technology

I've been getting a few e-mails from people asking where they can download MSE now that Microsoft have closed off the beta. The short answer is I don't know. I can tell you the MD5 and SHA-1 hashes, so you can at least make sure you can get a copy that hasn't been tampered with if you're that keen on using it. There's three installers: mssefullinstall-amd64fre-en-us-vista.exe (3.72MB) which is the installer for Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit, its hashes are as follows:...

As expected Symantec (the makers of Norton, the most popular anti-virus/security suite software) are a tad nervous over Microsoft Security Essentials, and with the number of technology enthusiasts they've scorned over the years they've got every reason to fear a backlash now, so they're upping the FUD campaign from level 1, they're not concerned about MSE, to level 2, stating that its rubbish and won't protect you. From the BBC:...

The beta for Microsoft Security Essentials is now available from Connect, or find your way there from the official homepage. Highly recommended.

Neowin has some details on codename Morro, now called Microsoft Security Essentials - rumoured to go into a public beta form soon. You can clearly see how this was built upon the excellent anti-spyware software Windows Defender that Microsoft included with Windows Vista (and made a free download for Windows XP), you can see it even more clearly in earlier builds. Hopefully this will be everything the PC ecosystem needs it to be....

Tom Gromak wrote up a post detailing his experiences with Windows 7.  However, almost everything he mentions positive of it, is present in Windows Vista, which he seems to dismiss out of hand. Windows 7 is everything Vista was not: Sleek, stylish and speedy. Sleek and stylish?  It looks pretty much the same as Windows Vista.  If it wasn't for the new less-efficient taskbar it would be almost indistinguishable.  Speed is hotly debated....

I've been complaining about this for ages, crappy HSDPA coverage in the centre of town from O2 - annoyingly just going a couple of hundred metres west or east would sort it out, so just a tiny strip of the town was missing out, GPRS was the best we could get - ouch. Well last night at around 3:00 I checked my phone and bam a solid HSDPA signal. But this morning it had gone back to GPRS, but later in the afternoon HSDPA was back with all its speedy goodness....

Following on from my previous post on the subject of my new server, its been running fine for a week. Here's the thing sat next to the old server. Much smaller, and much more likely to survive the journey to Guildford - I've actually decided to use screws to hold this one together, not cellotape and blu-tac. Although I'm sure I'll be swearing at it when I need to swap out some disks....

Today I'm putting together a new server, its based on an Asus T3 barebones system, I've got a 2.5Ghz dual core Pentium for it, and 4GB of RAM. As well as some of the new low power Western Digital disks. This will be replacing my 9 year old system which has faithfully been running almost nonstop based on a 1.4Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, with 1.5GB of RAM and a collection of aging hard disks, this has been running Windows Home Server and a Virtual Machine running Small Business Server flawlessly, so hopefully the new system will be just as reliable....

Go get it here. New features include OpenDocument support, integrating the XPS and PDF functionality that was previously a free add-on (removed before the original release because of Adobe's complaining). More changes here.

Photosynth, the online service which creates a 3D "synth" you can explore out of 2D photographs, has moved over to Silverlight for its default viewer. Formally you required a Direct3D based browser plugin to make use of it, and as such this opens up Photosynth to a much larger audience. The biggest advantage from using Silverlight is obviously embedding it in other websites, if I embedded a Photosynth with the D3D viewer - about two people would have it installed, however most people visiting this blog do have Silverlight installed....