Vista has once again annoyed me. My post on how to turn off UAC is all well and good until you need to add a network printer…

You cannot add a network printer in Windows Vista unless you have UAC turned on, not even with the administrator account. And for more added fun, the error message does not tell you what the problem is, rather it gives you an ambiguous error message. That’s the reason I’m posting this, I was baffled until I found this article.

read more | digg story

Computer · Microsoft · Vista · Windows

Daniel Petri comes up with another great tip and insight into the way Microsoft’s software can be manipulated to do things you want to do. In this case how to trial different versions of Windows Vista. Once the activation deadline is reached you must put your legal key in for the version you installed to continue but… it does let you try the different versions first!

read more | digg story

Activation · Computer · Microsoft · Vista · Windows

Disable the User Account Control (UAC) feature on your Windows Vista computer.
Makes Vista a lot less annoying for power users.

read more | digg story

Computer · Microsoft · Uncategorized · Vista · Windows

Hurry before they take it down. Littlewoods currently have listed a CoreDuo Tosh satellite laptop with 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD and 128MB ATI Radeon graphics for UNDER £150

(click either image to see it in all its glory)

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This is clearly a mistake on their behalf but most people at work seem to have ordered a few.

According to the Littlewoods Terms & Conditions:

Whilst it is our intention to keep our website up to date and error free, product description or pricing errors may occur. If we discover such an error after you have submitted an order to us, we will contact you prior to accepting your order with the correct details. You may then either cancel your order or re-confirm it based on the correct information. If we are unable to contact you, we will treat your order as cancelled.

Computer · Microsoft · Vista · Windows

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I would like to try the Windows Vista RC1 release to see whether it is going to be worth my while reformatting my PC again to get it up to date with the latest Windows OS. I currently run Windows Server 2003 and find that it is much nicer, and more stable, than Windows XP and thought that it would be an interesting time to compare the old with the new to see what Microsoft has managed to develop this time.

Microsoft seem to have once more lifted the basic UI from the latest OS X and then applied a paint brush to it is evident. Just go to your My Documents and see how you navigate through it. There are also a new set of icons that are bigger and take up more of your desktop as a result. The Sidebar is another OS X rip off – Apple introduced the widgets idea a couple of years ago and suddenly it has appeared in the latest version of Windows!
The Start Menu has been upgraded and now sports a built in find/run bar at the bottom making it even quicker to load a command prompt or notepad or…. It has however put a button that “looks like” the Shutdown button in the corner but is actually a standby/sleep button instead. In order to shut down your computer you need to click the arrow to the right and then click shut down from there. This is incredibly annoying!

Adding further to this annoyance is that the computer automatically protects your system from anything you try to change. “Windows has detected that you are trying to open the Device Manager. Are you sure?” Of course I’m sure – I just clicked on it!!!! This happens all over the system wherever you see a little shield next to an option Windows will ask you for permission to use it. Well why not just disable it? I did and for about 20 minutes I had a more relaxed time looking around the computer. Then I had to reboot. When Vista started back up again a nice red warning was sitting in my system tray. “You have turned off the features you just disabled. Im going to tell you about it with this annoying balloon popup” There seems to be no “I’ll monitor it myself” option as per Windows XP SP2 Security Centre and this became even more irritating.

The aforementioned reboot had been due to the installation of GriSoft’s free AVG – a really quite useful alternative to McAfee, Norton or Sophos. This however brought about my next grievance. The idea of automatically updating your anti-virus when you log on is a fairly standard practice. Vista is now so paranoid that when AVG is trying to update in the background it stops you from what you were doing to alert you to the fact that “A program is running in the background. Do you want to check what it’s doing?” NO ITS MY ANTI VIRUS LET IT RUN IN PEACE. I can see the use of this however – it can help people to see when malicious programs are running in the background that shouldn’t be there but I didnt feel that i needed it running and I didnt want to face a barrage of “Do you want to do….” as I searched for a way to turn it off.

One of the more positive things that I had noticed about Vista a while ago was that if you setup user accounts for children then you could stop them having access to system functionality (like Device Manager) and as an administrator you would need to enter your password to give them access. I didnt get a chance to test if this was still a feature but I am fairly sure that it is which means that this new OS will become a success with the home users who want to make sure that their precious little children arent looking at the latest erotic website or buying viagra off ths internet.

Vista doesn’t strike me however as an instantaneous replacement for Windows XP in the workplace. XP & Server2003 work well together and I can see that for the larger corporations to shell out on site licenses for Vista to install on all their workstations is a while off because they will need to trial it on a small group first to check for teething problems. After which they will probably keep to the old WinXP because the process of upgrading an entire workplace would be more trouble than it’s worth.

After a week of using it I have decided that IE7 is no improvement on IE except for the addition of tabbed browsing which isn’t as nice as Firefox anyway so no need for that. WMP 11 is nasty and so completly different from WMP10 that it’s hard to understand where half the options have gone to so I wont be using it anyway.

Windows Vista does make a lot of improvements over the WinXP interface but at the end of the day I still like to be in control of my computer and when I give it an instruction it shouldn’t question me about it. Amazon have been listing the different variants on its website for a couple of months now and the Ultimate version which I was testing comes in at £325 which is an insane amount of money to spend for a very small upgrade.

If you really want that Vista look download a visual style that has been made to look the part and use that – it then gives you £325 to spend on something more useful!

apple · Computer · Microsoft · upgrade · Vista · Windows

After a while of waiting I should hopefully be able to get my new mobile phone tomorrow.

The desire for a new, preferably a 3G, phone has been going since the end of April when my contract came up for renewal. Back then I was faced with the £130 for the N80, £50 for the V3i and £99 for the M600. [ Original post ] Since then I had been waiting for the appropriate phone to come into stock so that I could order it. On the 7th September my M600 arrived. During the 7 day “cooling off” period I found the M3100 was available and on the 15th September I sent it back.

When Orange received the M600 back the M3100 was out of stock and I was placed upon the waiting list for the new phone. At about 4pm this afternoon I received a call from Orange Customer Services to say that the phone was in stock and would be with me tomorrow. All I had to do was spend £50 to get it sent to me. So, as I write this the new phone is in the post and should be here between 9am and 5pm tomorrow.

When it arrives I will write more about it and compare it to the phone it is replacing. Needless to say I am incredibly happy.

M3100 · M600 · Microsoft · mobile phone · Orange · upgrade · V3 · Windows

my new phone has arrived and as usual I have ignored the “please ensure you charge your phone for at least 16 hours” advice that the people at Orange always give.

So far it has worked really well. I have put all my contacts into Outlook 2003 and they are synced with the phone. I had a slight problem when the phone tried to call +4401372****** (my home number) and found that this wasn’t dialing. After a quick edit of the phone book to remove those number-breaking 0’s I now have a full set of contacts on my phone again.

I have also found out that the phone isn’t powerful enough to support Skype mobile which is a shame as I had planned to let my phone double as a WiFi Skype phone when im at home. Instead I shall just have to make do with the normal dialing of numbers and talking over GSM rathar than VoIP.

I could always try to get an M3100 instead which has the 400Mhz processor and see if that is any better than the M600 – but that depends on whether or not Orange are willing to do it as an upgrade phone.

I have 7 working days to try this out now and see whether or not I want to keep it

M600 · mobile phone · Orange · skype · Windows

Each year around the start of May I start to decide what the latest must-have mobile is. I currently have the Motorola V3 RAZR which has served me very well until now. It has been able to take any abuse from me spliing things on it to accidentally throwing it across the floor. It’s only recent floor has been that the battery life has been reduced from around 5 days to 5 minutes. As soon as a call is made it starts to flash “Low Battery” and beep every few minutes to remind me that if I don’t plug it back in soon then it will have no battery but it is happy to waste its precious resources and tell me this. As a result it spends most of its time connected to the mains and when I go out I hope that if anybody tries to call me it will be for about 10 seconds otherwise they will be cut off.

My other activity at this time is to see if Orange can give me more minutes/texts than i previously had and, at the same time, reduce my monthly bill. I tend to find that this helps a huge amount when trying to get the latest phone for free! However this year Orange refused to budge and when I threatened to leave for another network they told me that they had already put me on their best plan last year when I was upgrading from my V600.

So, i’m not getting a better deal on my calls but maybe they will give me a free phone anyway – afterall I have been with them for 7 years now. No. In order to get the same model phone (V3i) just with a slightly upgraded camera I would have to pay them £50 for the privilege. Furthermore if I wanted to have a more powerful phone such as the Nokia N80 this would set me back £120. It was then that I remembered about the phone one of my friends had. The O2 MDA mini was a PDA smartphone running Windows Mobile 5 and would let you send emails as well as make calls, send text messages, take photos etc. The closest phone Orange had to the MDA was the SPV M600 which was the same size, looked the same and had similar features. The only noticable difference was that the M600 didnt have the qwerty keyboard to aid in message writing. The M600 also would have set me back £100 so I decided to leave it until after my exams and then see what was happening when I got back from Durham.

Upon my return to Leatherhead I found that the M600 was no longer in stock. I phoned Orange every couple of days to see if it was available – No luck. They said they would contact me when one came into stock – i missed their call. Checking the Orange website I noticed it had come down in price and was now free – it was still “Out of stock”. By now it was too close to my holiday in Africa. I decided that there was no point ordering one in case it arrived whilst I was away. Instead I waited and on my return the answers were the same – out of stock.
Now, after almost four months of waiting for the phone to be available a chance call to Orange this afternoon has revealed that it is IN STOCK and will be free. I have agreed to a 12 month extension of contract (I’m not about to throw away 500 mins and 120 txts/month) and I will be able to take receipt of the precious at some point tomorrow between 9am & 5:30pm.

I was overjoyed that this was now available to me but upon finding a link to the phone for this blog I have discovered that Orange have now made a shinier precious that is the same size and dimensions as the M600 and features the qwerty keyboard that I had wanted. The Orange SPV M3100 is the same as the MDA mini except they have put different coloured plastic on the front and back. If I hadn’t checked to for the link in the full Pay Monthly section I would not have known about it. I now want this phone!

Thankfully I am allowed a 7 day cooling off period to decide whether or not I like the phone. If, after the week, I am dissatisfied with the phone I have decided to upgrade to I can arrange to have it sent back to Orange and trial a new one! I will try to see whether or not the M3100 is available as an upgrade. If not then I may try the old “Well I could leave and rejoin Orange” tactic to see what happens!

Either way I will eventually get a nice shiny smartphone to replace the battered old V3.

M3100 · M600 · MDA · mobile phone · Orange · upgrade · V3 · Windows

Well this works fine

No problems with the install, no broken USB, no audio issues!

It seems that there is just no software available for Windows XP Professional x64 so I guess I will have to send this back to Overclockers and try to exchange it for a copy of 32-bit Windows XP Professional as this just seems like a much better option at the moment. I just hope that the PC will still be able to make full use of the available resources!

32-bit · 64-bit · Microsoft · Windows · XP Professional x64

What a waste of time that seemed to be

Intel’s brand new motherboard doesnt have RAID, XP Pro x64 doesnt seem to have working USB support, all is going down the pan for what was looking at being a very nice new computer for my neighbour.

The system is fully cased up and looking very nice but I am suffering from the problem of the 64-bit architecture of WinXP being completely incompatible with any of the other pieces of software most “normal” people would want to run on their computer.

Now I am by no means a fan on Symantec or their Norton Products (give me Sophos all the way) but for a “normal” home user it is the best of the standard products available on the market. There is however no support for Norton Internet Security 2006 in 64-bit Windows. Having checked the Symantec Website I found that “Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 will support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, available today“… But I don’t want “Corporate Edition” so I did more digging and found an article entitled Compatibility of Symantec consumer products with Microsoft Windows operating systems which stated that “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows 2003 Server – There are currently no consumer products that are compatible with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows 2003 Server.” Bring on GriSoft.

GriSoft is my second favourite AV engine (after Sophos of course) as it has a free version that can be loaded onto most computers and provide decent anti-virus protection for no costs. However after downloading and copy a number of files around the HDD I was told that only the paid version of GriSoftAVG supports x64. Time for the big guns

Sophos would, at least, do the decent thing of installing but I found myself unable to start up the InterCheck Monitor which meant that I had no onaccess scans available. Another worthless installation.

Next I tried to install the Intel chipset drivers off the supplied driver CD. This not only refused to install the audio drivers but also successfully managed to break the USB root hubs for all USB ports on the system. Which in turn meant that I thought the system was hanging on boot as I was getting a NumLock light on the keyboard through the KVM but no mouse activity. I plugged the PS2 keyboard and USB mouse from my brothers PC into the new system and I had working KB but still no mouse.

A quick trip to the Intel site to get their Chipset Identification Utility proved that Intel can’t recognise their own hardware, either that or XP x64 was preventing it from detecting properly, so I searched by mobo part number and found the BIOS update, chipset drivers and other software. Flashing the Bios has helped speed up boot time but not solved the faulty USB problem.

Checking Microsoft’s XP x64 FAQ’s there is no support for 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit OS as this would cause everything to fuck up.

As there was no RAID setup I was able to use the second hard drive to install 32 bit XP Pro onto to see if this would be any better behaved… It’s installing now so will publish results soon

64-bit · Computer · Microsoft · Windows · XP Professional x64

Having re-cased a computer for a neighbour I was shocked to find out that it wouldnt simply re-activate (the only change to the hardware was the motherboard). In order to get through the activation process I had to:

1. Phone Microsoft
2. Key in the Activation Number given by the XP Activation Wizard
3. Be told it was invalid
4. Get transferred to a “Customer Services Representative”
5. Read them the activation number
6. Tell them it was an OEM key from a manufactured PC
7. Change the product key (from something to the one on the old case)
8. Generate a new activation key
9. Read this back to the CSR
10. Have them enter it incorrectly
11. Re-read it to them
12. Confirm they made a mistake
13. Enter their half of the key
14. Finsh

Or so I thought! The new problem came when I tried to Windows Update and I was told that somebody was trying to give me a counterfeit key and that I should look for a genuine key.

Only after a few reboots and ignoring their “you are illegal” messages did I successfully get it to WU and repatch itself

Why can MS not just make a system that works first time!

Activation · Computer · Microsoft · Windows