Vista goes RTM

After 5 long years, with so many setbacks and so many features taken out that people didn’t expect Vista to show up until next year for RTM, it was announced today that Vista has now gone gold!!! According to Jim Allchin, who put together a small video making the announcement, Vista will be available to everyone on 30th January 2007. A big well done to MS for *finally* getting it out the door . Screenshots of all builds can be found here. The Vista Team Blog also has a simple message letting everyone know that Vista is complete.

Links:

Neowin Story
Vista Q&A
Vista Team Blog

New External HD

After my recent HD failure, I realized how stupid it was to keep backups on a single Hard Drive. So after some hunting around on the net, I found the Western Digital My Book Premium Edition, which seemed just about right for my needs. I went for the 320GB edition (formatted capacity 298GB ), since it was only for back up and some minor video editing.

I received it it today, and so far so good. It has a dual interface system; 2 Firewire connections and 1 usb connection. It runs pretty quite and cool, and has some nice eye candy LEDs on the front , one for drive activity and one for how much space has been used. The LEDs also happen to be blue, which is my favorite colour . I backed up all the documents on my laptop, and will backup my desktop pc soon as well. The desktop pc needs to be formatted, its become slow and sluggish and its been a year since I installed Windows on it, so no surprise there.

I also need to get a new router, probably the WRT54G, since you can use modded firmware on it . My current one is acting really funky. lol, it seems that for me, one thing breaks down after the other .

Need for Speed : Carbon

Like I promised I tried out NFS:Carbon. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy it at all. The graphics looks shit, the handling was rubbish, and there wasn’t anything new to the game. Anyway, I took some videos and screenshots of the game, they can be found in my Gallery. I would say this game is not really anything impressive. I reckon its about time EA moved on to something else. The NFS series has lost its touch.

Life at the moment

Don’t know what to write about really. The HD is still dead, seems like the logic board got fried somehow, probably by static. Uni is getting quite difficult, got an exam on Monday, and also pieces of Coursework to hand in on Monday and Thursday. Gotta get started on my Java mini-project as well. So yeah, its a bit hectic at the moment.

I’m also looking to buy an external HD, I don’t wanna suffer again with a massive HD failure . Probably gonna get a 200-400GB 7200 RPM drive, and something that’ll last a long time. The new laptop hard drive is really fast, its a 5400RPM Seagate drive. Now my apps load up faster, and the laptop is just faster in general. So far 27GB is used up, but I’m not gonna bother deleting files until I’m really starting to lose capacity.

I also got hold of the Need For Speed Carbon demo. Once I get round to playing that, which wont be until next week, I’ll post some pictures and post whether it fails to impress .

Pictures of the laptop when it was opened and cleaned have been posted.

I still haven’t got round to posting any pictures in the gallery, so sometime over the weekend, I’ll post pictures of my laptop I took when I was cleaning out the dust and adding some Thermal Paste to replace the crappy stuff Fujitsu Siemens put on .

Laptop HD died

So today i got my new 100gb Seagate HD. I took out my old one, took them both to my desktop pc, hooked them up with some 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapters, and turned on the pc to clone it. So nothing happens, except for the new HD being detected. I check the adapters and see one of the pins are bent. So I fix it, stick ‘em back in, and still no luck. I out the old HD in the laptop again, and this time I get error message, but no HD is detected. So now I’m a bit worried, I check the connection, still no luck. No spinning, no creaking, no nothing.

I take my new HD, and it works perfect, so the connectors ain’t the problem. So I have to reinstall Windows on the new HD, transfer all my docs (still doing it now), and customize my Windows back to the way it was before ATM, I’m freezing the old HD, apparently this works in some cases. Tomorrow I’m gonna buy an external enclosure for the HD, and see if it has any life It’s a sad ending to a happy story

Upgraded my laptop :D

Ok, so I’d been wanting to do this for a long time, but I didn’t have enough money. So I got paid quite a bit from work, I ordered some RAM from ebay. It was a 1GB 200 pin Corsair PC 2700. I received it today, popped it in, loaded up Windows. Now everything is much faster, but the real bottleneck of my laptop is the HD. It is a slooooow 4200RPM speed, which slows stuff down. I’m gonna buy a new HD from ebay. ATM, I’m waiting for my 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter to turn up so I can clone my current HD. Ordered it on Monday, and still no sign of it.

I ordered the RAM on Thursday, and it came today. Quicker then I expected. So now I have 1.25GB RAM, and once I get a HD, this laptop should be a beast.

The RAM was £80, incl. P&P.

Google and Youtube

After a lot of speculation, Google has bought Youtube for $1.65 billion!!! Google has said that it’ll let Youtube keep it’s service separate from Google’s own service, although I can’t see the point. So now Google controls much of the video market, which is something I support. Hopefully, Google wont screw Youtube over with some stupid ideas, and now we have to see what the best name for the combined service is . Gootube maybe??

Link for more: Neowin Story