Has summer gone yet?

It is the summer that just keeps on giving. Won't end, is damn well September and still too hot.

Dell laptop update

Well firstly the bug that can never be fixed has been fixed. A few people suggested calling Dell. So I did. What is the worst that could happen? They would laugh at me and tell me that it was an act of god and therefore not covered under the warranty?

Anyway, after talking to his manager the Dell engineer agreed that it was probably damn annoying and I had a new screen the next day. I obviously felt a little guilty at having an engineer drive all the way from Portsmouth just to swap a screen, but he had other jobs in the locale so that was pretty cool.

DRM Cracked, for a little while

So I must admit I took a gander at Fairuse4wm, I have quite a few old DRM-protected albums I purchased from MSN Music. I don't mind the concept of paying for music online, in fact I took great pleasure in going thru the catalogue and buying albums I had never thought of picking up. Sadly the x64 support for such content is pathetic so for weeks, months; I have been unable to play any of my purchased audio.

This little tool helped me of course stripping all the protection out, I even purchased some new stuff in the hopes I could do the same but the hole had been patched by that time. So sadly I have to burn the music to a CD and then re-rip it again, that is so last decade.

It does raise an interesting question though did I pay for the music or the licence? If I paid for the licence then I guess I just broke some law, but the last time I was out buying a CD I don't remember signing a licence so I guess I own the music, but the music is licensed.

At the end of the day, as I do with most things, I will do what I can to get what I want. Denying me access to something or not correctly supporting a feature will only have me look at doing it by other means.

The Logitech MX Revolution

So I picked one of these mice up the other day and it has it's benefits and disadvantages over the old Logitech MX1000. It is pretty much the same shape, but obviously slightly different as they continue their mission to find 'the' ultimate mouse shape. It has an extra button and an extra wheel, in a bizarre place. Let us do the good stuff first, it is always nice to end up slating something:

-- Advantages --

- The new scroll wheel is awesome. It has both a clicking scroll and a free spin mode - or both. It intelligently predicts what is needed, no clicking in Internet Explorer - one flick and I gracefully scroll to the bottom, alt-tab in World of Warcraft and it clicks - unless I start clicking so fast it releases and spins. It is difficult to explain but hoping between the MX Revolution and MX 1000 (for reasons I will explain shortly) I really miss this wheel.

- The laser thing is more focused or powerful, something like that?

- The additional button can be used in an interesting way, highlight some text, press this mouse button and it will search for that string in Google. I guess this saves you highlighting, cutting, pasting and pressing return, or clicking go. It is a gimmick but an interesting one. Although currently there is a frustrating pause while it thinks about things. Could be because I am in x64 but I won't comment more on Logitech and x64. Bastards.

- The charger looks prettier than the MX1000 one.

-- Disadvantages --

- Where to start, the micro USB adapter is bloody horrible. Lets say you keep your PC under your desk because it is so enormous. It keeps interfering with my wireless keyboard but I have ordered one of those over featured G15 keyboards so I can ditch the extra charger unit for the MX1000 which the wireless keyboard shares.

- The MX1000 was pretty easy to clean, lots of smooth surfaces so when it gets a little bit gunky a cloth was great for sorting it out. The MX Revolution has all these raised faux rubber edges with perforations, I just know it is going to be a nightmare to clean.

- The same extended edges give me the impression that they are going to make my hands sore, in the same way holding a pen for a few hours does, we will see how that goes.

- I don't like Setpoint but when you start wanting features like the hot funkiness with the scroll wheel you need it.

I am looking forward to seeing the wheel in future products and perhaps even hoping it somehow slips into Microsoft Ultimate keyboard mouse set which I am hoping to get my hands on once they are available but there hasn't been any additional information on that since they first released the initial preview.

Can I recommend the Logitech MX Revolution, not sure, I will have to see if it grows on me at all. The USB adapter it uses is a huge turnoff.

Windows Vista RC1

So I avoided commenting on the last interim build party because I am lazy and partly because I knew that this build was coming. I took the opportunity to hog all Europe's bandwidth and download both the x64 and x86 editions and installing them on my test desktop and my laptop respectively. Both installed flawlessly.

My laptop has an X300 and 2 gigs of RAM and runs flawlessly, I threw the last old (!) beta 2 of Office 2007 System (rearrange that until its the correct name) on there along with Counter-strike and its behaving itself nicely. Very pleased. I didn't watch the install as I was pre-occupied with something else, but once I entered my username etc. it was running very nicely.

I was bored when I was installing the x64 edition so with throwing a cat around a room to keep me semi-occupied I was ready to play with the x64 edition (and the subsequent NVIDIA drivers which I pestered NVIDIA for: NVIDIA source: we will release drivers once RC1 is out ME: It is out mate NVIDIA: Oh.) I was ready to go. Now my desktop has a 6800 Ultra and only 1 gig of ram and has always performed well on the 32bit version in the past so I thought it was about time I gave the 64bit version a go and to be honest it felt very sluggish. Was hoping up around 7-15% CPU usage every few seconds and never dropped below 52% RAM usage (although after a reboot it was 38%). This did have me a little concerned, but looking back it could be because of initial background processes running such as Windows Search...

...Because I haven't sat there and watched the install for such a long time it was hard to tell and I haven't had the chance to go back to it and take a look yet. Chances are it could well be ok, so perhaps notification, I will address that in a second.

What Microsoft really need now is for us to mention every single little niggling thing we can about RC1 (which should also go public in a few days), you can add your comments to this thread: http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?t=86132

A few off the top of my head:

- When installing Windows Live Messenger, I had three prompts. First one we know is in WindowsXP (this file may be unsafe etc) and we need to allow the file to run (how you can disable this in XP as well? Its bloody annoying), then another with a Vista style interface with effectively the same warning (perhaps even noting it is an installer), the third is UAC popping up. I feel that while it is all doing important different things but shouldn't there be a special flag for installers that could merge some of these functions.

I will need to refine some of these examples later as I have no access to my windows Vista rig here, so here is their first incarnation:

- I installed Windows Live Messenger by following the "Download Live Messenger" links, shouldn't these links be removed when you have done the process described above? It seems a little inconsistent.

- Folder structure really has the opportunity to tidy up here, why is a "Windows NT" folder needed in program files just for Wordpad.exe - surely that could be moved elsewhere.

- The default start menu run/search box seems to have changed over the beta, I know it can be changed but the old method seems to be more useful. Typing ‘cmd’ in will now search the HDD for ‘cmd’ and show you it, same with ‘services.msc’ -- cant it just run it? I will play with this a little more as I can only be vague but I know the behaviour was changed.

- Windows Media Center will run very slowly at a higher resolution than it is fully compatible with, can't it run windowed if this is the case rather than affecting performance?

- Temporary file in the root of the installation partition, it is the one visible file and it would be fantastic if it could be removed. At the moment I need to elevate my privileges to delete it, then elevate them again to empty the recycle, there are no adverse affects after deleting this backup file.

More as I think of them and hopefully more on that thread.

And lastly an interesting point raised at work today, how are Dell going to dispose of the defective batteries? Burn them? The only guy in our company who needed a battery replacement didn't realise it was a recall and thought he was getting a free second battery for train journeys. Only a company director.