Day: October 31, 2009

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Online Travel Sites

Reagan National Airport

Online travel booking is easier than ever. And for us lucky folk in Washington DC with three airports (Dulles, Reagan, and BWI) there are flights everywhere and lots of deals. Below are some useful travel sites.

Travel Reservations

Travelocity – early leader in online reservations with roots back to CompuServe and AOL. Now known for the gnome commercials.

Orbitz – developed by airlines in response to Expedia and Travelocity.

ITA – uses the search system that powers Orbitz, but allows far more complex trips.

Priceline – offers standard purchases or allows you to name your own price for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Pitchman is now William Shatner.

Expedia – started by Microsoft, bought by Ticketmaster, now independent.

Hotwire – owned by Expedia. Unique in that you purchase hotels based on location and star rating. You only find out the name of your hotel after the purchase.

Kayak – travel search aggregator. Kayak does not directly sell tickets, but links to all the sites that do and makes a small amount of money on click throughs.

Bing Travel– recently renamed from Forecast.com, now owned by Microsoft. This site has flight price trends and predictions to help you decide if you should buy or wait for a better fare. It’s not perfect has helped me on a couple of occasions with suggestions to wait for a better price.

Special Airlines

JetBlue and Southwest airlines are not part of the above travel reservation sites. You can only book with them directly.

Other Resources

The Savvy Traveler Blog – deals and news by Rudy Maxa who often discusses travel on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show on NPR in DC.

Flyertalk – forum for frequent flyers to discuss deals and reward programs. This is where serious deal seekers go to discuss optimizing their points and airline status.

Liftopia – discount ski lift tickets and ski hotel deals.

TripBuzz – find local activities.

Have other travel resource recommendations? Email me to let me know.

6/12/16 UPDATES: Updated ITA Link and added TripBuzz, thanks to Phoebe.

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Windows 7 Fresh Install from Upgrade Disk

Upgrade Conundrum

Microsoft offers Full and Upgrade versions for each of its Windows 7 versions: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. To qualify for an upgrade, you need to have a copy of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. Unfortunately, anyone running Windows XP or 2000 can not do an in-place upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7. A migration to Windows 7 is needed. This can be done with an upgrade disk, which moves all your existing files to a windows.old directory. See the this Upgrade/Migration Table to see what is possible for your scenario.

Upgrade from 32-bit Windows XP of Vista to 64-bit Windows 7

If you back up your files yourself, wipe your hard drive completely, then try to install using the Upgrade disk, it doesn’t work because the Upgrade disk doesn’t see the qualifying product that you are upgrading from.

There are many other reasons to want to do a clean install. It is smart to do a clean install on such a major upgrade. Many people used the beta of Windows 7 after wiping their legal copy of Windows. Those people need a clean install but are legally entitled to use the Upgrade Disk.

Hack Time

Thankfully Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows explains how to get around this technical problem that Microsoft created. Method 1 is to just try the Upgrade activation key to see if it works. If that does not work, Method 2 explains the “hack”:

  1. Install Windows 7 Upgrade DVD and do no put in your upgrade key. Just leave the key blank and do not activate yet.
  2. Open RegEdit by going to the Start Menu search and typing regedit.exe and hit enter.
  3. Navigate on the left menu to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
  4. Double-click on MediaBootInstall and change it from “1” to “0”. Close RegEdit.
  5. Type cmd in Start Menu search to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.” Accept the UAC prompt.
  6. Type in the command line: slmgr /rearm
  7. Hit enter and wait for the completion notice.
  8. Reboot.
  9. Activate Windows with your Upgrade Key

Microsoft Upset

Microsoft is upset that this “hack” could be used to illegally install the Upgrade on computers that do not qualify for it. See Paul Thurrott’s response to this: Enough, Microsoft. No One Is Endorsing Piracy. Obviously.

Also consider that Microsoft doesn’t have to act this way. Apple realizes that activation keys do more to frustrate legitimate users than to thwart thieves. That’s one of the reasons that Apple’s operating systems have never had an activation system. Upgrades and full installs just work. Apple trusts that most of its users will do the right thing.

Windows 7 OEM Version

For technically savvy users looking for a better deal on Windows 7, this isn’t even needed. One can purchase a cheaper OEM version of Windows 7 from Newegg for building a new computer. This comes without support from Microsoft, but is a great deal for people who do not rely on Microsoft support.