Category: Windows & MS

For some reason my Windows install was misbehaving worse than usual lately. It was having problems booting for the last two weeks – hanging at the loading screen and such. I run a dual boot system, but overwhelmingly favour Ubuntu for almost all tasks. I only keep Windows around to run games and to use… Continue reading The annual Windows re-install

A few weeks ago I got a PC upgrade at work. My new PC is pretty much top of the line: nVidia 8800 GTX, 3GB of RAM, and 8 CPU cores. It’s pretty nifty. Which makes it all the more incredible that Outlook 2007 is literally the slowest, poorest-performing application I’ve ever had the misfortune… Continue reading The world’s worst-performing application

Yesterday I spent the day at Microsoft. I flew up on Wednesday night, out of LAX at 6.30pm, and it was a beautiful evening. As we took off over the Pacific, we passed over a small bank of stratocumulus and banked north, flying over Malibu and the mountains. Two hours later we passed Mt Rainier,… Continue reading Into the belly of the beast

I think I bent the Microsoftie’s ear a bit about eBooks, DRM and open source. But in fairness, I was provoked by a colleague… Yes, I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

The Windows Vista EULA has been in the news a bit today. It contains several worrying features. Other sites were complaining about how it allowed just one re-install on different hardware; that is now fixed. So you can upgrade more than once and transfer it. There has also been some complaint about the clause that… Continue reading Windows Vista: Restrictive EULA?

The EU has to back up its threat with action, and soon. The verdict is not so different to that of the US DoJ. But the eventual outcome of that case proved the DoJ toothless – where are they now? Now the EU has a chance to prove to the world that it can make… Continue reading just fine them already

I’m coming off the back of another Windows install, so I now have a directory containing about a CD’s worth of software – the essentials for installation on a clean system. In alphabetical order (from my folder listing): 7-zip – for dealing with .zip, .rar, and all other archives. nVidia drivers – I ditched ATI… Continue reading The essentials

Well, I reverted my Windows XP x64 to Windows XP Home. Unfortunately, in the process, something in the Windows installer decided to wipe out my existing FAT32 partition (the one where I keep all my data files, mp3s, etc). I’m not sure what happened; I didn’t see any reformatting going on or anything. All I… Continue reading Windows broke my setup