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Update

2010-04-09T11:44:00.000+01:00

Where have I been? I realise I haven't updated in a while, so I thought I should make a short update to let you know I'm still alive.

It's the easter break at university and I've been very busy trying to finish my dissertation before the end of it. I also have that multi-hopping report I mentioned a little while ago to get on with - that's nearly finished, I just have to simulate my idea using the archaic GloMoSim (that was a real chore, turned out you specifically need Visual C++ version 6).

I don't currently have any ideas on posts to make about technology, keeping everything together is just about all I'm capable of at the moment. However, if like me you need to sit and calm down now and again, then try to catch the Comedy Gala before it's removed from 4oD.

Extend Your WiFi Router

2010-03-30T16:46:00.001+01:00

This guy just went ahead and cut his open. What do you think?

I don't think I'd go for this, because I'm not a fan of soldering things back together. It might be good though if you need the extra range...

Delayed Shutdown

2010-03-27T20:27:00.000Z

This little program allows you to easily shut down windows after a certain amount of time - perfect for when you leave something downloading over night. There are ways of doing this without using an application, like setting a scheduled task to execute a batch file at a certain time, but this application is quick and easy.

Give it a try, see what you think, and let me know if you have a better one.

Tune Up Your PC

2010-03-16T22:33:00.010Z

This is probably the most frequent thing I demonstrate to people, and repeating it time and again was the thing that first got me thinking about writing a blog. Ironic then that it should take me several months of posts to get around to it, but there you go. This post will finally give you all the information you need to reduce your turn-on and shut-down speeds, and hopefully teach you a little something about how Windows works.

This post is broken down into several short posts that I have published separately for your ease of reference. All of this material will be included in my mythical "PC User Manual" that I occasionally refer to and will eventually complete.

This has truly been a mammoth task to properly document, and I hope you find it really useful!

Programs that run when you turn your computer on

Windows Services - more stuff that runs when you turn your computer on

Malicious Software

Even More Speed Tips for Windows

The Windows Registry

Please click any of the above links to view separate blog posts that detail what they are, and what you should do about them.

Malicious Software

2010-03-16T22:33:00.008Z

While it is true that websites are fast becoming the number one source of security risks to the average user, viruses, worms, trojan horses and their friends are still out there to get. But shoving as much security software onto your computer as you can is not the solution; you need to understand what threats are there, and what you should do to protect yourself from them.

Viruses

Viruses can slow your computer down, steal private information from you, and damage your computer. Unfortunately, antivirus software has a reputation for slowing down your system, so apart from cost and effectiveness, you also have to look at the performance of an antivirus when you pick it.

Antivirus software can be broken down into two obvious categories: free and not free. I have not used an antivirus that you have to pay for since 2007 and I have not suffered a virus attack since. I was sent a virus at the start of the millennium that Norton at the time failed to stop; I also have a friend who around the same time got a virus that actually disabled Norton and thus held the door open for other viruses to come in. The only other virus I have suffered from was the blaster worm, which almost everyone got at the time.

I currently recommend Avast. In my own private benchmarks, my computer turned on faster when using Avast than it did using AVG, another popular antivirus that offers a free version.

If you do want to pay for your software, although that by no means ensures that it is more effective, then I recommend Sophos. I have had only bad experiences with Norton, but I have been informed that their latest version is an improvement.

I recommend keeping an antivirus installed and updated on your computer at all times and just swallowing the performance loss. If you are truly that concerned about performance, then try ClamWin, as it doesn't run in the background but can be used to run a full scan at any time, and updates daily.

Worms

Worms are similar to viruses, except that like real worms they can move around by themselves, and unlike computer viruses, don't need to attach themselves to existing files in order to infect PCs.

Apart from a good and up-to-date antivirus, the best protection from worms is to update your operating system whenever security updates are available.

Firewall

I used to run separate firewall software on Windows XP, but since Vista I have happily relied on the built-in firewall and not suffered for it. I don't recommend running separate firewall software for this reason as I don't believe it is worth the performance loss. If you are behind a router then it will be protecting you too.

Spyware

Spybot is the only dedicated anti-spyware software I have ever consistently used. If you disable the "teatimer" feature, then it will not run in the background consuming resources, but is still always available for you to run a system-scan whenever you like to ensure you haven't picked anything up on your travels. I am happy to report however that since using Avast, Spybot has never found a piece of spyware on my computer other than tracking cookies, which don't worry me.

UAC and other Windows security blemishes

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have two built-in security features that are worthless: User Account Control (UAC) and Windows Defender. According to Sophos, UAC has a 70% chance of not stopping a virus on your computer. So it really isn't worth the annoying pop-ups that it provides, and you should disable it. As for Windows Defender, running a good antivirus like Avast and using msconfig to control your startup programs makes this software essentially redundant, and you should disable this too, first from Control Panel, and then from the Services window, to increase system performance.

Hosts File

Before contacting a server to find out the IP address of a given link, Windows can check its own internal Hosts file to resolve the IP and save time. You can use this to your advantage however if you edit your hosts file to block the IPs of websites that will try to send you malicious software. Thankfully, you don't have to do this yourself; you can download a hosts file periodically from winhelp to avoid accessing websites that have been found by others to be harmful.

The hosts file can also be used to increase system performance; if you manually add all the IP addresses of your favourite websites, then Windows does not have to access any servers in order to resolve the URLs, although your web browser may cache these for you already.

The Windows Registry: Myths and Legends

2010-03-16T22:33:00.002Z

Just incase you are unaware, the Registry is a small database built in to Windows. The Windows Registry used to be a "Hot Topic", as getting it clogged used to result in a lot of system performance degradation, but these days Windows does a good job of not letting it slow the whole system down.

Personally, I do not recommend any registry defrag or cleaning utilies for Windows Vista or Windows 7 - I have not noticed any system performance when using them, and I have had my registry hives corrupted by a registry defrag utility on Windows 7 64-Bit, which required a re-install to fix.

On Windows XP however I have noticed increased shutdown speeds when the registry is clean, and for this operating system only I recommend Auslogics Registry Cleaner. There are also free registry defrag utilities out there like the aptly named "Free Registry Defrag", but most you have to pay for. Defragmenting the registry might make an improvement for Vista and 7, but for a 64-Bit system, at the time of writing, it is not worth the risk.

Even More Speed Tips for Windows

2010-03-16T22:33:00.001Z

Here we are; finally the end to optimising your installation of Windows. There are a few extra operations we can perform that don't deserve a page of their own, and so they are all bundled into this one and displayed below:

Windows Components

Open your Control Panel, click "Programs and Features" (or "Add or Remove Programs"), and then click "Turn Windows features on or off" (located to the left of the window); in Windows XP this is called "Add/Remove Windows Components". You should see a new window that looks like this:

From this list you can remove components that you don't use, like the Indexing Service (this indexes your hard drive to make searching faster, but you can still search without it, and you'll probably find that Windows uses system resources to index the drive more frequently than you actually run a search), and the Tablet PC component, unless you actually own a Tablet PC. Again, like when we were disabling startup programs using msconfig, the goal here is to remove as much as possible to increase system performance; mainly startup and shutdown speeds. If you're unsure about a component, then Google it first, but don't be afraid to experiment; you can always renable these components again.

Pagefile

The Pagefile is an area of the hard drive that is used like RAM. If you have two or more hard drives then you can increase system performance by moving the pagefile sector to a drive that is not being used for your operating system.

To do this, right-click My Computer, and click properties. Click "Advanced System Settings", which opens the System Properties window, and then via the Advanced tab on this, click the Settings button in the Performance section. The "Performance Options" window appears, click the advanced tab on this, then in the "Virtual Memory" section, click the Change button. You should see a window like this:

From this window, you can disable the pagefile on C drive, and create a manual area of pagefile on another hard drive. Ensure to set the "Initial Size" and "Maximum Size" values to the same, say 4GB, to prevent Windows from having to resize the pagefile sector at any time which momentarily reduces performance. After a restart, check this window again to make sure you did it right.

Network Folders

Windows XP allegedly automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. I've not noticed a difference, but to fix this, open a folder, click the Tools menu item, click Folder Options, and on the View tab, un-check the tickbox "Automatically search for network folders and printers", click Apply and OK, and restart your computer.

Defrag

Windows Vista and 7 automatically defrag the hard drive. Not only is the built-in Windows defrag utility rubbish, but the last thing you want is for Windows to start defragging the hard drive when you are trying to use it. Open the defrag utility via Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools, and disable automatic defragmentation. Run a defrag yourself now and again when you want to, and check the section below for a replacement utility.

Default Software

Foxit Reader is a PDF viewer that is faster than Adobe PDF reader, has a portable version available on PortableApps.com, and tkaes up hardly any hard drive space.

Google Chrome is a very fast and light web browser by Google that is an excellent replacement for the infamous Internet Explorer. If Chrome isn't your style, try Firefox.

Auslogics do a good free disk defrag utility that is much better than the Windows version.

Windows Services

2010-03-16T22:32:00.004Z

In addition to the startup entries found using msconfig, there is yet another group of 'applications' that automatically start when you turn on your PC, and in Windows these are called Services.

A Service is a process that runs in the background. Windows comes with a lot of Services pre-installed, for example there are a lot of Services that handle your internet connections, there is a Service that handles your Printers, and many more. In addition, many applications, especially anti-virus software and hardware drivers, install their own Services that are separate to the startup entries that can be handled using msconfig. A lot of Services that start automatically when you turn your computer on however are not required by the average user; for example, when Windows starts, there are a few services that automatically start with it for file sharing, even if you don't share files from your computer.

To view your Services, go to Start -> Control Panel, and select Administrative Tools. From here, click Services. You should see something like this.

Our aim here is to disable as many services as we can, to reduce the amount of work Windows has to do when it starts up. How this can achieved, however, differs between versions of Windows; the number of services, their names, and what they specifically do, is different between Windows XP and Windows Vista, but the Vista and Windows 7 services are almost identical. There are some good lists on the internet of which Services are "safe" to disable, so pick which guide suits you and get disabling!

Windows XP Services
Windows Vista Services
Windows 7 Services

As usual, if there is anything here you don't understand or are unsure about, or if those links go down, comment here or send me a message.

Windows Startup Programs

2010-03-16T22:32:00.003Z

The Windows world is plagued by applications that automatically run when you log in, taking up some of your RAM and/or pagefile, and bogging down your CPU with unnecessary processes that reduce your system speed and responsiveness. Some of them have icons in the notification tray, which makes their existence easier to notice, but many don't. A friend of mine used to open Task Manager every time he switched on his PC, and would manually go down the list of processes and terminate the ones he had found out were not needed. This ritual works well enough, but there is a much easier way, and it's called msconfig.

If you click Start -> Run, and type "msconfig", you'll be shown a window that looks like this.

From here, if you click the "Startup" tab, you'll be shown a list of all the applications that turn on when you start your computer. Each item in the list has a tickbox that can be used to enable or disable that particular item. You should disable as many of these items as you can; typically I only allow essential hardware drivers and my antivirus to start automatically when Windows starts; everything else I disable.

Feel free to experiment here, remember you're only disabling these items; if you disable something you needed, you can just as easily re-enable it again later using this window. If you see things on the list that you're not sure about, check the "Manufacturer", "Command" or "Location" columns for extra information, or try searching on Google for the name of the unusual startup entry to see what it is.

Don't be afraid of disabling entries like Java, or Adobe Reader etc. This won't make these programs unavailable to you; many manufacturers just add startup entries for their programs to make launching them seem quicker, as your computer has already put some CPU time into getting everything ready to run that application when you first turned on your PC (even if you weren't going to run Java or Adobe Reader anyway).

Feel free to comment here or send me a message if you have any items you are unsure about disabling. Remember; you can't do any permanent damage in this window, and you should aim to disable as much as possible to improve system performance.

As a general rule of thumb, "portable" versions of applications like those found on PortableApps.com will never add startup entries to your computer, or fiddle with the registry, and so I usually go for these over full-install versions if they are available.

Bra Mask

2010-03-15T21:27:00.000Z

Name says it all. This bra can be turned into an emergency gas mask in the event of a gas attack.

Bizarre, funny, and inventive... but one day this bra might save your life!

Afghan IEDs

2010-03-14T10:00:00.000Z

I'm currently working on a mammoth blog post that I've decided to break up into 6 separate pages; I'll publish them all at the same time when they're all done. In the meantime, however, you've probably watched Bill Nighy by now, so here's another interesting video for you.

The Robin Hood Tax

2010-03-12T21:54:00.006Z

This is completely unrelated to the normal subject of my blog, but I was just watching this via their facebook group and decided to put a link to the video on here.

The Robin Hood Tax is an idea that if all bank transactions that did not include a member of the public were charged 0.05%, then billions of pounds could be raised each year to help fund the NHS and charities. It's a good idea on the face of it, but if something like this were implemented, then I can somehow see the banks managing to pass that loss on to the customer somehow. Have a watch and see what you think.

Look After Your Laptop

2010-03-03T15:57:00.003Z

Laptop care is really worth it; laptops often give the impression of ageing quicker than PCs, but that can usually just be attributed to the accumulative damaging effects of heat. When using your laptop, always try to use it on a flat surface. If it's on your bed or your lap, without something hard like a tray being between the laptop and that surface, then the air vents on the sides and under the laptop are probably blocked.

You should also clean these air vents from time to time with a strong vacuum cleaner. That's not something I'd recommend for cleaning the inside of a machine, but for the air vents, a vacuum cleaner can easily remove the dust clogged in the grills.

Dust inside the laptop can also increase ambient temperatures; it gets sucked in when the laptop draws air to cool the CPU and other components. Most laptops have easily removable panels over the heatsink(s) and fan(s) - it's a good idea to once or twice a year unscrew these and remove dust with a soft paint brush or compressed air can.

Be careful with the compressed air method though; I've seen it recommended many times on different sights, but compressed air can often produce moisture when it is released.

Even if the panels are not easily removable, taking the case apart and cleaning the circuits and components every 6 months or so is a good idea - just be careful on those screws; they're often made of cheap metals and you can easily strip the heads by slipping with a screwdriver too many times.

Speaking of moisture, always be careful with liquids around your laptop. A spillage onto the keyboard of a regular PC isn't a big deal, but under your laptop's keyboard is a very expensive set of circuitry. If you do spill anything onto your laptop, turn it off immediately and remove the battery to avoid electrical shorting. Turn it upside down (assuming you spilt liquid onto the top of it) to stop the liquid seeping through the keyboard, and wipe it down with a towel, then remove the hard drive, optical drive, all access panels, and the keyboard if possible, and dry the inside as much as you can. Don't turn the laptop back on for at least 24 hours, and try to leave it near a radiator (but not on one!), to allow the water to evaporate.

The above should prevent any damage from occurring, but if it was something sticky like coke, then your hardware may be ruined for life. My best advice is not to keep liquids near a laptop at all. I spilt a whole glass of water onto my laptop last month; it's the only time I've ever dropped liquid onto an electrical appliance, and it would have to be one of the most expensive things I can have laying around; needless to say I was furious with myself.

One last piece of advice from me is to look after your battery as much as possible; a few years down the line it will probably be worth as much as the rest of the entire laptop. Whenever your laptop is plugged in, it's best to remove the battery; most laptops have quick-release batteries to make this job very easy. If the laptop is plugged in and has the battery connected, then the battery will be continuously drained a little bit and recharged for no reason - it's this charge/drain cycle that consumes the battery life.

Although the battery is slowly losing potential energy storage since the day it is produced, not draining it when possible will definitely increase the lifespan. By the same token, try to minimise battery consumption when running off it by turning the screen brightness down and turning off the wifi adapter when you don't need it (this is actually hardly an inconvenience at all on Windows 7 - it reconnects to a wifi network extremely quickly when it is turned back on again). Put your laptop to sleep whenever you're not using it, it takes Windows 7 mere seconds to resume from the sleep state.

If you have any other tips, please feel free to comment and share them.

Multi-Hop Networking

2010-02-24T20:57:00.001Z

I'm going to write a report for Multi-Hop networking for university soon. My initial idea was that, if every "node" (laptop) connected to wifi acted as a router, then we could extend a router's radius for every node connected to it. In this situation, you'd only need to be in range of someone who is in range of a wifi network in order to access it, or or maybe you'd only need to be in range of someone else who is in range of someone who is connected. I thought of this concept myself, but my lecturer says it's called a Multi-Hop network, so that's what I'll actually be studying.

I foresee some problems with this before I even begin, namely that it will drain the batteries more quickly of any laptop that is helping out with this network, and it could degrade in service the more nodes that you route through before you get to the wifi router. That being said, I think it will be worth researching; it's quite possible that acting as a router won't make much use of a laptop's CPU or RAM, and it's definitely do-able with current technology and protocols.

If the report is successful, I'll post it up here for you to read, although that won't be possible for another 12 weeks or so.

On an unrelated note, check these out.

Chrome OS Latest

2010-02-23T19:36:00.004Z

Google's Chrome Operating System is still chugging alone nicely. Here's an opportunity for you to try it without any disadvantages - boot from USB.

Just download the OS from the above link onto a USB stick, then with the stick in, reboot your computer and tell it to boot from the stick (using the BIOS) - once the computer has booted from your USB stick, you can use Chrome OS fully to your heart's content. When you're done, take the USB stick out and you'll be able to use your previous OS again with all your files intact. Just make sure you take the stick out when the computer is off...

For those of you who don't know, Google's Chrome OS is a new operating system that Google are launching. It won't be a direct competitor for Windows, but instead is geared towards cloud computing for netbooks and laptops. All the applications on it will be accessed through the web browser, such as google docs, so it will require very little in terms of system resources (but will probably be quite useless when not in range of wifi).

The above version is called "flow" and is a bit of a spin-off; it's everything that's included on the normal Chrome OS branch that's under development, but is designed to work off a USB stick and doesn't need to be installed onto a hard drive.

Wireless Security

2010-02-18T12:22:00.003Z

Sometimes when I'm in my car with my laptop, I have a look at the local wifi networks, and at least a few are always WEP encryption; indeed, there's usually one completely unencrypted. The fact that people would go to the bother of buying and installing a wireless router, and not bother to encrypt the signal, is amazing in my opinion. So this post is all about how to increase the security of your wifi.

The very first thing to do is to make the encryption type WPA or WPA2. "Wi-Fi Protected Access" is a good encryption technique that makes your wireless network far far harder to breach than WEP. WEP can be extremely quickly compromised by a linux laptop using "aircrack-ng", - all the software has to do is "sniff" the packets of data flying around in the air, and it can quickly work out how they are encrypted with WEP. WEP has been made officially depreciated for years now.

As a general rule, Linux computers are better for using to crack someone's WEP encryption (or MAC filtering), because the drivers for the wireless cards on them are open-source. Windows wireless drivers don't allow the same piece of hardware to perform the operations required to crack a wifi network.

To enable WPA on your wifi, log into your router's admin panel - from here you can change to WPA or WPA2 if it's supported. Also test that all your mobile devices still work after reconnecting to your now-WPA-encrypted wifi - very old laptops might have problems.

MAC address filtering is not worth bothering with. Plenty of tools freely available online such as Nmap or Macshift can help you with pretending your MAC address is on the router's allow list. There's no point in removing the MAC filtering if you've already implemented it, but if they can break WPA encryption, MAC filtering is only going to slow them down for a few moments.

Another effective technique is to stop your router from broadcasting it's "name" (aka SSID). This prevents people from connecting to your wifi unless they already know it's name - when they scan for wireless networks in the area, yours should not appear on their list. While there is no-doubt ways of detecting hidden wifi networks, this technique will at least allow other people's wifi in the area to present more of a target than yours. This option is probably disabled by default (although I know that the Netgear routers offered by the Post Office do use this by default), and can be activated in your router's admin panel. After making this change, test that your devices can still connect to the network. I don't recommend changing to WPA and hidden network name at the same time, as this will make it hard to diagnose any conflicts if they occur.

Ninite

2010-02-15T12:43:00.000Z

A friend of mine pointed this out to me a little while ago, and I'd like to make a short post to just raise awareness of it.

Ninite is a website that provides a kind of batch-installer for downloading and installing all of your favourite programs. Users simply select from a list all the software that they want, such as Open Office, Windows Live Messenger, Firefox, etc., then hit the download button, and you'll download a small program that will automatically download and then install all of the programs that you previously asked for.

It will install programs as they are downloaded, so won't wait for everything to download first before beginning the automated installation process. On install, it automatically says no to free toolbars and other unwanted extras, and it doesn't keep the install files that it uses, so it has good house-keeping too.

This tool is extremely useful for when you get a new computer (or hard drive), or reinstall your operating system. It's also useful when you want to replace all the bloatware on someone else's computer for them; ditching Norton and Adobe PDF reader are things I've done for others many times - getting it all from one place without having to maintain a USB stick with all the latest versions of the installers on it is a real pleasure.

Switching Power Plans

2010-02-12T10:17:00.002Z

When I'm on my laptop, I have it set to a power plan that's maximum everything when the cable is in, and minimum everything when the cable is out. Sometimes though, when the cable is out, I don't want the hard drive or screen to turn off after 5 minutes of inactivity, and sometimes I want the screen brightness to be on maximum anyway. Changing the power option is a bit of a pain though, and requires more clicks than I can usually be bothered with.

The solution: create some shortcuts on your desktop or taskbar that change the power plan for you. Then all you need to do is create some power plans that suit your current needs (Since a single power plan will perform different actions for when the laptop is plugged in and running on battery, I'd need 2: unplugged - full power saving and plugged in - no power saving, and the other one, no power saving regardless of state).

So the first step is to create these power plans, if you don't already have them. Open the power options window from control panel, and modify the "high performance" and "power saver" plans, so that the "high performance" plan never turns the screen brightness down, never turns off the screen, never turns off the hard drive, always engages the cooling fan, etc. regardless of whether the laptop is plugged in or running on battery. Now modify the "power saver" plan so that it has everything the same as "high performance" when the laptop is plugged in, but turn on all the power saving features that you like for when the laptop is running off battery. Alternatively, create new power plans that have these properties, rather than editing existing power plans.

Now we have two power plans that do the same when the laptop is plugged in, but when the laptop is on battery power, one will save as much power as is possible, and the other will be optimised for presentation.

The next step is to create shortcuts to these power plans. In Vista or Windows 7, but not Windows XP, open up cmd.exe and type "POWERCFG -l". This will display a list of your power plans, and the ID numbers of them (referred to as a GUID in the command prompt - Globally Unique Identifier). Take note of the GUIDs of the power plans that we want to use. You'd get an output something like this:

==========================================
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Chris>powercfg -l

Existing Power Schemes (* Active)
-----------------------------------
Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced) *
Power Scheme GUID: 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (High performance)
Power Scheme GUID: a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a (Power saver)

==========================================

Now we create some shortcuts to these power plans. The best place to put these would be a toolbar on the taskbar, as it would allow us to change power plan without opening the start menu or minimising everything to get at the desktop. Somewhere in your documents folders, create a new folder called "Power Plans". Inside this new folder, create two new shortcuts: one to each of these power plans. To create a shortcut to a power plan, right-click somewhere inside the folder, click "new", "shortcut", and for the location of the item, type:

POWERCFG -SETACTIVE

...followed by the GUID of the power plan, displayed to us earlier using cmd.exe. If you're using windows XP, you use the name of the power plan instead, surrounded by speech marks. You also use "/" instead of "-" infront of the keyword "SETACTIVE". So, if I wanted to create a shortcut to my High Performance power plan in Vista or 7, I'd type this:

POWERCFG -SETACTIVE 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

...but in Windows XP, I'd type this:

POWERCFG /SETACTIVE "High performance"

Once you've created suitably-named shortcuts to both your power plans, right-click your Windows taskbar, select "Toolbars", "New Toolbar...", and create a toolbar of the folder that contains your shortcuts. If you already have a toolbar on your taskbar for shortcuts, you could just place your power options shortcuts on this toolbar instead.

And there we have it. If you ever want to demonstrate something to someone on your laptop when it's running off battery power, you're only one click away from full screen brightness and no chance of the display turning off half-way through.

You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to these power plans. Right-click their new icons on the toolbar, click Properties, and in the "Shortcut Key" field, you can assign a shortcut, for example "CTRL + ALT + P" (just select the field and then press the button combination on your keyboard to assign it). You can also change the icon from this window too.

Install Windows from a USB Memory Stick

2010-02-09T12:22:00.002Z

You may have read a post of mine last year about when I tried to install Windows 7 on my laptop, but got an error about requiring a driver for the DVD reader - an impossible situation which would never be fixed with a driver.

After doing some thinking, I've come to the conclusion that it was most likely caused by the Windows 7 ISO being burnt to disk using a DVD-RW drive that was different to the one being used to later install Windows 7 (the disk was created on one machine but used on another). I'm quite disappointed that a Sony DVD-RW drive would create a disk that cannot be read by other drives, but from asking around it's not an uncommon thing for burning installation disks. So here's a "new" way of doing things: use a USB memory stick to create an installation "disk" of Windows (or any other program, operating system or whatever).

The advantages to this are simple; you'll avoid the incompatibilities that seem to occur between different DVD-RW drives, and in addition, the USB interface is quicker than the optical disk interface, so your installation will go much faster.

The steps to do this are quite simple, but you'll have to watch out if you want to do this to install Windows XP, as it might not have USB drivers that work with your motherboard pre-service-pack 2. Windows 7 or Vista, and any applications, should install fine however.

The first thing to do is to acquire a USB stick. I recommend an 8GB stick, as the capacity of a single sided DVD is over 4GB - they cost around £10, but leave room for slipstreaming some service packs and applications (something I'll go over in a future post).

Now we need to format the USB stick. Insert it into a USB port, and when it's ready to use, open up cmd.exe and type "diskpart" to launch the Windows program of that name. You might get a UAC prompt. Once the command prompt states that "diskpart" has been started, type "list disk", to get a list of all disks (hard drives, DVDs, USB sticks, etc.) that are currently connected to your computer. We need to get the number assigned to your USB stick, shown in the column labelled "Disk ###". Once you know what number your USB stick is, type the following commands:

select disk X
clean
create partition primary
select partition X
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Where "X" is the number assigned to your USB stick. Make sure you get this right, otherwise you'll be formatting one of your hard drives!

If the above was completed, your USB stick is now ready to receive the files to turn it into an installation disk. If you have an installation CD that you want to convert to the USB stick, put it in the computer, and when it is ready, type the following command into command prompt:

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

Where d:\ and e:\ are the drive letters of your DVD-RW drive and your USB stick, respectively (change if necessary).

If you have an ISO file that you want to "burn" to the USB stick, try an application like UNetbootin.

When everything is finished, go into the BIOS of the computer you want to install Windows on and change the boot order so that it checks if it can boot from USB stick, restart again and go! If you're using this to install a program from the USB stick, rather than an operating system, then you should be able to do this right away from the USB stick in the same way you'd do it from an installation DVD.

Useful?

Semester 1 Finished

2010-02-09T11:45:00.000Z

I've now finished my semester one exams and coursework, and will return to regular updates shortly!

Make the Most of Your Screen Resolution

2010-01-19T17:50:00.003Z

It's often tempting to leave things as they are when they come out the box; it's easy to assume that the people that made it know what the best configuration is, and changing things will probably make it less efficient.
Unfortunately this has never been true with computers.

This is a post about how you can make a few small changes to improve how you see your computer, and since it's a purely visual experience, it'll also improve how you use your computer.

Item one: The Windows Taskbar

The key to all of this is using as little 'height' space as possible. In most applications, such as reading a word document, a PDF or a website, you scroll down rather than side-to-side. Unfortunately there are two things against us: the typical screen resolution for some reason is much wider then it is high. Unless you have a spinning monitor and a graphics card that supports 90-degree rotation (these things do exist), this isn't something we can change.

We can however move the taskbar to the left or right hand side. This looks rubbish in XP and Vista, as it displays a tiny icon and about 2 letters of the start of each program's name, but in Windows 7 with large taskbar icons and no tasbar item titles, this looks great! The taskbar has to take up space anywhere we put it, and I have always hated auto-hide, but if it's positioned on the left or right then it takes up space that isn't normally used.

Give it a go, and if you can get used to it, you'll never want to change back.

Item two: Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon Bar

Whether you like it or not, it is here. You can however minimise it by clicking a button on it and clicking "Minimize the Ribbon", which frees up a surprising amount of space. This takes away some speed of access, but we have ways of getting around that.
First of all, ensure that you have the "Show Mini Toolbar on Selection" option turned on. This allows us to perform some common formatting tasks without having to go all the way to the top of the screen.
The next shortcut is to add all the features that you normally use to the "Quick Access Toolbar". By default this toolbar is located on-top of the document's title bar, but we can move this down to below the minimised ribbon bar to make it quicker to select the items on it - or you could just leave it where it is by default to save even more screen space!

Make sure to do this separately on all your installed Microsoft Office applications!

Item Three: The Web Browser

Uninstall all unused 3rd party toolbars on your web browser, even ones like Google Toolbar, you really don't need them!
From the View menu in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, turn off all toolbars that you don't really need to look at, such as the status bar. You can also turn off the favourites bar, if you learn the keyboard shortcut to quickly re-enable it when you want to click of on your favourites (for example the Google Chrome shortcut is Ctrl+B).

I can't recommend Google Chrome enough for this task. Although it's RAM usage is slightly higher than Firefox's, it is great for netbooks and other devices with small screens, as it uses the browser's title bar for displaying your tabs, and so with the favourites bar hidden, it's practically full-screen viewing.

Before Example
After Example

Windows 7 64-Bit and Registry Cleaners

2010-01-17T13:35:00.000Z

Just a quick note to say, for the time being at least, don't use a registry cleaner on Windows 7 64-Bit.
Auslogics registry cleaner seems to delete the registry entries that record what folders you've used and pinned on the right-click menu of Windows Explorer when it's pinned to the start menu or taskbar.
When I first installed Windows 7 I used a registry defragmenter (called Free Registry Defrag 2.40) that I got from CNET that corrupted my registry and forced me to reinstall Windows 7.
So, my advice is really don't use any registry cleaners until they start explicitly saying "works with Windows 7 64Bit".

Making Windows Easier to Use - Godmode

2010-01-09T13:03:00.003Z

There will be a chapter in the user guide later for "Making Windows Easier to Use", but for the time being I want to share this little gem I just came across on CNET.
Microsoft have been continuously departmentalising the features and utilities in Windows in order to make things easier to use. We had "Security Centre", now we have "Action Centre", and there's "Administrative Tools", "Ease of Access Centre", "Power Plans"... The list goes on. These are fine for most people, it's nice to have related things grouped together sometimes rather than just having an ever-increasing Control Panel, but for those of us more experienced, sometimes you just want to go straight to a specific feature without navigating through 3 menus to get there.
That is where this article comes in. Someone found out that if you create a new empty folder and call it specifically "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}", without the quotes, then that folder will turn into a massive control panel with a shortcut to pretty much every Windows feature in it, one click away. Fonts, Internet Options, Network Adapter Options... it's all there. While you could always create a batch file to the control panel items you most frequently use, this little beast has everything.
Give it a try and see what you think. If you feel that there is literally too much there, this other CNET report details some ways of creating folders like this but with less in, to make more specific control panels.

Desktop Javascript

2010-01-08T20:00:00.001Z

Have a play on this. I don't know what to say about it, to be honest with you. I've seen desktop examples before, but this is the best I've come across so far.
It has a dock of some sort, it has a taskbar, window resizing, a start menu, icons, the works. It just goes to show how far JavaScript has really come. What's the point in a JavaScript desktop? you say. To run a JavaScript desktop web browser, of course! Ever since getting internet access, I've wanted to run a JavaScript web browser in a Javascript desktop. Just think what would happen if you used it to navigate to the above url... the universe would implode in an infinite loop, at the very least.
In all seriousness, as a coder I can really appreciate this sort of work. These guys have pushed the technology to the point where they can create what looks like a your own desktop. A generic desktop might not be of much use, but the applications you could put this to are immense. What do you think?

Windows 7 Tip: msn minimise to tray

2010-01-07T14:43:00.000Z

Just a short post today, if you use Windows 7 and msn messenger then you might have noticed that it doesn't minimise to the system tray (notification area) when you close it, but instead keeps a presence on the taskbar. To fix this, you need to run msn in Windows Vista compatibility Mode.
Open the directory that msn is installed in (usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Messenger), then right-click on the msn executable file, called "msnmsgr.exe" or just "msnmsgr", and click Properties. In the properties window that opens, click the Compatibility tab then click the checkbox labelled "run this program in compatibility mode for:". On the dropdown list that becomes enabled, select Vista Service Pack 2, then click OK and restart (or start, if it wasn't running) msn. When you close the msn window it should now minimise to the notification area like it used to.

AMD Phenom II vs. Intel i7 AGAIN

2010-01-03T12:35:00.007Z

Here we are again; AMD Phenom II vs. Intel i7.
Last night I was attacked in the form of text (...) over Steam "friends" by a keyboard warrior, who called me an AMD fanboy (exact words were "Phenom is just for people who just can't accept that Intel have finally pulled ahead of AMD"). Nobody likes a fanboy, and so here is the proof that an AMD Phenom gives you more for your money than an i7 if you're not going to overclock - which has always been my stance on the 2 CPUs.

1. Tom's Hardware Chart 1

2. Tom's Hardware Chart 2

The charts clearly show that a Phenom II 965 - which operates at 3.4GHz, will perform better than an i7 920 - which operates at 2.66GHz. These charts show that the i7 has superior architecture, which cannot be disputed, but the phenom 965 is cheaper than the i7 920. Therefore, if you're not going to overclock, then the Phenom is better value.

After looking at these charts, you'll notice that i7 models that are a few megahertz slower than the 3.4GHz Phenom get a few fps more, but if you look around you'll find that they are easily twice the price. Also we have to remember that some games/applications are more dependent on the graphics card than they are on the processor (actually this is quite common for games), so in these cases it probably wouldn't matter if you had the Phenom or the i7. The CPU simply isn't usually the bottleneck in most computers.

Of course, if you have completely expendable income, and don't want to overclock, then you could get a 3GHz or faster i7 straight out of the box, which would definitely leave the Phenom II behind, but I'd never recommend spending such a grotesque amount of money on a single piece of computer hardware, especially since a computer system will only ever perform as well as the slowest component in it (sure spend a grand on an i7, but then strap it to a single magnetic hard drive and watch it try to suck treacle through a straw).

If you are going to overclock, however, then I do recommend the Intel i7. This article shows that the i7 can get to a higher clock speed than a Phenom, and when at equal clock speeds, the i7 leaves the Phenom well behind (it should be noted that the conclusion of that article is out of date, as the Phenom is using DDR2 in the review when it can now use DDR3, but the fact that they could easily get the i7 going at a faster clock speed than the Phenom is still valid).

So there you have it - I still know what I'm talking about. If you're going to overclock a Phenom to get even more for your money, I recommend getting a "black edition", as you can turn up the speed of the clock as well as the hypertransport speed (aka front side bus) - on non-black editions you can only turn up the hypertransport which forces your RAM and northbridge to operate faster, putting additional strain on your motherboard.

In other news, I'm not so active at the moment because of university. Once my semester one exams are over at the end of this month, I'l be back to updating every couple of days again.

If you've overclocked an i7 or a Phenom II, comment on this thread and say how you got on with it

URL Shortener

2009-12-28T10:52:00.005Z

This is a cool little site called "bit.ly" that lets you shorten a URL. Just paste the URL into the field, and the website will create a short bit.ly URL with a number suffix to represent the URL you gave. Putting that bit.ly URL into your address bar will open the site that the original URL pointed to.

It's very simple really; they just save the URL you gave on their database, then when you click the link that they gave you, it just polls the database and redirects you to the URL that was originally submitted.
The also offer a few other services, like link tracking, history of what links you've ever posted, etc.
Pretty nifty for forums and such, but I'll probably stay away; URL lengths are not really an issue usually, and if their database goes down, your link will be broken! What do you think?

"PC User Guide" - Chapter 1: Hard Drives

2009-12-23T12:35:00.004Z

If you are loaded and have a solid state drive then you can completely ignore this post!

This chapter will cover:

Basic Concept of Operation
Choosing a Hard Drive
Maintenance
Optimisation

Basic Operation

A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) consists of multiple magnetic disks that rotate on a spindle using an electric motor. The disks have on them tiny marks that have positive or negative magnetic charges, arranged in a tight spiral on the disk a bit like a snail's shell (if you flattened it down). A "read head" reads the magnetically charged marks on the disks, and interprets these as 1s and 0s, which is binary. The read head is so close to the disk that if any dust were to pass between the disk and the head you'd get an error; for this reason the disk is sealed shut.
Due to the way that a hard disk is constructed, with data on spinning circles, it is quicker to access data at the "start" of the disk then it is to access data at the "end". We'll take advantage of this in part 3.
You can have multiple hard drives in your computer, motherboards typically support 6-8. You can arrange your hard disks in "arrays", referred to as "RAID - Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks". I'll cover RAID later in this chapter, but the basic principle is that if you've got more than one HDD, you can link them up using a driver, so that they work differently to just individual storage solutions. Or you could just store the operating system on one, games on another, page file on another, etc. to reduce data traffic and minimise the negative effects of "mechanical delay" that traditional hard disk drives suffer from (As the disks inside each hard drive have to physically rotate to get you the data you want, this causes a delay between requesting data and receiving it).

Choosing a Hard Drive

Going on capacity alone isn't enough to make a decision as to which hard drive to buy. There are many different aspects that need to be considered, such as access speed, buffer size, noise and heat generated, etc.
First of all, everyone knows about capacity; the more gigabytes a HDD holds, the more you can fit on it. It's tempting to buy the "biggest" HDD you can afford, but this is an easy way to waste money. Only pay for capacity that you're going to use; if you don't keep many games installed at the same time, or you don't keep lots of videos on your computer, then you don't need to buy a "big" disk, and should put that money towards the other aspects of the hard drive. Having said that, however, the capacity is the cheapest part of a traditional HDD, and you never know; you may end up installing a second operating system on this HDD in the future, or you may suddenly get into High Definition video, and in this situation you want all the capacity you can get. Mine is 500GB, holds 3 operating systems and plenty of music and games, and is nowhere near full.
The "RPM" (revolutions per minute) is important for hard drives. Remember in part 1 I said that a HDD contains magnetic disks that rotate; the higher RPM, the faster the read head can get to your data. Be warned though, that the faster the disk revolves, the more heat and noise it will produce. 7200RPM is normal, faster disks will perform better but will need cooling in the form of a heatsink and fan, which could get noisy.
The Cache - measured in megabytes, is a place for the hard drive to store copies of files that are accessed a lot. Retrieving data from the cache is faster than the disk, and frees up the disk rotation for getting other files. 32MB or higher cache is good.
The interface of the HDD is important. New Motherboards will use SATA or SATA-II interface type, older motherboards and laptops will use IDE. You have to buy the correct type of hard drive or it won't fit your motherboard; simple. Also be warned that while laptop hard drives are very easy to replace, they are smaller in physical size, so make sure you buy a HDD of the correct physical dimensions to fit your computer.
Seek Time - measured in ms, this is the average time it takes the read head to get to what data you want. The seek time at the front of the disk will be lower than that at the back, and a defragmented disk will also have lower seek time. If it is displayed to you what the seek time of the hard drive you want to buy is, then the lower this number is the better.
Latency, again measured in ms, is the time it takes to actually read data from the disk, independent of seek time. Again when choosing a HDD you want this number to be as low as possible.
Operating Temperature is the temperature that this HDD can work in before experiencing mechanical fault. If the hard drive starts operating outside of these parameters then it could shut down or potentially fail - in which case you could lose everything on it. Faster rotating disks heat up more, so if you're got more than one you should try to space them apart inside your computer to allow an air game. Applying stick-on heatsinks, usually sold separately, can also help with this, and they are silent. Hot hard drives will increase the temperature of other components inside your computer.
Sound Emission, usually measured in db, sometimes in "sone", should be as quiet as possible. Under 20 db is preferable, but may not be affordable. Noise is generated by the disks rotating, which is also where most of the heat will be coming from. In my opinion quiet components are more enjoyable than fast ones; I'd rather play a game on a slightly lower graphics setting than have the sounds of my computer dominating my ears.
Drive Transfer Rate - limited by mechanical delay, this is the speed with which your hard drive can work, basically. Measured in megabytes per second (MB/ps). You want this number to be as high as possible, but unfortunately it's directly related to RPM, Seek Time and Latency. Since increasing RPM, which is the main way of improving the transfer rate, increases heat and noise, this is the dead end of hard drives, and the reason why they're slowly being replaced with solid state.

Maintenance

Due to the way Windows stores data, a hard disk can get fragmented. That means that the data that makes up your files, folders and programs can get spaced around on the hard drive. This wouldn't actually be an issue except that having a big gap between parts of a file causes more mechanical delay when trying to read that file. As a solution, you should defrag your hard drive from time to time. Don't bother with the defrag program that comes with Windows, however, as it's been terrible since 1995 and hasn't gotten much better since. I recommend Auslogics disk defrag, as it's free and good and has features that we'll make use of later in this chapter.
In addition to defragmenting the hard drive, you should delete your temporary files from time to time, preferably before you defrag so that it doesn't waste time defragmenting files that you're going to delete. Auslogics can do this automatically via "Settings" -> "Program Settings", or you can do it yourself in Windows via "Start" -> "All Programs" -> "Accessories" -> "System Tools" -> "Disk Cleanup".
Be warned that you should not defrag your hard drive too often, as if it is only a couple of percent fragmented then this probably isn't enough to noticeably affect performance, and defragmenting a hard drive puts it under stress that can shorten its lifespan. I usually defrag once every couple of months, and/or whenever I install a new game.

Optimisation

There are certain things you can do with a hard disk that will improve the performance of your computer. While There will be a chapter later on dedicated to performance increase, hard drive performance tweaks are quite specific, so I'll put them all here and you can refer back to them later in the guide.

Page File
"Page File" is a place where your operating system stores data that it doesn't use very often but would normally be taking up RAM. There are some things that need to be put in RAM but don't get used very often, these et put in Page File. Page File is also used as an overflow for RAM, so if you don't have enough RAM to do what you want to do, Windows can make some space for you by dumping some stuff in Page File.
Access to the PF impedes what you want to do, as the hard drive can only retrieve one thing at a time. To help with this, you should move the PF to a separate drive if you have one. To do this, right click on My Computer, click Properties, Change Settings, "Advanced" tab, then the "Settings" button in the Performance section. Click the "Advanced" tab on this window and then click the "Change" button in the Virtual Memory section. In the Virtual Memory window, you can set the size and location of the PF. If you have multiple hard drives, move the PF to a drive that the OS isn't installed on. The best setup would be to have the OS on one drive, games on another and PF on a file, but if you have 3 drives then maybe RAID0 (covered later) would be a better solution. You should also set the PF so that the minimum and maximum sizes are the same, so that no time is wasted "resizing" the PF. If you do move the PF from its default drive/partition, don't forget to switch off the PF at the original location.

File Location
Ridiculously, files at the start of the drive are faster to access than files at the end of the drive. This issue is caused because of the way data is physically stored on the drive, and has nothing to do with capacity.
Auslogics Disk Defrag has the option to perform an "Advanced Defrag", which can move system files to the front of the disk and consolidate free space. While this takes a long time to do initially, it means that Windows should be able to get things done faster, as all the important stuff is quickest to access. Consolidating free space also moves data away from the end of the disk, decreasing the seek time to read/modify this data too. Auslogics has the option to turn off your PC automatically when it is finished, so you can kick this off then go out and not worry about it.

Separate Drives for Separate Tasks
If you have 2 drives or more and don't want to use RAID, you should use your different drives for different tasks. For example, if I were to install Windows on one disk, and all my games on another, then the disks will have less traffic, and thus less mechanical delay, which should improve game performance.
As said earlier, moving the page file to a separate disk can also increase performance, for the same reason.

RAID0
And finally, the daddy of improving disk performance; RAID0.
2 or more physical disks are used to create an "array", where data is distributed evenly across them. The array of disks is treated like a single drive, and the driver abstracts address locations for the operating system, so the OS thinks you only have one disk when infact you have more than one.
For example, if I have a RAID0 array of 3 disks, then when I install a program, it will put a third of the program on each disk, thus tripling the access speed (thirding the traffic and mechanical delay that would be experienced if it were all on one disk, while granting the ability to simultaneously access 3 areas of storage at once).
You can set up RAID0 at home right now, but it will require you to reformat your disks, so it is a slightly lengthy procedure. You should be able to acquire the drivers from your motherboards manufacturer's website; the instructions will be included with the driver, and they vary between manufacturers, so I cannot include a how-to in here. It will require you to boot from a usb drive/CD with the RAID0 driver on it, however, and you'll probably have to use the computer's BIOS to enable RAID configuration. You should also use disks that are the same; if one disk is faster than the other then that disk would have to operate at a slower rate to keep in sync.
The downside to using an array like this is that if you have 2 or more disks that split all data between them, then if one fails you lose a portion of everything, essentially corrupting everything. There isn't more chance of a given disk failing when using RAID0, but a failure will have more effect, and more drives means more chance that you will experience a fault. Still, if you back everything up then this isn't such a big deal. You could use say 3 300GB fast drives for your array, and one 1TB slow drive for backing them up. You can also do this with solid state drives, but this would be very expensive.

Forget Disks, Think Inside The Cube

2009-12-20T13:05:00.001Z

Not everyone knows that DVD disks actually use layers to store data. A 1 or a 0 is represented on an optical disk such as a CD or DVD by a tiny reflective mark; the way this mark reflects light tells the laser if it's a 1 or a 0. This is directly limited however to the surface area of the disk, so layering is used to increase the capacity of the disk by n times, where n is the number of layers.

The number of layers you can have, however, is limited. In order to reach a reflective mark on a layer lower that is not the first layer, the laser has to travel through all layers that are above what you want to read, which causes interference. Apparently about 10 layers is the maximum that current laser technology can pass through; any more and there's simply so much between the laser and what it wants to read that it can't tell what is written on the disk any more. Imagine paper is transparent, and then try to read the 10th page of a newspaper without opening it. There would be so many pages of words between you and what you want to read that you simply wouldn't be able to work out what the words said, if you can see them at all.

There's a technology however that ignores this, and goes for as many layers as possible. The idea is that you could make a block or similar object with such a dense level of layers, that you could make it the size of a Lego brick yet store terabytes on it. This is called 3D Optical Data Storage.

One way of creating this kind of optical data storage is to hit a material, say glass, with a laser that has the same strength as a nuclear bomb. This sounds ridiculous, but it's already possible, and scientists working on the technique say they could reach levels of density that would "result in an amount of information comparable to that held by the U.S. Library of Congress written in a volume of just one cubic centimetre of material".

The material would only be under the laser for a fraction of a second, but the amount of energy transferred would be so high (an increase in temperature at a billion billion degrees a second) in such a tiny area for such a minuscule amount of time that plasma would form, and cut a tiny sphere in the material. The resulting crater would be less than half the size of the reflective marks used on blu-ray disks. Different layers can be addressed by focusing the laser at different points in the block.

"DVDs and Blu-ray are currently simple two-layer devices. What these guys are saying is that it might be possible to record data in 3-D with the same kind of precision – or better – as is currently used in a Blu-ray disc, in a block of glass," said Marshal. "If you take data like that from a Blu-ray and stack it up in 3D, then you can store a lot more information in something much smaller than a sugar cube." - Physicist Graham Marshal from the Macquarie University node of CUDOS (Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems); (researched from www.cosmosmagazine.com)

Although the tiny depth of current optical disks is useful, their radius is huge, and was never really suited for mobility. If we could truly start storing huge quantities of read-only data in an area the size of "a sugar cube", well, you don't need me to tell you how useful that would be. Weather this sort of technology will actually take off, however, when terabyte hard drives are getting so cheap, and 16-32GB flash memory is no longer cutting edge, is yet to be seen. For backing up, you'll never get cheaper or faster than magnetic disks, and do we really need to carry terabytes of data around with us?

SpaceShipTwo

2009-12-16T11:00:00.004Z

So I see Branson is finally getting his space programme off the ground (excuse the pun), something he's been planning since 1969. It's a far cry from the casual space travel dangled in front of us by sci-fi stuff like Star Wars, Stargate, etc., but let's have a look at what he's offering for a paltry £120,000.

"WhiteKnightTwo", also called "Virgin Mother Ship: EVE", also called "a plane", uses four huge jet engines to lift "SpaceShipTwo" to a height of 17KM above sea level. It does this by incorporating two fuselages, joined by a single thick wing, with SpaceShipTwo dangling between them. Once the allotted altitude is reached, WhiteKnightTwo releases SpaceShipTwo, which, sticking a big middle finger up at the environmentalists, ignites its rocket and shoots off at 0-2,500mph in 10 seconds.

Now airborne and free of "the mothership", SpaceShipTwo will fly around in the stratosphere, on the very edge of space, giving its passengers the unique once-in-a-lifetime experience of being hit in the face by someone else's vomit while in zero-gravity, as well as seeing Google Earth "in real life". Once everyone's bored with this, SpaceShipTwo will "return to earth like a shuttlecock", thus apparently avoiding the heat buildup generated by a regular crappy old NASA designed shuttle, somehow.

Once ready for business, Branson's first act will be to go up with his family, thus proving to us all that it is "safe". It'll then be open to Celebrities, Arabian Princes, Drug Barons, Oil Farmers, and anyone prepared to get out a second mortgage.
There is also a model that has been designed by scientists to test how ants handle flying such a fast vehicle:

Windows XP Remix

2009-12-15T19:27:00.001Z

Nerdy as hell, but catchy...

The future of RAM

2009-12-14T12:27:00.001Z

We all know what RAM is, and how important is in a computer system; but outside of the storage, the RAM is the greatest bottleneck. There have been attempts to improve the performance of RAM, such as increased speed of operation, reduced latency, and adding a second (dual) channel, and now a third (tri) channel (a comparison of the two will be reviewed in a future post). But here's something really revolutionary: Non-Volatile RAM.
Traditional RAM, no matter how fast or how many channels you deploy it in, is "volatile". It needs constant electricity to retain data, and as soon as the computer is switched off, it "forgets" everything. Even the motherboard's CMOS, a data chip that holds user-configured settings, is volatile, and all motherboards actually have a rechargeable watch battery on them for keeping this volatile memory charged.

NVRAM on the other hand doesn't lose its data when you turn off the power. Keeping RAM charged would need a car battery, so the solution of providing power when you're not using your computer is really not an option, even if you're using ecoRAM. NVRAM is a concept where the RAM holds its data when no electricity is present. If this was possible, computer boot times would be seconds, you wouldn't have to wait for the motherboard POST every time you turn it on, and you could even "install" your favourite game or heavy application directly onto the RAM, greatly increasing its performance.

It's a lot easier to talk about NVRAM than it is actually possible to build it, however. "Magnetoresistive RAM", where magnetic charge is used to store data like how a conventional hard disk does, has been tried. As has "Phase-change RAM", where electrical resistance is used to determine if a bit is 1 or 0, and "Nano-RAM", where nano-structures like "carbon nanotubes" are used (an image of which is shown below), with the obvious advantage that the sheer density of data represented on the scale of nano technology would mean huge quantities of storage in tiny areas. The problems with these technologies is that the speed and quantity required to make it useful as RAM is either so expensive that to produce it in useful amounts would be to go bankrupt, or the technology simply doesn't exist yet to get them past the design phase.

I suppose it's a good thing, really; Windows still likes to mess up and require a restart to fix it, if the RAM retained the state of the machine then restarting it would have no effect, and you'd be stuck in an infinite loop of Microsoft fail. Still, it's exciting to think that the days of casual nanotechnology are, at least, on the drawing board.

While researching for this blog post, I came across these guys. 512GB of system RAM is probably a con, but it's clever that they are able to do it regardless.

Speed Test

2009-12-12T16:08:00.003Z

This handy website can be used to test the speed of your internet connection. It tests your download and upload speed independently; which gives you a good idea of the kind of connection speed you're getting, and if it's as good as what you're paying for.

Computer User Guide

2009-12-12T10:48:00.001Z

I'm thinking of writing a PDF file on how to maintain your PC, optimise it, and improve the general quality of your experience while using it. Many of my friends often ask me about specific tasks they want to do with their PC, like how to reduce boot time, increase system performance, make Vista or XP more productive, what software is available to do X job, etc. Rather than repeating myself, I may as well just write it all down, and then they and you can just read the guide whenever, to find something out.

What I'll probably do is write articles about specific tasks, like Windows services, improving the boot time, improving system performance, or whatever. Whenever I finish one of these articles I'll post it on here, and when they're all done I'll form them into chapters, save the text into a pdf and upload it onto a few servers.

As time goes on and I learn more magic tricks, I can just add to it, and then upload the latest version. Stay tuned on here to see the next update on this project.

In other news, this blog will probably slow down in January as I will have some university exams and report deadlines. But you'll all be too busy trying to lose weight after Christmas, so I doubt you'll notice!

Speaking of magic tricks:

Batch Files

2009-12-11T09:52:00.002Z

Batch files are a great way to automate tasks that you often run yourself. To create a Batch File, open Notepad, type in some valid commands, and then save the file as name.bat (not name.bat.txt). Every time you double click the file, it will execute the commands. You can also set this file as a "scheduled task" in Windows if the batch file is automating a task that you usually do when you turn on your PC.
For example, I make use of two batch files frequently. I created one batch file called "Shut down.bat", which as you can guess, shuts down my computer when I run the file. What I typed into Notepad before saving the document as a .bat file is this:

cd\
shutdown -p

I then created a shortcut to this file, changed the shortcut's icon to the Windows shut down icon, and placed the shortcut on my taskbar at the opposite end to the start menu (you could put it on your quicklaunch toolbar if you use Vista or XP). Now I just have to click this icon and my computer turns off - I don't have to open the start menu to turn off the PC.

The other batch file I use contains just the command:

control netconnections

This opens my Network Connections window, something that's normally only accessible from the Control Panel. This batch file is pinned to my start menu - I don't need to access it quite often enough for it to warrant a place on my taskbar.

So batch files can be used as shortcuts to perform operations that you often do when you use the computer. But what operations can batch files actually perform?
A batch file can be programmed to do anything that you can do. Windows is just a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to a set of commands built in to the Operating System, and a batch file is way of executing those commands directly without clicking on buttons or tabs that normally perform these commands for us.

Command Prompt is a way for you to experiment with giving commands to Windows. On your start menu, open the Run box and type "cmd" to see the Windows Command Prompt. On Vista you can just write cmd into the search box.
This black box with text on it is what goes on behind the scenes in Windows. There are hundreds of commands you can type into Command Prompt, and even more tutorial websites, like this one, to help you learn how to command Windows to do things using this interface.
Once you figure out how to write the command you want to execute, you can save the text of the command in a .bat file, and then running that file by double-clicking it or adding it as a scheduled task will make Windows execute those commands. Just don't add the shutdown command I showed you earlier as a batch file, and then schedule that batch file to run when you turn on your PC, or else you'll be in a difficult situation!

Interesting uses for batch files are:

Making a shortcut to shut down or restart your PC
Making a shortcut to open specific Control Panel items that you use often, such as wireless networks, or personalise your desktop
Making a shortcut to start an antivirus scan or defrag your hard drive (many 3rd party programs have command-line interfaces, and thus you can write a batch file to invoke their functionality. Consult a programs' help files to see if it can be interacted with using cmd)
Making a shortcut to open the search window in Windows

If you have any interesting uses for batch files, comment on this post and let me know.

Another tutorial

Freak Out!

2009-12-10T20:38:00.004Z

This guy totally freaks out...
Nobody told him it was a Friday (23/5/2008)

Windows 7

2009-12-10T19:16:00.006Z

Now I've had time to properly use Windows 7 on my laptop, I thought I'd take the time to share with you what I think about it.

The first thing I'll comment on is the thing about Windows 7 that makes the biggest difference: the user interface. I'm happy to say that with Windows 7, Microsoft have actually improved the standard Windows UI. The core features, such as the taskbar, window, etc. have only been incrementally improved since Windows 95 (and were originally based on designs by Apple), with nothing much changing until XP made the presentation a bit nicer, and modified the start menu (something that garnered much criticism at the time). When Vista came along, Microsoft again had borrowed something from Apple - a glass effect rendered by the graphics card, yet the the basic layout and design had not changed.
However, with Windows 7, I'm happy to say that Microsoft have finally broken away from Windows 95. The taskbar has lost the quicklaunch bar by default, and instead you can 'dock' your favourite applications directly to it, thus avoiding having to open the start menu for everything you want to do (another concept that Apple implemented first...).

If an application that is running is docked on your taskbar, then clicking it's icon will show the currently running version of it, rather than starting another instance of it; in this way Windows 7 has eliminated the different between a shortcut to the application and the application itself. Right-clicking an application on the taskbar, docked or not, displays a submenu specific to that application; for example, Word will show you your most recently opened documents, and you can "pin" documents that you use all the time to this list. Chrome on the other hand shows you links to your most frequently visited addresses, along with their favicons.
The taskbar also has the option to group items where more than one instance of that application is running, enlarge the icons and remove the titles, so that all you see is the running and docked apps' icons - this means they take up a lot less width, so you can actually now realistically put the taskbar on the left or right side of the screen rather than the bottom (an advantage because word documents and web sites, 2 very commonly used things on a computer, usually take up a lot more height than they do width).
The glass effect is also better on Windows 7 than it is on Vista, although you could always download a skin for Vista to make it look better, but I doubt the Microsoft modding community are going to keep on bringing out new things for Vista for much longer...

Amazingly, Windows 7 actually has some features that I find useful. Apart from how much easier it is to get around now that the taskbar has been revamped (which to be fair is the best thing about this OS), Windows 7 brings a couple of things to the table that make using my laptop more enjoyable.
The IP properties of your network adapters now have the feature that if by default you use DHCP, then a new tab is shown which allows you to input alternative credentials. This means that if you use multiple networks frequently, and one of them has manual IP settings, you can put these settings in the "alternative configuration" tab, and then you don't have to delete them when you want to use a DCHP network again.
UAC is less intrusive, and doesn't have to be disabled in order to make your computer usable (disabling UAC in Vista makes using it a lot nicer, but actually makes your computer a lot less secure).
Paint has been given a ribbon menu, like in Office 2007. I find this amusing.
The battery plan settings offer much deeper levels of customisation than Vista, and make it a lot easier for you to save power on features that you don't use, or alter how much you're prepared to dim the screen when on battery. For this reason, I think stripped down Windows 7 would actually be viable for netbooks; something I'd never recommend with Vista.

Performance-wise, Windows 7 turns on and off faster than Vista did, and doesn't suffer from the lag that Vista does when your desktop is first displayed to you. I can't benchmark fps to you, since this is not a gaming laptop, but my battery lasts about 50% longer than it did on Vista, which probably means the CPU and HDD are being made less use of in the background - something which is bound to improve the performance of gaming.
The UI is generally more responsive, with menus and other user interaction seeming to be given higher CPU priority than they were on Vista and XP.

All in all, Windows 7 is a good operating system, perhaps the first OS from Microsoft I've ever actually enjoyed using for its own sake. It's a much more viable upgrade from XP than Vista presented us with, and the redesigned taskbar really puts shame to how little Microsoft have been innovating for the last 15 years.

Solid State: Still a Solid Waste of Money

2009-12-08T12:02:00.002Z

The Solid State Drive is the next advancement of the PC's method of storing data while the system is turned off. Rather than your standard Hard Disk Drive, which gets its name from the days when we used to use Floppy Disk Drives, and is based on the same basic concept as a Phonograph record player, the Solid State Drive uses technology similar to the memory card in your mobile phone, MP3 player or digital camera.
Unlike a Hard Disk Drive, Solid State Drives have no moving parts, and therefore there is no 'mechanical delay' like there is in a normal Hard Drive. Because it takes the same amount of time to find data on the drive no matter where it is located, they also do not suffer from getting fragmented (in the sense that "defragging" one will have no effect).
They are much faster than a standard Hard Disk Drive, run cooler as there is less friction, and use less power as they don't have to use motors. With all of the above mentioned, it seems stupid that we continue to use Hard Disk Drives, which are based on a concept of technology that is simply archaic by the standards of the rest of a computer's components.
However, as far as I'm concerned, with all the benefits of Solid State, there really is no motivation to upgrade to one just yet. The price alone is enough to put you off; a measly 64GB drive will set you back nearly £100, when a 500GB Hard Disk Drive is a mere £38.98.
From a performance point of view, most motherboards these days support "RAID 0" configuration, where 2 or more identical hard drives (or solid state drives, if you're loaded) can be connected, and the motherboard splits all data evenly across the disks. For example, if I have a RAID 0 configuration using 3 Hard Drives, I will only see 1 disk when I open "My Computer", with a capacity of all 3 disks put together. When I save a file, install a program, or whatever, a third of the data will go onto each disk. This has the effect that when I want to run a program that is installed across this array, it will be retrieved from 3 locations at once; thirding the speed it takes to start and run the program.
The drivers to do this should be available on your motherboard's manufacturer's website, and may have even come with your computer on a disk, but you will need to use 2 or more identical hard drives, and you'll have to reinstall everything including the Operating System (which you'd also have to do if you upgraded to Solid State).
The disadvantage of using RAID 0 is that if 1 of the hard disks fail, you will lose everything. This is exactly the same as if you keep everything on 1 disk as normal, but if you're using a RAID 0 array with 2 disks, that doubles your chances of experiencing a mechanical fault. 3 disks - triple the chances, 4 disks, quadrupole the chances, etc... But you back up all your photos and documents onto DVDs anyway, don't you?

RAID 0 is a great solution to drastically decreasing loading times of applications and your operating system, and can be done with Hard Disk Drives inexpensively, or Solid State Drives extortionately.

Here are some nerds who don't have to pay for things, going over the top with both Solid State Drives and RAID 0:

Touch Book

2009-12-06T12:45:00.001Z

With 10-15 hours of battery life, this netbook uses an ARM CPU and hardware the likes of which is normally found in mobile phones to provide a truly mobile computing experience. While it has it's own OS, it still provides important functionality like word processing and a web browser (based on Firefox). The keyboard is detachable and the screen is magnetic, touch-sensitive, and includes an accelerometer and 6 usb ports, with solid state technology for it's storage solution. The vendors also claim that Google Android and Unix-like OSs such as Ubuntu could be installed on the device.
Head over to their website for more details.

I love stuff like this, and I truly believe it's the future of casual computing. Many people are put off by non-Windows operating systems, but we need not be. Microsoft have dominated, and essentially crippled the computing industry for too long, and small companies like Always Innovating are exactly what we need. This machine is a genuine solution for web browsing and the like, and "non standard" hardware like this is going to be a lot safer than the virus and spyware infested world of the x86 CPU.
When Sony get their organic screen technology affordable, which I plan on writing an article on in the future, this sort of computer will last even longer between recharges. Or we could see the refresh and colour range of e-Paper improving, another amazing technology, which would be even better.

Google Wave

2009-12-06T09:30:00.002Z

Thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the concept of websites that provide many forms of communication is well known to us, and perhaps even expected. Hotmail provide the service Home which allows you to 'tweet' (or 'have a status') and a 'network', share photos etc., and likewise Google Mail provides an ajax instant messenger like the one on Facebook.
These are, however, rather lacking, and simply cannot complete with Twitter or Facebook. While Windows Live "Home" is expertly ignored by most of us, Google, however, have been thinking of what they can do to offer us something new. Their solution: Wave.
Google Wave is still in its Beta phase of design, and is strictly invite-only, although you can invite your friends, so contact me if you want to give it a try. The service offered by Wave is sort of a hybrid between msn, the traditional web forum, and your wall on Facebook.

The page is divided up into multiple panels. The right-hand panel displays your current conversation. The panel shows the conversation in real-time, so they actually see you typing. You can drag people into and out of the conversation at any time, and each post made by someone in the conversation can be directly replied to, which indents it from the rest of the thread and avoids the classic [quote][/quote] method used in forums, which force test from messages to have to be repeated, and is open to abuse. Videos, images and other media items can also be inserted into conversations.
The central panel holds all conversations that you are currently privy to, and they do not expire unless you leave them. It can also be filtered so you can see conversations only between you and certain users, and old threads can be archived to clear them from the default view.
All the panels are resizeable just like in desktop applications. All in all, the interface has been put together very well using a lot of ajax and javascript trickery, and acts and responds just like a locally installed desktop application - something that was never achievable on the web just a few years ago.
The overall point of of Google Wave is to collaborate on the internet, whether this is for business, entertainment or social networking reasons is up to you. Although it might have limited use to use already ingrained in forums, an instant messenger desktop program, and facebook/twitter, it certainly has potential to provide us all with a great way to communicate, and along with Google Mail and it's built-in ajax-powered messenger, is obviously supposed to be a member Google's Chrome OS feature lineup.
If you want to give Google Wave a go, comment on this post or send me a message on facebook, and i'll happily invite you to the closed beta.

AMD Phenom II X4

2009-12-04T20:13:00.002Z

Just a short post about the above-mentioned CPU. This 45nm processor from AMD is available in a 3.4GHz model for just £145.98 inc VAT at Overclockers UK. Although you can always buy a slower model of the same architecture and then overclock it, buying a 3.33Ghz Intel Core i7 will set you back £769.99 inc VAT!
The price difference is just crazy, and even though the i7 does more per clock tick, the AMD model operates at a faster frequency anyway. Also don't forget that while the i7 has the equivalent of eight logical cores (4 physical cores each running 2 logical), most applications will only use 1 core, 2 at maximum.
There is, however, a catch; at the moment the Phenom II is only supplied in models that support RAM speeds of up to 1.333 GHz, and as the 'best' DDR3 RAM and AM3 socket motherboards support 1.666GHz speeds, this AMD CPU will actually be accessing your memory at a slower rate than the motherboard and RAM modules can supply it.
The solution is, if possible, to overclock the Phenom's HyperTransport interface to force it to access RAM at a faster rate. If this isn't possible, however, then my advice is to buy the cheapest Phenom II you can and overclock it to 3.4GHz, because at these prices you get far more for your money than the i7. With this over-clocked CPU, buy the 1.666GHz RAM with the lowest latency you can afford and a motherboard to support it, if you can afford it. In the future, you can upgrade your CPU to an AM3 socket model with a faster HyperTransport interface, which will result in your RAM being accessed faster, and as the RAM is the biggest bottleneck in a system once you're outside of the hard drive, this is always going to make a difference.
The alternative is to buy the cheapest i7 model that can access RAM at 1.666GHz, and overclock it. Bear in mind however that i7 motherboards are also more expensive than AMD ones because they have to support tri-channel memory and 8 logical cores.

Web Archiving

2009-12-03T15:46:00.001Z

How many times have you visited a website that you know and love, and it's not available? We take it for granted that it'll be back pretty soon, but sometimes websites really do get removed from the internet; especially the smaller, and often more useful, non commercially orientated sites that we often use to find a quick Windows fixor find out some song lyrics.

Many people get around this by manually saving web pages that they want to preserve; for example some people who read web comics will download each edition and save it in a folder on their PC as and whenever a new strip is posted by the comic's author.

However, this isn't always possible. We never know if a website is going to be removed, and we can't download and save every page that we ever find useful or interesting. There is, however, a solution.

The Wayback Machine is a website that allowsyou to recover now-removed pages from the internet. Type in the URL of any web page, and hopefully you'll be presented with a list of all saved versions of this page that The Wayback Machine has archived over the years.

For example, this page shows you which services in Windows XP can be disabled to improve performance. However, when I wrote this blog post, that website wasn't available. Using The Wayback Machine, I was able to recover the information on XP services that I weanted to know while writing my own article.

So, next time you search on google and find the page you wanted to view is no longer available, give The Wayback Machine a go!

Windows 7 "FUN" (on a HP 6735s laptop)

2009-11-30T10:50:00.007Z

Thanks to the Academic Alliance, I legally obtained a free copy of Windows 7 64Bit, which I installed over Vista 32Bit on Sunday. I subsequently encountered 2 apparently common yet difficult issues, which I will now go into detail on incase you too have either of these issues.

Issue 1: CD/DVD Driver Required

So I put Windows 7 into my dvd reader, reboot the laptop, and Windows 7 starts unpackaging itself. It gets to the part where you choose your language, but just after, I get an error message demanding that I provide a CD/DVD Device Driver. How the hell does Windows 7 work out that it needs a driver for the DVD reader, when it is on a DVD in the first place?

The short answer is, there is no DVD device driver for this laptop. A quick search on the internet reveals thousands of people also have this issue. From reading forums full of smart arses taking the piss because the person asking the question doesn't want to buy a new DVD reader, I found out the answer is that actually, regardless of your hardware, you get this error if there is a problm with the disk. It seems that Microsoft just coded a generic "DVD reader driver required" if it can't read the data off the disk for any reason.

Solution: I redownloaded Windows 7 using a different machine with a different operating system, reburnt the iso using a different DVD drive to the one I used originally, and when I burnt the iso this time, I did it on minimum speed and ticked "verify image". Once that was complete, I popped the disk into my laptop and Windows 7 installed, no new hardware required.

Issue 2: Screen Brightness

After installing everything onto Windows 7, I noticed that the screen brightness would reset to minimum if I closed and reopened the lid, took the battery out when the AC power was plugged in, or removed the AC power cable when the battery was plugged in. At 23:30, I also discovered by accident what happens when you remove the battery when the AC cable was also removed.

Going onto the Power Plan, I discovered that the brightness slider on the "Select a Power Plan" window would refuse to slide to the right, and just jumped about when I tried to slide it. Changing the brightness for when on AC power or battery sometimes increased the brightness for a little while.

Searching on the internet and the HP help and support forum showed that many owners of the HP 6735s and some people with the HP 6735b who had 'upgraded' to Windows 7 from Vista had also got this issue. After much trolling, I found the answer.

Reinstalling your graphics drivers does not work, because Windows actually communicates with the motherboard and hence the BIOS to change the screen brightness. You actually have to upgrade the BIOS ROM in order to get Windows 7 to interface with it and thus adjust your screen brightness. To do this, go on HP's driver download page, and download the tool that lets you upgrade your BIOS. If you have the 6735s, the download is this. You want the tool that lets you create a USB or CD/DVD boot disk - using the tool that just lets you ugrade the BIOS when in Windows results in WMI compatibility error. Once you have the boot disk utility, select to create a bootable CD/DVD - using the USB method also doesn't work (even though this utility was updated a few months ago by HP). Burn the iso to a DVD or CD and boot from it. Follow the onscreen instructions to upgrade your BIOS to one that actually works.

Other people have suggested just installing the HP Quick Launch Buttons driver. This is a crap solution however because not only does this create yet another startup entry for your computer to have to initiate when it loads Windows, unless of course you want the quick launch functionality, but it also means you have to manually adjust the screen brightness every time it resets back to minimum setting (which it does a lot if you havent upgraded the BIOS) - which really just is not a solution for this issue.

And after all this, was Windows 7 really that much of an improvement over Vista. Who knows. I bet if you changed the UI on both and got people to pick one, they wouldn't be able to see a clear winner.

If you are trying to install Windows 7, or have a HP 6735s laptop, I hope this helped!

Blind Search

2009-11-28T11:08:00.004Z

Most of us like Google, a lot of us use Bing, and some of us even search with Yahoo! But why do we pick these search engines? Why not use something like Ask, Lycos or mamma? We all have our reasons, but I bet the main reason why you do it is just because you want to, right? Well, here's something for you. On the following website, you can do a search, then pick which set of search results you found most useful, and the website will reveal to you which search engine you actually preferred. Go ahead, I'll wait:

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

What result did you get? I got Bing, which surprised me a lot, as I have used the search engine before and found it gave less relevant results than Google. I searched for "transformers", and Bing gave Wikipedia entries for "transformers" and "transformer", Google just gave 5 links about the latest movie; not very broad or useful.

I must admit though that despite this, I won't be switching to Bing any time soon. For one thing, I find the Bing interface harder to read than the Google one, with Bing's left-hand menubar drawing my attention away from my search results (we read left to right, so the first thing I see on a page is the most left text - in this case a menu bar I don't want to use). I also find Google's image search almost always returns more relevant search results, and Google's spellchecker (Did you mean, recursion?) is definitely better than Bing's, which just automatically includes search results for what it 'thinks' you wanted to see. Google also cater better for people with slower connections, as there is very little required to download for you to use Google and get some search results.

reVista'd

2009-11-27T13:01:00.003Z

With all the hype of Windows 7, I thought I'd give Vista 64-Bit another go, for old times sake. As it happens, it's actually not so bad now! Compared to XP, using the Source graphics stress test I was able to get it to chuck out an extra 10fps running on the same hardware; an increase in 5% overall. This isn't much, but might make the difference in more demanding applications between meeting the screen's refresh rate and not. However, I did notice that it seems to take longer to compute physics using the Havoc engine than XP, although I suspect this is the CPU (The AMD X2 is an old model by today's standards, and although it has a 64-Bit instruction set, it was brought out when everybody was using 32-bit. I expect that the 64-Bit instruction set is more limited than the 32-Bit on this CPU).

The hardware used was:

4GB 800MHz RAM

2.8GHz dual core AMD X2 64-Bit

Nvidia GeForce GTS250 (single card)

Asus Crosshair Motherboard

A lot of people seem to be giving Vista the heave-ho in favour of Windows 7, saying that the latter is "the best operating system Windows have ever created", and the other half of the community are putting XP up on a pedestal, as if it's the 'promised land' of operating systems.

In truth, I don't think XP is a viable alternative to Vista; it's less safe, has an out-dated (although luckily still widely supported) graphics library, is less user friendly for beginners (a main complaint about Vista is that you have to relearn the locations of things; I think Vista's layout is better for the newcomer to PCs, and we all know how much there is to get to grips with on a PC when you first begin), uglier, hammers the hard drive with it's poor policy on page filing... the list goes on. XP is by no means perfect, in fact it was terrible until Service Pack 2. Vista was never given a chance by most people, and although it is now updated to an extent where it is actually pretty good, I expect the majority of users will still treat it with prejudice. The time between the Vista release and Vista SP2 was shorter than the time between the XP release and XP SP2.

If you want a viable alternative to Vista, and are not big on gaming, try Linux or Mac. Linux is built on the UNIX kernal - same as Apple's operating system for the Mac, which is safe and efficient. Using a software called Wine, you can run many programs that were designed for Windows. Don't switch back to XP.

If you want to give Linux ago, try this website, which helps you decide which distribution is right for you. Personally, I wouldn't really bother with Mac because they are really expensive! But you can install Linux on a hard drive partition right now and see for yourself how good it now is. Using OpenGL, Linux's graphics library, many Linux distributions are now as pretty as Vista.

If you are running Vista, these websites will help speed up startup/shutdown times, and general performance:

Disk Defrag

Registry Defrag

Registry Cleaner

Guide to disabling unnecessary services

Improve the Vista taskbar
Stop unwanted programs loading up at logon

All of these also work for XP, and all but Taskix work for windows 7 too.

Rats leaving a sinking ship?

2009-11-26T20:32:00.003Z

Wikipedia fairies seem to be unhappy with their lot, and are boycotting their (probably) only hobby. I guess we'll have to start using Microsoft Encarta, and hope that the industry-crippling conglomeration doesn't start filtering our knowledge like they are filtering our news.

The Wikipedia article:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Slashdot/slashdot+(Slashdot)160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In -Record-Numbers?from=rss&utm_source=feed burner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed :+Slashdot/slashdot+(Slashdot)

Hugh Pickens writes:"CNET reports that the volunteers who create Wikipedia's pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning Wikipedia in unprecedented numbers, with tens of thousands of editors going 'dead' — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — a trend many experts believe could threaten Wikipedia's future. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008. 'If you don't have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly,' says Felipe Ortega at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, who created a computer system to analyze the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. 'We're not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation.' Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site, which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.' Arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. 'Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again,' adds Ortega."