09/10/2008 by Gavin.

Blu-ray add-on coming to the Xbox 360? | Register Hardware

I think this is a great idea.  I’ve been enjoying dozens of really cheap HD DVD movies via my 10 quid Amazon 360 HD DVD drive so might be a bit of a shock to the system to buy full price blu-rays, but I think this is a positive move for Microsoft (if true of course).

Posted in Highdef, Microsoft, Xbox 360 | Print | No Comments »

01/10/2008 by Gavin.

‘Windows Cloud’ to descend this month, says Ballmer • The Register

A new OS from Microsoft!  Surely this will be an extention to  Live Mesh?

Posted in Cloud computing, Microsoft | Print | 1 Comment »

18/09/2008 by Gavin.

Microsoft announcement tomorrow: No more Seinfeld ads!

Were the ads really that bad, or did Microsoft suffer from the kneejerk anti MS sentiments in the IT press.  Whatever, looks like there’s a change of direction coming, according to Vallywag.

Posted in Are you having a laugh?, Microsoft | Print | No Comments »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Working with Office files, especially presentations can sometimes result in bloated file sizes.  I’ve seen it with co-workers when working on presentations, the file size increases until in one extreme case I was sent a 99Mb Powerpoint presentation.  One option is of course to use Zip or Rar compression.  however, both these approaches mean uncompressing the file before each use or edit.

NXPowerLite  http://www.nxpowerlite.com works on Microsoft Office files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by compressing their content without changing the file format.  This is a terrific thing to have for the reasons given above.

The program lists several different levels of compression -  Normal, Extra (greater compression, lower quality), High Quality (less compression, higher quality), Mobile Device, and Custom.  I must admit I didn’t notice much difference in end quality (which is a good thing!) but of course some images may well degrade with compression.

I tried it with that 99Mb powerpoint presentation and it got it down to 3Mb!  Another presentation with general text, embedded spreadsheet and photos went down from 5Mb to 768Kb at high quality.  Yes you could do all this manually but it takes literally seconds for the program to do it’s stuff!

Where this comes into its own of course is when having to work ‘in the cloud’ or via email where bandwidth might still be an issue, on a 3G or PRS connection.

There is a trial version available on the website and I can recommend it as a very useful utility if you work a lot with Office Documents.

Posted in Utilities, Cloud computing, Microsoft | Print | 1 Comment »

25/08/2008 by Gavin.

GottaBeMobile - Resolve Some of Those Vista Annoyances : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums

Warner Crocker over at GBM posted a great link to a 5 page article on resolving issues with Vista.  I honestly believe Vista is dumped on by people purely out of habit or based on the sensationalist and inaccurate opinions they read on the Net.

Anyway, here’s my response below:

Great article!  Love how they’ve used Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer as an example, as he typifies the type of journalist/blogger that is so anti Vista/MS that he’s no better than a typical forum troll, except he’s got a bigger platform to spout his FUD.

At the end of the day we’re only talking about software here, performing a task, and again the author has a telling phrase ‘An operating system is no ordinary piece of software - it’s the platform upon which a potentially limitless combination of hardware and software operates’.  I actually think it is remarkable that Vista works at all given the huge permutations of hardware out there, and let us not forget that the biggest issue Vista had from day one was hardware drivers, a situation which has improved greatly since launch.

I installed Vista 64 on an old 3500+ AMD system with a Gig of Ram and it had 5 exclamation marks in device manager.  Got the PC online and did a driver update on Windows Update and it found everything it needed.  Job done, and it ran rather well too!

Now, we know Vista doesn’t like low powered PCs.  I had it on an HTC Shift I owned for a while, and it certainly worked but wasn’t what you’d call snappy.  On my Core 2 Duo M700 or Quad Core desktop with 4Gb it flies, and this is what I’d call a normal spec now for a modern PC.

I too remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when XP was released.  It needs 2 Gig of HD space!  Don’t even bother getting this if you’ve less than 128 Mb Ram!  What goes around….

Now, I quite like Vista, and OSX for that matter.  They’re both good, modern OSs (but then I’m going back to the days of TOS on the Atari ST) and so my perspective maybe different because of living through such amazing advances in computing.  I think however, the biggest challenge facing the modern OS is where to go in the future.  Even Microsoft is confused.  They would love to rent Apps to you.  Remember the introduction of the Active Desktop on Windows 98SE?  That was the first stages of the idea of being online all the time and getting information sent to you.  If this is seen through to its logical conclusion then where is the need for a full featured OS.  Why not have the stripped down linux OS of an Eee, or a ‘dumb terminal’ approach where everything is spooled off a server.

Things are about to get very interesting I feel!

Posted in Vista, Microsoft | Print | No Comments »

03/07/2008 by Gavin.

Microsoft is about to launch its rental service for Office.  This will allow you to ‘rent’ an Office Licence for 1 year for $69.99 for a 3 user licence (I like that part).  Now, at the moment this is US only and strangely not available online but through bricks ‘n’ morter store  circuit city.

I remember reading years ago how MS wanted to move to a subscription model and obviously this is now happening.  The biggest competitor to this is of course the cheap licences already available, for example ‘Student’ editions which many people will qualify for, and alternatives like Open Office.

Let’s see if this launches in the UK.  £69.99 anyone?

Posted in Microsoft | Print | No Comments »

26/05/2008 by Gavin.

There’s a lot of discussion on the web just now about whether HD DVD is worth buying into given the current bargain prices.  Well, if you have an XBOX 360 then it is worth picking up one of the external drives for it.  Why?  Well, as you have a 360, and if you are running Vista Home Premium or ultimate, then you have access to the rather fab Media Center.

What I have done is use the  360 drive with my PC to rip high quality WMV files to my PC, allowing me to stream high def over my home network (using Homeplug AV200).  Excellent results can be had on file sizes around DVD size, 8Gb, albeit at 720p.  Nice!

Posted in Microsoft, Xbox 360, Networking, Home Entertainment | Print | No Comments »