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Throughout my travels I get a chance to talk to many different people. One thing that most of them has in common, they really love to complain about the local economy in Hillsdale MI. My favorite question to ask people after they start complaining, where do you do most of your shopping? Anyone care to guess the answer? Wal-Mart…..

Come on people, don’t complain about the local economy unless you are actually supporting it! Yes I know Wal-Mart creates jobs but what else do they do for the economy? Do they sponsor local little league teams, soccer teams, or the 4-H kids at the fair? The answer is no, at least not in Hillsdale.

If you want our economy to get better than start supporting your local businesses! The people that put money back into our town and support our children and school systems! There are plenty of local businesses in Hillsdale that you can get your necessities that you need and support our local business and economy. Most of your local businesses are normally competitive in pricing with the big box stores.

So that is my short rant…… don’t complain about the economy in Hillsdale unless you are someone actually supporting it or trying to support….

It’s been a very eventful year in 2009, here’s a recap of all the fun craziness, or at least what I can remember!!!

Actually everything started at the end of 2008. On December 24th 2008, Brad, Jon, and I signed the papers to purchase our new building over on Lewis St. and the excitement began. Throughout the end of December and beginning of January, we had the place somewhat remodeled for what we wanted and we were moved in. It has been so nice to have so much extra room which allows us to better server our customers!

In March I started working on our industrial computers again. On April 1st, after many redesigns and revisions, Jon and I headed to Cincinnati to test the first Dos based system and to start design on two different Windows systems. After three long days of being down there we had three new products to release into the industrial environment.

In May Ashley and I moved into our new house and had our first of many summer cookouts. It was a great time to have friends, family, and even some clients get together to have good food and just hang out. At the party Jon hurt his hand but we won’t go into that! LOL The day after the cookout was our open house at SabreTech with WCSR. It was our first open house our new building and were very excited to show off our new building. The open house was great success and it is always nice to be able to give something back to our clients as they came for food and door prizes.

In July my baby girl, Madison turned 2. She is growing way to fast which means that I am just getting old way to fast! We tried watching the fireworks for the fourth of July from our house but a tree was in the way so we decided to have our own fireworks display which was a lot better than theirs anyway!

In August Ashley and I celebrated being married 7 years. I don’t know how she has put up with me for so long already but she has and I love her! In the end of August we took a four day trip just the two of us. We headed out to New York City. Spent two nights there seeing as much as possible! It was a lot of walking but still had a good time. After NYC we headed into Philadelphia for Ashley to take some engagement photos of some friends I hadn’t seen since we graduated from high school. We had a great day and half there and then headed home. Xander also started first grade in August, I really am getting old!

In November Xander turned 6. He had his party at the house and his first sleepover with friends. He really enjoyed it and had a great time and so did we.

December, the year is winding down and it went by way to fast. It was a very exciting year for our family and a great year of memories. As for our business, we managed to still expand and grow in a slow economy. 2009 was a great year and I am looking forward to 2010 being even better as we already have some exciting things coming up!

Over the past month we have been looking at cutting some costs and part of the idea was moving away from AT&T and the iPhone and going back to Sprint. I started looking at phones and the closest phone Sprint seemed to have that compared to the iPhone was the HTC Touch Hero.

The basics……… The Hero’s touch interface is works well almost as good as the iPhone, winner is the iPhone when it comes to the touchscreen navigation. Speed, both phones seem to be about the same speed opening similar programs. The programs I opened that are similar on both the phones were twitter apps, facebook apps, calendar apps, and the web browser. Web Browsing, on wi-fi both phones are the same speed opening the web pages, on the data network however since I live in Hillsdale MI only Sprint has 3G networks here so the Hero’s browsing on the cell network is of course faster. Video quality, loading the same youtube videos on the phones, the Hero’s screen looked better and crisper. Customization, the winner here is the Hero for sure in my opinion. You get the different “pages” like the iPhone has, you can have your shortcuts on each page, but the biggest thing I like are the full screen widgets! Example, I can have my calendar on one screen all the time as full screen without having to open the app. The same goes for mail and many other apps.

Since I use an Apple the synching was going to be an issue I figured. As far as my music and pictures, it is not as easy as the iPhone was. You have to manually add the music and pictures to the micro SD card after you mount it to your system. With the iPhone of course all this is done through iTunes and it works extremely well. As far as my e-mail, calendar, and contacts….. since I use google for everything that works flawlessly on the Hero. All you have to do is set up your google account on the phone and select what you want to sync. Within 3-5 minutes over the cellular data network, all of my contacts, calendars, and e-mails where on my phone the way I wanted. Of course there is customization to how often to sync with google on both phones.

There is no true winner in my opinion. Both phones have their positives and negatives. I think a lot of it depends on where you live and how much you want to spend a month for service. For me I went with the Hero after having an iPhone for over a year. A lot of my reasons for switching was the cost savings. I was able to save a good amount of money without losing hardly any functionality that I was used too, maybe even gained some functionality!  Both phones are greats phones and you can’t go wrong with either one of them.

So we had a customer bring in an old Windows 98 system. The problem, the system was not booting, and his software will only work on Windows 98. So unless you want to spend big money, there really is not any good hardware you can buy anymore that Windows 98 will run on. So started thinking about past experiences and what we could do to solve this problem.

Solution; see if we can run Windows 98 on a virtual machine in Windows 7. Windows 7 business and ultimate come with a virtual machine built in for windows XP. According to Microsoft, Virtual PC 2007 does not run on Windows 7, but when do I ever listen to what Microsoft says? So I took our Windows 7 test machine and downloaded Virtual PC 2007 and installed. Of course I got errors saying that Windows 7 is not a supported operating system but I didn’t care! It installed and runs fine. Next was to see if we could even get it to run Windows 98 in a virtual machine. So I created the virtual machine and put in a Windows 98 machine and about 30 minutes later I had a full version of Windows 98 running in a virtual machine. So far so good! The next step was how do we get all of his programs and stuff over to the virtual machine. I did a little more looking around and found a program called Disk2VHD (VHD = Virtual Hard Disk). So I put restored an image of his old hard drive to a new drive and proceeded to make a VHD. After the VHD creation was finished, I created a new virtual machine and used the VHD I created as the hard drive for that virtual machine. I booted up my virtual machine and of course had problems! Went through and got all the drivers installed in the virtual machine, and after about 45 minutes of playing with the virtual machine, we had his complete system running on brand new hardware with Windows 7 installed.

So for those out there who still have those old programs and we can get you well taken care of!!

Over the last 18 months or so, we have been working on some specialized systems that control manufacturing machines and medical equipment. The machines have been a hit and are really starting to take off. The coolest thing about it, we have machines in many different countries across the world, not to mention in probably half of the states in the US. To us at SabreTech, that is pretty cool that systems from us are being delivered and used across the world! Just a little more proof that we are a lot more than your “small town” computer store!!!

So we had a chance to quote a large job against the evil giant Dell!! LOL SabreTech was not only able to beat Dell’s price, the fact of keeping the business local and getting our support over Dell’s made the customer extremely excited to do business with us. It just goes to show that your local computer store, SabreTech, can not only match the big store prices, our service makes the deal even sweeter! So be sure to check us out on your next project big or small!!

Welcome to the new home of Sam The Slacker….. it has been time for a change and now it has been changed…… make sure to check out what I’m doing daily by following my Twitter stream on the right. Also, be sure to check out the links on the right. Good people, great companies, and awesome products is what you will find if you click on those links. One last thing…. be sure to check out my picture uploads of family and other random things!