Tag Archives: review

Review: D-Link DSL-2640B ADSL2+ Wireless Router – A brilliant budget buy!

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I hate the supplied Tiscali router. It sucks. Port forwarding is stupid, there’s no DynDNS support, and overall it’s just a cheap piece of crud.

So, I decided to go and buy a new one. I needed to ideally stick to a budget of around £50, so I had a search around.

It wasn’t easy to find a router for under £50. I found out that routers are much more expensive than you think. I was rather surprised to be honest. If I’d have upped my budget  to £60 I would have probably found the task much easier – and I was thinking of doing so, until I found this.

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Safari 4.0 Beta – The good, the bad and the ugly.

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It looks like Apple have been working on their next release of the well known Apple web browser which was released for Windows a couple of years back. Safari 4.0 Beta is their latest release, and I took the courage and downloaded the beta.

The first thing you notice when you download it is that it’s quite a big file – for a web browser anyway. Baring in mind that Google Chrome’s installer is about 3 or 4 MB (including the installer downloads), Safari’s installer size of 25.5 MB is a little bit of a shock. Once it has downloaded and you run the install program, you are presented with the usual terms and optional extra installs (which I proudly unticked – I personally think the Bonjour crap is a waste of time), after which it will spend a couple of minutes installing the program.

Once it’s installed you will find the program immediately fires up, and you are presented with a “Welcome to Safari” video, followed by a very snazzy looking frequently used tabs screen.

 

Safari

Safari

As for generally browsing the web, the experience is relatively good. There are a few bugs, but these can be reported with ease via the bug button at the top right. 

The new interface has definitely made an improvement to the general feel of Safari since version 3. I still prefer Chrome – despite what Apple says, Safari is not the fastest web browser. It has to be Chrome – by miles. Don’t you agree?

I recommend you go and try it. I don’t think I’ll keep Safari as it’s just unbeatable to Chrome, but maybe in the future when the final release comes around, maybe I’ll do a full review. Head over to apple.com/safari to try the new beta.

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.

Internet Explorer 8 RC1

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Well, Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has arrived, and I decided I ought to download it for a review here on GEEK!

And, honestly… as usual, I’m not overly impressed. It’s install isn’t too bad, weren’t any problems and after about 20 minutes of installing the setup requested a reboot. So, after a swift reboot and Vista’s ‘Completing Setup’ procedure, I fired it up. The first thing I noticed, which really annoyed me, was that it had gone and set itself as the default browser without even mentioning it or checking it with me.

So, after that, it confirmed a few settings with me, and then opened up the homepage. So, knowing me, the first thing I did was go to www.geekonthepc.com and got open a new post (I’m writing this post now in IE), and annoyingly I already see the problem that it hasn’t rendered the page properly. Why?! Why does Google and Mozilla get it right by Microsoft just can’t seem to understand how a browser is supposed to render a page.

[Sorry, the images linked to this post cannot be found. Please try later.]

So, if you want my opinon, I don’t like it. Microsoft’s claims that it’s the simpler and better to use than any other browsers are just utter rubbish. What are they doing? So, for me, I’ll be sticking with Firefox and Chrome, and you should too.

Windows 7 Beta: Hands On Review

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Well, after several hours last night in line for a download of Windows 7, I finally have it installed on the computer. I’ve had a little play-around with it and seen what the biggest new features are, and also checked to see if there are any common bugs.

Anyway, what do I think? Well generally I think it looks very promising. The speed and performance is relatively good, there aren’t too many bugs despite it being in beta, and overall it looks side of it is relatively good.

There are a few things I don’t like, such as the new “super bar” (new name for the start bar). I don’t think that designed very well at all at the moment – but don’t forget when Vista beta 1 went out the start bar looked nothing like the final release. Personally, I’m not a fan of the “super bar” not showing my window names. I don’t know what other people think, but I much prefer having the names of my windows shown to me all the time, instead of having to hover over the logo.

However, I do like the new feature on the “super bar” that shows on demand information such as recently used items, commonly used features and the likes. That would be very useful to me.

I’m a fan of the new boot screen which looks snazzy while not to over the top. The nice glow of the Windows logo looks good with the simple ‘Starting Windows’ text below it. Boot time isn’t fantastic on a 1GB RAM laptop with a dual core processor (running in Virtual PC over XP), but it’s not worryingly slow and I’m sure if I had just installed it on a proper partition on my computer it would have been much quicker.

Media Center has had a few modifications, but nothing ground-breaking yet. There’s a few new features, but I wouldn’t get too excited about that yet.

So should you go and get a download from Microsoft? Well, if you really want to test it for yourself, go ahead. Beware that Microsoft are limiting download to 2.5 million and the servers have been under extreme pressure since the launch of the download yesterday. You are very unlikely to be able to get in first time (or even second or third) so unless you’ve got a lot of spare time on your hands, just don’t bother. To give you an idea, I waited nearly 6 hours to merely get to the download. The download itself took another hour and a half or so (it’s a 3GB file so don’t download it if you are on strict bandwidth limits) and then you have to worry about the actuall install process, which on a slow computer may take a good hour or two. You could end up spending a whole afternoon and maybe some of your evening on this.

So if you want a simple answer, I recommend you don’t go downloading it unless you really want to see for yourself. But, on the other hand, I do think it is something to look forward to as Microsoft are saying it could be ready in time for Christmas 09.

Next up on the reviews list is the new Windows Live Essentials pack, which will be on review here on GEEK! in the next few days.

Update: Microsoft has postponed the public release of the BETA due to high traffic. They say that especially this morning there was excessive traffic to the beta. They are now “adding infrastructure support” and I hope the beta will be up again for download soon!

Further Update: Just went and tested the beta download, and the news that the beta is no longer available isn’t entirely correct. You can still download the beta. I just went to the Technet page and tried getting to the download, and it worked first time. Go and get it now if you want a download.