Windows 7

Ok, there have been a few interesting developments on Windows 7 since I last blogged about it.

For starters, the starter edition will no longer have the 3 app rule. For those who don’t know, the 3 app rule was that you could not run more than 3 apps at once (not including A/V software). Their reasons were that the netbooks couldn’t handle it, and that most people won’t use more than 3 apps. So, it is interesting that they have stopped this, as they seemed to be taking more and more control over netbooks as time went on.

I wonder what made them change their mind. Was it the bad press? Was it the hundreds of people being unhappy bout it? I guess we will never know…

Second of all, windows 7 seems to be running at a base install (no AV software) at about 400mb on a 32-bit computer. That is interesting. It seems to be a lot better than Vista, but still quite heavy. 400 as apposed to about 150 for a base ubuntu install running compiz. But ach well, it is a step in the right direction.

Third, it seems Windows 7 will only be released as a full install in Europe. They will have an upgrade option, but it will just be the full install disk. I wonder what the point is…? But also, it will be much more expensive than in America. Up to double depending on the actual version that you choose.

So, good and bad things going for Microsoft and Windows 7 just now. I would like to point out that the RC seems to run slower than the beta.

A few predictions from earlier in the year

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see…

2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do. – Turns out I was right with this one. They have released the iPhone 3Gs already, halfway through the year
5. I will get my computer working again. – This one did happen, but I didn’t update you with it. I got my money back for my old motherboard, and bought a new one.
6.Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version. – Turns out this one is right as well, with the release today of the HTC Hero
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something. – This one happened as well. As we all know, it is called Karmic Koala
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough. – This one might happen soon, as we currently have the Beta 2 of Thunderbird, and mozilla don’t do many betas (ha…)

So, looks like a very successful year for me so far in predictions. More to come people…

Microsoft are selling Viagra?

I just got this email today (it went into my spam folder, but I check that anyways, just incase anything slips into it.

I find this really amusing. Do people think this is Microsoft??? Why???

Windows easier than Linux?

First of all, I’m annoyed because I typed it all out and then clicked a close button. Stupid scribefire. It needs a thing which automatically saves. Grrr. Anyways, on with the blog…

Who ever said that Windows is easier than Linux. I’ll tell you who…someone who has never installed Windows without it being preinstalled. Anything is easy when you do that. Even Slackware would be easy as an OEM.

So, I set up a new computer at my church (and before you say something Steven I didn’t do it alone), and tried to install Windows on it. Started it up off the cd, and it went through the motions of formatting, and copying over the install files. It rebooted, and went through the motions of installing…well until it got half-way through and crashed. So I restarted the computer and it tried to install again…and crashed. Tried again…and it crashed again. This time tho, it didn’t start back into the files it had copied over, so I had to go back to the cd. 2 more tries, and it finally installed it.

Thank goodness, 4 hours installing and its finally there. Should be plain sailing from there, yeah? Ha…no. Course not.

So, I installed a couple of programs, then decided I wanted a driver for my Graphics Card, as I wanted it to run at a decent speed. Ha, silly me, wanting a graphics driver.

I went to the ATI website, downloaded the apropriate driver, and executed the executable. (Remember those things, ex-windows users…). It installed, and all seemed to go well, until I rebooted, and was told that my system was corrupt. Sorry…? Installing a Graphics Driver corrupted the registry??? Man alive…thats insane.

I have never seen something like that…I mean yes, occaisionally if you have a wonky card, or install the wrong driver, X won’t start, and you just have to uninstall it, and install a different one, and then it’ll all work. But corrupting the registry? Geez.

So, whoever said that Windows is easier than Linux, should install it from scratch.

Hacking

Ok, So I spent the other day helping our office manager to do something with her computer. Basically, her Sony Viao had shipped with 2 partitions, a 40 and a 30 GB partition, and she wanted it to be one partition. So basically, I told her I’d do it, but needed to back up her stuff. So I asked her if I could work out her password myself to get into it to back it up. She said yes. So out came the live-cd of the program I used (I only ever use it legally) and I amn’t mentioning the name because it is a worrying piece of software I don’t want just anyone to know about. Then, 300 seconds later, I had her windows password.

So I’ve been concious about hard security on my laptop for ages. If someone steals my laptop, then they can access everything, including my cookies and stuff. So, well, I have a few methods of securing my laptop to make it harder for someone to hack into it with hard access to my laptop. Not impossible to do it, but harder.

So, first of all, I have a BIOS password, and a different BIOS editing password, and it only boots to my harddrive as standard, so they have to know 1 password to get it to boot into my computer, and another one to change it so that it can boot from a cd, to run the hacking software or whatever.

However, the problem with a BIOS, is that it can be cancelled with just taking out the BIOS password, and put it back in, and the password is lost. So, then I obviously need a way of stopping someone loading up this live-cd and in 300 seconds having my root password, which is, incidentally different from my normal user profile. So, I decided to encrypt my disk. There is a program built into linux which allows you to encrypt a filesystem, so making it really really hard to decrypt it without the encryption key.

So, it isn’t fully secure, but then again, no computer system is.