Damn it. It's saturday!
As soon as Windows 7 was no longer available for £44 I wished i'd bought two copies. As soon as it stops being £69 i'll probably wish I bought a second copy at that price. Either way it's going to be depressing to wipe the Ultimate RC1 and replace it with the Home Premium version (the one that doesn't cost £200 or £100), but overall the OS seems to be able to drive this laptop quite nicely compared to Vista which after a year or so was finally beginning to show it's bad side that I was so convinced everybody else was just making up. I'll meet you half way Vista haters - it's not without it's issues, but most of the things you guys hit on are the wrong things, such as having to hit "Continue" occasionally or *gasp* changing the settings so you don't need to. Losers.
7 is less impressive on my leftover machine with one component dating back to the last millenium. For some reason I never let go of the idea that the Soundblaster Live was a high end card even though it's three generations old and part of a line that audio professionals have hated all along. Still, the chipmunk voice altering thing was fun for a few weeks way back and it's managed some fairly decent band related recordings over time. It just seems that the device has no driver support in 7 and using the KX Project drivers is throwing up blue screens fairly randomly now, usually it seems in the middle of video playback, which is incredibly frustrating given that this machine acts as a TV for my 30 minute constant cross trainer workout, and if it blue screens, or worse hangs on a repeating slice of audio I have to interrupt the workout or live without the entertainment, which makes the whole thing seem to take a lot longer.
On another topic, I finally called BT on my broadband speeds tonight. Longest hold in a really long time - probably in excess of 30 minutes with an almost constantly ringing phone and one standard message.
They seem to think I do have a fault on the line, but that being the case, where does that fault go at 6am when I wake up and download podcasts each morning at a fairly consistent 585KiB/s? It seems far more likely i'm being subjected to some shaping here. I've seen other files download slowly too, but I wonder if i'm being punished for downloading large MP3 files, most of which (and I must emphasise most here) don't contain any copyrighted material. My only hope is that when I finally get away from BT on to a better all rounder I don't find that their service is somehow also impacted by BT due to their overall involvement in the underlying system.
Final thought - I love that when all seems lost with Ubuntu a quick drop into recovery and a dpkg always seems to manage to fix everything. It's like a colonic for the OS. I have no idea what I did to cause what seems like hundreds of half installed packages resulting in X stalling at the login screen, but I know it knows how to sort itself out if I just let it. As far as being ready for the desktop - forget it. It barely seems to understand how to communicate using the most common wireless security protocol, WPA, and i'm NOT the only person that thinks so. Just do a search for Ubuntu WPA, or if you really want nightmares, WPA2.
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