News

Things have been going on these last few days. Here's my take on them:

First of all E3. Great ..too bad I wasn't there. Fortunately there were no " Giant enemy crab(s)" ( for people familiar with bashing Sony you'll know what that means). Second the game I was looking forward to, Assassin's Creed 2 was demoed. It seems to be a nice sequel with some definite improvements. What people can only hope now is that Ubisoft finally gives some freedom to the player. What Assassin's Creed actually needs is to have a talk with Hitman.

Second, we have a launch date for Windows Seven, and it's sooner than anyone expected: OCTOBER 22. As I have been beta testing for the last few months, I can tell you Seven is going to be a great release, and a very stable one. No more Vista-like mistakes.

Third I've had some rendering issues with a 9600GT on Sims 3. There is no possible reason or explanation, and I have yet to find a fix. And there's nothing on the net related to this.

Fourth Alongside Seven Microsoft is launching Bing. The beta has been around for a few days now. Bing is a new search engine, that is supposed to be Search 2.0. And while certain features, and ideas that went into it's making surely sound smart and great ..time and page-hits will be the judges in the end.

I'm sure many many many other things have happened in the last 2 weeks but I've been really busy with exams coming up. Anyway that's why the name is RANDOM geeky stuff. Cheers

Quick Update on Vista

I mentioned two posts ago ( approx) that I'll keep you posted on what happens when the grace period for Vista SP1 expires. Well that happened a few days ago and here's what happened.

-> first ..and this was immediate , actually a few hours before it expired , my background turned black. But that was fixed by simply ..resetting the background :)). It might just go black again once I reboot but it really doesn't bother me. Also someone mentioned that Aero will be disabled. Well it;s hasn't so far, it's working just fine. Later edit: it reverts to black after some time ..or after runing a full screen app.

-> second the system keeps telling me ..from time to time let's say once every 30 minutes that I may be a victim of sofware counterfiting. It's not only that I'm a victim, I'm an addict of counterfited software :)) 

-> third thing, when you boot up , after logging in, a screen appears that tells you to register now, and the register later button becomes active after about 15 seconds.

-> this is a curios one: from time to time when i use my cpu for more than just listening to music or refreshing my desktop ..let's say when a play a demanding game, it stalls for a few seconds and then goes back to normal . That has happened a few times and i know for a fact it has never happened before. Now this was not mentioned anywhere in the effects sp1 might have, nor have i heard of anyone having such issues. It might just be that my hard drive is kinda old and maybe it's just failing. Not sure on this one.

-> another curios one: updates still work. Two days after my license expired I downloaded and installed the latest definitions for Win Defender. I really wasn't expecting this.  I read somwhere that usual updates will not be delivered anymore but critical ones will. MS is socially obliged to deliver the critical updates to all machines even if they say they won't/don't/whatever. Right now this seems to be the case.

So to sum up , if you don't mind ocassional small popups ( they really don't bother me and they aren't even on top of other applications) and the fact that you have no background, you can get all the benefits of the SP1 without worrying of anything bad happening ...for now at least.  Whichever way this develops I'll keep you posted. And for any experiences or questions please be sure to leave a comment.

News

      Well in the absence of any other article I'll just fill you in on a few things that caught my attention lately.

      First of all on the Microsoft - Yahoo deal.
 
    As you all know a few days ago Microsoft put up an unsolicited bid of 44 billion $ for Yahoo. They tried to do this one or two years ago and they got a very big NO. The answer was exactly the same this time, not to mention all the oposition towards the merger from outside parties. Without any other bid, MS may still argue that their price is fair, and will probably try to put pressure on Yahoo executives into negotiating, even if that will eventually mean reaching a higher strike point than iniatially thought.
    Yahoo's response to the unsolicited bid was to apparently restart negotions for a merger between them and AOL. This was quoted from London-based Times newspaper which also mentioned Google as another possible partner for  future colaboration with Yahoo.
 Right now most of us will just have to wait to see how this whole thing turns out.

      Second thing in the news: Vista Service Pack 1.
    It's done, it's ready but you're not going to get it any time soon.  At least that was the way Mike Nash from MS first explained it to us.
    Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing on the 4th of February but a full implementation of it was scheduled for mid April. The reasons for this were quite confusing and weird... Microsoft- style.  First Mike said that there were still some issues with certain drivers that would malfunction once the update to SP1 was complete. And so there was this 1st thing to solve.
    Then they said that the whole point was a great Vista experience and that everyone should receive the sp at the same time, and because mid April is when it will be in stores that was the release date on Windows Update too.
    And now , I believe MS must have reconsidered after the negative response because the SP1 is already available on both MSDN and TechNet for subscribers to download. And almost all the prerequisites for the sp were put up on Windows Update in preparation for the release which was set for mid-March.  So in just 3 weeks most of us will have it installed. Now for exact 
info on what the sp will bring
you can check around on microsoft.com. Be sure I'll do an article about this when the time comes.

 Well that was is , time's up. Stay tuned the next article is due soon.
    Cheers, Geeky.

AMD Phenom™ Processor

I was trying to decide what to write: the already way-to-late article on Browsers, or an article on the great and fabulous Adobe Creative Suite 3 at which I finally got a look last week, when suddenly I decided not to write about any of them ( that Browsers article will probably become my own goal in life :P ). So this week I'm writing about the (almost) All New AMD Phenom™ Quad-Core Processor.

The news about it started pouring as early as July when AMD unveiled it at its 2007 Technology Analyst Day and ever since then, there's been much anticipation. Well it is ( or has been for a few days now ) out on the market, and it does have a complete tech profile on their site here .

What I can quickly say about it ( I haven't had the chance to actually use it yet ) is that it sounds absolutely great. AMD took a fresh start on this one, abandoning their classical chip architecture. Instead the Phenom is based on the new k10 microarchitecture technology. This results in excellent performance and you can actually see a list of all the features and benefits here.

Phenom processors will use the same X2 and X4 suffixes used in the Athlon line to differentiate between dual- and quad-core processor variants, and the flagship FX moniker will move over to the top-performing Phenom processor.

The perfect combination ( or at least the one AMD put out for the Technology Analyst Day event) is a 3GHz Phenom FX system running three Radeo HD 2900XT GPU's everything working on the RD790 Chipset, which can support up to 4 , yes that's 4, GPU's in Crossfire. That was just in case you had some money and you were wandering how you could spend it to play Crysis as smoothly as you can play Starcraft 1 now :)). By the way Phenom supports AM2 sockets so no need to worry about that.

The last thing ( and this is probably one of the greatest ) that I will say is about the price. AMD promised to cut down ( a lot )on it, and they kept that promise. The Phenom 9600 processor is at about 245$, which is a reasonable price for it.

Now what I am really wondering is if there will be a response from Intel. I really am waiting on some giant battle between the two that will result in Quad-Core processors to cost less than 20$ :)). Oh well I can always keep dreaming. But seriously Intel will probably respond somehow and everyone's expecting a new extraordinary processor from them.

Disclaimer: Yes yes it's true. I prefer Intel to AMD and Nvidia to Ati :D

Cheers, Geeky.

Yahoo Again

   Finally I found the time to write this. I promised I'd write the Browsers article, but before I had the chance to do that something extraordinary happened. A few weeks ago I wrote an article, Yahoo Depression, and I was saying that Yahoo has yet to release the long awaited Vista Messenger, nor had they given any news on it's development. Well after reading my bad reviews about them Yahoo decided it was finally time to give us a preview of the product. So they launched the beta version of the program. You can download it here! I downloaded it as quickly as I heard, because I was really curious how it will look and what it can do. So here are the features:  (* Remember this is just a beta version so the full one will probably have more cool and interesting stuff)

   First of all the design. Yes, it really is great. The color schemes integrate very nice, and the whole program has that cool, stylish, Vista look to it.Plus the contacts now arange themselves according to your window size. One smiley face for Yahoo till now.

   Second, we have the big avatars, and the adjustable display mode for the friends list. That works out really nice, but unfortunately I have found some bugs and some things that could be improved. For example the program seems to randomly choose when to display a web adress as a link ..or just as a normal status. And if the status is really long there's no other way of seeing it than opening an IM window with the person and stretching it out as long as you need to. That's why I sent Yahoo a suggestion ( using the very nice Feedback link in the program) to simply maximize contacts in the list ,regardless of the display setting, whenever they are selected. That would really make things easy and smooth.

   Third feature, and this one is probably the nicest : Tabbed IMs. As it was said in the demo video ( yes that very old one that i was complaining about ) whenever you talk to multiple people you now need only one IM window. You have tabs, and choose from the different people you are talking to. As i said this is a very nice feature ( and just in case you don't like you can always expand the windows) because it helps keep your desktop clean.

   Another feature, you can actually take one or more contacts and post them on your Vista Sidebar so you can monitor them directly without having to check the Yahoo window everytime.Now I don't use this ( because for some reason it doesn't work), but it's still a nice feature.

   The last added nice thing that I want to mention is they increased the transferable file size even more. It now reaches 2gb of data. This is actually great as I send lots of edited clips that can take up a lot of space, and thus this helps a lot.

   Now as this is still a beta version I'm not sure what right I have to complain about this but I will do it anyway. Certain , very nice features, seem to have disappeared, such as Photo Share. That is completely gone and there's no mention of it anywhere. Also voice chat, audibles and some other stuff are also gone. I hope , and I believe that these features will be back in the full version, which will probably be released some time in Q2 of 2008.
   Oh and as a last bug thingy : I noticed the memory usage of the program fluctuates a lot sometimes as low as 2mb and sometimes as much as 200 mb. Still haven't figured out why it's doing that and if this only happens to me or to everybody. Well besides this, the program is very nice overall and I do recommend it, at least for a go.I'll let you discover new features on your own.
Have fun with it!