Thursday, January 24, 2008

How to stop a Microsoft employee in their tracks

I have been to a few Microsoft talks now where they show off shiny new things like Silverlight and Surface and suchlike. Each time I have seen this new technology I have asked "So how would a blind person use this technology? I usually receive some sort of reply which is a mutter about how they don't deal with accessibility issues in the UK. They don't very much deal with it in the US either!! I'm sorry I know I sound miserable but if Microsoft Surface had made it, a tactile version would have been the best thing for a blind person because they would finally be able to experience the full advantage of a graphical user interface, and not an audio version of it, which takes a long while to work your way around. They would be able to point and click on things, draw vector-based images (and even Bitmap images) and this would help blind people to appreciate the full potential of a PC. Braille displays are here but at the moment, they are expensive one-line text-based devices. Come on people! Instead of wasting time ripping us off with stubborn product activations and DRM that stops us putting our favourite tracks onto any MP3 player of our choice, why don't we move the development of tactile displays on because this would be something that could really take off in the Blind community!

I demand more RAM ..... or Vista gets it

Recently, Windows Vista has been running shockingly slow on my Ensis laptop, and I think I need to give it the boot because it has started getting into the habit of flicking the screen off at will. It has done this the last couple of times I have used the laptop. I am thinking of recycling my old Windows Media Center Edition license and installing it on my laptop, then I'm going to dual-boot XP with Ubuntu. If I can acquire more RAM, let's say 2GB, I will consider going back to Vista but for now, I can't actually use it. It's a shame really as I am going to miss Spotlight –er, I meant the search box on the Start menu.

I am thinking that I would like to find part time employment and buy a Macbook because they have impressed me no end. Every Macbook comes set up ready for a visually impaired person to use, thanks to Universal Access, which has been around for twenty four years. All you need to do is hit Apple+Alt+8 on your Macbook and suddenly everything becomes larger, and hopefully clearer. To turn up the magnification level, press Apple, Alt and the '+' key, and to turn the magnification level down, press Apple, Alt and the '-' key. I think Apple have done a very good job with accessibility and I take my hat off to them.

I would like to see the RNIB start to recommend Apple iMacs and MacBooks as well as Windows based Screen reader/magnifier software because it is a much cheaper and in a lot of ways superior alternative to having to buy a new Windows machine, and pay the same amount that you paid for the PC in accessibility software. You can buy a half-decent Windows Vista based PC today for around about £300-400, yet Jaws 9.1 costs around £600 for a full license! Why?

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Revising Amongst Friends

I feel that I am slightly more confident about my exams because I've been at my friend's house since eleven this morning revising. I hope I do well because I really want to make a good go of this degree – I have realised how much it means to me

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Windows AnyTime Upgrade – Not such a great idea

You may remember me telling you about when I upgraded my Windows Vista Business installation on my desktop PC to Windows Vista Ultimate. I did this using Windows AnyTime Upgrade to save money. The problem is that if I want to reinstall Windows Vista, I can't do a clean installation of Windows Vista Ultimate because the Windows AnyTime Upgrade license will not let you do that. If I had a BitLocker™ ready PC, I would not be able to use BitLocker™ because it requires you clean install Windows Vista Ultimate with two clean hard disk partitions. Also, I have found that Windows Movie Maker will not let me import video, and that that I can't save projects from within Windows DVD maker. I wonder if it's because these were added on (or upgraded in the case of Windows Movie Maker) during the Windows Vista AnyTime Upgrade. Also, because I have to install over the top of Windows Vista Business edition, this will make the total recovery process about ninety minutes to two hours longer. Using up time which I can ill afford. I really hope that Microsoft will sort this problem out because if not I will probably just go ahead and waste the bank's money on a boxed OEM copy of Vista Ultimate using my eight-month old PC as an OEM container.

Don't get me wrong there is no problem with the actual operating system. It's just Microsoft's licenses are too restrictive, I mean we could clean install any upgrade OS. I remember doing it with a version of Windows 98 RTM. I just started setup from the bootdisk and when asked to validate my upgrade, I just inserted my Windows 95 OSR2 disk, and the upgrade took place. It was the same with Microsoft Office for Windows 95, in fact it was even easier because all I had to do was insert Disk 1 from the Microsoft Office 4.2 installation floppy disk set to validate the upgrade, whilst leaving the Office 95 Professional CD in the drive! Why can't we have that in Vista? Please sort it out Microsoft!!!

And that concludes my ranting for this week. Please tune in next week where I will be probably ranting about exams, Bill Gates again or something similar. Just kidding!

Monday, January 07, 2008

The Switch-over to Vista, Part 2

Ash Technologies have released a Beta Windows Vista driver for their Opti Verso. This and the fact that I can now run Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City under Windows Vista has prompted me to switch over to Vista on my laptop. I started at 9.50 this evening and it is now coming up to five past four in the morning. It has taken me a while to work out how to get the volume keys working on Vista but I managed to download some drivers for the Asus A3F, on which my Ergo Ensis 211 is based. I installed the ATK utility and Power4 Gear Extreme for Windows Vista and Hey Presto it worked.

As for my Opti Verso, I tested that and for a thirty second glance at the software I do believe it is as responsive as the XP version (version 1.12) was. I am glad that Ash Technologies have given us a chance to sample a Vista beta driver, because I was losing hope of ever being able to install Windows Vista on my laptop.

If you have an Ergo Ensis 211 laptop that you are thinking of upgrading to Vista, please be aware that Ergo still do not officially support Windows Vista on this particular notebook for some stupid reason. If you run Windows Update when you have installed Vista and connected to the Internet it should work automatically though.

I do have a couple more programs to reinstall on this machine but apart from that it is good to go with me as I start in earnest, my revision for my exams.

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Grand Theft Auto III, GTA Vice City and Windows Vista

So far, I have been enjoying my upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate. Indeed, you have the nice shiny new Aero Flip 3D, a whole host of new security features and program indexing that actually works and really can speed up your PC if you leave it running unattended for an afternoon. I had all these features in Windows Vista Business. The one thing that I didn't have however is the Windows Media Center, which was sorely missed because Hauppauge's WinTV software is, shall we say, a bit performance shy. If I was going to stick with Vista I needed Media Center for the watching of TV. For Christmas I did just that. I upgraded my Windows Vista to Ultimate so that I could take advantage of Windows Media Center, and when I get a device compatible with it, BitLocker. I used the Anytime Upgrade feature from Windows Vista Business, which after taking all of my money guided me through the effortless installation of Vista Ultimate. Once everything was set up, I set about setting up Windows Media Center, which has been improved Windows XP Media Center 2005, which was also very good. One thing I have noticed is that when on freeview, you can switch channels very quickly like you can on a normal freeview set-top box. Also in Media Center, you can pause live TV (I think you could do that in XP but I never tried it). You can even rewind it as far as half an hour. I like this feature as I can pause Top Gear when I want another cuppa. What I like most, specifically about Vista Ultimate is that it comes with it's own DVD decoder. This is good news as my once faithful PowerDVD 6.0 will not work with Windows Vista, and I can't afford to go out buying PowerDVD 7.

Up until about thirty minutes ago, this came with, in my opinion anyway, a substantial price tag. The thing is that I enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto a lot. The logical thing to do would be to install Grand Theft Auto under Windows Vista, go to Start > Games and launch GTA. That IS the idea but like most things in life it isn't as simple as it would first appear. As part of windows Vista's new security system they have included something called User Account Control. This prompts you to confirm you want to do anything slightly administrative on the computer. This is quite good for blocking out those little nasties we all seem to pick up. Unfortunately, in reality it's more of a pain for an avid computer user than traction control is to The Stig (another Top Gear reference). Because of this Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City will not run as they are not recognised by Windows UAC as safe programs, and because they are in Program Files, Windows will not let either of them run. Thanks to my friend Tim, we have been able to make both GTAIII and GTA Vice City run on my Vista box.

  1. Firstly, you need to go to the directory where the game is installed. Usually this will be something like "C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games". There you will see either a folder for GTAIII or Grand Theft Auto Vice City, or both, depending on which games you have installed. Right-click on the folder and go to Share...
  2. Click on Advanced Sharing, and when asked, click Continue
  3. Tick the box labelled Share This Folder, then click on Permissions
  4. Give everyone Full Access to this folder by checking the box labelled Allow under Full Control
  5. Click OK on all the boxes, and close the Windows Explorer window
  6. Next go to Start > All Programs > Rockstar Games >Whichever GTA you installed
  7. Right click on Grand Theft Auto and select Properties
  8. Go to the Compatability tab and check the box labelled "Run This Program in Compatability mode for:" and select Windows 98 / Windows Me from the drop down list box.
  9. Click OK, and run the game

Hopefully, all should be well but if not, check for updates for the games by going to www.rockstargames.com and selecting the version of GTA you wish to update. If you are running GTAIII you will need to patch it to version 1.1. You can patch it by clicking here and downloading the patch from Rockstar's Web-site.

Please note that if you are on a network you must ensure that you are not running the game with No CD patches enabled as this will enable other people to play the game. Be careful when sharing files and folders as you can cause your system to be exposed to viruses. Make sure your firewall is turned on and updated, and that you have up-to-date antivirus software.