Hasta La Gadget!

Unwrapping a nice lustworthy gadget only to learn that some crucial part is sold separately can be a major drag. But exercise patience: It’s dumb to run to the first open store for HDMI cables and extra game controllers.

Beware of the Upsell

It’s something worth repeating every holiday season: When retailers take a hit on TVs, they often make up the difference on ridiculously overpriced extras. You may find a genuine deal or two on a big ticket item at a giant tech retailer like Best Buy, but, as far as I am concerned, you would have to be a damned fool to buy any of their extras and accessories. You know about HDMI cables, but there’s a lot more profit-driven accessorizing where that came from.

Even if you already did buy the accessories needed for your gadget gifts, go online and do some calculations before you toss out those receipts. You may want to return them when you see how much you could have saved. As for late shoppers—listen up. Getting batteries, cables, controllers, mounts and other necessities can really nickel-and-dime your holiday budget. Time may be running out to shop, but that doesn’t mean you should allow retailers to take advantage of you.

Let’s go over this again. Retailers like Best Buy are not above bending you over with sucker warranties and massively overpriced or deceptive services.

And how about those high-margin extras? For example, I selected a random low-profile wall mount from Sanus designed for HDTVs measuring 30 to 60 inches diagonal. It’s the kind of wall mount the average Joe would probably select for their new TV—a TV they may well have got a reasonable deal on. Best Buy is selling it for $169. Buy.com is selling it via Amazon for $94 with free shipping. Guess what, Best Buy—bite me. I can wait for the UPS guy if it means saving $75 or more.

The Rewards of Patience

So, I have to ask: Is the convenience worth spending $50 or more on that “high quality” 6-foot HDMI cable upsell in a store when you can get basically the same performance from a $3 version (shipped) from Amazon? Best Buy’s cheapest 6-foot HDMI cables will still run you $13. Even discount giant Walmart can’t get anywhere near the prices you can find online at places like Amazon and Monoprice. When you consider all of the various cables you might need to buy for your gadgets this holiday, the costs can really add up. My advice with cables is to suck it up, shop online and and wait if necessary.

For other products, you may not need to wait for an online shipment because the best price is just up the road. I don’t know why anyone would spend $50 on a wireless Xbox 360 controller and $100 on a wireless-N adapter at Best Buy when they can hop in the car and head to Walmart and get them for $38 and $83 respectively. I know shopping can be hectic, and I understand why you would just want to get it over with, but saving money is going to be worth the inconvenience. As always, it is best to do your price comparisons before heading out. And if your local store is sold out, you can always order them.

Other Extras You Might Need

Now that you’re good and aware of the nature of this problem, let’s go over all of the things you might still need, even after Santa has left the building.

Batteries: I don’t expect you to order batteries online last minute, but the good news is that you can probably find great prices in your area. We recommend Duracell rechargeables, but if you try and pick up a basic 6-hour charger with 4 AA batteries from Best Buy, it is going to run you $28 compared to $20 at Target. Futhermore—if you already have the charger or are buying it separately—a 4-pack of extra pre-charged NiMH AAs runs you $18 at Best Buy and only $13 at Target.

Storage: Everyone who buys a new computer or even upgrades their OS suddenly finds themselves in need of a backup hard drive. Generally speaking, a big ole USB desktop unit is the best value. The going rate for a 1TB brand-name USB 2.0 drive is around $100, and while Amazon, NewEgg and Walmart all beat Best Buy on price in some ways, only Walmart, strangely enough, offers either the 1TB Seagate FreeAgent desktop drive or the 1TB WD My Book desktop drive for $99.

If you have several computers (especially with different OS platforms), you’re going to want to check out setting up a network drive or array. We really liked the Iomega’s Ix2-200 as a cheap but full-featured NAS solution. I actually ended up picking one of these up myself for about $40 off list at Amazon, but you can find a slightly (and I do mean slightly) better deal on Next Warehouse right now. NewEgg also has a great reputation for good prices on storage devices. In this case however, they come in third because of shipping charges.

Powerline Networking Kit: If you’re getting a connected Blu-ray player, TV, Roku Box, game console, HD media player or other assorted networked thingamajigs, you may want to think about a powerline adapter, like Linksys’ PLK300. It’s a simpler and usually more broadband friendly alternative to Wi-Fi. But the PLK300 sells for $155 on Best Buy and a shocking $169 at Walmart. Amazon will hook you up for $122, but if you don’t mind a little risk, NewEgg has an “open box” offer for $93.

Bags and Camera Packs: There are countless options when it comes to cases and bags for your gadgets, but one of our faves is the Timbuk2 HAL backpack. It has all of the storage you would need, and you can score it for as little as $96 on Amazon shipped. In other stores, it might cost as much as $120. eBags also has the Timbuk2 for $96 with a free 2-day air upgrade. Some cool bags aren’t as easy to find on sale—Matt loved the Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home camera bag, and we can’t really find it anywhere (respectable) for under $80.

Gadget Cases: When it comes to cases for iPhones and iPods, profit is the name of the game, so be careful about any potential screwings. Our best advice is to try doing generic searches—instead of a brand name, type in “silicone iphone case” or “rugged iphone case” and weigh your options. For the former, Amazon and NewEgg yield a huge selection of cases in the $15, while Walmart only shows just two $20 cases, and Best Buy has a similar two, for $25 a piece. A combination of thinking—and thinking ahead—is what works here.

iPhone and Smartphone Car Mounts: With many of us relying on our cellphones for GPS guidance these days, a good car mount is becoming essential. Unfortunately, those fancy iPhone docks with a GPS-boosting receiver like the TomTom and the Magellan are pretty overpriced (especially when you have GPS already built into the phone), and besides, they’re in pretty short supply, as is the official car mount for Droid phones. So where does that leave you? Well, it leaves you with a lot of basic, no-frills options that do the job just fine. For the iPhone, you could get something as dirt-ass cheap as this $6 windshield mount from DealExtreme. Here’s a secret, the Droid fits in many iPhone docks, especially ones that hold at just one end. But if you’re gonna fudge it, go cheap, or else hold out for the official dock.

In-Car Phone Chargers: Don’t ever ever ever spend money on specialized, phone-specific chargers if your phone happens to charge with USB. That’s just a con. Just take the same cord you plug your phone into your computer with—regardless of whether you have an iPhone, a Droid, a Pre, really anything “smart”—and plug it into one of these super-cheap 12V USB adapters. Griffin’s dual-USB one sells on Amazon for $7.50. With all the money you can finally save not buying proprietary car chargers, you may just want to buy a few of those, and while you’re at it, stock up on extra USB cables.

Universal Remotes: You can get cheap universal remotes anywhere, but if you want something more high end, the Logitech Harmony 900 should fit the bill. On Amazon it’s $280 shipped. How about Best Buy? Oooh, $380. See a pattern developing here?

As I mentioned in my recent article championing the HTPC, you can get something as simple as the HA-IR01SV from Mediagate to control Windows Media Center for only $25.41 shipped from Amazon. If you absolutely need it now you will have to pay a few extra bucks at Walmart.

Conclusion

When it comes to buying all of those extras for your holiday gadgets this year, my advice is simple: Use common sense and don’t settle. Stores like Best Buy, Staples, Office Max and Gamestop are probably not the places you want to go to score your accessories. Look at the local discount stores like Walmart and Target first—and if you can’t find a good enough price without ordering online, you’re just gonna have to wait it out. As tough as that might be with a new gadget to play with, the savings will be worth it.

And if any of you have come across any good deals of your own on stuff to make your gadgets run at 100%, just throw them into comments—with pricing and a photo, if possible.

Image via Link

Crouched behind a thin eucalyptus tree on a crisp Saturday morning, I peer through my gun sight. I spot someone running through the woods. I aim for his head. And fire. The robotic voice in my gun says “CASUALTY”.

My quarry stops and looks around confused, but makes no effort to take cover. So I resume firing until my gun yells “Arrrrrrgh!”, signifying a kill shot. The LED lights on my opponent’s head flash red and he raises his gun into the air. This little tree is proving to be the perfect spot for ambushing attackers. I maybe kind of like pretending to kill people.

——————

Today is BattleSFO, a day-long laser tag capture-the-flag tournament. The field of conflict is a hilly eucalyptus grove in San Bruno, CA, 45 minutes south of San Francisco, in Juniperro State Park. There are about 30 people here broken up into platoons of 5 to 7. Each player is dressed to the nines in varieties of camouflage, some with black war paint under their eyes. They’re not quite as geeky as I had expected them to be. Then again, this isn’t exactly the kind of laser tag everyone played as kids. The gear is bigger and badder, even if the players are not.

Almost the entire crowd of mostly men has never played laser tag outdoors before. For the most part they’re very friendly, though a little shy when I ask them about themselves. One team is made up of four guys who went to college together — an electrical engineer, a carpenter, and an options trader. Another team makes up a local rock band (they seem more interested in drinking beer and running around the woods in battle gear then actually playing to win.) Then there’s a group of three middle-aged Asian gentlemen and one of their sons who get together regularly and compete. They found the game on Meetup.com. Raymond Wan, who convinced the others to join him in the woods, explains that normally they play paintball. “The weapons and radio communication make a big difference,” he says. “I’m a strategy person. This is more fun.”

But among the beginners are some veterans of ray gun war.

The general of these mini-gorilla-armies today is Ziggy Tomcich. Earlier in the morning Tomcich performed his duties as the event’s organizer, scurrying around the picnic table area, AKA central command. He’s sort of a goofy guy, but his excitement was palpable and I couldn’t help but giggle a little bit in anticipation of getting my hands on these fake guns and peering down the sight at some unknowing adversary. As I watched Tomcich untangle headsets, distribute color-coded headbands, and make sure everyone was checking in correctly it was clear that, though his day job is as an audio engineer for the San Francisco Opera, playing laser tag is his true passion in life.

Tomcich has been playing the game since he was a teenager. Running around the Photon indoor arena in Baltimore at 15, Tomcich got hooked. After graduating college he took a job as a designer, marketer, and consultant for several arenas around the country. Then, in 2006, Tomcich took laser tag to the next level. Playing in Armageddon games in the UK and Sweden, where players compete in 3-4 day tournaments, Tomcich played outdoor laser tag for the first time. When he returned to San Francisco, Tomcich realized that the city lacked the kind of gaming he really loved. Being outdoors and playing laser tag was something, he felt, everyone should do.

“To me, laser tag is an extreme sport,” he says. For him, part of the fun and the reason why he started his event website SFLastag.org, is the idea that the game is simple to play and creates a highly social environment. “Unlike most other sports, first-time players in outdoor laser tag can do quite well against seasoned players. It’s more about strategy and tactics.”

Before the first battle “Cypher,” aka Todd Robinson, who co-owns SpecOps Live Play, a central California company that provided the artillery, gave everyone a rundown of their equipment. SpecOps imports their guns from an Australian company called Battlefield Sports, essentially an arms dealer that deals in toys. The company custom builds 10 different models of gaming weapons from sniper rifles to sub machine guns – all equipped with real-world laser sights, speakers for feedback, and sensors to keep track of game stats. Guns can emulate any of 69 models down to recoil, and fire and reload rates and muzzle flashes (LEDs, essentially). SpecOps has brought M4 assault rifles, sub machine guns, carbine rifles, and sniper rifles.

During Robinson’s speech, Tomcich chimed in: “Do not aim your gun at non-laser tag players. These guns don’t exactly look like Hasbro.” For this game every weapon has 99 clips of 50 rounds. Those with smaller guns reload in about 5 seconds, the bigger ones about 7-10 seconds, so Robinson recommended taking cover while reloading. “The ‘bullets’ will bounce off of pavement,” he says. For this game they’ve disabled friendly fire. But when they hit the laser targets velcro’d to heads that belong to enemies, the guns vocalize the action like weapons with built in sports announcers synthesizing current status of prey as “casualty”, “killed” or “already dead”.

As he went through the briefing, the look on Robinson’s face was more serious then anyone in the eucalyptus grove. Listening to him describe each weapon and how they worked made it clear to me that, though some people are here to play a game, for others laser tag is a way of life. In other words, I better take good care of his guns.

Honestly, the weapons are a little intimidating. First off, they’re huge and I’m, well, I’m little. The guns are so heavy, in fact, that I opted for the smallest one I could find. I was also one of two girls on the field. Cypher’s father, who co-owns SpecOps, told me that women actually tend to fair better at this type of laser tag then men. Women, he said, will hang back and think tactically about the game. Guys sometimes have a tendency to run out out commando-style and shoot at everything they see. My tactics were set: I’d wait for my enemies to come to me.

The game starts and I take up position. When I shoot people that happen upon my trap, they stood still, look around, and fired recklessly without making much effort to take cover. Those I shoot over 20 times are killed, sent back to the respawn area (AKA Command Center, AKA picnic tables) where Robinson will reset them, reactivate their ordinance and send them back into the fray.

The battle heats up. Despite my overall aversion in life to things that require running and exercise, the real-world feel of this whole day is bringing up the competitor in me that normally only emerges when I’m shit-talking people during video games. It is unclear who is winning at the moment; the command center tracks the flag movement via new GPS-tracking system and the PC that also handles all the on field comms.

But no one is listening back at HQ. The General Tomcich isn’t attending to the computer anymore. Instead, Tomcich’s standing across from me in the grove defending our Purple flag from capture. “We’re encountering heavy resistance,” we can hear over the radio. “Wear them down,” a player shouts. Minutes later our fellow Purple team members come running through the brush holding a flag. Our opponents are not far behind. But they’re too late. This round is ours.

Erin Biba is a San Francisco-based Correspondent for WIRED Magazine who writes about science, popular culture and beer made from primordial yeast. Follow her on Twitter.

Given carrier reputation and our own iPhone call drops, we were pretty surprised to discover, through careful testing in 12 markets, that AT&T’s has pretty consistently the fastest 3G network nationwide, followed closely—in downloads at least—by Verizon Wireless.

Let’s get this straight right away: We didn’t test dropped voice calls, we didn’t test customer service, and we didn’t test map coverage by wandering around in the boonies. We tested the ability of the networks to deliver 3G data in and around cities, including both concrete canyons and picket-fenced ‘burbs. And while every 3G network gave us troubles on occasion, AT&T’s wasn’t measurably more or less reliable than Verizon’s.

It was measurably faster, however, download-wise, in 6 of the 12 markets where we tested, and held a significantly higher national average than the other carriers. Only Verizon came close, winning 4 of the 12 markets. For downloads, AT&T and Verizon came in first or second in nine markets, and in whatever location we tested, both AT&T and Verizon 3G were consistently present. If you’re wondering about upload speeds, AT&T swept the contest, winning 12 for 12.

The Cities

Last year, we did an 8-city coast-to-coast test, and called Sprint the big winner. This year, we have results from 11 cities coast-to-coast, and even got to test (during what was otherwise vacation time) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Also, unlike last year, we were able to test T-Mobile’s new 3G network, active in all the markets we visited (except, at the time, Maui). For being such a latecomer, T-Mo did well, and the numbers show even more promise from them.

We tried to spread the love around this year, geographically, hitting cities we didn’t get to last year (at the cost of losing a few from ’08). Besides Maui, we hit Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco/Bay Area and Tampa.

The Methodology

Our testing regimen was based on the same scheme as last year: We picked five locations in each city, including at least one “downtown” location that was considered a suburb. The selections were arbitrary, or fixed but logical—landmarks, residences, etc. (Note: Due to timing constraints, Chicago and Maui only had three test locations.)

Our hardware consisted of two identical stripped-down Acer Timeline laptops running Windows Vista, and four 3G wireless modems requested from the carriers. We allowed them to make the choice of hardware, simply asking for their “best performing” model. Once up and running, here are the tests we ran:

• Bandwidth & Latency: Speedtest.net – Reports upload and download bandwidth in megabits per second, as well as ping latency in milliseconds. We performed this test five times at each location on each modem.

• Pageload: Hubble images at Wikimedia – A 4.42MB web page with 200 4KB thumbnails, it was fully reloaded three times, and timed using the Firefox plug-in YSlow. The three time readings were averaged.

• Download: Wikimedia’s Abell 2667 galaxy cluster photo – This single 7.48MB JPEG is a clear test of how fast you can download stuff from the cloud, and again, we hard refreshed this file three times, and measured time using YSlow for an accurate human-error-free reading.

This was a test of 3G performance. Even though Sprint and its tech partner Clearwire have intrepidly released 4G networks in half of the tested markets—Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Maui, Portland and Seattle—we only tested Sprint’s 3G network. The reason should be obvious: While we performed the test with laptop cards on PCs, it’s supposed to serve as a test of the network’s ability to deliver service to all devices, including smartphones, dumbphones and laptops. Show us a Palm Pre WiMax edition—better yet, sell 100,000 of them—and then we’ll switch it up. And while you may argue that this 3G test still doesn’t adequately reflect your experience with your iPhone, at least it’s the same network, and may serve to rule out AT&T’s data pipe as the independent cause for all those infamous dropped calls.

(On a side note, when multiple carriers release 4G networks, we’ll definitely conduct a comparative test of them all, using new parameters, and focused around laptop use.)

The Results

Now that you know how we ran the test, here are the top finishers in each market, plus some pretty bar graphs showing you how bandwidth compares.

Though we tested for uploads and downloads, we focused our additional tests on the downstream, as it’s the more important direction, in the minds of most consumers and most carriers. The anomaly there is AT&T, which has dramatically good upload bandwidth, even when its download bandwidth doesn’t keep up. Fast uploads are a priority for AT&T, and will soon be for T-Mobile, which recently turned on faster uploading in NYC, which you can see in our test results. Meanwhile, although Verizon technically came in second in uploads as well as downloads, it doesn’t seem to treat this as a major priority.

When it came to downloads, though, the competition was markedly stiffer:

Atlanta – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Bay Area/San Francisco – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Chicago – AT&T, followed by Verizon then Sprint
Denver – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Las Vegas – Verizon, followed by AT&T
Los Angeles – AT&T, followed by Sprint
Maui – Verizon, followed by AT&T
New York – AT&T, followed by T-Mobile
Phoenix – Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Portland – T-Mobile, followed by Verizon
Seattle – Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Tampa – Sprint, followed by AT&T

Is That The End?

No. We’ve compiled the following gallery with all the data from each test location in the 12 markets, so you can see on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level who won what. This also includes latency, pageload and download numbers, so you can track the performance in several ways. (The data above is bandwidth, though as you’ll see, that was generally representative of the overall performance. If a carrier was tops in bandwidth, it was usually tops in download time.) These tests are all just “snapshots in time,” as the carriers like to say, so feel free to bitch about where your experience doesn’t reflect our results. We stand by them, but acknowledge that network performance is changing all the time, and experiences very regular hiccups.

Regarding latency, you’ll notice it didn’t appear to affect actual user experience—3G isn’t really up for Modern Warfare 2, if that’s what you’re thinking—we will gladly show you latency averages, as well as pageload and file download averages, broken out for every market on the test.

Special thanks to all of the excellent testers we enlisted, Mark Wilson, Chris Mascari, John Herrman, Kyle VanHemert, Dan Nosowitz, Matt Buchanan and Rosa Golijan from our own team, along with Tamara Chadima and the indefatigable Dennis Tarwood. You guys were troopers, and I’m pretty sure FedEx either loves you or hates you. Thanks to John Mahoney for helping develop the initial tests that we’ve continually refined, to Chris Jacob for mapping all the locations, and to Don Nguyen for the mad number crunching—you truly are a spreadsheet pimp.

Note: Some of you may have noticed that San Diego is among the cities highlighted on the top illustration—and that Maui is not. The reason is that while we did testing in three great San Diego locations, one of the locations didn’t get any Sprint or T-Mobile service, and the already fairly thin dataset was rendered too compromised for any kind of usable report. As for Maui’s absence, Maui’s just too far out in the Pacific to make for a pretty map shot.

Networking is stupid. You’d think it’d be real darn easy to share stuff between PCs and Macs, but it’s not as nearly simple as it should be. So, here’s how to make ’em talk and share stuff like best friends.

What You Need

• A Windows PC (Linux dudes, you already know how to do this, right?)
• A Mac
• A router to connect them

Before we get into sharing between computers directly, are you sure you don’t just want a NAS?

Talk to Me, Girl

So, assuming that your PC and Mac are both sitting comfortably on your network, wirelessly or otherwise (if you haven’t gotten that far, you need more help than I’ll be providing right here), there are a couple of different ways for the various machines on your network to talk to each other and share files. Think of ’em sorta like languages.

• SMB (Server Message Block) aka CIFS (Common Internet File System) is Windows’ preferred network file sharing protocol, and luckily, Macs speak it, so this how your computers will most likely be talking and sharing stuff. Vista and Windows 7 use SMB 2.0, which is mo’ faster for file transfers.

• FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is one you know and love, if you’ve ever spent any time on the internet. It’s one option for sharing stuff between your Mac and PC.

• NFS (Network File System) is the protocol Unix-based systems like to use for sharing files, which both Windows and Macs can understand. A lot of NASes use it.

• AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) is like a secret language for Macs, ’cause Windows sure as crap don’t speak it. But from Mac-to-Mac, it’s what makes sharing just work (when it does).

Things That Will Help

My goal here is to show you how to share files between your PC and Mac easily, and for the most part, without worrying about things like IP addresses or diddling with your router’s settings. But! If you want to make troubleshooting easier—this kind of networking is more voodoo than science—there are a few things you could stand to know and do beforehand.

1. Know your router. Or really, know how to get into it. For most routers, punching the number soup 192.168.1.1 (Linksys, for instance) or 192.168.0.1 (D-Link, for example) into your web browser will take you to the router’s settings, where you can fiddle with things (which you hopefully already did to protect your network).

2. Make everything static. If you take your computer on and off the network a lot, odds are, your router isn’t going give it the same IP address every the computer jumps back on, because it hands those addresses out dynamically (you might recognize this as DHCP in action, if you’re wondering what that acronym refers to). For consistency’s sake, it’s not a bad idea to assign your computers static IP addresses on the network, so they’ll always have the same address—I at least give my desktop PC and Xbox static IP addresses—just in case something else is broken.

Look in the router settings for a reference to DHCP reservations or static DHCP, which is most likely under the general settings tab. Hit that up, like so, and you should see a list of computers on your network, along with their MAC addresses (an ID tied to the actual networking card in your computer) and currently assigned IP address (something like 192.168.1.102). If your computer’s already connected to the network and listed here, it’s real easy to give it an unwavering address on your network, a matter of a couple checkboxes.

If, for some reason, your computer’s not on the network and you wanna give it a static address, like 192.168.0.104, you’re gonna need to know its MAC address. On a Mac, just open the Network Utility app and select AirPort—it’s the “hardware address.” In Windows Vista and 7, go to Network & Sharing Center, and tap view status link next to your connection. Hit “details” in the pop up box and note the “physical address.” On XP, bring your network connections, double click the one you want, flip to the “support” tab, and hit details. It’s the physical address. Now that you have the MAC address for your computers, you can assign a set IP address to each one, that it’ll have every single time it’s on the network, which is a handy list to have.

Getting Ready

Okay, let’s get our machines ready. We’ll start with the Mac, ’cause it’s a little easier.

Mac
1. Setup a user account for sharing, either under Accounts or Sharing -> File Sharing in System Preferences. (Unless you just wanna log in from Windows using your regular Mac login, then you can skip creating a sharing account.) Click the little plus sign under users, and then you pull can a name out of your address book to use for the account, or setup a whole new one.

2. Open system preferences, go to sharing if you haven’t already, and check the box for file sharing. Click options, and enable AFP (if you’ve got other Macs you wanna share with) and SMB. Crucially, make sure the account you’re gonna be logging in from Windows with has SMB enabled.

3. To pick the folders you wanna share with other users, click the little plus sign and browse to the folder you wanna give access to. Maybe it’s your pictures, maybe it’s your whole Home folder. You’ll need to add each folder individually, especially if you wanna give different people access to different folders. (If you’re logging in from Windows with your standard Mac account, you’ll have access to your whole hard drive anyway.)

After you’ve picked the folder you wanna share, then you just pick the user you want to share with, and how much access you want them to have. Read-only, write-only or read and write.

4. Note your computer’s name on the local network. It’s sitting on top of the main file sharing setting page. And, if you’ve got AFP turned off, you’ll get this dialog, noting the IP address Windows users can access your stuff.

5. Go back to the main system preferences page, then click on Network. Go to the main connection you’ll be using, like AirPort, and click advanced. Go to WINS, and set your Workgroup to the same one as your Windows PCs (probably either WORKGROUP, on newer Windows machines or MSHOME on XP).

Windows 7 and Windows Vista
In Windows 7 and Vista, the Network and Sharing Center is where we’ll be spending our time. (Here’s Microsoft’s own guide, if you wanna check it out.)

1. First, make sure in your little path to the internet up top, you’ve got a picture of a house sitting between your computer the internet globe at the top. That means you’ve got it set to private network, so stuff’s a little more exposed to other computers on the network. If not, click customize to the right of the network name, and set it to private network.

2. In Vista, you’ll notice the big ol’ Sharing and Discovery section up front and center. In Windows 7, it’s under advanced sharing settings. Go in there, and you’ll want to enable network discovery, and make note of your Workgroup (so you can make sure your Mac is on the same one) which is listed here. Also, you have the option to turn off password-protected sharing, so that you don’t need an account on the machine set up for sharing. Obviously, it’s less secure, but if you prefer convenience, that’s up to you.

3. Now for some voodoo that’s not required, but it’ll make life easier and might be something you need to come back to if stuff isn’t working, because OS X and Windows shake hands like goons (really it’s about tweaking the LAN Manager Authentication Level, so OS X has an easier time connecting to Windows). If you have Windows 7 or Vista Ultimate, go to the Control Panel, then Administration Tools, then local security policy. Hit local policies, then security options, and look for Network Security LAN Manager Authentication Level. There, you want to switch it to “send LM & NTLM, use NTLMv2 session if negotiated.”

If you’re in Windows 7 or Vista Home Premium, you don’t have access to that, so you’ll need to registry hack it up. Open up regedit, and look for this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA\

Double click on LmCompatibilityLevel, and set the value to 1.

For more on this, just Google “vista mac NTVLM2.” (Sans period.)

4. Now, we’ll need to set up an account to share with. (Again, you can skip this if you’re just going to use your regular Windows login from your Mac, though you’ll need to have a password on the account for it to work best in Vista.) Go to User Accounts in Control Panel, then to Manage Accounts. Create a new account.

5. If you’re going to be logging in with your main administrator account, you can skip this step, since you’ll have access to everything anyway. For all other accounts, go to the folder you want to share, right-click on it and hit properties. Click the sharing tab, hit “share,” and then you can add users to the share list, along with their permissions. Windows will share it, and give you the network path where you can access it. Alternatively, go to Computer, right-click, and check out the system properties and note your computer’s name on the network and its Workgroup (make sure the Workgroup is the same as your other computers, it makes life easier).

Windows XP
XP’s interface feels pretty damn ancient when it comes to Networking. Anyways, it’s mostly the same stuff, just with a slightly uglier interface. I found this guide helpful when I was trying to remember where everything was.

1. Like before, you’ll need a user account and password setup. Go to control panel, user accounts and create a new one, if you need to.

2. Make sure you’re on the same workgroup as everything else—XP Home defaults to MSHOME, so if you need to change it, right-click on My Computer, hit properties, then go to Computer Name, and go to “Change” if you need to switch up the Workgroup.

3. Go to the folder you wanna share, right-click, hit properties, and switch over to sharing. Allow it to be shared over the network, and allow users to change files.

Sharing Stuff

Okay, if you’ve done everything correctly, and the gods are pleased, what you should see on your Mac in your Finder Sidebar under the Shared tab is your Windows computer. (Make sure Shared is enabled in your Finder sidebar preferences, or you won’t see it.) Then, you should be able to just click on it, enter your user account and password, and voila, you can get right at everything just like you hoped.

On your Windows 7 or Vista machine, you should be able to click Network, and see all of your connected computers, including your Macs. To login, as Ross McKillop points out, your username is the name of the Mac followed by the OS X username, like this, minus the quotes and period: “MATTBOOK-PRO/matt.” In XP, you’ll go to My Network Places or Workgroup, and it should be the same deal, though you can just stick to the actual Mac username and password. Life’s good.

Update: BTW, if you have Apple’s Bonjour—Apple’s zero configuration networking dealio, which powers music sharing in iTunes—installed on your Windows machines (it comes with iTunes), the discovery part of the guide above—the parts pertaining to locating the other machines on your network, should just work. That is, your Windows machines should just show up in your Finder sidebar and your Mac in your PC’s Networking page, though you still need the accounts setup properly to actually share stuff.

Sometimes, things don’t work like that. PCs don’t show up in the Finder automagically, you can’t login easily from your PC. Network discovery just isn’t always that reliable. In that case we go all manual mode. Remember earlier, when I had you note your computer’s name on the network and setup a static IP? That’s where this comes in handy. So, know either your computers names, or their IP addresses on your network.

On a Mac, it’s pretty simple. Go to Finder, tap command+k and punch in:

smb://computername or smb://192.168.X.XXX

The latter is the PC’s IP address, which should be something like 192.168.0.105—unless you have a weird setup—though the last two numbers of it will obviously vary. The computer name is easier and usually better, especially if you don’t have a static IP address set up.

It’ll ask you what volume to mount (what folder you want stuck on your Finder Sidebar under shared, essentially), and a login, and then you’re good to go. If prefer the cmd+k approach, you can add computers you tap a lot as a favorite, so you don’t have to type it in every time.

It’s pretty simple in Windows too, actually. Either in the Windows Explorer address bar, or the Run command type:

\\MACNAME\Folder or \\192.168.X.XXX\Folder

And it should give you the option to login there, giving you access to all of your stuff. Using the full address of the folder you’re trying to get to will help with making sure the authentication pop-up appears—otherwise you might just see automatically what’s publicly shared and not the stuff you’re trying to log into.

Shortcuts

Logging in every single time would be a pain in the dick, but luckily you can make shortcuts to this stuff. On a Mac, as Gina points out here, under Accounts, you can add a network share to login items, so it’ll connect every time you start up your computer. In Windows, you can either create a shortcut by right-clicking on the share, or you can add your Mac’s shared folder as a mapped network drive, so it’ll connect to the folder every time you fire up your computer.

Your Tips and Tricks

There is more than one way to tackle this particular angry bear, so if you’ve got your own tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our weekend How To guides.

And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let us know. Happy sharing!

Other Helpful Networking How Tos:
• How to Remote Control Your Computer From Anywhere With VNC
• How to Back Up All Your Stuff for Free, No Hard Drive Needed
• How to Kick Your BitTorrent Addiction with Usenet

The anti-iPhone. The phone that “does.” The first Motorola device that we’ve seen in years that’s downright awe-inspiring. Naturally, we’re referring to the Droid. VZW spent all kinds of money to hype up this Android 2.0 handset as the phone to get if AT&T’s 3G coverage was just too weak for your liking, and it seems to have been at least decently effective. We know the phone had its fair share of quirks right off the bat, but we’re happy to say that most of those nuisances were taken care of via firmware update. Still, we know geeks, and those suckers are never happy. If you were in charge of redesigning this thing, what aspects would you tweak? Is the slide-out QWERTY up to snuff? Is the display crisp enough? Are the transitions snappy enough? Do you wish it was impossible to turn off the “Droid” sound emission each time you received an email? Dish out your hot fury below.

How would you change Motorola’s Droid? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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