For those of you who haven’t tried ooVoo yet, I highly recommend you do so! ooVoo is a video conferencing application like Skype, only much, much better! If you have friends, relatives or colleagues across the country or world you wish to talk to, you simply can’t do better than ooVoo.

I’ve run it on all of my Windows machines with no issue, and it works great. But today I had difficulty trying to install it on my MacBook Pro. However, thanks to Elliott Lee, I managed to solve the problem. So, I figured I’d pass along the solution as well.
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Have you ever had a computer for a long time and then wanted or needed to move all your data to a new one? Or, have you ever had to reinstall Windows just because you’ve loaded so many programs that it’s caused your computer to crash so often that you’re willing to start over? Well, what would you say if I told you it is possible to take a “snapshot” of your entire computer and move or copy the data to another machine in minutes so you can continue right where you left off.

Well you can, and it’s not something that is “coming soon”, it’s here today and has been here for at least a couple of years. The technology is called Virtualization, and there are several software vendors who provide the capability to allow you to do this on any operating system - Mac, Linux, or PC.

Before you ask me “why would I want to virtualize my computer”, let me share a few reasons:

• Portable workspaces - virtualization allows you to move your entire digital workspace from one physical machine to another. You can even use an iPod or USB memory sticks to host a virtual machine!
• Testing and training - rather than loading all kinds of unknown software into your normal computing environment, you can have a virtual machine just for testing. Heck, you could have one for games, one for personal computing, and one for work!
• Disaster recovery - if you always keep a recent backup of your virtual machine, say… on a portable USB hard drive, even if your computer dies you’ll be able to pick back up exactly where you left off without having to reinstall everything.
• Consolidation - Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.

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As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the Mac. I’m a PC power user, so I can happily do anything within Windows, and don’t find the need to feel special about myself by standing out from the crowd by purchasing a computer that has miniscule market share.

Having said all that, for those of you that have been living under a rock, Apple has just launched a pretty cool new laptop that is only about a half an inch thick. The presentation of the new machine was done in typical Apple style - that means, perfectly launched. Just watch the video to see what I mean.
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For those of you in the “Mac Camp” who are forced to work on a PC everyday (you know who you are) here is a little program you can use to make your PC feel more like home…
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