. Now, you're free to boot into windows or Ubuntu Linux, no partitioning necessary. And if you ever get tired of Ubuntu taking up space on your hard drive, just run the Wubi on the installer under Windows. That's it for this Insider Secret. I'm Tom Merritt for cnet.com proving there's more than one way to boot a Linux. [ Music ]

>> That's true.

>> Dimension back up?

>> Yes.

>> Okay, I love Wubi actually it's--

>> It's awesome. It's really good. It's really a good low-risk way.

>> And it maintains the ongoing theme, I'm sure you notice to your folks that Tom Merritt will get any Operating System turn on in any device it wasn't intended for.

>> I can't make OS X run virtualize on Windows.

>> Yet!

>> Okay, let's get to our last call. Where do you wanna go? We've got a Windows question and we've got a Snow Leopard question.

>> I defer to you commander.

>> We're gonna on line 3 'cause I wanna stamp Dr. Merritt. Josh in Rhode Island. You're the winner. You're our last call. What's on you're mind today?

>> Hi, I've heard a few humors about Snow Leopard. I'm just wondering if it's worth paying you for if you have Leopard right now 'cause I heard they're not gonna do many features and it's just gonna be security?

>> Yeah, that's the rubbish that it's gonna be a security instability upgrade. Bet your button dollar that as we get closer the Snow Leopard actually coming out, Apple will start telling you all these wonderful things that it will be able to do. But I think the idea is that they're not gonna roll a ton of new things and it's almost even implied in the name, there's Leopard. Snow Leopard.

>> Yeah

>> Now, one of those speculations is that this is going to leave behind the G4. The Snow Leopard will be for Intel only and applications will be able to run a lot better. Because you won't have to try to support two code basis, which will actually make Snow Leopard a little smaller too. There are some other ideas that Snow Leopard is going to get rid of some of the problems with drivers, there are some audio issues in Leopard that people have been having.

>> It looks a lot like a maintenance upgrade.

>> Yeah, I mean there's a lot of rumors and lot of speculation about what it's gonna do and what is not. It's still too early to tell for sure.

>> Yeah, and Apple has never rolled out on OS X upgrade. It wasn't full of bells and whistles. Not that I can recall. They've always got tasty treats along with underpinning improvements.

>> I think conventionalism is pure treats but to make a big deal out of them.

>> Yeah, I mean but they're pushing what I call the XPC. You know after a while, your Operating System is doing everything it can do. It has to get boring after a while relatively so and Windows have been there for a couple of additions. So, let's just hang out until we get a little closer with the release, okay? Good luck for that one as you bite your time there. It's time for our Best of the Web. [ Background Music ]

>> And this was brought you by our good friends over at CNET's Webware.com. Check this out in this crazy election session. You know, all the messaging that gets to put is paid for by who campaigns, wealthy donors well, you can be one of those advertisers votervoter.com and this is for about this week. You go in there and you buy and place television ads. This is in some web thing that anybody can do. You're actually putting political ads.

>> Crazy, right?

>> Well, you can start off as few as 200 bucks if you buy cheaper time in small market. So, like Greenville, Illinois so here we at [laugher] television station but anyway.

>> So you start here. You--

>> Channel 13 in Mount Vernon, maybe.

>> Channel 13, Mount Vernon, baby. The next screen, you go and you pick your ads. They got a bunch of creative or you can upload you own and they got the spot in a second and go through almost like cover flow.

>> Now, these are officially approved by like said the Mccain campaign?

>> These are produced by this company. To feed in to their system and then you can also got to Obama. You can go to various causes and initiatives. They've got spots for those.

>> These are approved by Obama, or Mccain campaign?

>> You can make it your own.

>> You can make your own, sit down here, create and upload your own. That's the interesting part. You can make your own spot.

>> Yeah

>> And that's what really gets interesting to me. Then you go in here. Here's where you choose your demographic screen. What ethnicities, ages and what day parts do you wanna buy. Just like a real broadcast advertiser and then you go through and they will say...they'll show the stations it qualifies. Based on how much you wanna spend. I'll say a measly 2500 bucks and in that point, you put his credit card and you buy air time. And actually they're buying was called remnant inventory. TV spots that haven't been sold and they're gonna go in there and they're gonna put your spot in there,

>> Maybe, our cameraman Lawrence here who've been working on attack ads against you. Maybe this is where they should be put up.

>> We can air them on TV.

>> Yeah. I would really appreciate that.

>> Maybe we should.

>> Yeah, with a knife in your neck. That'd be great.

>> No.

>> Hey. Where is Lawrence? Here's Lawrence

>> Hey man, you can't attack me.

>> When you see attack ad for old Cooley, he is the culprit. He is the one who did it.

>> There's gonna be one for me too.

>> Yeah, I'm working on that.

>> All right, folks! That's it for CNET Live for another crazy, breezy week.

>> It's an old time buzz out loud reunion next week. Brian is gonna be off so Molly Wood will be filling in and our guest will be Tech zealous, Veronica Belmonte. [ Background Music ]

>> That's 1 o'clock Pacific 4 Eastern.

>> 10 AM Hawaii.

>> Call at 12:30 to get on the air. See you then. ^M00:31:23 [ Music ] ^M00:31:37

>> You eating enough? You look a little thin.

>> Yeah. Oh, that's a very mom question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know.

>> I miss you baby.

>> I miss you, too.

>> Love you.

>> Yeah, we love you.

>> We tell everyone about the relieve work you're doing, you know.

>> Of course, you do.

>> Welcome to a network that's bringing countries and families a little closer.

>> It's been a while now.

>> CISCO. Welcome to the Human network.