Tuesday 31 March 2009

Windows Vista and its huge disk space requirements, plus my external monitor

As part of a project to get my girlfriend's laptop up and running again (minus its CD-ROM drive), I've had the displeasure of installing Vista again.

I am astounded at how much disk space it seems to consume. Two common problems appear to be Windows Event reporting alongside what's called the (side by side) Winsxs folder.

Allowing for 20Gb for install, I found that after only a few programs had been installed that the whole Vista OS had eaten up nearly all of my disk space. 20Gb for an operating system - I DON'T think.

Running the disk cleanup tool gave me back some of the space (4Gb) but it was unable to do much with the gargantuan winsxs folder. How the developers at Microsoft sleep at night, no-one knows. Total bloat in my opinion.

My recommendation is to set Windows Error Reporting to Off, which can be accessed via the Control Panel (Settings|Control Panel|Problem Reports and Solutions). Goodbye and good riddance.

On a more happy note, I was pleased to be able to get my external monitor hooked up to my ACER laptop. This can be a right royal pain under UBUNTU 8.10 Intrepid Ibex with its overly complex xorg.conf file editing etc. so I was pleased to be able to do the following.

Press Windows key and X to bring up the Mobility Center [sic]:

From there, you can simply enable the external monitor. Very useful.

JB

Mutant fly lands in Montevideo


I was alerted to a monster fly in the living room when my girlfriend Ale grabbed hold of me, clutching my arm and shrieking 'Get rid of it, urrghhhhhh'. I went to the window and on the curtains I saw this enormous mutant fly, rather dozy and quite happy to be swatted. I tapped it lightly with a flip-flop once it had landed on the floor and was surprised to see its thorax crack open slightly. After gently taking it outside by holding its wings, I went and grabbed my K800i to get a picture of the unfolding nastiness. The fly was obviously ready to impregnate something with its load. Disgusting.

At this point, Ale was going a bit mental so I managed to take another picture before giving it the big squish treatment.
I suppose that's nature at work but it's still yukkaroo.

My mate Ed suggested that I put them in a jam jar and watch the maggots feast on their dear departed parent but I'm not that bad ... hehe

JB

Saturday 28 March 2009

AVG antivirus, new free version 8.5

Here's the link to download the latest version of AVG's antivirus product:

AVG free antivirus download

It gets larger and larger each time, with this one clocking in at a hefty 60Mb!

Regards

JB