technology

Question: These UAC prompts are annoying, can I get rid of them somehow? Answer: Disable UAC. WRONG. If any so called "expert" gives you this advice, ignore it. If you don't like the prompts you should put UAC into silent mode, it should never, ever under any circumstances be disabled by normal computer users. Microsoft exposing the ability to disable UAC in the UI came quite late in development, as late as one of the release candidates if my memory serves me, much to my disappointment....

I recently came across somebody posting on the Microsoft support groups who had problems with one of his input devices misbehaving. It seems one of the things this person tried to do to resolve this issue was to purchase a registry cleaning application. I won't name the specific one here. The registry is a part of your computer where Windows and other applications typically store their settings. It is essentially a database, and it is critical to the functioning of your computer....

I came across Wakoopa few months ago, but never got round to using it. Well today I installed it on both my desktop and my Tablet PC. It's an application which shares the applications you use either publicly or with a list of friends by posting the applications, and how much you use them onto their website. You can see what I'm using here. The application installed on the system is very lightweight....

It seems that Mr Naughton is a tad upset about the media coverage Microsoft has been getting lately, a few articles over the last week or so have directly quoted Steve Ballmer because of his recent trip to the UK. Heaven forbid. Ballmer was in town last week, graciously granting audiences and genially talking through his hat. Yet his every word was reverentially chronicled. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones reported Ballmer's metaphorical comparison of Microsoft (annual revenues, $60bn; 90,000 staff) as 'David' in comparison to Google's 'Goliath' (annual revenues $20bn; 19,000 staff)....

HTC have been pretty busy over the last few months with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, over the last week they filled in the low and medium-ends of the market by updating last year's Touch models with a TouchFLO 2D interface, now dubbed Touch Viva and Touch 3G. More impressively they've released another high-end device to stand with the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. Called the Touch HD (no the screen isn't HD, and no they shouldn't call it HD)....

I've just been routing around the dark depths of my file system, and came across this gem from back in the olden days. The newbies who think the internet is the web probably won't get most of this. Regardless, here it is. July 18 - I just tried to connect to America Online. I've heard it is the best online service I can get. They even included a free disk! I'd better hold onto it incase they don't ever send me anther one!...

Here's the images from the HTC Touch Pro unboxing... Hoping to have the full review done in a couple of weeks.

So I've finally got around to doing something a bit more fancy than just my garden with Photosynth, since we were out in Norton sub Hamdon today doing a bit of research into the family history I thought I'd use the opportunity to make a synth out of St. Mary The Virgin Church. It is embedded below, or you can go to it directly here. Yes you will need the Photosynth plugin....

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has been released. First impressions: this is a solid release, I've been using Beta 1 as my primary browser since it was released earlier this year. Not had any issues with Beta 2 over the last hour or so, plus it fixes a few of the annoying bugs in Beta 1 and adds bucket loads of new features. Go grab it from here. Read up on the new announced features here....

Let's put this bit of FUD to rest. Fact: Windows Vista on launch was around 5-10% slower than Windows XP for gaming, this was largely due to video drivers not being as mature. 10% isn't even noticeable, I'd happily trade 10% for video drivers which don't take out the entire system when they crash thanks to them running in User Mode in Windows Vista instead of Kernel Mode like they do in Windows XP....