Vista - Very Instable System To Avoid! And Why I hate Sony And Microsoft

vista - Very Instable System To Avoid! & DESTROY MY SONY VGN-TZ21MN with Genuine Windows Vista® Business - LIVE ON THE INTERNET!

I was excited, very excited, I was getting my new beautiful laptop with

"Genuine Windows Vista® Business"

after Sony took three months to try and fix the last Blue Screen of death one I thought that this would be heaven. Now I know I work in the IT environment and I should have known better and looking back at myself I am wondering why I did not rip out Vista put in dual boot FreeBSd, and XP pro but I was excited I got my new baby (sorry love I do love you but it is a beautiful laptop).

I am ready, I turn it on, knowing full well that it will take a while to get everything installed running but what the hell its worth it. After one week I am frustrated, the camera stops working, I have taken off Office 2007 demo and installed my registered copy of 2003 (Still use OpenOffice.org but hell), it refuses now to run Office 2003. But during one of the boots Windows runs off grabs some more software for office and vista and hides it some where. (still can't find it all - more later). So I had to uninstall Office 2007 and almost all of its components (not too sure on some apps if they are office related or not) then reinstall Office 2003. Yeah it works now, except every time I start any ap in the family it asks me to accept license..... Its a real pain.

Ok if you are anything like me you are a blogger and social networker and have loads of friends all over the world on ICQ, SKYPE, MSN etc Now when I have these listed in my start up Windows Vista takes 19 minutes 34 seconds to complete its boot before I can start using it! Let me say that again 19 minutes!!!!!!. My Sinclar Spectrum ZX 80 was a dream compared to this. Oh the camera still didn't work at this stage. So I remove all of these from start up and it now boots up like a cheetah....ok I lie like a hobbled cheetah with its legs tied to a post, it now takes 9 minutes 48 seconds to boot. oohh Camera still doesn't work.

Then I thought I will wait till SP1 comes out and pass judgement maybe just maybe it will fix my problems, it did the Camera works and they gave me back an additional 32 seconds of my life. Yeaahhhhh.

Ok now why blame Sony for this after all they built a beautiful machine the hardware I have to say is excellent battery is amazing, screen faultless look beautiful. They shipped it with Vista for gods sake, then to make matters worse they only ship this with 1 gig of ram (for vista its the minimum requirement). Now we all know when Microsoft gives guidelines on their systems or delivery dates we double it and then triple it just for safety sake, so why did not Sony do the same, why not at the very least put a minimum of 2 gigs, at least it would start faster and close faster and not throw up the circular little icon on the screen when you type a word in notepad. Oh I ment to tell you the shut down procedure is over 10 minutes. Back to Sony Rant, the ship it with a peice of crap operating system then to really rub it in they only give ! gig of ram. But I blame myself I should have checked this, I should have read more docs, I think my brain bypassed the bit where it said that the maximum memory the Sony can take is a massive 2 gigs!!! So by SP2 this will be on its knees begging me to put it out of its misery.


But what next I hear the lonely voice reading this cry, well if I do not notice a major improvement by the end of June 2008 after a full 6 months of usage I am going to (bank balance depending) DESTROY MY SONY VGN-TZ21MN with Genuine Windows Vista® Business - Live onthe Internet here!

I would also recommend that no one buys a new laptop with Vista Business if it only comes with 1 gig of ram, it is a complete waste of time and money.

So if I am going to destroy my laptop I am going to be looking for creative ways, so does any oe have some cool suggestions?

Vaio : VGN-TZ21MN/N : Ireland


Seed Newsvine

Where the Internet has been and where is it going, part one.

I have been involved as a user and as a creator of Internet (in its modern form) services since 1996. Over the last 11 years I have seen many advancements in the technologies used, services and applications. So I thought I would share some of them here.

VOIP

I have used Voip services since 1996, yes believe it or not it has been around that long and a little bit longer. Back then in the dark ages I used to use Net2phone, Freetel (not to sure if this is still around, link is to an archive site) PowWow (brilliant, again link to archive site), Net Meeting and a few others. These I ran with windows 95 on a 28k modem to 36k modem and when duplex modems came out I was flying! The quality of these services back then were not too bad, (except two people talking at once was a problem). But then everyone loved to listen to me anyway >:¬}. The only paid for service then was Net2phone and it allowed me to call any number, whilst the others were P2P. Things have the appearance that they have come along by leaps and bounds. But remembering back to those halcyon days to be honest the technology was just as good, and the features on the software was so much better.

Actually with Net2phone I was hired by Cablelink in Dublin(more about CableLink and this in Wikipedia in the late 90's to turn them into an ISP and we provided cable broadband services to almost 30% of the network in Dublin during a commerical trial. We dialed the New York speaking clock over the Internet much to the amazement of the assembled press, at the press launch.

I will go more into the history of IM's in a later post, when with PowWow you would be able to whiteboard, type and talk conference call to several people and then take over the browser of the person you were talking to and bring them surfing with you... loved it, bloody VC's and their dotcom created craze ended this and so many other amazing app's long before their time. With the feeding frenzy for money.

Search

Ok, Search has stayed fairly static for the last 8 or nine years since the advent of Google, when they came along and kicked everyone's asses into Orbit. When they came out I used to use Meta Crawler as this searched the search engines. Before that it was AltaVista (link again is to the archive). Back then Alta Vista was the Google of its day because all Yahoo was a listings directory and it took MONTHS to get listed. You could never really find what you were looking for with these guys, but then in 1998 along came Google (take a look at how Google looked back in October 1998). I remember then I used to be able to email a human in there can get my sites listed quickly it was great, hell he even answered back! But now we have some new and exciting new entrants into the world of search, there is over 100 new search companies all viewing to be the next big thing, with Governments all over the world funding some of them (Japan, China, Russia, France, Germany etc.,).

But for now Google is still king, but here is a few new ones that I have played with and to be honest I like a lot. The next killer app they think that is coming is Visual Search and here are the main entrants into that market.

Quintura
This one works by showing you the results on the right and related keywords on the left a bit like the way Tags work now, so for the NewBe's out there who only know Web 2.0 then they will feel at home with this. Now at the moment they are more of a display results rather than a search engine as they are using Yahoo's search but like all new entrants it is only a matter of time. But it is worth using mainly for the related "Tags" on the left you may just find what your looking for faster and easier then in Google.

Kartoo
This is another visual search, I first came across this in 2002 and I loved it but it was a bit clunky. But now its a slick piece of work and an excellent piece of searching and visual technology.

Zuula
This reminds me of MetaCrawler of old, this was the meta search engine's search engine. In that it would search a number of different search engines and directories at once. Now with so many conflicting search results coming up it is handy to be able to click a tab and see the results of another search engine.

Gigablast
This is a standard search site but I must admit I have found pages in here that dropped off from Google, which for been No.1 is not good. What made Google great years ago is now I think their major downfall (more later).

I also did a simple search for the key words (not in quotes) Alex Gogan Morgan Llywelyn in the above engines plus two more and the results were:

1. Google - Not Found
2. Yahoo - Found
3. Gigablast - Not Found
   
4. Quintura - Found (but uses Yahoo so
5. Zuula - Found
6. Kartoo - Found
   

This is actually very bad for Google because here is the page with the term Alex Gogan Morgan Llywelyn. Ok I realise that this post is going to get spidered and then Google will list it eventually, but they have not for a few years now.

OK it was a vanity search but I am a vain and modest person, but did it to prove a point with Google, that over the next year or so, if Google don't get their act together in search again I think they will be in trouble. Maybe that is why they want to buy a wireless license in the states and also with Android mobile OS control the handsets. If they control free wireless, free mobile OS then they control the access so this could be their future money maker. But they still need search as they killed off the competition in less then a year when they were much more intrenched. Who's to say that Gigablast, or Kartoo or one of the others come along written by to shaggy haired guys/gals and take them out.

One more point of mention there is another interesting piece of software that you might like to try. I have played with it now for awhile and I LOVE IT, its called Space Time with 3D search. It really is something to download and play with as it is an amazing piece of kit.

Some screen shots