Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Is it just me, or does everyone out there think that Vista is rubbish?

I’ve a nice new Vista ready computer that came with Vista Business installed yet it will only run for about two hours before it hangs up. Not only does it hang up, but it stops working in a very peculiar way: when I start using it, many keyboard shortcuts work yet after an hour or so they stop working.

And then, there’s the updates. Every single time I need to reboot it (which is easily three times a day) it has more software updates to install.

Now that the “two hours” before it hangs seems to be reducing, I’m seriously looking into scrapping it altogether and installing Linux. The one thing that’s stopped me doing that so far is that I’ve a lot of information inside Outlook which I don’t think would transfer into a Linux setup but since Outlook constantly stops working anyway, I figure that I’m going to lose all that information sooner or later anyway so I’ve started looking into dual boot options to easy the transition.

I think Microsoft have squarely shot themselves in the foot with this one: not only is the file format not compatible with older versions but the keyboard shortcuts that we’ve all learnt don’t work and to cap it all the software is the most flakey that I’ve come across for many years.

Popularity: 45% [?]

There seem to be as many sites reviewing hosting sites as there are hosting sites to be reviewed so perhaps it’s no surprise that just about any hosting service can find itself at the top 10 of the listings somewhere.

The sheer number of hosting services available is just amazing too. Whilst I was looking for a new hosting service I came across one or two that seemed to list hundreds of services. Although it’s not the most comprehensive, Website Hosting Jury lists almost 600 which should perhaps give you some idea of how great the choice is these days.

What’s not so evident is how one might choose the “best”. Most of those on WHJ have only one review which I dropped immediately from my shortlist but even just counting those with more than 50 reviews still leaves 24. Many of those in the top 10 actually have quite bad ratings which isn’t a good sign as they have from 80 through to 220 reviews each.

Of those top 24, there are relatively few that combine good economy with good service (if good marks on WHJ can be said to indicate good service): U2-web, Polur Net, RealWebHost, Integra-Net, ICD Soft, BlurStorm, LunarPages, Banana Hosting and HostGator. We need a lot of addon domains which narrows that list down to IntegraNet, LunarPages and HostGator of which we went with LunarPages on the basis that IntegraNet at $32/year sounded a little too cheap and HostGator at $10/month was a little too expensive. Having said that, I’d be quite tempted to start using IntegraNet as our backup host at some point (you can get both IntegraNet and LunarPages for less than it costs for HostGator) and were we only running personal sites, I’d have gone for it as the main host.

Popularity: 36% [?]

One of the items of hardware that’s jumped in functionality and dropped in price is the humble projector.

In fact, the meaning of the word has changed quite signficantly too over the last 10 years. In days gone by a projector was just a short-hand way of saying overhead projector but these days a projector is pretty much always the type that you plug into your computer to do your presentation.

What’s possible with them has changed significantly too and whereas the early models were just about up to displaying 16 colours, these days you can use them to display video clips along with all the normal dissolves and whatnot used to switch from one slide to another. There still remains quite major differences between the various models though and whilst you’ll find that a small scale fairly cheap model will be fine for presentations to small groups, you need something somewhat more substantial if you’re presenting to audiences in the hundreds when, of course, the price will rise comensurately.

In practice, you’re usually talking in terms of audio visual projectors ie plural for larger audiences as you can find that it’s more of a “show” that’s expected in some situations so not only is each projector more expensive but you need to get more of them as well.

Popularity: 24% [?]