The days of being able to show off a flashy image on your desktop and think that's enough to impress are sadly over.

If you want inspiration of just what is possible, you won’t go wrong by taking a look at Lifehacker.com. The most recent is a rather good picture of a Fender Stratocaster guitar with some clever custom menus.

The good thing about Lifehacker is there are explanations of how to work on the bits round the edges; it’s not just about the image any more.

One day I will get round to following the instructions for my Ubuntu laptop.

Posted by Tim Smith on March 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10)

It’s finally here. Internet Explorer 8. I’ve got high hopes of better standards support and performance improvements. Both of which were promised by Microsoft when I saw them last week for a quick preview.

I see a vision of what my evening has in store. Well, it will keep me off Ubuntu if nothing else.

Don’t forget to check out our preview videos one and two for a taste of what is to come.

Posted by Tim Smith on March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday we caught up with Asus, so today we went to see the latest products from one of its biggest rivals: MSI. MSI's Wind range of netbooks compete directly against the Asus Eee portables, but the focus at MSI's stand seems a little different: rather than the dozens of netbooks Asus is showing, MSI seems to be focusing on fewer models with more unusual features. Here, for example, is its forthcoming "hybrid" Wind U115:



It may look unremarkable, but there's some interesting technology inside. It uses both a solid state  disk (SSD) and a hard disk, but the hard disk can be disabled at the push of a button. This gives you loads of cheap storage space when you want it, but allows you to save battery power when on the move. MSI claims a battery life of nine hours, and we expect it to cost around £400.

More unusual still is the X-Slim series notebook, which looks a little like a white plastic Macbook Air. We got our hands on an engineering sample to take some photos:



And here it is from the side (note the two USB ports - one more than the Air):



This new "X-Slim" range will initially include two models. The X340 pictured here will use an Intel Core Solo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) processor and include an HDMI output, and is expected to cost around £800. The X320, however, will use an Atom processor and should come in at between £500 to £600, making it a potentially interesting choice for those who want a really thin and light notebook on a budget. The notebooks will be on shelves in May.

Like Asus, MSI is also creating low cost desktop PCs. Here's the Wind Top AE1900, with a 19" touch screen display, DVD writer and an Atom processor:



It should cost around £600 and will be available by the end of March. Several other models are in the works, including one without the touch screen (the AP1900) as well as 20" and 22" models. A 24" version could appear later this year. Slightly more unusual is this model, the Wind Box DE200:



It has a Blu-Ray drive, HD video output and runs Windows Vista Home Premium - making it an interesting Media Center PC. Expect it in May, but prices are not yet confirmed.

And there are many other interesting products tucked away around the show. Icy Box, makers of hard disk enclosures, was showing a few new media player products that support H.264 video:



This model, the IB-MP309-HW, should appear in March, while one with a slot that accepts a 2.5" hard disk caddy will follow in May. Over in another hall, Zotac have what must be one of the smallest PCs at the whole show:

Posted by Tom Royal on March 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the oddities of computing is that even though your computer is never fast enough, the CPU spends most of it’s time hanging around waiting for something to happen.

That presents a problem because the CPU is then wasting power so there are all kinds of clever tricks for slowing them down or reducing the voltage to save electricity. You might think this is only of interest to notebook users, but remember that this could have a reasonable impact on your electricity bill.

Following a tip from a reader (thanks Ashley), I did a bit of digging into the power plans on Windows Vista. I have to admit that I’ve never really paid that much attention apart from making sure that Power Saving is selected when I’m running off batteries.

What I discovered was the difference between the Full and Balanced power schemes. I’d flitted between them but hadn’t noticed any difference.

It turns out that Balanced mode scales the CPU speed (or frequency) depending on how busy it is. If there is nothing going on it runs at half speed and gets progressively faster as the work load increases. It’s impressively dynamic, compared to the slow/fast that I’ve seen in Ubuntu with the CPU frequency utility.

There’s some interesting analysis over at The Metaverse showing how the CPU frequency is automatically throttled in Balanced mode. But I decided to do some of my own.

There’s a lot of boring figures but the upshot is that in the PC Mark tests we ran there was no performance drop when using Balanced over Full Performance.

Given that power consumption should be reduced with the CPU speed reduction, I’m struggling to think of when Full Performance would be a good idea.

At last, a way of being green with no drawbacks!

Posted by Tim Smith on March 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Windows Vista blog has announced that Vista SP2 has reached Release Candidate status. This is the last stage before final release and means it is available to people with Technet and MSDN accounts. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on it soon and will take a look.

A full list of what Service Pack 2 will include can be found here. In addition to all of the updates released since SP1, it will install Windows Search 4 and an improved Windows Media Center.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6)

If there was ever an idea of mine that was considered ‘outside the box’ by my colleagues it was suggesting a feature on using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

It was offered with the best of intensions (take note please naysayers). I’ve not used it for a little while because I didn’t have time to learn it to level of Qwerty but I was definitely picking it up more quickly than I’d expected.

If you’ve never heard of Dvorak, I strongly recommend looking at this introduction. DVZine.org is also an excellent resource but the site seems to be down at the moment.

To summarise, the Dvorak layout was created with a lot more attention to how people type. This even included arranging the home keys (the ones your fingers start from) with the relative finger strength in mind, giving your little (pinkie) finger a break.

Anyway, the Colemak keyboard solves one of the biggest problems of the Dvorak keyboard by leaving the most commonly used shortcut keys – Z X C V B - in the same place as Qwerty.

Here’s a picture from Wikipedia, and there are lessons on the Colemak website.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

An excellent programming language and editor for beginners, Small Basic has received some useful updates.

The most exciting for me is that ability to share code with other Small Basic users over the internet. Code can be uploaded to the Small Basic website where it is given a code that can be used to find it again. It’s a little like the short web addresses from sites such as tinyurl and snipurl. So the latest game posted on the blog has an address of http://smallbasic.com/program/?QRQ360. It’s a great idea and should make it even easier for beginners.

There are some bug fixes and performance improvements too. If you’ve never attempted programming before this is a good place to start from.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)

A fast Javascript engine it would appear from all of the press releases flying around about upcoming releases. The most recent from Opera about their new Javascript engine, called Carakan.

If you get down to the bottom of the press release there are some impressive numbers, doubling performance on cross platform versions and somewhere between 5 and 50 times faster on native code.

Why should we care about Javascript performance? Well it’s at the heart of Web 2.0 as the J in Ajax, and it’s getting harder to find websites that don’t use it. Bizarrely though I couldn’t find a logo so it is something of a backroom boy.

Google Chrome was really the first to champion its Javascript performance. Chrome isn’t just about processing code faster, but about giving every tab the ability to run Javascript independently of the others. I’ve noticed the delay of starting Firefox with 30 odd tabs as they load one after the other rather than all at the same time. You can read more in the graphic press release from Google from page 3 onwards.

Firefox has also got a new Javascript engine in the works called TraceMonkey. In Mozilla tests it did better than Google Chrome, so it looks like things are getting interesting.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (15)

Having posted last night very quickly about the Windows 7 versions, here is some more information. Microsoft has released an interview with Mike Ybarra, the Windows General Manager.

It seems that the list I linked to needs a little bit of context. There will still be lots of versions but two will be given greater prominence, Home Premium and Professional. Much like the good old days of XP. Of course it remains to be seen whether manufacturers choose to keep it simple.

Versions that I’ve been able to pick out of the interview (it would have been helpful if a list had been in the interview):

1. Home Premium
2. Professional
3. Home Basic
4. Starter
5. Ultimate
6. Enterprise

One change that springs up is that Home Basic is for emerging markets but Starter will be available worldwide.

Pricing is yet to be announced.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Life used to be simple with Windows XP. You had Home or Professional and the descriptions pretty much said it all. Apart from the odd irritation when we’d come up with a solution for a problem with XP that only worked on Pro ( Group Policy Editor mostly ), it was simple and it worked. And I never had a problem knowing which to recommend.

Then came Vista and life got more complicated. From the point of view of the home user (step forward the Aged Ps) there was a choice between Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate. Ultimate could safely be recommended to enthusiasts but what about the other two. Having used Ultimate for a year, I was pleasantly surprised at how I didn’t mind that much moving to Basic*.

There were some hopes that Windows 7 would return to a simpler path, but according to Engadget, that isn’t going to happen. There’ll still be a Home Basic, Premium and Ultimate. The Starter version probably won’t be available over here in the UK, although it might have some advantages.

* Well alright, I really miss the handwriting recognition right now and the backup situation is a nagging worry. Aero Glass doesn’t bother me, I boot into Ubuntu for a cool, arty desktop(note transparent task bars, and the 3D efforts not visible). In fairness I could probably get Vista Basic looking as good, but it feels like too much effort.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)