Posts by Matt

Oh yay!

The three app limit was ridiculous, but even now Win 7 for netbooks still looks lame. People have shown the current crop of Atom-powered units can amply handle the full Win 7 Ultimate RC without any problems. The sheer number of different Windows editions is laughable. It's like Vista all over again.

All these SKU's serve to do is allow MS to keep the price artificially high for "Ultimate" versions, whilst giving essentially the same piss-poor product away for peanuts with cheap hardware. They want to stomp all over Linux in the budget market, but preserve their margins at the top end. It's not as if they've worked diligently to optimize the OS from the ground up, specifically for low power devices. They've just disabled and left out a few bits to justify the price difference. Its as if they want to make choosing a computer as confusing and awkward as possible - Mrs Miggins buys a new laptop only to find the cut-down version of Windows doesn't look the same as the wizzy TV ad, and is told she must pay an extra £100 for an Anytime Upgrade. Congratulations Mrs M, it's a PC! *Cha-ching*

Well, I for one am tired of this BS. I don't want to be treated like a second class citizen and to be up-sold a new product key, just so I can do what I've always been able to in XP.

Maybe, just maybe, if MS trimmed the range down to just 2 Windows versions that were sensibly differentiated as Full and Lite products, and if they weren't unnecessarily mean about feature exclusion, and actually charged a sensible amount for each product in the first place, they wouldn't NEED to tie everyone in knots with all this version crap.

It'll be a cold day in hell before I buy a computer with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Basic for Netbooks (EU compliant) w/o Developing World Restrictions Edition.

Not just Windows though...

OS X lets you disguise files as other types, and even lets you change the icon in the Finder. Its not a big issue though, because its a decent, permissions-based OS. So if Joe Bloggs inadvertently executes a malicious, nothing untoward will happen unless he supplies an admin username and password. And if he DOES unwittingly enter credentials just to open a .jpg without raising an eyebrow, he deserves all he gets...

The real question is whether Win7 will allow the malware to run without throwing up a UAC prompt, and just grant it full permissions to do what the hell it likes in C:\Windows\...

Electric cars, eh?

In Britain we're going to be lucky if the National Grid has sufficient capacity to power our low-energy lightbulbs (get 5 for only £0.50 at your local Morissons today!) in 10 years time, let alone anything as power hungry as a fopping car. We need new power stations stat, and plenty of 'em!!

Paris, because only when the entire nation is plunged into darkness will she become the brightest bulb in the box.

@ Dan RE: Virtual Machines

> I will want to be able to run virtual machines, and I'm not sure the Macbook is up to that. Thoughts anyone?

Depends on what you want to do in the VM's I guess. I have a Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 GHz with 2 GB RAM, and that runs WinXP in Sun VirtualBox with no issues whatsoever. I only use it for Outlook, Excel, SAP, IE and (ahem) MS Hearts, but I run all of those in the VM with iTunes, Safari, Camino, Entourage, Adium, Illustrator and a few other things all running on the OS X host. It all runs as smooth as silk, so I'd guess any Macbook would be up to the task.

Just max the RAM and it'll be sweet.

Balls of Steel

I've serviced G4 and first generation Intel Mac mini's and really don't see why cracking them open is considered such a big deal. Whenever I carried out RAM and HDD replacements I actually thought the G4's were laid out really well given the size constraints. My only gripe was the location of the PRAM battery required the removal of the internal frame, but how often is that an issue?

The Intel mini's aren't so easy to work on, with some fiddly cables to disconnect, but you can still be in and out in under 10 minutes, no problem. Sounds like El Reg needs to grow a pair. ;-)

Paris, because she knows a thing or two about cojones and rapid entry.

What am I missing?

CPW would prefer to shed 80,000 customers due to them having old OS or hardware, rather than providing them with inexpensive, new routers and keep their custom? If money's that tight, then ask the customers to contribute to the cost (then lock 'em in for another 12, sorry 18 months). Surely that's better than just saying au revoir?

Paris... because of the French connection

Disappointing

I've e-mailed Apple conveying my disappointment over this. My iPod touch is less than a week old, and having just forked-out for their top-of-the-line model, I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay AGAIN for some measly software update.

Bad move Apple, do the right thing.