Just bought myself a shiny new PC from Dell that came with Vista pre-installed. I liked the GUI, very slick and intuitive. But within 3 days I’d been forced to do the following tweaks just to get things running the way I wanted..

• Hacked the registry to try & get the display to run at the native resolution of my flatscreen (1680×1050)
• Downloaded PowerStrip and used that, after the above didn’t work
• Disabled UAC (User Account Control) as it was preventing PowerStrip from working correctly
• Disabled IPv6 to try & get uTorrent to work
• Then disabled Windows Firewall, Network Topology Discovery…etc etc… (yet more registry hacks along the way)

uTorrent still didn’t work… Azureus also caused the network to hang. Noticed along the way that Vista seemed to be flooding my home network too.

So thought, sod it - blew the OS away and tried to install XP SP2… That of course led to another can of worms… First off, XP kept blue-screening after getting halfway through the install.  Guessed it might be something to do with disk drivers as the new box has SATA.  Disabled RAID in the BIOS and tried again.  Still no luck.  Found out from the web that XP doesn’t come with SATA drivers so you need to supply them on a floppy at boot time. Yes, a floppy… Who uses them any more?  So ended up slipstreaming the Intel drivers onto a new install CD using nLite.

Got the box up and running and all that was left to do was get networking up and running so I could download the rest of the drivers.  Intel “All in one” driver was 86 megs and that took an hour to download as their site was super slow.  (My first PC had an 80 meg HDD - oh how things have changed).

Anyway all up and running nice and smoothly now

http://www.affordable-removals.co.uk/

Be sure to check out the “Bargin Corner!”

Since moving to London I joined Be and am now enjoying 24 meg broadband… well it don’t actually go that fast but on a speed test I got 13 megs. Sweet.

Happy Chinese New Year!

My flatmates & I celebrated CNY last night with a steamboat party and I tried my hand at a bit of calligraphy!

“Volumouse provides you a quick and easy way to control the sound volume on your system - simply by rolling the wheel of your wheel mouse.”

Just installed it - it’s excellent.

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

See them by clicking here - enjoy

Well… it’s been a while!

The new banner is from the Science Museum in London, I met up with Brendon at the weekend (a good old friend from NZ) and we saw some of the sights.

I’m going up to Sheffield tomorrow for Keane’s stag do, I’m sure it’s gonna be a messy one (for a change!!)

Some of my favourite vids from YouTube are available here - this is my new pet project - hoping to make a bit more cash from Google AdSense.

Have just moved into a funky new office in Fleet Street, complete with Foosball table, automatic espresso machine and motion-activated bins. Sweet!

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