I recently updated my main production machine and was left with a fairly recent (three years old) machine. After pondering what to do with it I remembered it had a silent power supply and this would make it an ideal candidate for a media PC.

I did some research on open source media software and had almost settled on Media Portal when Microsoft released the Windows 7 RC. The RC is the Ultimate version and has Windows Media Centre included. With W7 being a freebie for the next six and a bit months (before it begins to nag) I thought I’d give it a go.

After downloading the .iso and burning it to a DVD using the free burner program ImgBurn I put it in the DVD drive and rebooted the PC. A fresh install of Windows 7 took about 15 minutes. From memory I only had to make three selections for the entire process. Once the install had finished there were a couple more reboots that added about 10 minutes to the process but once these were done Windows 7 was set to go.

First impression is that Windows 7 is quick. Very very quick. I have Vista running on a Quad Core with 4GB of RAM but Windows 7 on a Dual Core with 2GB seems snappier. It takes the best of the visual elements of Vista and improves the task bar with icons and great preview thumbnails.

Setting up Media Centre was a breeze, all I did was point to the directories I wanted to use for movies and television shows, change the setting to make Media Centre run on start up and it was ready. The interface is stylish and intuitive, although options once are playing a file and you wish to quit can be a bit confusing.

I want to keep the media PC as lean as I can so this meant finding a way of getting content on to the machine without installing uTorrent. The answer was Windows Live Sync. I added a wireless network card to save running CAT6 through the roof and installed LiveSync. Now all I do is add/download the media I want on my main PC and it automatically syncs to the media PC at the other end of the house. It takes about 5 minutes to transfer an hour tv show, about 10 to do an average movie.

The biggest plus is that we may now actually get around to watching all the shows we have stored up. Prior to this we would have to decide what we wanted to watch and either convert them to DivX or create a DVD, burn the DVD and watch it that way. Given the time this takes, and the media we went through (we always seemed to loose the RW discs) we’d just sit and flick through channels instead. Now everything we have is there, ready to watch straight away.

I’m impressed with the set up and Windows 7. I’ll be upgrading my production machine and the media PC once the final version is released. Microsoft certainly seem to have got it right with W7.

The story of Why Comic Sans was invented, from its creator, Vincent Connare.

And his presentation: I hate Comic Sans, which covers some of the same ground, though is a little harder to follow due to the lack of… well, the presenter.

(via a comment at LifeHacker)

I gave the Windows 7 beta a try. I've deliberately skipped Vista, as my PCs are a few years old now, and an upgrade is not a high priority at this stage.

Thankfully it happily installs into a partition of its own, leaving XP intact. Though interestingly once running it didn't seem to even see the original C: drive, but could only see the D: drive it was installed on, but as C:.

To co-exist with XP, it creates a new boot menu, where XP is the “Previous version of Windows”. Not sure how/if I'll be able to get rid of that later when I zap W7.

The installation appeared to go smoothly, but it hasn't recognised key parts of my old PC: the on-board ethernet, the video, and the sound. So apart from there being no net access, no sound, and the video resolution is screwy, it's all fine.

Of course that may all be fixed in the final version.

So I had a play around in it. The new applets (Calculator, Paint etc) are much nicer than the old versions. The whole interface looks pretty nice in fact. And with just the basics installed, it seems to run quite well on my old computer.

How to tell Windows Media Player to STFU and stop prompting you to download the latest ve

rsion. (Thanks Barry)

Or I guess you could switch to using another player, such as VLC.

Everyone knows this already, right?

To put start menu items into a subfolder, use folder name and backslash.

I use it to try and help keep the start menu tidy, since the most commonly used shortcuts end up on my desktop and/or quick start menu. If I can tidy away Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Ko

mpozer and whatever else that's Net related into an Internet folder, my Start Menu might not grow to take over the whole screen when I open it.

You can also move them around after installation, but that means if you ever remove the application, it won't know where to find the shortcuts and remove them. (You'd hope one day they'd get this fixed in Windows.)

Bill Gates' rant about Windows (or to be precise, microsoft.com) usability:

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weir

how to use icloud for ipad

d dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

Read all of it here. It's from five years ago, but still makes entertaining reading.

(via Cameron Reilly)

I’m working from home today, and looking at some system monitory stuff in Firefox. In the background I’ve also got an Remote Desktop session open to my work PC.

Every few minutes, the corporate screensaver kicks-in on the work desktop. For some reason, RDP decides it absolutely has to show me this. It grabs focus, bringing its window into the foreground.

STOP GRABBING FOCUS, DAMMIT! I DON’T CARE IF THE SCREENSAVER HAS KICKED-IN. YOU’RE INTERRUPTING ME! JUST FLASH YOUR TASKBAR ITEM!

It even does this while connecting. If I alt-tab away onto something else while waiting for the connection, it keeps grabbing focus to show me… that it’s working on it, so please wait… Other applications do this sort of thing too.

And it keeps losing the connection, and re-connecting. But that may be a server and/or VPN issue.

(This is the RDP client in XP SP2. I’ll upgrade to SP3 in the next few days and discover if that’s any better.)

Sounds like there are broadly two ways of getting a small WinXP installation:

• Build it that way using a tool like the freeware nLite — here’s an article about it
• Do it after the event by ripping stuff out using something like XPlite (not freeware, but free trial available; it also works on Win2K, and also available for Win98) — article here

Something else to do for performance is shutdown extraneous services, though it’s said this doesn’t gain you much. This guide goes into a lot of detail, but is painfully formatted with one service per page. This guide is a bit briefer. This one is a nice balance.

Do you live in a DOS window, and use ClearType? Microsoft has made the Consolas font, previously only available in Vista and a few products, available for earlier versions of Windows. Looks very nice. Instructions for getting it working here — it requires a registry hack. And like many things in Windows, it only works after a reboot.

(One font = 4.3 Mb download?! Aye carumba! Check first if you already have the font; it comes with some versions of Office and Visual Studio. And why do they give so many setup programs meaningless filenames like setup.exe?!)