I installed the Windows 7 beta on my old PC (Intel P4 3GHz, 2GB memory) and it’s really responsive, it’s easily as quick as XP even with all the funky Aero stuff running. I admit, I didn’t run up 10 huge apps and see how it handled Firefox with 10 tabs (the machine for some reason, drives the fan really really hard when the graphics card is working overtime and it’s basically too loud to use these days), but in general it’s clearly useable.
Category Archives: Technology
Windows 7 Beta – file sharing
I suspect it’s because of how I’m running Windows 7 beta under Sun’s VirtualBox, but I can’t at the moment get file sharing working working between the beta and my XP machine. That’s not an issue in it’s own right (I suspect I know why it doesn’t work), but it does highlight an area that frustrates me. In their effort to simplify the sharing of files on Windows, Microsoft just confuses the hell out of me. Three different types of network connection (Home, Work, Public), different behaviour in each, some new (maybe it was in Vista?) network sharing thing that’s not Workgroups, but it might kinda support workgroups as well.
I just wanted a single network options dialog with clearly explained options I can tick or cross. Where’s the ‘trust me’ option?
Windows 7 Beta in Sun’s xVM VirtualBox
So I never used Vista. I heard too much negative press before it was released and too many negative comments from people who did use it after it was released. Our PC’s came with XP and we were quite happy thank you very much.
But I’m not an out and out Microsoft hater. They get a lot wrong, but on the other hand, XP does what I want it to do. I wish it was more secure, but when you’re a target the size of Microsoft with the install base it has you’re going to be under constant attack anyway. They could be better, but I’m not sure the products are as bad as some haters claim. Yeh, the company has some terrible practices, but the product isn’t the worst.
I was amused at how quickly news about Windows 7 turned up, it really looks like Vista failed, and I wanted to get a look at it and see if it was something I could move to in the future. I managed to nab the public beta this morning, and although I doubted it would work I tried installing it into Sun’s xVM VirtualBox – and lo and behold it works fine.
And despite only having 768MB of memory it’s actually pretty usable. I’d get naffed off if it performed like this all the time on my main machine, but I should imagine given it’s full complement of CPU and another 1.2GB of memory it’ll perform pretty well.
I had one problem installing it into VirtualBox, initially I created the virtual disk as an auto-expanding one and the install crashed half way through (taking out the install, VirtualBox, my machine, three quarters of my desk and creating a small worm hole). Creating the disk at the full size before installing fixed that and it went on pretty quickly. You can install the VirtualBox extensions by running them in XP Compatability mode, and you can install the network by telling Windows 7 to look at the VirtualBox extensions CD. Once the network is up and running, Windows 7 chugs out to the ‘net on it’s own and grabs the sound drivers (as part of windows update). It was pretty slick.
I’m writing this from Firefox running on the Windows 7 VM (Firefox installed fine, regular version). There’s a free version of AVG which runs on Windows 7 which is running (link checker turned off).
Clearly I’ve not had a chance to really use any major applications, or push the OS hard, but I have to say Microsoft may have learned the Vista lesson. I’ll play with it a lot more, maybe see if OpenOffice installs, and let you know.
I LOL’d
So, what went wrong (or WordPress, Cron and Squid)
Recently my web host (Gradwell) moved to a new hosting platform (Apache 2, php 5.2) to try and bring things up-to-date. In general, the end result worked okay. However, the load balancing they had in front of their web cluster was apparently sub-par. This became entirely apparent when a single customer was able to bring the whole thing to a grinding halt with some kind of chess related website.
Now, I know it’s shared hosting, and you have to take the performance hits every now and then, but there’s a difference between ‘takes 2 or 3 seconds longer sometimes’ and ‘didn’t load’, ‘won’t load’, ‘took 8 minutes’. I raised a ticket on the Friday when the problems got to their worst, but for reasons I’m not sure about, that didn’t get looked at by anyone technical until Monday. So from Friday to Monday all my Gradwell sites were basically unusable between 1pm and 8pm UK time.
Gradwell made some changes on Monday and spoke to the owner of the other site, but it didn’t really fix the problem. Eventually they decided to replace whatever load balancer they were using with a Squid reverse proxy, which had been running ‘fine’ in front of their php4 cluster. They did this Tuesday night and since then the site has been a lot quicker.
However, it broke WordPress. Let me explain.
Grrr and sorry
Sorry if your feed reader got about 20 test posts to my blog, but something’s broken. The automated posting of scheduled posts isn’t working along with pings and a couple of other features. It seems to be related to Gradwell putting squid in front of it’s shared hosting infrastructure, but I can’t work out where the issue is. I was making lots of test posts to try and work out where the issue lay.
Sorry about that.
Sorry
Sorry about the poor performance of this site over the last few days, you may have had timeouts or the page loading without any style sheets, or just taking an absolute age to actually show up.
My web host (Gradwell) is once again suffering major performance issues on it’s shared hosting platform and so far, hasn’t commented on the problem ticket I raised yesterday.
The poor performance is most apparent between 2pm and 7pm (UK time) so if you have trouble then, try again earlier or later and hopefully this will get resolved next week.
Thanks for your patience.
Half done
And 6 hours later, Grete’s machine is in a state where she can play LoTRO. In the meantime I learned about a nice little tool called nLite which I’ll talk about another time, and I was reminded how much I hate rebuilding Windows machines, and that it’s not the base build it’s all the minor customisations and tweeks you make over a period of weeks when you first start using it.
Anyway, now I’m knackered and taking a break.
Proving negatives
Grete’s machine is infected with the Virtumonde trojan ((sometime today, when she was only visiting regular legitimate websites, so be careful, it may be one of the web comic sites she reads that caused the infection)). One of the things is does it download other malware. People have written malware which claims to remove Virtumonde but actually just makes things worse. It comes in many, many variants. Most of them resist being removed.
But here’s the rub. Say you get it removed such that none of your anti-spyware / virus software detects it. How do you know it didn’t install a rootkit? How do you know that you’re not finding it or anything related to it because it’s gone, rather than because it’s better at hiding than you are at looking?
How do you prove a negative?
So, out come the XP CD’s. Grete will be offline for a short while.
PC World price promise pointless
I’m flirting with buying a blu-ray player (although frankly I have been for a long time) and I’ve had my eye on the Sony BDPS350. It’s been as low as £158 on Amazon recently although it’s up to £169 now. I like Amazon, but when buying expensive electronics sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk back into the store with the bits in your arms and say ‘it’s broke, make it work’, and obviously it’s difficult to do that with Amazon.
So I checked in PC World, and the same player was £230. Being generous that’s about £60 more expensive. Yes I understand PC World has to staff stores and pay rent, but still that’s a bit crazy. However, PC World has a price promise, I quote,
Price Match Plus: We promise we won’t be beaten on price!
So I thought, maybe I should point PC World to the Amazon price and we could get the benefit of a good price and be able to pick it up in store. So I read a bit further, and even this bit sounded ok,
We check our prices against major retailers and websites every day so you can buy with confidence.
Oh cool, they check websites, not just high street stores.
But then you check the rest of the page,
This applies to prices offered by retailers within 30 miles of your local PC World store.
The product must be identical, in stock and available for immediate home delivery in one of the retailers detailed below – single unit purchases only.
This price promise applies to:
Argos, Comet, Jessops, Tesco, John Lewis, Asda, B&Q, Game Gamestation, Halfords, HMV, Maplin, Staples, Toys R Us, Zavvi.
In other words, they can’t or won’t compete with the price that Amazon offers. So the price promise is basically a statement which says, we’ll match the price of stores in your local area, who in turn are probably just matching our prices or those nearby, so in your area it doesn’t really matter who’s selling this item you’re going to pay out of the nose for it.
High street retailers complain that online shopping is destroying their business, I can’t believe PC World has to charge £60 more for a Blu-ray player to cover their store costs compared to Amazon’s costs, so I suggest it’s their overpricing which is destroying their business.
Of course, if you want truly crazy, Kays Catalog charge £269 for the very same player. Now that is insane (especially since the higher spec BDPS550 is £238 on Amazon).