a blog by Ben Fallaize
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Windows XP, your days are (finally) limited

Posted by admin in Windows - (0 Comments)

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my, er, iMac for nearly a year now.  I started off with 64bit 7 Professional, but have recently swapped to 32bit Ultimate.  I never got any benefits of 64bit. Drivers for the iMac weren’t up to scratch, and my older versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver didn’t support it.

Since swapping to 32bit Windows 7, my machine has been absolutely faultless.  It’s fast, stable and easy to use.  A year ago, I couldn’t see a time when Windows XP wouldn’t be the norm in my place of work, however I find myself on a daily basis starting to miss features of my home machine when at work.

The new start menu with items that can be docked is great.  A feature that was introduced in Office 2007, it shows recent documents as a panel, rather than the traditional 4 or so items at the bottom of the file menu.  7 goes further and puts them into the start menu, and allows you to pin your favourite documents to the menu for quick access.  Every single day, I click the start button on my work machine, and pause on Excel waiting for the menu to appear to the right with my documents in, but alas, it never appears.

I’ve never really been a fan of the new taskbar.  My first step was to add the text labels back in, show small icons, and stop them grouping.  Since installing 32bit Ultimate, I have left it as is, and I am warming to it.  The Windows taskbar hasn’t really changed in 15 years.  That’s more than half my life, so it’s understandable it’s taking a while to get used to the change.

I genuinely now believe that Windows 7 at work would be ever so slightly more productive.  The next machine I order for myself will have Windows 7 on it.  However, when will we see an office completely away from XP?  Who knows.  5 years, 10 years, before I retire?  I wouldn’t put money on any of those, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

Windows 7

Posted by admin in Rants and Rambles | Windows - (Comments Off)

Have you seen the new adverts for Windows 7 on the TV?  I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea…

Microsoft are obviously trying to push the fact that they have listened to their painstaked users and are now responding.  Having not seen 7 in the flesh yet, I can’t really comment on it, however I can see a Microsoft ad in a couple of years, once 7 has flopped just like vista:

Windows 7.  It’s not our fault, it was all your idea…

Internet Explorer 8

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Quite a while ago, IE8 was released to the general public.  It was billed to be the best browser for web developers, as it now had proper web standards built in like every other browser in the world.  It also had this great feature allowing you to render the page in IE7 mode…

Microsoft, what the hell are you playing at?

This week, I had not one, but two phone calls from customers announcing to me that their site had stopped working.  In both cases, it was the menu at fault.  One site has a fairly hefty javascript based menu, and the other drop-down submenus.  So, off I go, testing the sites in all browsers available to me, FF, IE6, 7, Safari, Mac FF, Mac Safari, and then came IE8.

Now we’re not talking a slight rendering issue here, or an IE-hackable few pixels out of place, IE8 had invented a Javascript error.  Every other browser in the world was fine, but IE8 had a problem with it.  So this is bad enough, but in IE8 there is a button called Compatibility mode.

From the MS site: Internet Explorer 8 is a new release and some websites may not yet be ready for the new browser. Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the website as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes.

Sure enough, this actually fixes the problem.  What the hell?  Microsoft have released a browser that in default form, doesn’t work very well, but if you want it  to work properly, you can just click a button.  I’m sat here now fuming about this.  If I put out a website where nothing worked, unless you click a small button first, without any prompting, I’d be fired for shoddy workmanship.  Yet the biggest software house in the world seems to think it’s ok?

Now I need to spend considerable amounts of time fixing websites to work in a minority browser, when this goes against all the normal rules just because of who it is.  Well F*** you Microsoft, I’m never going back to a PC if you keep this attitude up.  Leave your browser to die, and let the experts who work for free sort out the world’s internet browsing.

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A fantastic mac/windows article

Posted by admin in Apple | Rants and Rambles | Windows - (1 Comments)

An article by Charlie Brooker, of the Guardian.  This bloke’s sense of humour appeals to me!

Click here to read

Apple Snow Leopard

Posted by admin in Apple | Windows - (Comments Off)

Finally, the refinement the Mac world has been waiting for…

First impressions are, it is faster, but it’s not the huge gap I was expecting.  Apple have re-written the entire operating system to run natively in 64 bit.  Good news since Apple have been pushing 64bit Core 2 Duo processors out for a few years now.

I was teetering on the edge of swapping back to a dedicated Windows machine.  Those who read my last post would have seen me surprised to see how well Vista runs through Bootcamp.  Well, I decided to run a little test.

Photoshop CS3, 141 JPG images and an automated action with the following commands:

  1. Auto levels
  2. Auto colour
  3. Resize to 50%
  4. Save for Web
  5. Close

So, Snow Leopard was first, and completed the test in 6:55.  Windows was booted up, and I opened the images.  I wish I had timed the opening of the 141 images, as Windows was considerably slower.  Once it finally opened, the action was run.  Windows completed in 7:45.

Both tests were run from a folder on the desktop, both from the same hard drive.

I think if the RAM was upgraded, the Mac would have steamed ahead thanks to it’s 64bit-ness.

So, for now, I’m back on the Mac side of the fence…

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Windows vs OSX

Posted by admin in Apple | Windows - (Comments Off)

I’m posting this from the usual place, in front of my stunning iMac.  However, there is one major difference.  Behind this website is firefox, nothing unusual there, but behind that is a Windows desktop, and not just any version of Windows, it’s Vista.

Previous readers will have read my opinion of Vista and Microsoft in general since I became a Mac user.

So, what happened?  Well, a friend sent me a link detailing the upcoming release of a new series of Monkey Island games.  To your average nerd, this is the best news since, well, the last Monkey Island game!  This presents a problem to the Mac user.  A productive, stable machine it is, but a games platform it isn’t.

So, Bootcamp was installed, and then Vista was dusted down and installed.  I am slightly concerned to say, that Vista appears to run quicker and more efficiently that Leopard.  I know that I need to install Anti-Virus etc, but I was expecting to install a great big turd of an operating system, as I remember it on my laptop, but it just doesn’t seem to be.  Maybe the service packs and general updates have improved it, but I am actually enjoying using it again.  Plus, I much prefer Photoshop and Dreamweaver on the PC.  They just seem to work nicer, however I’ve been using video capture recently, and also iDVD, and these run nicer on the mac than the PC…

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