My wife likes dogs.  Probably heavily influenced by her childhood, which was somewhat dominated by two Golden Retrievers which whom she shared the house.  No surprise then that for my birthday treat we went to the cinema to see a film about a dog.  At least, that’s what the title and the trailer would like you think.  It turned out to be less about the dog and more about the relationships that developed around the dog.

For those who haven’t yet seen Marley and Me, feel free to either keep on reading or read something else, depending on whether you’re the type to get offended by spoilers.  I’m still not sure what spoilers I’ll actually use here, we’ll see during the course of writing, but needless to say it’s about the contents of the film, and I may well end up mentioning some important plot devices.  Just so you’re warned.

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Just look at its beady, shifty eyes.  What secrets does it hide?  What is it plotting?  I daren’t turn my back on it, just in case.

This is no irrational fear.  We have a penguin in the bathroom, who tries to charge me rent.  Honest.  Penguins cannot be trusted, I tell you.

There is overwhelming evidence supporting my claim, too.  Just look at such documentaries as The Wrong Trousers and The Simpsons.  Proof positive that penguins are up to no good.  Don’t be fooled by their black-and-white appearance, or taken in by their oh-so-cute fluffy chicks – give them an inch and they’ll swim all over you.

You have been warned.

What follows is my first review of Windows Vista, following my recent purchase of a new laptop.   Yes, I am aware that Vista has been out for ages, I’m just slow on the uptake.   But first, a few important points worth getting out of the way at the outset:

1. This is a nerdy post.  I’m not even going to try hiding that.   Apologies to readers who are not even slightly interested in nerdy posts.  I promise to write something less nerdy next time.
2. I am primarily a Mac user, and I fully expect this to influence my opinions to a certain extent, despite my attempts to be unbiased.
3. I am using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP laptop with a 2GHz dual-core AMD processor and 3GB RAM.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into what, for many people, is probably old news.  Vista has, after all, been around for some time now, despite its monumentally slow and cautious uptake (mainly due to the shocking support for old hardware and software).  It’s worth putting it all in context though, and consider what other products Microsoft brought out before and what their competitors have been doing.

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Yes, I’ve bought myself a laptop.  A brand new laptop, no less.  Running Vista.  Am I mad?  Well, no more than usual, it seems.  Because despite the overwhelming evidence supporting the idea that I was just jealous because two of my friends had also bought new computers recently (and my wife has a better mobile phone than I do), I have a sound and reasonable reason for needing a laptop.

I’ve not actually owned a laptop since my first year at uni, which was when I bought my very first computer – a bottom of the range Novatech notebook with a 366MHz AMD processor, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, and very little besides.  It was £600 too, which on reflection wasn’t actually the bargain I thought it was at the time.  Still, I got a good year of use out of it, getting it to do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to be capable of, like running all sorts of Windows 98 programs and running a skinning addon that made it look like Windows XP (which was very new at the time).  Since then I’ve only had desktops, and most have been Macs.

This new laptop (which I’m writing this blog post on, sat in my lounge on my comfy sofa), achieves two primary uses, plus a few other smaller ones.  (more…)

I wouldn’t say I was backwards, exactly, but I do have some very old technology sitting in my study, some of which is still in regular(ish) use.  To take an example, I have a PC sitting on my desk that is almost 7 years old.  Granted it’s only used for testing web sites, but it’s got to the stage where it’s struggling just to do that, and that’s taking into account that I reinstalled everything fairly recently too.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

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