Feckoff.net

I got the 64-bit Windows 7 beta yesterday and installed it on my main machine which I was planning to rebuild anyway, and I am quite pleased with it. It feels far more like a finished product than any of the Windows Vista beta releases did.

Microsoft’s site took a pounding yesterday and they pulled the beta release until they can organise some more bandwidth to keep things rolling.

I have all my usual stuff (Steam games, iTunes, etc) running very well indeed on it. The beta release is good until August 1st, when it expires.
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Microsoft’s Skydrive service upgraded its free storage from 5GB to 25GB this week as part of Windows Live Wave 3, which is nice. I’m using it as a free online backup of all my digital photos, which currently weigh in at about 13GB. Now, if only my broadband could upload faster than 384 kilobits per second…

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I’m writing this post via Windows Live Writer on Vista x64. I’ve heard people talking it up on podcasts recently so I thought I should have a look and see what all the fuss is about.

First impressions are that it is actually very good. It has full support for WordPress 2.5 and earlier versions and a bunch of other blogging systems. As I edit this post now it is fully WYSIWYG – as I am editing I see exactly how it will be formatted when posted, including the fonts and colours my chosen WP theme uses.

The GUI is very much like Word 2003, including the red zigzag lines indicating that you can’t spell.

Its pretty nice for a free product and is available for Windows XP as well, but not the 64 bit version.

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Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing during the week, but Microsoft won’t be pumping it out over Windows Update until March sometime. They’re catching a lot of flak from IT tech types (such as me) over that decision. Naturally, its been leaked all over the Internet already. You can even download it directly through Windows Update with a little registry hacking.
I installed it this evening on my 64-bit machine. It took about an hour and several reboots to complete. Straight off the bat I have noticed that LAN file transfer speeds have improved dramatically – I’m getting nearly twice the throughput over my wireless LAN. That alone makes this a must-have update! UAC prompts seem to be far less annoying now – the screen doesn’t go black for 2-3 seconds like it used to, its more like half a second now in my case.
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D:\>uptime server
\\server has been up for: 0 day(s), 1193032 hour(s), 71582771 minute(s), -41 second(s)

^^^^^

What the hell?

Computer name has been changed to protect the innocent!

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Since I got that nice cheap RAM the other day, I’ve now got more memory than 32-bit operating systems can address. I’m running Windows Vista Home Premium. Fortunately Microsoft allow you to use your Vista CD key for either 32 or 64-bit (not both at once, obviously), but you have to pay them to get the 64-bit disc, unless you have Vista Ultimate. The fee is a mere €10+vat. What was most surprising is that I ordered it yesterday and it arrived today. From Germany. Via UPS. I suspect that cost them more than my tenner! And that’s after their website said to wait up to 28 days for delivery

I’m going to upgrade tonight, so see you later. Unless it doesn’t work. Uh oh.

Update: That went rather well. Everything seems faster. So much so that I’m beginning to think something was wrong with my 32-bit installation!

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