Sorry for the quality of the video.  I plan to throw up some pictures of the interior of the laptop to show how I routed all the cables and where everything is mounted, but that will have to be later.  Maybe when I get the Bluetooth module in and install it, I’ll take pictures for the touch screen mod.

But it works.  I was touch-screening my way all over my OS X installation after installing it and getting the driver installed.  The configuration utility doesn’t seem to work correctly.  Not sure if that’s a problem with the application itself or if it’s due to the fact that my installation of OS X is on unsupported hardware in the first place.

First of all, Fidohub is incredible.  I live in Maryland and the touch panel kit was sent from China.  I received it in TWO days.  Fidohub doesn’t skimp on shipping.  The package includes everything you need, including a small internal USB hub to connect other devices (if you can find space inside the S10).  All cables are the perfect lengths and the touch screen controller board/USB hub is small enough to mount to the underside of the system board with some double-sided sticky foam padding (also included in the package).  The touch screen panel itself is a very thin piece of glass with some protective plastic film on each side and a thin ribbon cable connector attached.  The controller board is well made, but due to the fact that it has to be so small and thin, be careful handling it.  There are five total cables for the touch panel controller:  one cable is soldered onto the board already and it attaches to the ribbon cable on the touch panel, another cable attaches to the USB camera connector on the system board, another cable connects to the USB camera, and then there are two additional regular USB cables to add whatever your heart desires.

Fidohub sent instructions specific to the S10.  They were fairly easy to follow, if not very thorough.  The pictures are a little grainy, which makes it difficult at times to see exactly how they routed their cables or what color wires connect to what end of the ribbon cable.  Also, the english is a bit rough, but pretty good considering some of the Chinese-to-English translations I’ve received for other products’ instructions.  You can complete the install with these instructions as long as you use your head.

Before you start the installation, make sure you have a system for retaining and labeling all screws you remove from the case.  I just used some blue painter tape.  Whenever I’d remove all the screws from one area of the case, I’d tape them all together in a little tape pouch and use a Sharpie to label the pouch with the location where I got the screws from.  That way if you come back to the laptop several days later, you won’t have to remember where everything came from and you don’t run the risk of ending up with extra screws or parts.

Also, when disconnecting cables from the motherboard, be VERY careful as they’re very thin and fragile.  I cracked my microphone cable as I was trying to remove it.  Luckily, both wire prongs were still attached and the part of the connector that broke off was on the edge, so it still connects, but it was a lesson learned.

To install the touch screen, first remove the battery, hard drive, and RAM.  There are four rubber covers in each corner of the LCD bezel.  Pop these rubber covers out AND KEEP AN EYE ON THEM!  I lost (and luckily found) three of these stupid things.  They’re small and dark so they blend it with EVERYTHING!  Remove the four screws from the bezel and use something very thin and strong to start popping the bezel off.  It is held on with several small plastic tabs all the way around.  Use a credit card or something and be careful not to scratch the case.  Once the bezel is off, we’re ready to mount the touch panel.  Clean your LCD screen at this point.  Make sure that there are no fingerprints or specks of dust, because once the touch panel is mounted, those little things will be trapped there for good.  Put the battery back into the laptop and power it up.  We need to boot it up so that we can see the edges of the screen more clearly and place the touch panel correctly so that it covers the whole screen.  Once the machine is booted up, remove the plastic protector sheet from the back side of the touch panel.  The back side of the touch panel should be the side with some thin blue plastic around the edge.  When you remove the plastic protector from the touch panel, make sure it’s clean.  Don’t touch it and leave fingerprints.  Remember, once this is mounted, they’ll be stuck there forever.  After removing the big plastic protector, remove the blue plastic from the edge of the panel.  This blue plastic covers the tape that will stick the panel to your LCD monitor.  Now, just line the touch panel up with your bright, powered-on screen and LIGHTLY place it on the silver LCD bezel.  Make sure the thin ribbon cable of the touch panel is in the upper left hand corner of the LCD, by the wifi antenna.  Make any final adjustments.  When you’re fully satisfied with the positioning, press down gently on all edges of the touch panel to help secure it in place.  You can now power off the machine and remove the battery again.

Now, we have to remove some stuff.  The touch panel is very thin, but it’s still thick enough to make replacing the bezel difficult.  In order to snug everything up without making it TOO tight, we need to remove the two metal LCD brackets, one on each side of the LCD.  We won’t be putting these brackets back on in the final assembly, so you can toss them if you want or put them in a drawer somewhere for later use.  Once those are removed, the LCD panel is free to be pulled out from the top half of the laptop.  Remove the LCD panel and then remove the foam pad behind the LCD.  It’s very sticky and will keep ripping in your hand, but it needs to be removed to help free up some space.  Once it’s removed, you can put the LCD back into the top half of the laptop.  The inside of the laptop cover will now be super sticky, which is actually a good thing because now we don’t have any brackets to hold the LCD panel in place.  The stickiness will help secure it.

Remove the screws from the bottom of the case and pop off the palm rest.  Be careful as the palm rest is connected to the system board with two cables:  one for the microphone and one for the touchpad.  Remove the two screws for the keyboard and remove it, being careful to remove the cable from the ZIF ribbon connector.  Next, remove the 4 screws from the keyboard tray and pop it off the case.  You should now have full access to the top of the system board.  Remove the single screw holding the VGA cable down and disconnect that cable from the ZIF connector. Remove the camera cable and the speaker cable from the system board and remove the two antenna cables from the wifi card.  Make sure all cables are disconnected before removing the system board from the chassis.  IF you have a bluetooth card, disconnect that cable as well.

There should be no more screws holding the system board to the case.  Grab the edge of the chassis next to the VGA-out connector and pull out slightly to help pop the edge of the system board up.  Carefully lift the system board up and out of the chassis and turn it over.  On the underside of the system board, near the area where the bluetooth module would sit, there should be a fairly small area with no major components where you can mount the touch hub controller with the double-sided sticky foam tape.  Make sure you place it very carefully as you need to route all your cables from this location.  Verify that you have enough length to run the cables to their final destinations.  The instructions show the cables routed on top of the system, but I thought it looked better to route them underneath.  Plus, there’s more room underneath as you won’t be interfering with the keyboard or trackpad.  I used some electrical tape to secure each cable to the location that I wanted it.  Be mindful of any and all screw holes, potential hotspots, moving parts (fan), etc., when routing the cables.

Once all cables are routed, you’re ready to start connecting things up.  The two cables that connect to the camera and the camera’s system board connector are easy.  The one you’ll probably have to pay attention to is the connector for the touch panel.  For that, you have to route the wires up through the hinge in the laptop.  Just follow the same path as the VGA ribbon cable and you should be fine.  You would think that it’s easier to run the wires up the side of the bezel, just like the wifi antenna cable, but not really.  You want to run the four wires BEHIND the LCD panel.  Just lay them flat and stick them to the sticky cover, and have the connector come out at the top near the wifi antenna.  Put the LCD back over the top of the wires.  Now just connect the ribbon cable on the touch panel to the connector on the wires and you’re all wired up!

Reassemble the whole thing by just going in reverse of everything you did to disassemble it.  If you want, you can try to power the laptop up before locking down all the screws, but make sure all cables are reconnected and nothing will short out on you.  Once you’re satisfied, put it all back together and tighten all the screws.  Be very careful tightening the screws.  I had one of my routed cables just a smidge too close to one of the screws of the trackpad and the system board wouldn’t lay very flat.  I couldn’t tell there was a problem until I had the whole thing almost completely assembled and was trying to put the screws in.  I had to take it all apart again to reroute that cable.  If everything goes as planned, install the driver and play with your new touch panel!

As I said above, I had trouble running the calibration tool in Mac OS X, but I’m not sure if that’s because of my wonky install on unsupported hardware or if it’s a real problem with the software.  But it wasn’t really necessary as the touchpanel was already nearly perfectly calibrated.  Now the biggest problem is finding good software with buttons big enough to touch on the screen!  I mostly wanted this touch panel so that I could run some GPS on my laptop and GPS is so much more fun with touch screens.

One word of caution:  the touch panel itself is pretty fragile.  I originally ordered a touch panel kit for a Samsung NC10 because I didn’t know Fidohub made a kit for the S10.  So I have two touch panels.  While trying to remove the NC10 touch panel from my laptop in order to mount the S10 touch panel, the sticky edge of the touch panel was just sticky enough to cause the panel to crack right down the middle.  So be careful mounting and, if need be, removing the touch panel.  Also, you might want to consider getting a protective film for it from Zagg or something.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this mod.  If you’re going to do it, set aside a couple hours for everything.  There’s no soldering or heavy modding involved, but it’s still time consuming routing all the cables and positioning everything just right.

First link is to the actual Lenovo service manual for the S9e and the S10e.  It’s a PDF file.

IdeaPad S9e and S10e Hardware Maintenance Manual

The second link is to a site that has actual instructional videos on how to take the whole freaking thing apart.

http://www.lenovoservicetraining.com/ion/S10e/index.html

After looking at these two sites, I’m not sure I’ll be able to cram this kit into the body of the S10, but it’ll be fun to try!  When I get the kit, I’ll post my progress.

Unfortunately, the camera sucks in every other regard, including taking pictures!  Now, I know that any photographer worth his or her salt will tell you that any camera can take great pictures.  It’s the person behind the camera that needs to know how to use it!  Well, this is true.  I don’t know everything about cameras.  But I do know when a camera sucks.  And this one sucks.  A point-and-shoot camera should really be good at one thing: snapshots.  People buy point-and-shoot cameras for that reason.  They want a camera that they can just turn on and take quick snapshots and get decent results.  Well, the Samsung fails at this.  In anything other than a high-noon, bright-as-hell setting, the camera falls apart.  The flash wants to pop up for every single shot.  The “hand shake reduction” feature is horrible, usually resulting in photos that are even MORE shaky looking.  It’s just a poorly implemented camera.  In order to get even a mildly decent photo, you have to mess with 10 different settings to set the camera up.  Now, on a pro-level SLR camera, that’s fine.  Those types of cameras are meant to have every setting changed.  But a point-and-shoot requiring that level of commitment just to get a workable shot?  No no no.  Taking the Samsung to Vegas and seeing the resulting pictures sealed the fate of that particular camera in my mind’s eye.  

But what to replace it with?  I wanted something that could take good pictures on the auto setting.  I wanted something that would offer me great creative control when I wanted it, but also be smart enough to take great pictures when I just want a quickie snapshot.  It would have to have certain features like auto-exposure bracketing, white balance bracketing, nice menu system, etc.  It would have to take good pictures, even in low light situations.  

My best friend did a ton of research for his own new camera and settled on the Nikon D90 digital SLR.  After seeing his camera and seeing the shots he took with it, I was sold.  He sent some pictures to me at 1600 ISO and I couldn’t believe my eyes!  The pictures were not only usable, but they were actually almost completely noise free!  Anyone who plays with digital SLRs knows that the higher the ISO, the higher the noise in the final picture, just like film.  Higher ISO films have larger grains and so produce grainier images than lower ISO films.  But the D90 took great, nearly noise-free images.  

So I was on a mission to procure my own D90.  I went online and shopped around.  I found amazingly low prices from several retailers.  Obviously, buying an expensive piece of electronics like the D90 would require some research.  I looked in to each of those companies that were selling the D90 for such low prices and, sure enough, the company in question would usually have horrible user ratings.  The companies were usually very shady, trying to upsell products, resorting to bait-and-switch tactics, and even committing credit card fraud.  Then I found Abe’s Of Maine.  I had heard of Abe’s Of Maine for years.  I knew that they weren’t just some shoddy fly-by-night operation.  They had decent prices, barely beating Amazon.  So I ordered the camera body, a lens, and a UV filter from them.  The next day, I received an email from Abe’s saying that I needed to contact them to verify my information.  That’s fine, I thought.  On a whim, I checked user reviews of Abe’s online and it seemed that Abe’s also tried some upselling tactics.  So I called Abe’s.  And I called Abe’s.  And I called Abe’s again.  Their customer service is horrible.  I’m going to say that right now.  It’s bad.  Each order is assigned to one “sales associate”.  Your order can ONLY be handled by YOUR sales associate.  If your sales associate isn’t available and you try to call the regular customer service line, they won’t deal with you.  The instant you mention your sales associate’s name, the regular customer service person will transfer you to that person’s voice mail before you can even object.  If you do manage to get a word or two out about your order to these chuckleheads, they won’t help you at all.  They just want to transfer you immediately.

So finally I got through to my sales associate at Abe’s, and I’m waiting for the upsell.  It came, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting.  He just tried to get me to buy a slightly higher priced UV filter, which would have added only $5 to my nearly $1100 order.  Not bad at all.  I still said no, and the sales associate I was dealing with didn’t press any harder.  He double checked my info and said that it would be processed and sent out.

About two days later, I got an email stating that my order had been canceled and my money was being refunded.  That’s it.  No explanation about why it was canceled.  They simply stated that the order was canceled and I’d get a refund.  Needless to say, I was a little ticked off.  I called my sales associate.  He wanted nothing to do with me.  His little part in this order was finished.  He immediately transfered me over to billing.  I got someone on the line finally and they told me that my order was canceled because my shipping address was different than my billing address and my shipping address wasn’t on record with my bank.  While I recognize that this little problem was my fault, I was still flabbergasted that Abe’s just threw away an $1100 order because of a clerical mishap.  I mean, couldn’t they have just called and told me that the address was a problem and I’d need to add my shipping address to my bank’s records?  That’s all they had to do to make $1100.  That’s it!  A simple phone call.  But instead, they chose to just up and cancel it without any notification that there was a problem.  I wish I ran a business that did so well for itself that I could just throw away money!

Anyway, after this Abe’s debacle, I just paid a bit more and ordered from Amazon.  I knew they were trustworthy.  And it came in today’s mail!

It’s an awesome camera.  I got the D90 body, the Nikon 18-200mm lens, a UV filter, and the remote trigger.  I’ve only taken a few quick shots with it just to test it out and play with it a bit.  So far, I’m loving what I see.  Gotta try movie mode…

I wish I could play with it more right now, but it’s late and I’m tired, so it’ll have to wait until later.  If you’re interested in your own D90, I suggest you check out dpreview.com for digital camera and lens reviews.  It’s a great site with a TON of articles on cameras.  They thoroughly test each camera and write extensive reviews with sample shots.  It’s worth a visit.

Finally, I think I found the solution.  I searched high and low in the registry and couldn’t find an appropriate registry setting to change that would force this automatic connection.  That meant that Windows must be storing the connection profile in a different place.  After using some file access monitoring tools, I narrowed it down to an xml file.  If you’re having a similar problem, either in Windows 7 or Vista, try the following steps:

1.  Go to the Start menu -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.  Double click on the Services icon to open the Services management console.

2.  Scroll to the bottom of the Services console until you see WLAN AutoConfig.  Right click on it and select Stop from the menu.  Wait until the service is stopped.

3.  Now, open Windows Explorer and go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Wlansvc\Profiles\Interfaces.  You should see a directory or directories in there with long names like {FBDADD33-7552-4D1E-B3B0-71C6128AFE14}.  If you have multiple directories in here, then you’ll have to hunt for the correct directory.  Follow the next steps for each directory you have until you find the directory you need.

4.  Inside the directory with the long name, there will be an xml file with another long name.  You can double click on the xml file to open it and see it’s contents.  Inside the xml file are the settings for your wireless connection, including the name and various configuration settings.  If you have multiple directories from step 3 above, then you can open each xml file in each directory until you find the one that matches your wireless name.

5.  Once you find your xml file, open it in Notepad.  There will be one setting in that file that reads <connectionMode>manual</connectionMode>.  Change the word “manual” to “auto”, without the quotation marks.  Save the file.  Don’t change the name or the location.

6.  Now that the file is edited, we need to make sure that the SYSTEM account can’t change the auto setting back to manual, which is what was happening to me.  So we need to change permissions on the file to deny SYSTEM and Administrators from being able to write to the file.  Right click on the file you just saved and select Properties.   Click on the Security tab.  Click the Advanced button.  Click on the Owner tab and click on the Edit button.  Select your user account in the list and select Apply.  You now have full ownership of the file.

7.  After taking ownership, go back to the Permissions tab.  Click on the Edit button.  Remove the checkmark from the “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent”.  A dialog window will pop up.  In Vista, click on the Copy button.  In Windows 7, click on the Add button.

8.  Now you can edit all the permissions easily.  Highlight the SYSTEM account in the list and click on the Edit button.  Check the box to DENY full control.  All checkmarks underneath Full Control will move from Allow to Deny.  Now, we can’t deny ALL permissions because the system needs to be able to READ the contents of this file, so we need to move some of the checkmarks back over to the Allow column.  Check the box to Allow the following permissions:  Traverse folder / Execute file, List folder / read data, Read attributes, Read extended attributes, and Read permissions.  Pretty much any permission that says “Read” is good to go.  Just deny all the other settings that would allow SYSTEM to write or modify the file. 

9.  Do the same things in Step 8 for the Administrators account.  After you’ve changed the permissions for those two accounts, you can apply and OK your way out of all those windows.

10.  Go back to the Services management console and start up the WLAN AutoConfig service again.  Right click on the service and select Start from the menu. 

Now, your wireless connection should start up and connect automatically and it should survive a reboot.  My wireless connection is listed as Access Point.  I’m not sure if these settings would work for Adhoc networks or other connection types, but it’s worth a shot.  Any questions, let me know in the comments.

The installation was very easy.  Removing the 4 screws from the bottom of the laptop allowed me to pop off the palm rest, which is where the adapter sits.  I removed the two screws holding the adapter in place and popped off the two antenna connectors.  After that, the adapter just came out.  Popped in the new adapter, connected the antennas and screwed the new adapter in place, replaced the palm rest and put the case screws back in.  I booted up Windows 7 and the new adapter was immediately recognized as a Broadcom 802.11n adapter.  After reconnecting to my wireless network, I’m connected at speeds over 100 Mbps, whereas the previous adapter topped out at 54Mbps. 

The only problem so far, and I’ll need to keep an eye on this, is the additional heat.  The adapter sits right under the palm rest so the additional heat from this new adapter is readily apparent.  I’ll need to make sure that I don’t rest my hand there too long!  I also want to make sure the plastic case of the laptop doesn’t melt!  So far so good though.  Maybe I’ll stream some NetFlix or do some bittorrent downloads to see how hot this thing gets.

All in all, I’d say this was a good upgrade.  If you want to do it yourself, it’s really simple to do.  You can find cheap adapters on eBay all over the place.  The S10 only has two antennas though, and some 802.11n draft cards come with 3 connectors.  Obviously, you’d only be able to connect 2 of those, unless you got really ambitious with your hardware mod and installed a full third antenna!  Just something to keep in mind.  The card I used was an actual Apple Macbook miniPCIe card using a Broadcom chipset, BCM94321MC.  Works like a charm.

1.  Driver support for the S10 is awesome.  I didn’t have to install a single driver from a third party EXCEPT for an energy management driver from Lenovo (more on that below…).  All USB ports, wireless and wired network connections, bluetooth, etc., were found and properly configured.

2.  The full Aero interface with all transparencies and effects was the default interface when I logged in, which was not the case with my previous install of Vista Ultimate.  For the life of me, I couldn’t get the Aero interface to activate in Vista even with the latest drivers, but in Windows 7, I didn’t even have to ask.  It was already up and running (and running quite quickly, too, I might add).

3.  The new icon-based taskbar is awesome and even though most people will say it’s a rip off of Mac OS X’s Dock, I can honestly say that it’s a huge improvement over any taskbars or docks that came before it.  The “Start” menu is still there and available, though it doesn’t say “Start” on it, just like Vista.  The Start menu is still your overall launching pad for your applications, so it’s not quite like the Dock in OS X, which is merely an icon-based launcher that requires you to drag icons onto the Dock if you want them to be available.  But where the new Windows 7 taskbar IS similar to the Dock in OS X is in it’s handling of open application windows.  In previous incarnations of Windows, if you had 20 Internet Explorer windows open, you’d have 20 little indicators down on your taskbar (unless you used the previously horrible window grouping feature).  Each indicator would have it’s own unique label depending on which web page was open.  Now, in Windows 7, when you launch IE, the IE icon on the taskbar illuminates, indicating that it’s active.  If you open 20 IE windows, only that IE icon is in the taskbar.  If you move your mouse over the icon and let it hover, all 20 web pages will appear as little thumbnails, akin to Vista’s thumbnail preview.  If you move your mouse over one of the thumbnails in Windows 7, that particular application or web page will be brought to the front of your desktop temporarily while all other application windows are pushed to the back.  If you move your mouse off of the thumbnail, your windows magically come back.  So Microsoft has married several technologies into one, easy-to-use device.  It’s the old Windows Start menu and taskbar, mixed with the OS X Dock and Expose feature.  It may sound busy, but it’s actually quite understated and very well done.  Even on the low-power S10, the graphics were snappy and smooth.

Overall impressions so far are pretty good.  I’ll need to play around with it more in-depth later, but so far it’s pretty good.  Like I said above, driver support was incredible.  Having installed Vista previously on this S10, I know that hunting around for good Vista drivers is a pain in the ass, but nearly all devices were discovered natively by the Windows installation.  The only item missing was an energy management driver from Lenovo.  For anyone out there installing Windows 7 onto the S10, you will probably notice a device in the Device Manager console that is not identified.  It’ll be listed under Other Devices as an Unknown Device.  If you right click on the device and go to Properties and then to the Details tab, you’ll see a drop down list with Device Instance ID or Hardware ID.  In the lower portion of the Details tab, you’ll see something like ACPI\VPC2004.  After doing a bit of Googling, I found that this is a Lenovo energy management device.  Oddly enough, the driver for this device is not located on the Lenovo site under the S10.  I had to download the energy management driver from the Lenovo IdeaPad Y730 and install that.  After I installed that driver, the device was recognized properly.

One other little problem I’m having:  Veriface doesn’t seem to work on the S10.  On the Lenovo S10 driver support page, Veriface is offered as a download for Windows Vista.  I never tried to install it under Vista so I’m not sure if it works there or not, but I did install it under Windows 7 and it’s giving me problems.  Veriface, for those who don’t know, is an application that uses the built-in camera in the S10 to do facial recognition.  This application allows you to log in to your computer simply by looking into your camera.  However, using it under Windows 7 on the S10 gives me an error.  When the computer first boots, I’m taken to the log-in.  Veriface loads and then tries to contact the camera, but after about 20 seconds, it says that no camera was found or the camera could not be contacted (something along those lines).  I believe the camera in the S10 is connected to the USB, so I’m wondering if Veriface is loading BEFORE the camera is found and fully loaded by the USB driver.  I’m wondering if I could introduce a delay or a dependency for Veriface to wait for all USB devices to be found and configured before it loads.  I’ll have to look more into that.

Anyway, so far so good.  Windows 7 is really looking tight.  I know trying to wrangle Vista onto the S10 was a bit of a chore and even after it was installed, it didn’t run very well.  Windows 7, even in beta, seems to really improve on performance while adding some awesome new features.  Windows 7 is basically what Vista should have been all along.  I can’t wait for the final product to see if the improvements featured in this beta will stick around.

When I use Mac OSX, I go up to the menu bar and open the Go menu and click on Connect To Server.  I put the info in for my server and the directory that I am connecting to.  Mac OSX prompts me for the username and password to connect.  I put in the ftpuser username and password and Mac OSX mounts the remote drive just fine.  I can see all the files and everything.  But when I try to drag and drop files from the Mac to the remote FTP drive, I get an error message saying “The file such-and-such can’t be moved because the remote directory “whatever” can’t be modified.” or something to that effect.  Now this is frustrating because the user should have full control over everything!  Full control means I should be able to write files without any problems!

The strange part is this:  I can connect through the terminal using the same logon credentials and I can put files from the local Mac to the remote drive without any problems.  When I use 3rd party software like Panic’s Transmit 3, I can drag and drop the files without any problems.  So I know the problem lies with Mac OSX’s Finder and not with the FTP setup on the Windows box.  Does anyone else have this problem with Mac’s Finder moving files to a remote FTP drive?  It’s really frustrating.  It’s like Apple deliberately tries to make networking with Windows machines difficult and then blames Microsoft for being so proprietary!  Or maybe I’m just reading too much in to it…whatever.  I don’t really care for the reasoning behind it.  I just want to drag and drop my files between the drives without problems!

I’ve had to install the IE Tab add-on for Firefox in order to be able to view my Hotmail.

What did you do, Microsoft?  How can you have more money than God, but still hire inept web developers who can’t get your own web-based email service to work in your own web browser?!

For the record, I’m using Firefox 3.0.4 and IE 6.0 SP2 on Windows XP SP2.  This happens to me both at work and at home, so I can rule out the possibility of my office proxy/content filter.  And because this problem occurs on both browsers, I can safely rule out any of the few add-ons I have installed in Firefox.

Anyone else having similar problems with Hotmail not showing up?

I also have a subscription to NetFlix.  Now, in order to stream NetFlix “Watch It Now” movies, you need the Microsoft Silverlight plugin.  So I downloaded the disk image for the 2.0 Silverlight plugin for Macs and ran the package installer.  This is where it got a little odd.  I was greeted with an error message stating that “Silverlight 2 may not be installed on PowerPC.”  I don’t have a PowerPC Mac (obviously!).  I have an Intel Core 2 Duo running in my machine.  Now, the EFi-X chip isn’t perfect.  When you click on “About this Mac” in the Apple menu, the processor is listed as an unknown processor.  Even though the processor is unknown, why would Microsoft’s package installer not recognize this as an Intel-based Mac?  Every other app I’ve installed correctly identifies this as an Intel Mac.  What funky code is Microsoft using?  They must be using some kind of simple string search, like “if not ‘Core 2 Duo’ then exit with error_string” or something like that.

Well, long story short, I found a quick and easy way around this.  

If you’re having the same problem installing Silverlight on your Intel Mac, follow these steps:

1. Close all open web browser windows for Firefox, Safari, etc.
2. Mount the Silverlight 2.0 disk image and right click on the Silverlight.2.0.pkg icon.  Select “Show Package Contents” from the menu.
3. Double click on the “Contents” folder.
4. Inside the Contents folder, there should be a file named Archive.pax.gz.  Double click on that file to decompress the file.
5. A new window should pop up displaying the decompressed “Library” folder.  Open this folder and there should be another folder inside named “Internet Plug-Ins”.
6. Open the Internet Plug-Ins folder and there should be a file inside named “Silverlight.plugin”.  Right click on this file and select “Copy “Silverlight.plugin”".
7. Now, navigate to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins on your root partition.  Paste the Silverlight.plugin into this folder.

Silverlight should now be installed for both Firefox and Safari.  After following these procedures, I was able to stream NetFlix movies to both browsers using the plugin just fine.  In fact, if you open Firefox and go to “about:plugins”, you’ll see Microsoft’s Silverlight listed.

Now, I’m pretty sure that Silverlight doesn’t support PowerPC Macs, so these procedures probably wouldn’t do anything but crash your browser if you tried it on an older PPC-based Mac.  But if you’re having this problem on an Intel-based Mac or hackintosh, give the steps above a shot.  Any problems or suggestions, post a comment and I’ll try and help out!