George Pearce - iamPearce

In recent readings around the internet, I discovered that Mozilla are planning another interface refresh for Firefox (3.7 I think). I know it’s just a prototype at the moment, but I have to say I really don’t like it. It looks an awful lot like IE8 to me, and I *hate* IE8. It’s also very much reminiscent of Google Chrome – I like Firefox how it is now, what’s with the need to change it?

Maybe it is just for Vista and 7; and maybe it’s supposed to fit into the OS more, but I like how it works now. Bit more transparency, cool, but don’t change the stuff like the buttons, which work perfectly already.

Some may rememeber that around 2 months ago I signed up for Bingodisk. This is a follow up post, with what I’ve learned, decided and discovered about the service and the tools needed to use it.

Firstly, Joyent’s support is excellent. Friendly, fairly quick, and offering as close to a solution as possible first time round, I can’t fault them.

Secondly, the service is also excellent. So far, there has only been one time when I wanted to access it and I couldn’t. That was for about 20 minutes, and then we were going again.

Thirdly, Vista’s (and Windows’ in general) WebDAV implementation sucks. It is slow, unreliable and fails intermittantly, whenever it feels like it. That’s put me off Bingo very slightly, because my only pc at the moment is on Vista. I tried it on Ubuntu, and it was perfect. Fast, reliable and good looking. So it’s Vista that messed up the experience with BingoDisk for me, really. I’ve not used Bingo all that much in the last month, mainly because I’ve not needed to. S3 has done everything I needed.

I think I have a solution, though. Stay tuned

I’ve just upgraded to Vista SP1 on my laptop (late, I know, but it just showed up in the updater). Great.

My sound card stopped working, errors showed up left right and center, and system restore didn’t work. Not so great.

I’ve fixed it now, but it just goes to show how rubbish the Windows upgrade system is. I had a look around, and Windows even posted a knowledgebase article about it, apparently it’s a problem across the whole range. However, their steps for fixing it are entirely useless. Every single step failed. I ended up reinstalling the driver, but not through Windows’ own system, oh no. That failed, “Driver installer has stopped working. Close this program”. Update failed. Pretty much everything threw up errors of some sort.

Instead, I went manually searching for the sound card driver, downloaded it, and patched the original one myself. After about half an hour of trying to follow the Microsoft instructions. Nice one, guys.

What worries me is that I’ve got 2 other Windows XP machines to upgrade to SP3 soon. Not looking forward to that.

Okay, it’s a little more than a month on, but never mind. This is a follow-up to my post here about Vista, and how crap everyone says it is. I’ve been arguing messing playing with my laptop for long enough now to write what I think about it

What I like

The look. The Vista interface is millions of times better than XP was, I think, and the new effects do it justice, it’s all very nice.

Media Center. With sufficient RAM, it runs quickly, it looks good, and does everything I want it to, (I think). It’s silly that they didn’t just build media player into it, but never mind.

What I Don’t Like

Resource Usage. When I bought this laptop, it came with a gig of RAM, and it made it pretty clear to me (as laptops do ) that it wasn’t enough. Media Center wouldn’t run properly, IE was slow, and everything was generally sluggish. Now I’ve got 2.5 in, it’s happier, but it idles on 0.75 to 1.5 gigs usage, even with nothing running.

UAC. “Vista needs your permission to do this” “vista needs your permission to do that”. VISTA! DO WHAT YOU LIKE (sorta) JUST STOP ASKING FOR SODDING PERMISSION. I know I can turn it off, and I will. What’s strange is that it pops up and irritates me on the little things, but when I try to run, say, an installer, most of the time it doesn’t show up. Silly thing. It’s also pissing annoying that when it asks for permission, it loads its taskbar thingy, but doesnt pop up. Just flashes profusely at me.

Hibernation Silliness. Sometimes, not all the time, I tell my pc to hibernate, it does, and then it wakes back up again by itself. WHY?! On the flipside, sometimes (more often) when I start it up, it starts up, then goes back into hibernation. Again, WHY?!

There are other things I like or dislike, but it’d take forever to list them. Literally.

Yeah, well, the last few days it’s been a pain in the arse. I’ll see what it’s like when I fit my nice extra RAM chip, but right now, it’s being laggy whenever there are any mildly heavy programmes open, and coming out of hibernation, it comes out, then goes to sleep again, and I have to wait all of 5 minutes for that, and then another 2 for it to wake up. I am not pleased with it at all.

The laptop itself is great, Vista really lets it down though. I may consider blanking it and replacing it with XP, but then I lose the Lenovo suite = not good.

But, for the moment, it’s being a bit of a pain, and I don’t like that.

We’ll see.

Yep, the new laptop arrived

For the “4 working days” option, that was pretty quick. It appears that Laptops Direct are pretty good.

I’m writing this while I wait for it to uninstall the trail of office 07 that came with it (peh, 03 for me ) ; and with follow up to my post about Vista not being so bad, I think I was right, it really is good. The only niggle so far is the constant “We need your permission to do this” popups, but apart from that, it’s fast, well behaved, and it’s not struggling with the heavy pages anything like my old one

The packaging suffered an identity crisis, though: the laptop cleary says R61i on the front, while all the packaging and instructions say R61e. Looking at the spec, it appears to be neither, the processor is more powerful than the one in the specification that I ordered, and the one that it thinks it is. Never mind, it’s all good

I love the aero interface, it’s all nice and friendly, and it’s fast too, which is always a bonus. The keyboard is nice and responsive, and the touches that come in the Lenovo ThinkVantage suite are excellent. Lenovo included their own suite of components that work perfectly with Vista, like their own security manager, wireless handler (which is good ) and so on. It’s really, genuinely excellent.

[ this could quickly turn into a review, but never mind ]

The browsing seems to be handling the heavier sites better, too (I might have said that already) , but it’s loading miles faster than my old Inspiron did, although, fair play, it is 5 years old.

So, for a £360 laptop (including delivery ); this is really pretty good

I think that a bit more RAM might be a good idea, though, it’s sat here idling processor wise, but still using 830mb RAM. Vista, I suppose..

You can find the laptop sales page at Laptops Direct here, and my post about replacing the old laptop, including some pictures, here.

Well, I had a proper play with Vista over this weekend, instead of the last time, when I used it for about 5 minutes, and hated it (it crashed on me); and I’ll be honest, it’s nothing like as bad as I previously thought and said it was.

There are hundreds of thousands of people out there (a number which, up until recently, included me) who just go with the flow, say it’s crap, and it’s done a lot of damage to a system which really isnt that bad.

It’s not perfect, but the new features and functions, and more importantly, the new look, give it a great new feel, and for me (I was running it on a fast machine, though) it was pretty quick, and faster than I’ve seen XP on that machine (I think). It wasn’t one of my computers, actually my cousins, although I’ve just ordered my new one, which will have Vista on it .

So, while I still think Ubuntu is probably better, Vista is getting there, and maybe with a bit more work (SP2, guys ) It could really become a system people love, rather than hate.

For those who just went with the flow, try it. It’s not fair to slag it off without having a proper play with it first.

And, with regards to the post I linked to, I quite like the Aero interface. So there.

Yep, another long titled post

Anyhow, Microsoft released Windows Vista SP1 recently, onto Windows Update, and today I read about a number of people who are complaining that it’s broken their computers.

“What a disaster! It exiled all of my Nvidia drivers to the Bermuda Triangle… they’re simply all gone. OK, no big deal, go to the Nvidia site, download the latest drivers, install and nada. Zip, zilch, nothing changes… the install fails… every time.”

And it’s rendered some peoples computers inoperable, useless, or not fully functional. Well done Microsoft. It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m still running XP

The Windows Vista release post is here