One thing that annoys me with Windows is how easily useless stuff builds up and never goes away until you stumble across it all. Sure you can trudge through it all and find uninstallers or manually remove it, but I usually find the best way is a simple reinstall of Windows. Oh, and by the way, I’m not talking about windows on your house, I’m talking about WindowsXP. :p
Over the past year I performed a number of hacks and mods, most of which can’t be removed. Two big ones I done were to add Media Center 2005 to XP Pro and add the sidebar from Vista.
So now, I’m currently going through Windows Setup (formatting at 25%), then comes the fun of installing drivers, updates and then finding all the programs that I use daily.
On the upside, this gives me a chance to look at what I use and see if there are any alternatives out there that may be better.
Some may wonder why I don’t just install Ubuntu (or other linux flavour), but the reason behind it is that I can do things much faster in Windows, I don’t really have time to tell Ubuntu who is boss trying to work it out, and I have a heap of Windows only programs that I use regularly and I don’t want to fart around with virtual machines, oh, and I stream to my Xbox360 and my wife doesn’t like Linux.
Reader Question: For you Windows users out there, how often do you do a fresh install of Windows and why? Any hints or tips I should take note of for next time?
As much as I have loved the single column layout provided by K2, I have found it to be rather annoying having to scroll to the bottom all the time, and I have grown to love my sidebar, so I have gone back to the default 2 columns. This also allows me to show a few things on my sidebar when someone visits this blog like my Facebook status and my Xbox Live gamercard.
How cool is this? This is running Crysis at a resolution of 2880×900!! It’s on display at CES2008. More info over at Engadget. I’ll have one thanks.
I’m really starting to get sick of all of these problems that Xbox Live is currently having, but come on, it’s been almost 2 weeks and things still haven’t improved. Well, from my end, things haven’t changed. Call of Duty 4 is probably the only game that I’m interested in playing at the moment, along with another 500k people.
I’ve just spent the best part of about 30 minutes trying to join games, invite friends, and even host a private match, and I keep getting errors say that I must have an active network connection. Funny thing is that I’m chatting to a friend over Xbox Live right now.
I don’t know the ins and outs of how things are done with the Xbox Live servers, but I’m sure it couldn’t be too hard to add a few more servers in here and there to cope with demand. Gee, just yesterday they announced that they have sold over 17.7 million consoles and that signups to Xbox Live managed to crash the signup servers.
I know that Microsoft have said that they are going to give a free arcade game to members, but I think that they really need to pull their finger out and get this sorted out ASAP before people start to loose faith and move to another platform.
Anyway, I’m just have a bit of a rant about this whole thing.
Since I came across the K2 theme for WordPress back in the day when it was still in Beta 1, I haven’t used any other theme. Since then, I’ve learnt a heap about CSS and PHP, though I still have a long way to go, but I have managed to do a few mods and hacks to my blog over the years. One mod that I’ve been wanting to do is a single column layout with possible some content on the bottom. I’ve tried over the years to do this, but I always seem to loose interest and don’t end up doing anything.
Today I installed the latest release of K2, Release Candidate 3, and to my surprise in the settings there was an option for 1 column. I tried this out and instantly thought, that’s what I’ve been wanting!! The other good thing is that having this built into K2 is that I can now use the K2 module system for the sidebars.
I don’t know how long this single column feature has been implemented into K, but it was a nice surprise.
Ah, here we go.
First of all, I’d like to apologise for anyone that has come here looking for something specific. The old database for my blog has started to get a tonne of errors, so I decided it was time to start fresh. The old database has lasted since day one when I started this site, and has seen 3 different servers in it’s time.
I’m planning on going through a backup of my database and collecting some of my more usefull posts and adding them back into this blog, as well, as a few visual changes, but for now we will have to live with what’s here for now.
