. : : Marc Sez : : .

The Software Wars - Microsoft Under Attack

Wondered how the battle for software dominance would look like on a map? Wonder no more.

http://mshiltonj.com/software_wars/current/

Down with Microsoft!

IE7 Is Out! But Needs You To Have Non-Pirated Windows XP

IE7 is now available for download.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

All you stupid Microsoft fan boys can go download the 14.8 installation file now.

But get this:

You can to confirm that your copy of Windows XP is genuine when during installation!

Microsoft is truly brilliant. I wonder how many of us have legal copies of Windows.

Just get Firefox.

www.ie7.com is a Get Firefox site!

I found this on Digg.com.

The domain www.ie7.com was registered by some smart bunch of chaps who put a huge Get Firefox logo there.

Nice work guys!

(I’d have put my Adsense ads on the site. Doesn’t that remind you of something, by the way?)

A Computer Too Slow

A list of games I really want to play but can’t cause my computer is too slow. Sad.

Games marked with an asterisk have not been released yet.

• Hitman - Blood Money
• Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion
• Neverwinter Nights 2 *
• Medal of Honor - Pacific Assault
• F.E.A.R
• Dragonshard (horrible loading times)
• Unreal II - The Awakening
• Doom 3
• Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars

I need to upgrade, dammit!

Windows Screws Up (Again)

My copy of Windows XP got screwed early Sunday morning. It refused to go past the loading screen and I was presented with an unappealing blank screen instead of my nice blue customised logon screen. Some system file might have gotten corrupted.

So I popped in a XP disk, booted from it and deleted the OS partition. It had only XP and all the programs on it. Since I have to reinstall all programs anyway when Windows is reinstalled, I had placed them in the same drive. All data on all other partitions was safe. Then I reinstalled (after recreating the partition, 2 GB lesser than original size to allow for a Ubuntu installation later) which took forever as usual and then I had to download all the latest software and all that from the net and bring my system back to usable condition.

I hope I can last for another month or so without Windows screwing up again. If it happens within a month I’m permanently moving to Linux!

Another ZoneAlarm Update

Damn these ZoneAlarm updates. There’s one every two weeks and they’re usually 6 - 15 MB. Not that I don’t want my firewall to be better. I have to download the update, and then run it and then I have to restart my computer (which is the irritating part).

The previous update introduced some fundamental changes to the working of this firewall. When some programs are accessing the Internet and when you try to close the firewall, it warns the user that firewall protection will continue even after the firewall has been closed. While this is fine for most users, it is annoying when you are turning off the firewall specifically to remove protection as in the case of playing games through Hamachi.

This ‘problem’ can be overcome only by manually reducing the level of protection from within the firewall. Now I forget to increase the protection after playing the game most of the time and ZoneAlarm does not give me any specific alerts that protection has been reduced. So I end up with no protection over the net.

I don’t mind Nod32 (my anti-virus software) updates though. They’re very tiny and take very little time. You barely notice it updating AND you don’t have to restart.

June 20th, Edit:I take back my complaint against ZoneAlarm. The new version even nlocks your from visiting known spyware sites! Awesome!