Release Candidate for Vista SP2 coming up!

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It has been reported that Microsoft have sent a release candidate of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to a small handful of private testers. It has been said that the private release was sent to users on the 19th of February.

According to a site called Ars Technica, the build number for the release is 6002.16670.090130. The private release has also been sent out to some Windows Server 2008 users.

Hopefully this means that a release candidate for SP2 will be released publicly soon. It would be nice to see it as I’ve had Vista SP2 beta on my laptop for quite a while now and it has worked fine.

I’ll update you as soon as I can find a release.

What’s the difference between the Freecom Network Drive and the Freecom Network Drive Pro?

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I get a lot of Google searches from people who want to know the difference between the Freecom Network Drive and the Freecom Network Drive Pro. So in this post, I’m going to explain the differences.

Well, other than the price, there aren’t a huge list of noticeable differences. The first thing I can see is that there is only FTP support on the Network Drive, which means that it is only accessible via public FTP on the internet. However, the Network Drive Pro has FTP and HTTP access, which means people could access it as a normal webserver if they wanted to.

The next thing that you’ll see is that the Network Drive Pro has Gigabit LAN, and the Network Drive doesn’t. This means that the Pro will have slightly faster transfer speeds, both locally and over the internet. Gigabit LAN is capable of 1000 megabit transfer speeds (potentially, it won’t ever happen) whilst megabit LAN is only capable of 100 megabit speeds (again, potentially).

The Network Drive Pro has a cooling fan, whilst the Network Drive doesn’t. This means that the Network Drive may overheat occasionally if it is constantly used (however I have never experienced this with my Network Drive). The upside to not having a fan is that the drive does use less electricity, but I doubt there is much of a difference.

Both products come with the NTI Shadow backup system – which I hate – but some people may find it useful and it does actually work.

So, if you need to make a decision put it this way – if you need a high capacity occasional-use Network Drive for occasional internet access (but generally home use) by the Network Drive. But, if you need a faster, more powerful and more internet-accessible system, go for the Network Drive Pro.

A Small Orange webhosting – initial thoughts….

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Well, I’ve been with my new host, A Small Orange, for just over a week now so I thought I’d do a quick “first thoughts” kind of review.

So, what do I think? Well, for the mere $10 a month that I pay (in the UK, that’s just under £7.50), it is really good value. I chose the Medium package which gives me 400MB of space and 25GB of bandwidth per month. I also get cPanel and Fantastico with a huge range of unlimited features such as unlimited FTP accounts, email, mailing lists and even MySQL databases (which is very unusual for hosts).

The uptime is generally good. I’ve had a couple of outages but the customer support is very good and I can change to any one of their 60 or so servers at any time. They are often available for instant online chat support but if not you can just submit a ticket and they respond very quickly (usually within a couple of hours).

They also have customer forums but these aren’t recommended for support as the ASO staff don’t check this very regularly. However, the ASO staff often post details about downtimes here, so it is recommended users view this forum if their site goes down before contacting staff.

So, in general, I really like this host and hope I can stay with them for years to come. The prices are generally really good value, and they also offer VPS for customers who don’t like shared hosting.

Take a look and see what you think. They offer 30 day money back guarantee and there is no contract so you can cancel at any time.

Netbooks are the future. They just are.

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I’ve been having a good play-around with a couple of recent netbooks. The first one being the EeePC 701 and the second being the Acer Aspire One. They are both really good laptops. They both will run Windows XP (there is some difficulty one the EeePC – I’ll explain later), they are both relatively fast, they both have decent battery life, and both have expandable memory.

The EeePC 701 uses an 8GB solid-state drive whilst the Acer Aspire 701 uses a 120GB normal hard drive (although it is available with a solid-state drive). 8GB will not get you very far, even if you don’t have any music or video, but you can expand it with any SD or SDHC card. The 120GB hard drive in in the Aspire is relatively fast whilst fairly quiet, although it does drain the battery quite a lot. And ofcourse, because the solid-state drive has no moving parts, it saves battery and is less suceptable to damage from drops.

As for the battery power, they are both very good. The EeePC will run for just over 2 hours whilst working quite hard, and the Aspire just a tad longer. I believe the Aspire does have a slightly better battery, but there isn’t a huge amount of difference and both are fine for going on short trips.

Neither have an optical drive which is quite a downside if you want to watch a DVD on the move. You could add a USB DVD drive but this would probably hammer the battery life. There are netbooks available that will cope with a USB DVD drive, but these two will both struggle to make it through a DVD movie on one charge.

The screen size is definately a bit of a pain on the EeePC. The 7″ display is quite hard to work with, especially in Windows XP. It will run 800×480 without scrowling the screen, but you can run 800×600 or 1024×768 with the catch that you’ll have to scroll down the screen. The 8.9″ on the Aspire One (also available in 10″) is much more usable and can run 1024×768 without screen scrolling.

As for trying to install Windows XP, it can be a right nightmare on the EeePC. It will install fine, but trying to get programs to work properly is utter hell. Windows Live Messenger seems to fail horribly, and then you get issues which collide with other pieces of software. The Aspire is much better and will install software with ease. It will even run Google Earth with fantastic performance.

I really think notebooks will be the future. They aren’t perfect at the moment, and you definately get what you pay for. I wouldn’t go and buy one right now, but give it a few months and I think they will definately be the thing to have by next year.

When you see the potential of these mini laptops, you begin to think why you lug around these huge 15″ laptops which are several kilograms heavy every day.

They just don’t have the power right now. I couldn’t bear having to use a 1Ghz computer for general use – I can’t live without my lovely dual core processor – but I think this technology will come as processors get smaller and less power-hungry over time.

So, no, don’t go buying one now. If you’ve got a decent laptop now, it isn’t worth it. But give it a little while, and hopefully manufacturers will be able to get more RAM, bigger harddisks and better processors without costing a bomb. It will all come in time.

Microsoft offering $250,000 to person who catches worm creator

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Microsoft has said it will offer $250,000 to the person who finds the creator of the Downadup/Conficker virus.

The worm has infected millions of computers accross the world since it was first discovered in October 2008. Microsoft has viewed the worm as a criminal attack and has said that anyone who discovers the creator will be offered a cash sum.

Microsoft has said that they do not want to let this behaviour go unknown and will try very hard to get the creator arrested.

The Conficker worm is a self replicating program that seems to take advantage of any computer that does not have the latest security updates installed and running.

It doesn’t spread over network connections, but sometimes over USB sticks and other storage. It guesses usernames and passwords and attempts to breach security. It can potentially steal private data and take control of computers.

It has been predicted that a total of around 12 million computers could be affected by the worm, and it is still searching the net for unprotected PC’s. For goodness sake, make sure your computer is always using the latest security patches from Microsoft.

(On a site updates footnote, I would like to apologise for the downtime that occured on Friday 13th – yes, that day – the dreaded DDOS attacks got hold of my server, but I hope this won’t happen again.)