PostWindows 7 at the PDC

October 29, 2008 – 3:07 am

For now I do not have access to Windows 7 so I can only go on other peoples’ experiences and of course the live stream of the Microsoft PDC, but so far it looks amazing, take a look at some screenshots here at my favorite tech site, Neowin.

From a UI standpoint I am very excited about the possibilities that will be available.
From a web developer standpoint I’m eager to learn how it fits in with Windows Azure and the cloud computing vision.

I hope to do a review once it is available and look forward to other peoples’ reviews, expectations and experiences.

In other news I put Xubuntu on my laptop, I’m actually using it at the moment, It’s a great OS to run when you have an older PC, in this case 4 years old, my laptop maintenance guide will be up soon, I’ve been meaning to finish it but it’s one of those articles you can take forever to write if you wanted to.

I have decided to put up interesting facts, the first fact is that my review on D-Link SharePort on the DIR-655 has had the most views of any posts, you guys seem to like it so I will hopefully bring more of the same in future reviews.

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PostWindows Vista SP2 release before Windows 7

October 18, 2008 – 1:02 pm

Earlier this week Microsoft stated that Vista’s Service Pack 2 will be released before Windows 7. As Windows 7 will be released in the second half of that year it has caused many to be worried that Microsoft are rushing SP2.

I don’t believe this will be a problem and I certainly don’t believe Microsoft would be rushing this, to release a Service Pack within a year was common before Windows XP and has happened since, things have changed and Vista SP2 is not focused on the amount of features and deep fixes that have been needed in Service Packs in the past 6 years.

Windows XP SP1 had a reasonable time frame of just under a year, however it was fairly rushed and rightly so, but there were no issues caused by rushing the update. SP2 of XP took quite some time (2 years since SP1) and this was due to the radical changes in the OS that were proposed, new device drivers had to be made, this led to more and more testing and in the end it was a significant change, but with the amount of changes you would expect from 2 Service Packs, released in the same amount of time. Windows XP SP3 is again more of a roll up release that was not necessarily needed due to Windows Update, it was delayed because Windows Vista needed more resources at the time.

Windows Vista SP1 was like the Windows XP SP1 in a way, there were necessary changes that needed to be implemented and they were implemented fast, just over a year from the Retail release date and it was finished and ready, no rushing was needed.

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PostWindows x64 plagued with BS news stories

October 10, 2008 – 1:38 pm

Seems a little article has been getting a lot of attention, its the article at Windows Secrets about 64-bit users of Windows and their problems getting things to work, if you’re looking for the article you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit, there’s a whole heap of ads/look-at-me-i’m-so-smart that you must wade through first.

I have used Windows Vista x64 for 2 years now, before that I was using Windows XP x64 since it was in early Beta status, i’m no stranger to issues with compatibility, however I have rarely encountered a problem that wasn’t the direct result of a dodgy driver, or dodgy software.

When I first began using Windows XP x64 I had trouble with certain software not handling installing on the OS, after all it was built on the Windows Server 2003 kernel and because of a lot of the software that i used early on identified it as the wrong OS to run on. Since then however most software is at least Windows x64 tolerant, unless you’re trying to run something that directly affects Windows that was built 4+ years ago you should have no problems.

Drivers were a big issue with Windows XP x64, this was not Microsoft’s fault, it is the job of the device manufacturers to release drivers for their hardware, basically most of them didn’t bother coding drivers for it. However with Windows Vista they have a reason to code drivers and I have not come across any of my hardware that is missing 64-bit drivers except for Dvico’s FusionHDTV Lite DVB-T TV Card and I’ve written about that once before, that card uses an old chip that is used in many old TV cards that has never had 64-bit drivers written for it, I no longer use this card anyway as it’s out of date.

Printers used to be an issue with drivers, now they don’t come without them on the install CD, plus Windows supports most of the older ones that don’t have driver support from the manufacturers anymore.

Using Internet Explorer x64 edition is not much of an option at this stage, Adobe and Sun have stated that they still don’t wish to give support to it as they don’t believe many people use it, this is mainly because they haven’t released any plugins for it which kinda keeps the cycle going but I won’t get into it today. There’s no real benefit in using it yet, web pages do not hit the 4gb memory limit.. obviously.

I’m currently fixing 2 laptops, I’m making a guide about laptop maintenance that I will put up later on.

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PostOs Collection – Part 3 – MS-DOS 6

October 4, 2008 – 4:55 pm

I figured I’d make less of a review and more of a guide this time around, MS-DOS is really only necessary to use when you are installing Windows on top, or if you need to use a boot disk.

This guide is very image heavy, so click below to open it, it may not be dialup friendly.

Continue reading “Os Collection – Part 3 – MS-DOS 6” »

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PostSanctuary loves Perth again

October 2, 2008 – 6:16 pm

This is a little offtopic, but this is the second time Sanctuary has put parts of our Perth in their CG backgrounds, you can see the original here.

Central Park

The last time they did this was at the start of one of their web episodes, click it to view a close up, Central Park and Bankwest are in the top left, they didn’t even remove the Bankwest logo.

Sanctuary Skyline

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PostD-Link DIR-655 Router and SharePoint/SharePort

October 2, 2008 – 5:49 pm
Post Image

Update 16th January 2010: 1.33b01NA has been released.

Update 2nd November 2009: All users having issues with SharePort, check out this post for the latest information.

Update: Make sure you read the comments below to find out anything new about this feature, many bugs has been fixed since the original release, as of August 2009 Firmware 1.32NA FINAL is the latest firmware, read about it and download it here.

I have owned a D-Link DIR-655 router for the past year and it is by far the best router that I have ever used, although I did pay $150 more than what I have paid for a router before, so I’ve gotten what I have paid for.

Starting with the version 1.21 Beta 04 of the DIR-655 firmware there is now SharePoint functionality available. SharePoint as the media and other sites partially call it or SharePort as it is called everywhere else including the software itself is a way for D-Link products to share a USB device over the LAN, i’m going to try to not confuse you any further so I will refer to it only as SharePort from now on.

SharePort is an interesting feature that I actually wanted to be able to do a few years ago, by sharing USB devices from a computer so they can be used on another PC as if the device was actually plugged into your PC. D-Link have finally brought this technology to life in a limited fashion with SharePort.

Continue reading “D-Link DIR-655 Router and SharePoint/SharePort” »

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