Monday, December 24, 2007

Merry Christmas from JayWakefield.co.uk

Merry Christmas everybody! Hope you have a good one.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Reflections on the past Year

Hello everybody. Sorry it's been a long time since I blogged. I've just recovered from this very stressful semester I have had and didn't want to upset you all. While I've been away however JayWakefield.co.uk turned one year old at around Midnight on December 15th.This has got me thinking about the past year. 2007 has, in my opinion been a great year to be a blogger interested in PCs. In January, Microsoft finally brought out their long-awaited successor to Windows XP. Windows Vista has done quite a bit to boost sales in the PC market with people buying new PCs just so they can have a piece of Vista. Unfortunately, in my opinion, at the start of the year a lot of consumers (including myself) were angry not only about the fact that Windows Vista needs a beefy system to run the basics! We were also angry that we bought systems UNDER a year ago and they won't even run Windows Aero! There were a few people who were angry because they knew of people who had Windows Aero running with 64MB shared graphics cards whereas they had 128MB dedicated graphics cards and their systems just threw the ugly Windows Vista Basic look at them. This reminds me of my personal system which at the time was my AMD Athlon64 3200+ based PC which I built in May 2006, equipped with 1.25GB of DDR RAM and Radeon 9250 AGP graphics (which at the time was the best budget card money could buy). This system not only would not let me use Windows Aero (probably because of the fact that I was stingy on the graphics card) but Abit refused to support my M1689 UL8 motherboard any longer. I was able to install the sound drivers by running the installer in XP compatibility mode. I was very shocked by both ATI and Abit by their refusal to support nothing but the latest and greatest products that they sold. I had a bit of a hefty shopping list to bring that system up to spec. If you look back on my blog posts for January and February this year, you will probably remember that I had to buy a new TV Tuner as my once faithful Pinnacle PCTV 100 Analogue TV Tuner would not go undr Vista. I also upgraded the graphics to an nVidia GeForce FX5200 which let me have Windows Aero but only with a Vista system rating of 2.6. This meant Aero was very jerky but Hey! It still worked!. Eventually I had to upgrade the system from 1.25 to 1.75GB of RAM by adding an extra 512MB stick. After adding all of this junk, the system decided to pack up one week short of a year after it was built. This left me with no alternative but to build a new PC, which I did, and the system is still chugging along very happily.

I don't procrastinate much really.

I am trying (and failing) to make the point that because of Vista's fancy new features and the sheer size of the OS, a lot of people do not like Windows Vista. If this were not enough, let's say that you wanted to buy an upgrade to Windows Vista Home Basic when it originally came out. If you lived in the US, this would cost you $100, whereas in the UK, it would set you back a whopping £100. At the value of the US dollar was two to the pound, or to put it simply, we had to pay twice as much for a Vista Home Basic Upgrade in the UK than our cousins over the pond would. There was a lot of angry consumers.

While the public were tucking into Vista, Microsoft were peddling Microsoft Office 2007, the perfect companion to Windows Vista. This confuses a lot of people because of it's new ribbon but I have become used to this. I really do enjoy using the latest version of Microsoft Office.

If Windows and Office isn't enough for you, and you are a web designer have you had a chance to tuck into Microsoft Expression Studio? I have! IT is fantastic. Microsoft Expression Studio comes as a suite of four programs. Expression Web is the replacement to Microsoft Office FrontPage I would believe. You can create the actual web pages using Expression Web. Expression Blend lets you design graphics, and you can use them in Microsoft Silverlight applications. Microsoft Silverlight, by the way is Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. Expression Design lets you design elements to web pages and any other user Interface. Finally Expression Media keeps all your pictures and other media together so yhat you can easily find the media you need.

As I write this post I am currently downloading Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I will let you know how I get on with it soon.