Enabling sound in DreamScene

For those who have had a play around with the preview of DreamScene, an Ultimate Extra you may be wondering how to enable sound. You can do this by using the Sound Mixer, an often overlooked feature, just unmute DreamScene.

Thursday, 22 February 2007 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Cnet's five reasons not to buy Windows Vista

Time for another BS check, I spotted this over on Barb Bowman's blog (who nicely covers why not to trust Cnet's reviews). Tom Merritt, executive editor at Cnet went over five reasons not to buy Windows Vista, so let's see what he managed to say. 5: Search is buried. Search is everywhere, every explorer window, its right in the Start menu. It takes one key press or one mouse click no matter where you are to get to search....

Tuesday, 20 February 2007 · 3 min · Paul Smith

DreamScene Preview now on Ultimate Extras

Microsoft have posted up a pre-release version of Windows DreamScene, check for new updates for it to show up in Windows Update if you need to. It ships with one video the aurora style one, based off the default wallpaper.

Tuesday, 13 February 2007 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Apple's website needs some consistency

Likewise, it isn't plagued by never-ending security dialogue boxes like those in Vista. They're refering to the UAC prompts. On a Windows PC, software (both good and evil) can change the system without your even knowing about it. Not with Windows Vista, nor with an NT system (XP or 2000) properly configured. In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You're the decider....

Friday, 9 February 2007 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Apple lacks Microsoft's security investment

Bill Gates has been taking some flak lately in the Apple circles for some comments he made on the state of security in Mac OS. He was being interviewed for Newsweek: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system. Bill Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts....

Saturday, 3 February 2007 · 3 min · Paul Smith

Internet Explorer 7 surpasses version 6

At least on Portal Forums.net, Internet Explorer 7 this month took the lead from IE6. Internet Explorer 7: 117373 hits which makes up 36.6% Internet Explorer 6: 111058 hits which makes up 34.7% Firefox 2: 21953 hits which makes up 6.8% Firefox 1.5: 34848 hits which makes up 10.8% I don't know what happened with Firefox 2, last month it was 10% exactly. Firefox 1 last month was 7.4% so it looks like we saw a shift backwards within the Firefox camp....

Saturday, 6 January 2007 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Windows Vista vs Toshiba M200

As regular readers know I've been caught in a battle between Windows Vista and my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. The root cause? nVidia's Vista drivers not turning the screen back on when resuming from sleep. In the whole beta program and up until now with the final version I had been using the Windows XP drivers Toshiba had posted on their website, largely without a hitch, but they are dated 2004, don't support Aero Glass and all the other nice things that WDDM drivers do support....

Saturday, 6 January 2007 · 3 min · Paul Smith

Windows Vista DRM nonsense

There's a lot of nonsense spreading across the internet over the DRM support in Windows Vista, I won't link to the article itself as most of it is inaccurate and those posting it everywhere are in even less accurate in how they interpret it. I've seen it posted several time on Microsoft's newgroups and of course it's all over Slashdot and the like. The article basically claims that your media playback will be crippled in Windows Vista because of the new protected content pathways....

Sunday, 31 December 2006 · 4 min · Paul Smith

Office 2007 most innovative product of the year

According to PC World magazine it is. When you think about it, it isn't that surprising is it? Toolbars and menus are so old and completely can't handle the hundreds of features that Office has. Innovation? Microsoft? Yes, we were surprised, too, but the Redmond giant's latest upgrade of the world's most popular productivity suite introduces several new features that revolutionize how people work with documents. The most striking change is a "...

Friday, 29 December 2006 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Avoiding the invalid date error with b2evo

I know this has been going on for sometime, since 1.8.x I believe and is present in the 1.9.x builds too, to save me having to tell everyone hosted here: Under some conditions, such as editing a post under a locale that's not m/d/y the system will return invalid date. I avoid this by changing my user to English (US), this puts the post by default as English (US). However you can easily change the language on the entry itself back to English (UK) when composing your post without being tripped up by the invalid date error....

Saturday, 2 December 2006 · 1 min · Paul Smith