You may well be wondering why – it’s because the EU in their infinite lack of wisdom spent millions of Euros deciding that the evil Microsoft should offer a range of browsers to Windows users, despite the fact that all the alternative browsers are easily available to download and free.

Anyway, all this will do is confuse a lot of people, allow unsavoury companies and individuals to design similar looking screens in order to fool people into installing dangerous spyware and cause havoc for IT support staff as they receive a deluge of calls from bemused users.

Any questions, as always, feel free to contact me

Simply follow the installation instructions for your favourite browser and you’ll have a nice clean Facebook with all the basic functions and none of the rubbish.

Firefox 3.6 is out and brings a number of improvements over 3.5, most noticeably speed!

It’s much quicker, and instead of those nice but clunky themes you can use the excellent new Personas to brighten up your browser.

With full-screen video support and inbuilt reminder when your plug-ins need updating it’s a major improvement on 3.5.

Don’t delay, download today – http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/ .

You may not have realised but this is caused by your hand accidentally brushing the touchpad – so the best thing to do is disable the touchpad when you are using a mouse – some laptops already come with software or a switch to do this, but otherwise this useful program will do it for you.

http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/.

It’s free.

Before you load your own programs and data onto your new computer it is well worth while taking time to remove all this ‘bloatware’.

Apart from anything else your computer will run faster – most of this bloatware is configured to start when you turn your computer on so you are greeted with Sony this and Acer that – all it’s doing is slowing everything down.

As an example, a friend recently bought a new Sony Vaio laptop, very nice it is too, but it took me nearly 2 hours to get rid of the heaps of pre-installed rubbish, ranging from trials of Office and unwanted Internet Security software, to their proprietary ‘Network Configuration’ software – a remarkably useless program that allows you to connect to the internet, something Windows does very well all on its own.

Once you’ve had a good spring-clean you can sit back and enjoy your leaner meaner machine!

They are a waste of time.

There is no evidence that cleaning your registry makes any noticeable difference at all and similarly defragmenting your hard drive will only make a very slight difference if it is extremely defragmented – both Vista and Windows 7 keep the disk in order by default.

If you want to keep your computer up to speed make sure you keep it clear of viruses and spyware and make sure that you don’t have unnecessary programs and services running in the background – you will need to know what you are doing to tweak these though.

Apart from that, making sure you have enough RAM is the single best thing you can do to speed up your PC, 1GB minimum for XP/SP3 and Windows 7, 2GB if you are still lumbered with Vista.

There are usually two issues, firstly, confusing RAM with Hard Disk storage, and secondly how much do they need have of each?

Put simply, RAM is the memory that your computer uses to run programs and typically your computer will have between 1 and 4GB.

Hard Disks are where you store your pictures, documents, music etc and are much bigger – typically 250GB – 1TB (Terabyte or approximately 1000GB*).

So how much do you need of each?

Well, there is little to be gained for the vast majority of users in having more than 3GB RAM, though most new laptops or PCs will come with 4GB which is fine.

If you have an older laptop or PC you may well have less than 3GB, and as long as you are happy with the performance it’s not a problem – having more RAM than Windows need to run itself and your programs won’t make your computer faster, but not having enough will slow it down.

I mentioned that most new computers now come with 3 or 4GB or RAM – why the difference – well primarily it’s because of the operating system – the version of Windows you are buying.

Windows 7, and for that matter the now defunct XP and Vista come in two flavours, 32 or 64-bit.

32-bit versions can address, or use, only up to just over 3GB of RAM, whereas 64-bit versions can address much larger amounts, but as mentioned above it really makes little difference to the vast majority of us.

As far as hard disks are concerned, it’s really a case of how long is a piece of string – if you store lots of music, films and DVDs you will obviously need more but for most of us a laptop with 250GB is plenty.

* (Manufacturers cheat a little when listing hard disk capacities, they call 1000MB a GB and 1000GB a TB, when strictly speaking a GB is 1024MB and similarly a TB is 1024GB).

]]> http://www.chrisfixit.eu/2009/12/03/lost-your-memory/feed/ 0 http://www.chrisfixit.eu/2009/10/24/windows-7-arrives/ http://www.chrisfixit.eu/2009/10/24/windows-7-arrives/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:14:33 +0000 chrisfixit http://chrisfixit.eu/?p=289 unless you are in England and waiting for the postman to deliver your brand new copy – you will probably get it by Easter.

In contrast to the debacle that followed the release of Vista,  Windows 7 has received glowing reports from both users and the press alike – it is a easy to use, has a nice feel to it, is intuitive , and runs smoothly and quickly.

Both PC and Mac press comparisons put it slightly ahead of Apple’s latest incarnation of Leopard, though I won’t go as far as to  say it knocks the spots off it.

Of course it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t some confusion involved with a new release and in this case the blogosphere has been buzzing with the differences between the ‘Upgrade’  and ‘Full’ versions.

In theory you should have a previously installed version of XP or Vista to be able to install the upgrade version – this of course applies to the vast majority of  purchasers, but In practice you don’t, although you may have to install twice if you are installing on to a brand new hard disk which has never seen a Windows operating system.

In short, save money and buy the upgrade even if you are building yourself a new PC.

Windows 7 sounds the death knell for Vista and not many will rue its passing, but XP will continue for a few years yet – and why not – it’s still a good solid operating system.

The latest word leaking from Microsoft is that those people buying a new computer with Vista from some time in the summer will get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it is released.

Those who already have Vista will have to fork out again – and since Windows 7 is little more than a Vista Service Pack anyway, some might think this something of a cheek.

Yes, Windows 7 is a major improvement on Vista, but it is only making the worst OS since Windows ME work as it should.

So a very large number of Microsoft customers will have to pay twice to get a useable OS.

Kerching.

Having used the Beta (testing) version for a week now I’m happy to report it’s a considerable improvement on Vista – though that is not difficult.

Although it is essentially Vista revamped, it is much quicker, has some nice touches, and above all actually seems to work. I still find it a little difficult to navigate around Windows 7 , but it’s a bit more intuitive than Vista and I didn’t find myself constantly switching back to XP out of frustration.

If the final version is like the Beta, it will be a no-brainer for current Vista users to upgrade – those using XP may have more of a dilemma – there still is no ‘must have’ feature in Windows 7 that would entice hardened XP
users to change – they will probably be gradually forced over as they buy new computers and XP drivers are no longer available.

But in the current credit climate, I find it hard to imagine that companies who resisted the change to Vista will be queueing up to swap to Windows 7 in a hurry.

There is no official release date for Windows 7 yet, but it will probably be in time for Christmas.

As a sop to the millions of people who have shunned Vista and prefer XP, Microsoft decided to allow manufacturers to offer XP as a ‘downgrade right’ – Dell have rebadged this and are offering Vista as a ‘Bonus Disk’, implying (quite correctly) that it doesn’t see XP as a downgrade at all.

In fact, Dell’s blog is fullsome in its praise of XP and calls Vista ‘its harshly debated successor’.

Looking for a new computer? Get a Dell.

It claims that it wants to show a clear timeline in the release of its products – it seems more likely that its desperately trying to dig itself out of a hole.

Windows Vista has hardly been greeted with acclaim, not least by corporate customers who can, quite rightly, see little benefit in ‘upgrading’ from XP, so in order to encourage sales Microsoft have tried the carrot and stick approach – withdrawing XP from the market and promising Windows 7 in 2009 with an easy transition from Vista to Windows 7.

Unfortunately for them it isn’t working – on the one hand customer demand has meant that they have vacillated over the withdrawal of XP and although it is being officially withdrawn from sale at the end of this month, there are so many ‘exceptions’ – system builders that will still be able to install it – that effectively anyone will be able to get hold of  a copy if they want to, and on the other many companies are just skipping the Vista step completely and waiting for Windows 7.

So, a little more time for them to get Windows 7 right, and in a few years time Vista will be seen for what it is – a poor bloated operating system with few advantages over XP,  badly implemented, and for most people a totally unnecessary expense.

Adding a bookmark is now as simple as clicking the empty star in the address bar. Click the star again – which turns yellow to indicate a bookmarked page – and you’re presented with a new option to add tags. You can add as many comma-separated tags as necessary to each of your bookmarks.

The new system proves its worth when you come to find your bookmarks. Tags can now be typed directly into the location bar (nicknamed the “Awesome bar”) so that when you type “hotels” for example, all the bookmarks that have been tagged with that word appear in a scrollable, drop-down list.

“The Awesome Bar”  certainly has some impressive features.. as well as finding your tagged bookmarks, enter a word, ‘paros’ for example, and you’ll be presented with a drop-down list of all the sites you’ve previously visited with the word paros in the URL (i.e. www.paros-online.com) or with paros in the site’s title tag (e.g. .Taste of Paros).

The word you’re searching for is highlighted – either in the URL or the name of the site – in the drop-down list, making it easier to find the relevant site at-a-glance.

It’s an excellent way to find sites in your browsing history – far easier than digging through the History sidebar. And, after  using it for a while, the Awesome Bar quickly replaced Google as a way of finding those sites I remembered visiting a few weeks ago, but couldn’t remember the name of.

Behind the scenes, Firefox 3 offers greater security, including blacklisting sites that are known to contain spyware.

To find out more and download Firefox click here.

SP1 was completed in February, only for Microsoft to discover problems with a number of third party device drivers. The company tweaked Windows Update to ensure that systems running these drivers do not install the Vista update.

SP1 will reduce the time it takes Vista to copy large files, although it is still slower than XP.

Other advantages? Er..