Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while broadening its appeal way beyond the netbook crowd. Where an app like Google Documents might outsource a little processor load and some data storage, OnLive’s system will send all of the intense load to your CPU and graphics card associated with PC gaming to a monstrous computer hundreds of miles away. The benefits are clear. While existing web apps have sold themselves to the typical PC user on convenience (e.g. the ability to access documents anywhere), this is the only service I can think of that has a chance to sell itself by saving gamers significant money on the hardware that is typically necessary to run these intensive games… not to mention the dedication to keep up with frequent upgrades just to maintain the performance status-quo. An entry-level gaming PC is going to cost around $800. This system enables a $300 netbook to do the same thing by relegating every task associated with the game other than actual display of the resulting video stream.

There are also implications here for the established modes of game distribution. In my most recent post, I discussed a possibility for a new model of game distribution that does away with the physical product altogether, but that proposition did not suggest any fundamental shifts in the way gaming works—only the way they are distributed. Digital distribution platforms have gained significant popularity over the past year. OnLive’s distribution model is digital, but it seems to be something of a hybrid between GameTap and Steam. I honestly don’t understand the model entirely, but Steve Perlman claimed in an interview there will be tiers of service which suggests a subscription model while the interface’s options for either buying or renting any given title suggests a more traditional model of paying per title. This is serious competition on either front. Steam will have difficulty as games that are available for both services will have significantly lower requirements through OnLive. Subscription services like GameTap typically serve so-called “casual” gamers better and contain few if any new release hardcore games. OnLive is coming into this with major partnerships with huge publishers (and committments for simultaneous release with retail) to give it some more muscle.

For the numerous advantages, this service already has a few small disadvantages I can see. First, the max resolution being quoted right now is 720p which is a bit behind the times. I understand there are now Internet bandwidth considerations as the resolution increases, and I’m sure that is the reason for this choice. It doesn’t make it any better for gamers that crave high fidelity experience with their PC gaming and are accustomed to running 1920×1200 or higher resolutions on their PCs. Second, with any digital distribution model comes concerns about consumer issues. As with other similar platforms, many consumers will likely not be comfortable with the license they are actually purchasing. Every software purchase is merely a license whether or not you receive a physical product, but, frankly, it is much easier for software publishers to enforce unreasonable demands in a license while they still control the software. If I have a disc, I can always resell it whereas a digital software purchase may be impossible to transfer.

For all my excitement, I am sceptical. It sounds much to good to be true. The only way we’ll know (before an actual launch, that is) is by getting in on the beta which should start this summer. If OnLive launches at an attractive price, good performance, and reasonable licensing agreements, this may be the Trojan horse that brings PC gaming back to the forefront.

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1. A new games distribution model
2. Purchase and download old PC games on the cheap
3. Three great gaming blogs (two new to me)

The earliest platforms were probably closed. If I am a university sitting on a computer that cost millions of dollars to build, I’m unlikely to allow just anyone to come through and run whatever software they please. Although they have arguably been around longer than open platforms, closed platforms have been mostly taken for granted up until the iTunes app store launched with tremendous success nearly overnight. Closed platforms allow for tighter controls on developers and crafting of a ore unified vision for the platform as a whole.

Windows has often been criticized for the litany of malicious software that has plagued it virtually since day one. Users of closed platforms most often do not have to worry about malicious software. Controls can be put in place to test software for any malicious intent. If something happens to sneak through to users, it will most likely be found and corrected in short order. This does not apply only to malicious software but has been useful to control content for creators of platform that want to portray a squeaky-clean image. This has been used recently by Apple in denying approval to developers of apps that defend the company’s taste in some way. Nintendo also utilized this to great effect by insuring that titles released on its consoles were more family-friendly than those available on competing platforms.

This is an example of a Tengen cartridge released for the NES without Nintendo licensing.

The closed approach to the software platform also leaves companies vulnerable to backlash from both developers and users. Apple has felt this very recently on multiple occasions from initially restricting the availability of the now venerable sub-genre of mobile flatulence noise generators to their recent denial of the Twitter app Tweetie for it’s display of a swear word as a popular tag on the social network. Backlashes often create an underground of users and developers that find new ways to circumvent the closed systems and open them up. Apple has recently been on the attack against iPhone “jailbreaking“—the act of removing the iPhone’s protection against installation of unauthorized software. Jailbroken phones have recently gotten their own “app store” which provides developers and users a marketplace to buy and sell apps that, for one reason or another, went unapproved by Apple. Nintendo suffered from this as well in the late 80’s when developer Tengen reverse-engineered the NES lock-out chip to allow their games to run on NES consoles without approval.

Closed platforms allow for the party maintaining the platform to profit directly from the sale of software. Apple has deemed a charge of 30% is sufficient for their services of providing developers the tools, platform, and marketplace necessary for iPhone development. Microsoft has announced a similar mobile app store  that charges developers a yearly fee on top of a percentage of the sales revenue for apps. Gaming console makers have been charging licensing fees to software developers for many years now. In fact, game console hardware manufacturers often sell their hardware at a loss in anticipation of future software licensing revenue.

Because of the accessibility of open platforms and the lack of a centralized marketplace (although there are closed platforms without centralized marketplaces as well), software developed on open platform can have trouble gaining traction. The openness means there is a potential for much more competition which can lead to most releases being virtually invisible. This can be mitigated with beefy marketing budgets but those undermine the open nature of the marketplace. It doesn’t matter that I can develop for a platform without jumping through hoops if I then have to spend a million dollars to sell any copies of my application.

Ideologically, I much prefer the model of open software platforms for one key reason: all closed platforms to a greater or lesser degree leave developers wondering whether a piece of software to which they have devoted significant time, effort, and possibly money will, in fact, make it through the approval process so that it may be profitable. Open platforms give developers the peace of mind knowing that only the market will decide their success or failure. Closed platforms have distinct advantages, but the freedom offered to all parties by an open platform is a hard thing to sacrifice to any end.

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If you have to wire this, you definitely need to learn to make cables.

This is the first video in a short series about using your geek-sense to save a little cash. The first installment: making your own ethernet cable.

You may be wondering how buying a cabling kit that costs $71.50 is going to save you money. For the average person, it probably won’t save you much. If you need a couple of 6′ cables to wire up everything, you can get by purchasing pre-made cables. There are a number of scenarios where that much cable (at that price) will save you money.

1. You need to run two or three cables from one side of the house to another. Forgetting the fact that you may not find a store with cables at the length you need, a brick-and-mortar retailer has no qualms charging you almost a dollar per foot or more for the pre-made cable. The cost of two fifty-foot cables will pay for the box, and you’ll have loads of cable left for fun and profit.
2. You’re hosting a LAN party. If you’re going to wire up 20 or 30 machines, this is a no-brainer. You can’t touch the cost of doing it yourself.
3. You’re a cheap-ass and intend to split the cost of the kit with several friends. You can most likely wire any ten of your friends for less than the cost of wiring one of you the lazy way.

I believe I have sufficiently justified the existence of this video. So, on to the information!

Wikipedia has an excellent article (albeit a short one) on category 5e cable. This is the classification of cable you’re getting with the kit from Geeks.com. For most, this will be everything you might need. The specification allows for cables up to 328 feet. With support for gigabit ethernet, it will support anything a typical home network can throw at it.

The image above is from a tutorial on PC911 and clearly shows the correct order of the wires before you insert them into the connector and crimp. This is also described in the video, but I have placed the image here for quick reference. The order of the colors from left to right are white/orange, orange, white/green, blue, white/blue, green, white/brown, brown.

I think that pretty much covers it! If you have problems or questions, drop a comment. I will make an effort to respond to each and every comment posted here. Good luck and happy cabling!

Download the podcast

• Quicktime HD
• Quicktime Standard
• iPod
• MP3 (audio only)

Links

• Cat5e cabling kit
  
• Cat5 information (Wikipedia)
• Cable making how-to (PC911)

Check back for the next episode in which I will demonstrate some killer online shopping techniques for maximum savings! Look for it Friday, March 20th.

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Adblock Plus- The web is a much different place than it was in the ’90s. At some point, companies realized they could advertise on the web. Now, web sites will sell their entire site design off to an advertiser and convert the whole site to an ad for a week or more. You’re going to see ads that try to get your attention by being disgusting. You’ll have animated flashing ads and ads that come up on top of content forcing you to watch before you read the site. It’s the one thing about the old web I really miss. I would almost be willing to go back to the days of the solid-grey backgrounds to dispense with the plethora of annoying ads I must put up with today. Luckily, thanks to a wonderful Firefox extension called Adblock Plus that will block 99% of all that crap, you can lose the ads and still keep your pretty backgrounds. The plugin automatically updates from a list of block rules that will cover most every ad you might see. You are also free to add your own custom rules to block ads the filters might have missed. Adblock Plus is the first extension covered for a reason: it is the biggest part of reclaiming your web surfing experience.

StumbleUpon- You’ve already loaded all your favorite sites into a feed reader like Google Reader, right? In that case, you may be looking for something to do when your feed reader is empty. StumbleUpon takes your interests and delivers a cool page related to one of them with every click of the Stumble button. My favorite metaphor to explain Stumble is that it is channel surfing for the web. Of course, it is far more intelligent than channel surfing. The StumbleUpon toolbar has a thumbs up and a thumbs down button. As you Stumble, you can rate pages using the buttons. This along with the interests you have selected determine which pages you will receive. It also includes a social networking aspect. You can add friends and recommend pages to them. Those pages will come up when they are stumbling. You can add any interesting page to StumbleUpon by clicking the thumbs up button. If a page has never been stumbled before, you will be prompted to provide some information in addition to a review. It’s a really fun way to discover more of the web.

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks)- Foxmarks has been a great way to keep bookmarks in sync across multiple computers. Link as many machines as you like to your account, and your bookmarks are always in sync on all the machines. Now, the name has changed to Xmarks and features have been added to allow users to discover new sites that may be of interest. The new features are intriguing, but the bookmark syncing alone is enough to recommend this extension to anyone who uses more than one computer. The bookmarks are available online through the web interface in case you can’t or don’t want to install the extension. You’ll never be able to get away from your bookmarks!

Delicious/Diigo- I’m covering these together because you probably only need one or the other. Both are social bookmarking sites that, like Xmarks, store links to your favorite web sites online but unlike Xmarks these services have focused on the social aspects from the beginning. Before the massive improvements made in Firefox bookmarks with the 3.0 update, I used Delicious (and it’s extension) exclusively for bookmark storage. Now, I use both. In fact, I’m currently using Firefox bookmarks, Delicious, and Diigo. Diigo is a more full-featured service but is sorely lacking in the most important part of social experiences: users. Delicious has plenty of users to make the service seem worthwhile. The extensions for the services are similar. Both let you view bookmarks stored at the site without having to navigate to the page. Both allow users to easily add sites from the browser. They also work well with Firefox’s built-in bookmarks with a setting that allows bookmarks to be duplicated in both places. Both are indispensable for users who want to share their bookmarks and find cool new sites.

Edit Middle 2 and Cybersearch- Now, the most obscure extensions covered here. These are not flashy but are very useful. Firefox 3 gave us the “Awesome Bar”—a toolbar that is significantly less stupid than its predecessors in every browser released up to that point including Firefox 2+. Now, anything you type in the location bar is searched against URLs and titles of pages in your bookmarks and history. You may notice that searches are halted if you edit letters in the middle of whatever you have typed. Edit Middle 2 fixes this strange behavior and allows search to persist even if you correct a mistake in the middle of your typing. Cybersearch allows the “Awesome Bar” to search one more source: Google. Fantastic additions to an already stellar feature.

Read It Later- You may often find yourself with stories in your feed that are going to require more time and attention than you have at the moment. Read It Later allows you to organize pages and stories such as these. It uses Firefox’s bookmarking but tags the bookmarks you create with it so that it can include them in your reading list—a list of pages you would like to read at some point. Once you have read the page, you can add it to the permanent bookmarks, add it to a number of social news and bookmarking service, or simply mark it as read removing it from your list and bookmarks. This extension also offers syncing of its bookmarks, but you won’t need that if you’re also running Xmarks. The coolest feature of Read It Later is that, upon installing it, your Google Reader will incorporate a Read It Later button next to each of your stories making it easy to mark stories from the RSS reader for later review.

Tab Mix Plus- Firefox tabs are an amazing feature the browser thrust into popularity years ago. The browser’s native implementation improves with each release, but there are still some missing features. That can all be remedied with the Tab Mix Plus extension. You will now have a range of tab options you probably never before considered but soon will be unable to live without. My favorite option is the ability to choose which tab receives focus after you close one. I prefer the opening tab since I usually want to continue surfing that page after diverging to one of the links on it.

Stop-or-Reload Button- Here’s another small and simple extension that is really worth quite a lot. You may soon find that toolbar real estate is a premium in your newly tricked-out browser. This extension reclaims the space of one button which can be devoted to something more useful. How often do you need simultaneous access to both the stop and reload buttons? (That was a rhetorical question. You never need that, of course.) You only need to stop while a page is actively loading. Otherwise, you will instead have access to the reload button.

Download Statusbar- If your travels on the ‘net end up netting you any new files on your computer, you are probably somewhat frustrated with the fact that Firefox wants to pop up a new window when you start a download. It’s annoying. More annoying still is the fact that I have to switch between two windows to track my downloads while continuing to surf. The Download Statusbar puts your downloads at the bottom of the current window in a clean little bar above the status bar. When you aren’t downloading, it goes away. It’s much more elegant than Firefox’s default download manager.

Customization tips

You may find your interface a bit bloated if you install all of these and keep their default settings. You may customize the interface by right-clicking on an empty spot on the Firefox toolbar (try between the location bar and the search bar).

From this menu, you may disable toolbars or click Customize to start rearranging toolbar buttons. I usually end up with all bars hidden except the navigation bar and the bookmark bar. If there are buttons from another bar I want to use, I click the customize option and drag those from their current bar to either the navigation bar or the bookmark bar. Then I hide the other bar to save space. If you’re a Windows user, you can drag your bookmark toolbar to the top of the window next to the menu bar (You know the one. File, Edit, etcetera.) then hide the dedicated bookmark toolbar. Of course, if you’re a Mac user and don’t use the bookmark toolbar, you can just hide it without losing anything. This will save even more space. The key here is to get as much functionality into the smallest space possible to leave the most room for the actual browsing!

I hope you enjoy these tips. These extensions have really made the significant time I spend in my browser much more enjoyable and productive. If you’d like to recommend an extension or a tip for other web junkies like yourself, just drop us a comment!

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Netbooks have reached an amazing level of popularity in a very short space of time. In 2008, the netbook saw a 3,000% increase in sales over 2007. In the third quarter, netbook sales even outpaced those of the iPhone. To the average consumer, the choice is a simple one: I can go with a 15″ laptop for $600 or a 9″ netbook for $300. However, many netbook buyers are now learning that comparing a netbook to a notebook is not apples to apples.

In two years, the netbook will be another technology we look back upon and laugh like physics cards. The dominoes are stacked and ready for the fall. Here are the problems:

The original idea behind netbooks is that they would work primarily with web-based applications. This explained away concerns about low-speced builds. However, this was evidently a barrier for consumers who wanted to continue working with their desktop applications which require both processing power and memory to support the application along with storage space to keep saved documents and files. The evidence: manufacturers found soon after releasing the netbooks with Linux-based operating systems that users demanded the Windows-based operating systems instead. It also happened that Microsoft, no doubt feeling threatened by the growing popularity of a subset of computers incapable of running Vista, decided to resurrect Windows XP for distribution on netbooks. The web is virtually identical from Windows to Linux. Sure, people hate change no matter how small, but it seems to me that if users buy these machines with the expectation that the applications they are using are going to be primarily web-based, it wouldn’t be an issue. Also, the meager SSD offerings were seemingly insufficient as almost every new netbook coming out ships with a traditional hard drive. Why do I need 160GB hard drive to store my data in the cloud?

The processor, already a meager 1.6GHz, is throttled back to 500MHz for power savings. I’m all for power savings, but this seems a little extreme. Certainly road warriors will appreciate the longer battery life, but this comes at a great performance cost. It seems that much of the battery life gain will be utilized waiting for applications to load and complete processes.

To steal a phrase from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block of the gdgt podcast (who, I think, stole the phrase from someone else), netbooks are a race to the bottom. There is tremendous downward price pressure in this hardware category. This is great for the consumer… up to the point at which manufacturers can no longer offer lower prices for the hardware. At this point, they begin to explore more devious ways of externalizing the cost of these notebooks. You may remember the days of cheap computers with an AOL or CompuServe contract. Well, those days are back in the form of cellular data contracts. Who can resist a $99 computer with a two-year Verizon contract?

As consumers demand more from netbooks, the definition becomes muddied. We are already seeing netbooks in 10″ and 12″ configurations blurring the line between netbook and notebook. SSD has been mostly scrapped in favor of standard hard drives. Other manufacturers (I’m looking at you, Sony.) are releasing netbooks that they refuse to call netbooks in order to break out of the restrictive price constraints.

Ultimately, the problem is a misconception about what a netbook is meant to be. The netbook is really targetting geeks who already have a desktop, already have a real laptop (for doing real work), and want something to fill the gap between. Even this is a problem since most of these geeks have smartphones that are slowly becoming more and more capable of basic web-based tasks. The general populace sees this thing that looks like a small notebook and is offered at an attractive price. They believe it must be a notebook computer. Strictly speaking, it is, but it isn’t the workhorse a traditional notebook can be. This misconception leads to lots of sales on the frontend to average users who think they are getting a bargain, but it will not be sustainable as they recognize their error. An alternate scenario is that netbooks will slowly creep in price and performance to the point they are indistinguishable and thus will cease to exist. Either way, stock up on those cute little netbooks while you can. In 18 months or so, they may be much more difficult to find.

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From Brick to Slick: A History of Mobile Phones

Games

Cheapassgamer.com- Maybe you want to save $5 or $10 on a game that’s launching soon. Maybe you want to find a heavy discount on a game that’s been out for a few months. Maybe you want the details on an upcoming game clearance at a retail chain. Cheapy D and the forum folks at CAG will hunt down the craziest deals and provide you with all the details. This site has been around for a while, and I don’t think they ever really miss. If there’s a deal, check out these forums and you will find it.

CheapCollegeGamers- Another forum for gaming deals. I only discovered this one recently. My favorite thing about it: the RSS feed is updated more frequently than that of Cheapassgamer and hits more of the deals where CAG only includes maybe one stellar deal per week. This feed has multiple deals every day. A great candidate for your Google Reader.

Half.com- eBay bought this site a few years ago. Almost yearly, eBay announces the site will be shut down, but the users just aren’t having it. So, the site survives. It is a marketplace for games, movies, books, and music. It’s sorta like eBay, but everything is Buy-it-now. All the auction foreplay is dispensed with. One really nice feature is the pre-order feature (now called Match My Price). Go to an item page, click Match My Price, and enter your desired price. When a seller lists an item, they will see they can sell it immediately for your requested price. If they choose to do so, it’s over. The item is yours and they are paid. You can set expiration for your pre-order for as little as two weeks, and you will receive e-mail updates to remind you that the pre-order is active. You can also manually cancel it at any time.

Gadgets and Gear

Woot- I’ve covered this one before, but this article cannot pass without mentioning it. Woot will give you one daily deal on a product. Most products are geek-friendly although there is the occasional golf club or espresso machine.

Slickdeals.net- The site has deals on all types of items, but much of what is posted is tech related. The RSS feed is great, but I find the deals are sometimes expired by the time they hit my reader. I guess if you really want to be thorough, you will have to keep the site open and spam refresh.

[H]ard|Forum- These are the forums of an excellent computer hardware site HardOCP. Check out the Hot Deals and the For Sale/Trade forums for nice prices on computer hardware and gadgets. You may find some gaming stuff here too. I actually came away with a 3DO console for practically nothing.

I know there are many more sites I may have missed. That’s where you come in! Post in the comments your favorite deals sites or even techniques for getting great prices on your geek gear. You may see an episode of the podcast in the coming weeks with some advanced online shopping techniques that will completely automate the process of finding deals online! Subscribe to the site feed or the podcast (iTunes) to stay informed.

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He uses only software and hardware included with his Macbook to record his tunes and distributes them online via rifflet.com. If you have a Macbook, you can follow his exact procedure to record and distribute your tracks. If you have a PC, he suggests the free and open-source audio recording program Audacity. This can really be done with any kind of computer along with a microphone… even if it’s a cheap one! Like I said, the goal is not to build a home studio but to quickly and economically digitize your music and get it heard.

Colin also recorded a screencast showing his recording and uploading process to make things even easier on you.

Be sure to check out Colin’s other tracks on rifflet. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of his music to see updates in your feed reader when he posts a new song. If you need further information or have questions, you can e-mail him @ appletofu [at] gmail [dot] com.

Download the podcast

• Quicktime HD
• Quicktime Standard
• iPod
• MP3 (audio only)

Links

• rifflet.com
• Colin’s rifflet page
• Audacity

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2. Video: Making an ethernet cable
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I’m really liking the app thus far, but I do question the utility of it. The one feature I gain over managing my queue at the site is offline access. I can make changes to my queue, and they are updated to the site the next time I have an active connection. Frankly, I don’t often find myself using the computer without Internet access, but there is something to be said for the convenience of a quick, desktop app to accomplish a task that would otherwise be done in a somewhat slower web app that I will first have to actually load in my web browser. I’m going to give it a few weeks and see how (and if) this app makes sense for me. I suggest you try it too!

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This method will allow you to resize your partition, and, with just a little extra work, restore everything back to it’s former state after having created your new and larger Windows partition. You’ll need some software and (possibly) some hardware to get started. Download and install both WinClone and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both of these applications are free. Have a Windows XP CD at hand (just in case). You may also need an external hard drive for one of two reasons: First, you will need enough free space to store an image of your entire Windows partition. If you have that much space on your drive already, you won’t need the external drive for that purpose. Second, you may need to repartition your entire hard drive and restore even your Mac partition from an external drive in case the MacOS is unable to recreate your Windows partition after merging the old partition back into your Mac partition (This happened to me just the last time I resized so it is not infrequent.). If you end up needing a drive for this reason and don’t have one, you may have to do without a Windows partition until you can procure a drive. If you’re OK with this, feel free to start the process without an external hard drive (assuming you have adequate free space to image the Windows partition). If you run into both issues, you may need two drives to get you through. If you’re looking to buy a drive, I like the Western Digital Passports as a nice portable external drive (500GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB).

Once you have the software installed and the necessary hardware at hand, you’re ready to begin.

Fire up WinClone and point it toward your existing Windows partition. You can tell you have the correct partition by the “Total size” field in the program.

Image the partition to a location on your Mac partition (if you have the space) or on your external drive. This will take a little while.

Once you have the image, go into your Boot Camp Assistant in /Applications/Utilities/’

Click “Continue” from the first screen. Next, select “Create or remove a Windows partition” and click “Continue” again. Now, it will tell you that your drive will be restored to a single Mac-formatted partition. Don’t get scared because we have an image of everything in the Windows partition that will be deleted. You won’t lose data (or savegames .

Once the restore is complete, relaunch the Boot Camp Assistant. This time you want to create a Windows partiton. Size it however you like. Start the creation process. This is where the steps will fork a bit. If it is able to create the partition, you’re in luck because you’re almost done. Just relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If Boot Camp Assistant fails to recreate the Windows partition, you’re in for a few more hours of work. First, connect your external drive. If you had to put the image of your Windows partition on an external drive, you will need a separate one for this backup.

We need to make sure it is formatted properly to be bootable on your Mac. Run Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/. Select your external drive (the drive not the partition) from the left-hand pane. Select the “Partition” tab on the right. Under “Volume Scheme:” select “1 Partition.” Click the “Options” button at the bottom.

If your drive is a PC-formatted drive, the “Master Boot Record” option will probably be selected. Select “GUID Partition Table” instead. This is the magic setting that makes a drive bootable on an Intel Mac. This is very important later on as this drive will not only be your backup of your entire Mac drive but the OS you will boot to in order to format and restore to your internal drive. Click the “OK” button.

Now click the “Apply” button to start the format process. Once this is complete, start up Carbon Copy Cloner.

Select your Mac partition as the source disk. The destination will be your external hard drive. Click the “Clone” button to start the process. Depending on how much data you have, this may take a while. You should probably fire up the Xbox 360 or maybe a movie or something. Maybe you could go out to eat!

Now that we have your entire drive backed up, we need to boot to the backup so we can reformat the original drive. Leave your external drive connected. Restart your Mac and hold down the “Option” key after you hear the chime. You should see your external drive among the other connected bootable drives. Click on the external drive.

The OS should boot and look just like it would if you had booted from the internal drive. Fire up Disk Utility again (/Applications/Utilities/). This time, select your internal drive from the left-hand pane. Click the “Erase” tab. Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click the “Erase…” button. Click “Erase” in the dialog box to confim. This shouldn’t take long. Once the drive is erased, start Carbon Copy Cloner again.

This time around, the source disk is your external drive; the target is your internal drive. Click clone. This will take about as long as the initial clone.

Once the clone is completed, restart the Mac. Hold “Option” after the chime and boot to the internal drive. Now, boot to your internal drive. Start the Boot Camp Assistant (/Applications/Utilities/) and create a Windows partition. If you want your XP partition formatted NTFS, you’ll need to insert your XP disc and allow the computer to start the installer. You need only let the Windows installer format your partition. There’s no need to proceed with the install. If you just want to use the FAT32 file system created by default by Boot Camp, you can skip this step.

Boot back into MacOS. The rest of the steps are the same as the steps following a successful re-creation of the Windows partition. I will copy and paste them below for your convenience. Relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If you had to take this fork, it was a long road, but you’re here at the end. Congratulations! Now, get to installing some more games (or productivity apps if you must).

I realize there are programs to do this automatically for you, but those cost money. If you’ve just laid down $50 on that hot new game, you probably don’t have much more cash to buy a program to do something you may only ever do once or twice. This method, although convoluted, will get you there mostly for free. Do you have an easier method (or can you refine mine to make it better)? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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