Archive for January, 2007:

This week, Anneka and I finally booked our long-awaited holiday for February. We’ve decided to fly to Tunisia (north Africa) and stay in a hotel located on the beach for 7 days.

There’s two reasons to go - one for the relaxation and to get away from it all. Two - it’s where most of Tatooine is filmed in Star Wars. A quick Google search netted me this page, which documents various scenes in Episode 4, that were shot in Tunisia.

Of course, I wont be as obsessed as the author of the site, but I’ll take countless pictures of the desert sand dunes and caves.

On a side note, we have only just realised that we’ll be visiting both North and South Africa this year - Tunisia for a week in February and Botswana for 3 weeks in July/August. I hope I’m not allergic to sand…

I’ve recently found myself in a dilemma (or dimella in the words of Jade’s mum)…

As I have almost fallen off of the gaming bandwagon, my purchasing of consoles in particular has been non-existent. The last time I purchased a console was the same time San Andreas became available - and I bought a slim-line PS2. Between then and now, my pockets have been lightened by a PC, but I feel now is the ideal time to invest in the new generation of gaming consoles.

Games wise, they all seem pretty much identical now - with most games being released to all platforms. So I’m left with choosing between an XBOX 360, a Wii, a PS3 - or on the handheld front - a DS Lite or PSP.

If I had written this a month or two ago, I’d have opted for the DS Lite. But recently I’ve been edging further and further towards a 360 - especially as the PS3 looks certain to be an instant success flop. AND! To top it all off, GTA IV will be coming to both the PS3 and 360, with additional content for both.

So, help me out on my quest for another bite of the gaming fun! And point me in the direction of a few great games for your console of choice too…

Perhaps I’m a little late writing this… especially as the game in question has already received an expansion and numerous add-ons.

But two days ago I finally purchased Oblivion, for a mere £19.99 from PC World - only to find it at almost half that online, once I returned home. Adamskii tried sending us a copy for ‘testing’ but alas, the copy wouldn’t read in any drive.

I have to admit, I see what most of the fuss was about - it’s an engrossing game. I’ve played it for a grand total of 2 hours now, spread over two evenings. Hopeless I know, but I have spent almost double that messing around with setting up the controls and looking at all the grass and stuff.

Graphics wise, I was pleased to see my computay runs it easily at the highest settings @ 1280×1024. HDR looks good too. Though they visuals aren’t amazing, just nice. I’d say Half-Life 2 still looks the prettiest of all games my eyes have seen.

I’ve killed enough rats to feed me for a fortnight, so now I’m onto fishys in the lake…

Well, Vista RC1 has been installed now for over 2 hours. I’ve taken many pictures of the installation process and screenshots of Vista up and running, but I’ll leave them for another day…

Initial Impressions
I’ve seen Vista up and running several times now - mainly on my Dad’s new PC, as he’s been testing out RC1 over the past few months. But today, I got my first real taste of Vista and I have to say I was very impressed. Everything seemed to run smoothly and there’s a lot to get stuck into as soon as everything is up and running.

Installation - Operating System
You may have already read a few of my previous comments on the installation. The first time around, the installation routine froze at 80% of Expanding files. This seems to be the stage where the installation copies all of the necessary files and de-compresses them ready for installing. But, after cleaning the disc and retrying, everything went well. In fact, it went sooo smoothly that I was half expecting the whole thing to keel over and die - but no! Those of you already familiar with the installation process for XP and the likes, will find this even easier but just as involving. Sure, you don’t see what’s actually being put where, but Vista feeds back as much as needed for the average user. Microsoft seem to have nailed installation, especially as this is only RC1 - I can see many people opting for the upgrade and being able to carry out the upgrade installation without any problems!

The operating system itself took around the same time as a standard XP install would - giving you enough time to watch a TV program; eat dinner; or have a cup of tea and read of your local paper/favourite blog etc.

Installation - Drivers
As for driver installation - well, I didn’t have to do much really. Another credit to Microsoft, as Vista recognised EVERYTHING in terms of hardware on my PC - unlike XP, which threw up countless windows asking me to insert the driver CD. Even the Nvidia 7800GT that I’m using was recognised and assigned some Microsoft Drivers - which worked like a charm, enabling the Aero interface from the outset. I decided to upgrade these though, opting for Nvidia’s own 64-bit driver. As I expected, they work flawlessly.

Installation - Programs
That’s the O/S and drivers out of the way - how about programs? I’ve read countless rumours on various websites, strewn across the Internet, which state that Vista has problems with this program and that utility that it put me off installing Vista straight away - heck, it’s taken me 6 months to get this far!

But, alas, most reports are wrong when RC1 is concerned. I opted for a handful of programs that I use regularly on a day-to-day basis. Office (2007 in this case); Firefox (along with 3 extensions); iTunes; Acrobat Reader; AVG and Photoshop CS2. At the time of writing I haven’t yet had time to install CS2, so will leave that for another rainy (or not so) day.

Firstly, Office 2007 - the trial version of Office 2007 Professional. This went without a hitch and I was extremely impressed with how much quicker it installed, compared to say, Office 2000 or even 2003. I’ve installed the latter two many times at home and work, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs for what seems like hours. But 2007 installed quicker than I could say Bill Gates. Again, I’ve not got the time to fully experiment with it, but the interface looks as good as everyone shouts about.

Next up, Firefox. The installation process is identical to XP or wherever else you may chuck it, albeit with the Aero interface. I’ve mentioned this several times, but it really does make a difference to your Vista Experience. I feel sorry (in advance) for all those that opted for the standard edition of Vista, who wont get the chance to experience the Vista Experience. The extensions installed perfectly well too, and I managed to successfully synchronise my bookmarks.

iTunes installed without a hitch too. However, Adobe’s website seems to be down for this evening, so I was unable to test Acrobat Reader for this stage of the article.

AVG has been ranting and raving about their Vista support, but unfortunately, AVG Free edition doesn’t seem to support 64-bit Vista, or at least they’ve made it damn hard to find the download for it on their site. So I’m sitting here without a Virus Scanner at the moment…

I’ll also mention briefly, the extremely cool and extremely useful sidebar gadgets in Vista. Yahoo, Stardock and many others have had gadgets/widgets/poo things available for a good few years, but Microsoft has finally jumped aboard the band-wagon. 2 hours ago, there were 250+ gadgets available for download on Microsoft’s website - I’ve got a few monitoring ones running at the moment, along with a countdown to the launch of Vista (21 days, 4 minutes left).

Performance
Vista is bundled with its very own benchmarking facility. Actually, it’s more of a rating, which highlights the strong and weak areas of your system. My PC scored 5.1 average, with 5+ being the highest currently achievable by today’s PCs (according to the help file). What does this all mean in real-world situations though? Well, I’ve not had the time to install a game yet, but benchmarks so far have shown only a slight decrease in performance over XP, which isn’t bad considering Vista is brand spanking new. At this point in time, my sidebar gadgets are telling me that Vista is using 44% of my memory (907MB out of 2046MB). That’s a big dollop of memory, considering I’ve only got Firefox open. 1GB of RAM will be like running XP with 256MB - it’s do-able, but slow. 2GB of RAM and Vista feels comfortable, for now. I reckon if you are thinking of purchasing a new gaming rig in the near future, 4GB might be a worthwhile investment - especially for future-proofing.

So, Vista is a bit of a bloater, but you can instantly see where all that extra memory and hard drive space is going - speaking of which, Vista is occupying just over 15GB of my main partition. Not too bad as hard drives now are dirt-cheap you can easily grab a nice 250GB drive for under £50.

Features
I’ve already mentioned a few features - such as the sidebar and the Aero Glass interface. But Vista seems full of new things to explore and use, all of which seem genuinely useful. I’ve not got the time to sit and explain what each one does, but those of you familiar with XP or even 2000 will be happy to see many of the core tools and utilities still remain - for example, Msconfig, which now has an extra tab with links to useful tools. The computer management console is still present too, with a few extra features, such as the resource monitor.

It’s things like this that will give the experienced Windows user (otherwise known as a power-user) something to get their teeth into. I’ll no doubt be playing around with Vista’s hidden tools for a good few weeks still.

Let’s just say, Vista is full of features - many that are new to everyone.

Cost
We all now know the cost of both the OEM and Retail editions of Vista. Weighing up the cost against the various features, I can’t see why you’d want anything other than Home Premium or Ultimate for the experienced PC user. I’ll definitely be forking out the £130 for an OEM copy of Ultimate, purely because I’ve played with it now and wont want to miss out on anything! Stupid, yes. The OEM versions make Vista an affordable option for those already running an own-built PC. But then again, you may want the extra warmth you’ll get from owning a retail copy, complete with that shiny box.

Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this extremely long, but extremely short article on Vista. Please note that I’m not employed by Microsoft; I don’t worship them and I’ve been using Vista RC1. I highly recommend you try out Vista before you buy, as unlike me, you may dislike it.

But, if you haven’t already guessed, I like it. In fact, I’m in awe. When I first saw XP, I couldn’t think past the fact that it felt like Windows 2000 had visited the Early-Learning Centre. Vista is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I’ve come across. Yes I’ve tried Linux. Yes I use XP, Server 2003 and 2000 daily. And yes I’ve used 3.1/95/98 in the past, but Vista is undoubtedly the most impressive home user operating system to date.

Phew. Now I can go to sleep. Expect a follow-up article over the next week or so, as I relay back to you, yet more of my Vista Experience. I’ve got it setup as a dual-boot with XP Pro SP2, but I hope to always be booting into Vista RC1 over the next few weeks…

Today I was commissioned, if you like, to write up an article on my thoughts (and lack of feelings) on Microsoft Windows Vista. Actually, I mentioned to Simon that I’d finally be installing it tonight and he asked me to do a write up on my blog, but commissioned sounds better…

So, here I am, with a few hours ahead of me free. I’ve been toying with the idea of installing Vista for a good 6 months or more now. In fact, I signed up for the Beta testing and downloaded Beta 2 back in July 2006. But being the busy ICT Technician that I am, I put it to one side.

Within those 6 months a lot has happened in terms of Vista. For a start, the final code has been released to the corporate market and will be available to the average Jo at the end of January. Secondly, after Beta 2 came RC1 and RC2 (RC being Release Candidate). What to use for this article? Well, unfortunately I missed the opportunity to legally download RC2, so I’m stuck with RC1 from my Dad - but, before you go accusing me of breaking any laws, apparently you can install each version onto a maximum of 10 PCs. Perfect.

In my left hand I have a copy of RC1 and in my right, I have Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2, from a Magazine coverdisc. Afterall, what good is installing Vista when I could be checking out the latest Office? Microsoft have been very generous to us, as it’s the first time since Windows 95, that they released Office alongside Windows.

I’ve partitioned my Hard Drive successfully. In actual fact, I prepared for Vista back in August as I setup Red19. I’ve got an external caddy for copying over my XP Ghost Images in case everything goes tits-up. I have a USB stick to hand in case I need to quickly download and transfer some important drivers across. There’s a second PC in the room along with a laptop in case Vista totally fucks up my main rig, and I’m forced to post using an alternative machine.

So, if you don’t hear from me within the next 4 hours, expect the worst - Vista installed successfully, but then proceeded to draw all 530W from the PSU and some more - wiping out the power for the whole of Lincoln. Fingers crossed…