Windows 7 on a Inspiron 510m

My ancient old knackered laptop (recently upgraded with a brand new 1Gb stick of RAM) had been running Ubuntu for a number of years, and was getting to the point where a OS re-install was necessary. I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed with the university wireless not playing nicely – so decided to give Windows 7 a try (since I can get it nice and free!)

Install was a breeze, OS booted fine first time, all drivers found and installed by Windows Update – apart from one…

Seems I was stuck with the 640×480 VGA resolution driver, Intel doesn’t think their 8XXGM series drivers work well with 7. Never fear – a bit of Googling revealed this site: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html, which contains instructions for tricking 7 into installing the old drivers! Result! Although Seb may have had a slight point on this weeks Tech 107 (episode 3) about Macs being easier due to them not needing separate driver install. Ah well.

So – I’m now officially off Linux and 100% Windows again. Lets see how long it lasts this time!

Die Live Mail Die

I’m beginning to regret installing Windows Live Mail Beta… merely for the fact that it nearly caused me a major heart attack last night.

Get off a Bristol-ATC session, think I’ll check my emails… Outlook Express isn’t there…

<Insert expletive here>

Neither are the files in /ApplicationData/

<Insert further expletive here>

Uninstalled WL Mail in the hope it would come back… nope

<Insert head-banging noise here>

Finally managed to find OE squirreled away in /Program Files/

<Insert screams of joy here>

I now have backups of EVERYTHING from OE, just because without it… I am nothing!

Not heard much?

Hi guys,

You’ve not heard a lot from me recently, because I’ve been waaaay too busy for you all 😀

I’ve just got this "Windows Live Writer" thingy… and thought I’d test it out on here!

Just to keep you all up to date, I’m back from Jambo, back from Summer camp, and back to school!

School seems rather depressing, since I still have the same amount of frees as last year, and still got all the bad teachers. Lovely.

Anywho, FsPortal is progressing well, over 90% completed at the moment, and I’m aiming to get it released this side of Christmas ;o

Thats enough excitement for now… catch you later!

Vista Style

Decided late last night I wanted a Vista look for my PC…

Ended up with http://www.jcxp.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=13415

It’s pretty good, still a couple of problems with it so far… I’ll keep you up to date!

Safari BETA

I have been trying out Safari for Windows XP over the past couple of days, and my initial reaction is one of absolute loathing.

According to Mr Jobs, HTML and Javascript loading times are nearly cut in half from the ever popular FireFox. This may be so, I have not tried their testing program, but what use is this when communication times are so slow!

From what I’ve seen, Safari takes a lot longer to process the actual request, making the improvement of HTML loading times un-noticeable.

If Apple want to dominate this market, at least put out a piece of software better or equal to the competition! However, in my opinion: the layout of Safari for Windows puts it on a par with, or even behind, IE7