Vista RC2 - My Unbiased Opinion
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Alright, I’m not gonna bore you by introducing Vista. I’m sure all of you already know what Vista is, else go see Paul’s ultra lenghty review. I’ll go straight to the gist of my Vista experience.
Installation
Installation is really a breeze. Unlike XP where you’re prompted for language, date, timezone stuff in the middle of installation, when Vista does show that prompt, installation is already complete. One thing I didn’t like is that it “benchmarks” the computer for the Windows Performance Index. Pretty redundant in my opinion - can’t it just run in the background when the computer’s idle? Read the rest of this entry »
Opera, Still the Best Browser?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
I installed Internet Explorer 7 a week or two back, and primarily used to when browsing MSDN. It is a far cry from IE6 - tabbed browsing, better standards complaincy, built in feed reader and etc. One of the things that I liked is that the favourites/history/feeds pane floats by default, not disturbing the pages. Another advantage IE7 has over Firefox, is it can reopen closed tabs. When you close IE7, you’ll be prompted if you would like to reopen the tabs the next time you run IE7.
I also like IE7’s installation. When you first start, it’ll show you a list of search engines that you could add to it’s quick search box.
Nevertheless, like all other Microsoft’s newest products, it sucks up memory. To be precise, memory usage is OK, but, it pages a hell lot of stuff on disk: over 100MB! This wouldn’t come as a surprise to Firefox users, as it’s memory usage alone can easily go over 100MB. Here’s a screenshot of IE7’s memory usage, with just 5 tabs open (a few minutes of usage):
I’m not particularly woried about the high page file usage now. But when I migrate over to my laptop, excessive paging is slow! Why? Cause laptops only have 5400rpm hard drives..
All in all, I really have to say Opera 9 is the best “download-install-and-use” browser. Plenty of functionalities built in, simple user interface
Tags: software
Final Version of IE7
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
I don’t know what got in to me, but I just downloaded IE7. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t install it the usual way, no thanks to the Windows Genuine Advantage check thingy. But no worries, all I needed to do is:
- Download IE7.
- Extract it’s contents to a folder using any file compression tool. (I used 7zip)
- Open notepad, save it (without any content) as “iexplore.exe.local” in the folder where you extracted IE7.
- Double click on iexplore.exe to run. You might wanna create a shortcut ;-)
To my surprise, the tabs on top of my blog don’t look right in IE7. Perhaps they’ve improved their CSS handling and my IE7 specific CSS is no longer appropriate/needed. This blockquote look weird too. Anyways, will look into it this weekend. IE7 final seems to use less memory than the beta too, making a must use for those Microsoft lovers. In fact, it’s lower than Opera or Firefox.
Aside: Joke of the Day
Vista: VIruses, Spywares, Trojans and Adwares.
by Anth.
Tags: software
Funny Things ’bout PC-Cillin
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Didn’t blog for some days since my mood was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work I had to attend to. Okay, okay, maybe I was just plain lazy :p. Anyway, I ran out of hard disk space on C drive recently. I had 20 gigs allocated to C and it really had me wondering what the hell did I install in there. Luckily for me, I had this nifty little tool called jDiskReport that summarizes disk usage.
To my horror, Trend Micro’s PC-Cillin Internet Security 2006 took up 6 freaking gigs. Wtf~ I thought, it’s just a freaking anti-virus! I uninstalled it, and several files remained in the folder. Ah, there’s the culprit. They were funnily named files with extensions just as mystifying, each taking up hundreds of MBs. It’s been a day of two after deleting them and re-installing PC-Cillin. I checked the folder recently and discovered those pesky “temporary” files again. I selected them and hit Shift + Del, expecting a warning that it’s still in use by a program. Surprisingly, the file was gone; no warnings. That would probably mean it’s not actively used. Doesn’t it know how to keep those file sizes a little more reasonable? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: software
Need a Feed Reader?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
The funny thing with me is that, I discovered the fun of RSS feeds not long ago: when Firefox introduced Live Bookmarks. Not happy with it, I went and tried out some web based readers. To cut a long story short, I settled with Opera’s built in feed reader since it’s so convenient. But soon, the number of feeds I subscribed to kept increasing. I even tried creating my own web-based feed reader, just that time wasn’t on my side..
So just minutes ago, I finally Googled for “feed reader” in search of a better, non-web-based feed reader. First on the list was: “FeedReader“. Being impressed by the screenshots, I downloaded away. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: software
