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Last night I finally made the transition from the annoying Windows Vista to Windows 7. Although it was an upgrade on top of Vista, I’m still really impressed with it. The upgrade was really easy. I had to reboot before the upgrade as Vista had some updates to install, but other then that, it went really smooth, apart from taking good few hours.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it and try out all the new features, but there are a few that I have and I think the one that I’ll use the most is moving a window to the left or right, and it filling only half the screen. It’s certainly a lot easier then manually resizing two windows to just 1/2 the screen, and will make it really handy when doing HTML/CSS coding on my 23″ screen.

For the past 9 years I have been using my good old trusty Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical and have found it to be a great mouse. Unfortunatly the scroll wheel has started to not work, and it’s currently unable to scroll up, and has difficulties scrolling down.

I spent a few days shopping around, try a few different ones out, and reading reviews online. I was originally going to go with the Logitech MX Revoluion, but discovered that it has been replaced with the Performance Mouse M950, though it is a bit out of my price range with an RRP of AU$199 and not yet available everywhere.

Eventually I came across the MX1100 which is a slight revision of the MX Revolution, but not as crazy of a mouse. I must say that at AU$89 this has been a great buy. It is by far the most comfortable mouse I’ve ever used. The precision, comfort, and everyday use is amazing.

The other nifty feature is that being a wireless mouse, I can unplug it from my desktop and use it with my notebook. Finally a way to ditch that crappy trakpad.

It’s been an odd day for technology in my household. Firstly my wife’s iPhone decided that it wanted to be connected to iTunes which resulted in having to perform a restore, which I did and somehow got into a loop and wanted to keep being restored. In the end I decided to call Optus iPhone Support, and they advised to go into my local Optus Shop and get them to check it out. Turned out that it just needed to be activated, but they guy at the shop couldn’t explain why it wouldn’t activate for me at home.

Finally, my HP notebook decided to call it quits last night. The strange thing about it was that I used it about 30 minutes earlier, then wanted to use it again, and it would not wake up. I powered it down, and rebooted, but nothing would happen. All the lights came on, but no boot sequence.

I got on to a HP technician and he walked me through some steps, and concluded that it needs to be sent in for repair. Well, I figured that much. Luckily we purchased an extended warranty, so the claim has been submitted, and now I just have to arrange to have it picked up from my home. Now that is good service, don’t have to pay for a thing. Now, hopefully they don’t take forever to send it back.

Today I made the step from CRT to LCD. Yes, finally after all these years I have a LCD monitor for my PC. I got myself a Samsung 2333SW, and I must say that it’s a very nice monitor. The colours are nice and crisp, and the screen real estate is awesome. Full HD and 1920×1080 resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio is great!!

I was wanting to get a 24″ screen, but decided on getting a 23″ instead as a) it was cheaper, and b) they look as good, if not better then a 24″. All I have to do now is connect up my Xbox360, and it will be pure bliss.

I’ve been running Windows Vista for a while now. Everything seems to be going fine, but as I do a bit of BitTorrenting, one thing slipped my mind. Our good friend Event 4226.

As it turns out, fixing the 10 connection limit in Vista isn’t as easy as it was for WindowsXP. As of Vista SP2, Windows requires that tcpip.sys be a signed file, so hacking/replacing/modifying it will cause to become unsigned.

I thought I was screwed, until I came across Half Open Limit Fix. It’s a simple program that will modify the tcpip.sys file, and sort out all the signing so Windows remains happy.

I’ve noticed a huge difference already, but it’s not all fixed. Any future updates to tcpip.sys will revert it to the default version, meaning that the limit will return, and you’ll have to run an updated version of the patch. But for now, it’ll do me fine.

Here is one for ya! I’m trying to install WindowsXP Home Edition onto a PC for a client. They handed me the PC with the copy of WindowsXP Home SP3 install CD. The PC isn’t anything special, but it’s has 2 250GB SATA II hard drives running in a RAID-1 (mirrored) configuration, and 4 DVD drives (2 are Samsung, and 2 are Lite-on Light Scribe). Now, this is where the fun begins.

As per a normal installation, I insert the CD and run the installer. Silly me forgot about the raid drivers the first time, but then I was presented with a BSOD. A Stop Error to be exact.

0x0000007b (0xf78d2524,0xc0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

Now, the interesting thing about this error, is that from my google research, it seems that either the installer doesn’t like the destination drive for the installation, or there is a problem with the CD. I checked out the disc, all fine there, so maybe a problem with the Raid setup.

Even after a second attempt with the Raid drivers on a floppy disc (a what?!?! people still use them?? Sadly, yep), I was still presented with the BSOD.

This now had me baffeled, and almost everything I tried had errors. In the end, I started trying different DVD drive. Both Samsung drives gave the errors. I then tried a Liteon drive, and wouldn’t you know it, Windows is now installing. Currently it formatting the Raid-1 drive (27% formatted), but so far it’s been fine and working as expected.

have just spent the best part of about 4 hours installing ndiswrapper and a Netgear WG311v3 to a new PC running Ubuntu 8.10 x64 bit. All the turorials that I seemed to fine all mentioned the same way of going about to get this card up and running, but it wasn’t until not I came across a post somewhere saying to check ‘dsmeg’ and see what it say. There I found that it was saying that I’m running a 64 bit kernel, and the driver is only 32 bit, and that it was “bad magic”, lol!! Anyway, James Wilson has made some 64 bit drivers for this particular wifi card.

Many thanks to James for these drivers. I was starting to go nuts trying to get this card working. I have put this post up to help spread the word about these drivers, and show people that there is success on the horizon regarding this wifi card.

As per my last post, I’ve made the move to Linux. Previous attempts to move away from Windows to Linux have usually resulted in having to revert back cause I needed some program to do something, but since I last tried, Linux has come along way.

Anyway, I decided to give Linux another go as my WindowsXP install was getting rather slow, and was in need of a format and reinstall. My decided to go with Ubuntu as my chosen distribution as I’ve had previous use of it and found it to be rather easy to use. Rather then trying out the latest stable version, I decided to jump in head first and try out the latest beta 8.10 which from the Live CD seemed to have a lot better support for my hardware then the latest stable 8.04.

The main problem that was holding me back was to be able to stream media to my Xbox 360. Previously there were many ways to achieve this, but usually required some long confusing process that I never really wanted to try as I’m only a novice to Linux. Following this tutorial, I managed to get Ubuntu talking to my Xbox 360 just like in WindowsXP.

Wine is a great program for running some Windows program. uTorrent would have to be my favourite bittorrent program, but so far, everything I’ve seen for Linux comes no where near the feature of uTorrent. Using Wine, it is now possible for me to continue using uTorrent, and it works great!! Even the web interface works, so I can continue to check up on my downloads via my iPhone.

The only things that I haven’t tried much of is GIMP. I don’t really like it, but as Photoshop doesn’t run on Linux, I guess I’m stuck with it. I just have to work out how to use it.

Other then that, I can do everything that I previously could do in Windows, and it’s faster!! The only exception is that I cannot sync my iPhone3G as Apple haven’t made it possible. Hopefully this will change, but for now, I just use my Vista notebook with iTunes. So for now, I have no intentions of switching back to Windows any time soon for this PC. Besides, I still have my Vista notebook, should I need something.

What are your thoughts on Linux? Have you tried it? Have you made the switch?

For the last 4 days now, I have been running Ubuntu 8.10 Beta as my primary (and only) OS. WindowsXP has started to really slow down my machine, so much so, that it is more of a chore to use it, rather then a quick task to do something simple.

One major hurdle that was slowing down my move over, which could also through a spanner in the works and stop the whole move over (but is sorted out), was to stream media to my Xbox 360. I have seen numerous tutorials on how to achieve this, but also a lot of problems, so I was a little hesitant to make the move.

Anyway, I had a spare 120GB hard drive laying around, so I formatted it and installed Ubuntu on to it and set out on my quest to get Linux to do what I do in Windows. I’m now happy to say that this task is complete, mind you there was a few problems involved along the way.

The first problem that I had was that I wasn’t able to play any mp3’s, but as it turns out, this is very common with Linux, and you must install the relevant mp3 codecs for this to work. Sometimes simple, sometimes hard. In my case, it wasn’t fun. I had it working, then it stopped, then I done something, and it’s working again.

The other problem was with my displays. I run a dual screen setup, and this wasn’t an easy task. I managed to install the nVidia drivers, but they didn’t show the relevant screen resolutions for my displays. Up until now, I still have no idea how I’ve got it working (maybe a few reboots), but I’ve got dual 1280×1024 screens running, with compiz for some sexy eye candy and cube effects.

The last problem, that I’ve only just solved now, was that I couldn’t configure Samba (so Linux can talk to Windows). Turns out there is a bug in the current version of the config program, and would result in it crashing everytime I tried to change settings. I found a patch to my problem and had to rebuild the whole Samba config program (which was a cool lesson to learn), and now it’s all fine and dandy. My Windows PC’s can happily print to my printer which shared via Samba.

What I thought was going to be a huge process, but turned out to be very quick, what to enable Linux to stream media to my Xbox 360. I tried Twonky, but didn’t like the fact that it was a 30 trial, and had to pay about US$40 for it. I ended using this tutorial, which uses a modified version of ‘ushare’ to work with the Xbox 360. So far this is working great, but I haven’t tried it out extensivly of my library as yet.

I only have one task left, and that is to get my music from Linux over to my iPhone 3G. I’m thinking of using my Vista notebook and setting up the iTunes library to get it’s music from the Linux PC. Sounds simple in theroy, but who knows what problems I may encounter. Hopefully all goes well.

So, all up, I’ve got Linux running just how I want it to. It’s speedy, compared to WindowsXP, shares my printer to other Windows PC’s, and downloads torrents for me (though not automatically like utorrent for Windows does). The main thing that I’m happy about is that this PC is now really quick to use. Boot up times arn’t much different, but normal use once loaded is much quicker and snappier and is mainly what I was after. Oh, and I have installed WindowsXP in a virtual machine just incase I need Windows for something, but so far, I haven’t. Just more for toying around with at the moment.

Have you made the switch to Linux? Did you stay or go back to Windows and why? How was your experience with Linux?

As most Gmail users would know, HTML signatures are not supported in Gmail. I’ve just moved my domain over to Google Apps, and I’m really not liking the standard text signatures.

Today I went on a quest to see if there was a work around, more specifically I wanted to see if there was a Greasemonkey script that could do something, but I found one better, an actual Firefox add-on.

Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail message. So far I’m yet to come across any problems with this plugin. You can have multiple signatures, and also works with multiple accounts.

There is only one drawback for my use. I have a bookmark that opens the compose message window in a new window in the sidebar, and this add-on doesn’t yet support that, but this is no biggy.

Now that I have a HTML signature, I’m happy. It’s been one thing that has annoyed me, and I think that Google should add this in, but until then, this add-on will do, and I’m happy.