Category Archives: Software

Category containing all information relating to software.

Google to start phasing out IE6

1 Reply

Good for them!

I’m really glad to hear that Google, the biggest search engine on the planet, is to start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6, after years of it causing problems for the company.

From March 1st, Google says that some Google applications will stop working. This means that users will be forced to either move to IE7/8 or choose a different web browser.

Internet Explorer 6 has been the cause of many web hacks that have caused damage to Google’s varied reputation.

The ending of support will start with only a few web apps at first, but I suspect as the year moves on Google will try to phase out support for most of it’s online software.

The only downside to the ending of support will be that Windows 98 and ME users will, eventually, loose access to Google. However, I think it’s about time people moved away from the older systems.

I think that it’s about time Google did something about the older browsers. The trouble is that people don’t realise that they’re stuck with an older browser.

Windows 7 Media Center can record from hibernate!

1 Reply

A new feature in Windows 7 Media Center that enhances it’s power saving!

One thing I used to find really annoying about Windows Media Center in Vista was that if you wanted to record a programme, the system always had to be in either awake mode or S1/S3 standby mode.

This has changed with Windows 7 Media Center and Microsoft has finally solved the issue.

With Windows 7 Media Center (providing your motherboard supports it), you should be able to hibernate your comptuer – and Windows will wake your computer approximately 10 minutes before a scheduled recording. It should then return to hibernate shortly after a recording has finished.

This is a really big advantage. No more wasting vast amounts of electricity by leaving your computer in standby. I can finally leave my computer over a weekend and come back knowing that the system has done all of my recordings and hasn’t cost the Earth in electricity!

So incase you weren’t already aware of this – next time you need to leave your computer to record TV while you are away, put the system into hibernate.

Hibernate works differently to standby. When you hibernate a system, the entire contents of the RAM is saved to a big file on the hard drive. The system can then fully shut down. When you wake the system, it will transfer all of the RAM contents on the hard drive back to the RAM, and your system should be able to just return to its previous state.

Windows 7 standby issue…

Leave a Reply

What’s up with Windows 7 standby?

I have a real problem with Windows 7 at this point in time. It has a really annoying bug that drives me insane!

It seems to be an issue that occurs with ATI drivers – and since I have an ATI Radeon HD 4550, I get the issue.

When you standby your computer, the system goes into standby as normal. However, when you wake the system the Aero glass interface mysteriously disappears. For some reason, the DWM (desktop window manager), which deals with the Aero management, crashes. The only resolution to the problem is to reboot the PC – you cant fix it any other way.

It slightly defeats the point of using standby on Windows. The problem doesn’t seem to occur if you hibernate the system, but it’s still very annoying.

I tried contacting ATI but their customer support didn’t seem to understand the issue.

Is it just me or is the problem common with other systems as well?

Do you still buy DVDs (or physical disks) or do you buy digitally?

Leave a Reply

Digital online films are all well and good, but are they better than DVDs?

It amazes me – despite the fact that my computer is rapidly becoming my digital shopping centre, I’m still not sure whether it’s better to buy physical discs (in my case DVDs – my budget doesn’t stretch to Blu-Ray films… yet!) or whether to digitally buy them online.

Cost is still the biggest factor for me – and probably for most people. Often films are horribly expensive on digital stores, such as iTunes, when you can get them very cheaply on shops such as Amazon or eBay as a physical disk.

Also, even if I buy it as a physical disk I can still rip it to my computer and use it on whatever device I want. As far as I’m aware, I’m perfectly within my rights to do so if I own the disk and don’t share it with anyone else. If I buy the content through a digital provider, that may be subject to DRM which means I won’t be able to place it on my iPod or whatever.

I was interested to hear rumours that some stores were offering free digital downloads of content together with purchases DVD discs. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s true or not, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone can verify that info for me.

Do you buy discs or download them (legitimately, of course!)? I’m still a cost-cutter – so whatever is cheaper get’s my purchase! But there are many other factors such as quality or portability that should be considered.

Which virtual host do you choose for virtual machines?

2 Replies

I find this to be a very difficult decision. There are quite a few pieces of software that will, essentially, do the same job. However I seem to believe that some are better than others.

In this post I’m going to try and show which piece of virtual machine software I prefer any why I like it.

If you’re looking for free software (which I generally do – who doesn’t?) you’ve basically got three choices – VMware Player, Microsoft Virtual PC (which seems to be getting outdated, but still works fine), and VirtualBox.

Here’s the order in which I would choose them:

  1. VirtualBox – I have to say I like VirtualBox the most. It’s fast and has a very tidy interface that is easy to use. I tried all three pieces of software on the same machine and it was noticeable that this piece of software was most responsive and most effecient – especially when using Windows guest machines. It doesn’t have the handy quick install feature that VMware has, but the speedy performance definitely makes up for that. Sadly it doesn’t support FAT32 file splitting, which is a shame if the hard drive you want to run it on is FAT32 as you wont be able to make virtual hard drives bigger than 4GB. However, I do think that it does work most efficiently and has the best interface.
  2. Microsoft Virtual PC – Despite the fact that Microsoft seem to be trying to phase this out (with the launch of XP Mode in Windows 7) it is still a very good virtual machine host. It not only has a clean interface, but it’s native virtual disk format supports FAT32 file splitting, so you’ll be able to run virtual hard disks on drives that run FAT32 without the 4GB file size limitation. However, I find it to be quite slow. Even when you are performing simple tasks (such as clicking the Start menu in the guest machine) it can take ages to respond. Also, it seems to be designed more for Windows guests, as it’s “Other” host option is very vague. I like Virtual PC more than VMware, but I’d still choose VirtualBox any day.
  3. VMware Player – This is my least favourite piece of software. Despite it being a very popular company who makes VMware Player, I still think it really isn’t up to regular virtual machine jobs. The main thing I can’t stand about VMware Player is the interface – I find it so clunky and unhelpful. I also find it the slowest of the three in terms of performance. It seems to cope pretty well with most operating systems, but the lack of speed makes VMware annoying at times. It does have the Easy Install feature – which is designed to make OS installation much more simple by automatically running through the process, but I’ve never found that particularly useful.

So there you go – if you want a decent, free virtual machine host I’d recommend VirtualBox to you.