technology

In my on going struggle with Creative and their Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS I've now come across a new problem that manifested a couple of weeks ago. I'm not entirely sure why it started happening then, maybe it was the heat? Maybe after 7 or 8 years the card is finally starting to die. Now sometimes after resuming from sleep, any sound has distortion and noise in it. So far I'm restarting the Windows Audio service to get things back to normal....

I've been using the new beta version of Windows Live Messenger since its release last week. I was originally going to quickly blast out my opinions of it. But I'm glad I've waited the extra few days. My first issue which didn't manifest itself fully until the weekend is adverts. Now I understand that Messenger requires a fairly substantial server backend to operate. But isn't this going a little over the top?...

It's not yet appearing on all of Microsoft's websites yet, but here's the URL: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Enjoy. First impressions, setup is much better. Glad I don't have to see that woman grinning into her coffee anymore like with Wave 3! Update: replaced direct download link with the official webpage.

Last week Microsoft formally announced Windows Live Sync, the new version of which is based on Live Mesh. Live Mesh gave users 5GB of cloud storage to which they could sync data to. As well as near-unlimited data transfer between PCs. The new Windows Live Sync, based on Mesh continues to offer most of the functionality that Live Mesh provided, bar the Live Desktop which mimicked the PC desktop as a way to offer data currently stored in the cloud which was removed as well as a few other little things here and there....

So Apple announced the iPhone 4 earlier this week. Jobs proclaimed it was the biggest upgrade since the iPhone came out. To which the Apple fanboys cheered. Perhaps somewhat exposing how disappointed they had been by the iPhone 3G, which added 3G support bringing the iPhone up to the same level as smartphones that had been shipping for years prior. And showing how lacklustre the iPhone 3GS was which was the same thing, only a bit faster....

A few years ago, the Firefox fanboys were arguing for Internet Explorer to drop its own Trident rendering engine, and adopt Firefox's Gecko engine. More recently people have argued for Internet Explorer to use Webkit. Looking at these results, shouldn't we be asking Firefox and Chrome to use Trident? Well no, but it's the thought that counts. As we can see above the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 passed all 192 of the tests co-developed with the W3C, no other browsers came close....

This week's news of Google transitioning away from Windows to Linux or Mac OS has spread its way across the internet, Google cite security reasons for the move. But is that the only reason behind it? The answer is no. First up, we're talking about Google; of course they would rather run their own in-house stuff. Primarily Linux, they use that as the basis of Android and Chrome OS, their servers run Linux....

As I've got a few hours to kill I'd thought I'll install the new Windows Phone Development Tools that were released in April and play about with them a bit. Let's just say it is going to take a wee bit longer than I thought. Urgh.

There are several cases where end-users might want to disable Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Browsing mode. There isn't an easy way to do this however, but it can be done. If you're using Windows Vista/7 Business/Professional or up you can use the Group Policy Editor. To begin, type gpedit.msc in Start Search and press enter. You'll then want to navigate your way to: Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > InPrivate...

Time to buy a new Dell, this time for my parents, whose clunky old laptop from early 2002 has finally been put to rest (I've been arguing for its destruction for some time). As per usual I'm given a budget (£300-£400 this time) and given the task of deciding what to go for. I managed to get an extra £30 out of them in order to ensure it had a decent graphics adapter - they might not care about graphics now, but they won't be saying that when they need the extra power....