Long time to since my last post.
Sorry for no posts, I had a exam revision a few weeks ago. When I was about to post a new article, the server went down. When it came back online, I was on holiday. But I am back now, so the posts will be coming “thick & fast”
Just a quick post showing my three desktops, which I have created.
My Standard Desktop
Windows 98 on Ubuntu
Windows XP on Ubuntu
Please comment, and tell me what you think.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 has finally arrived, possibly the last service pack for this great Windows OS. Today, I will be reviewing SP3.
When SP3 was announced I was very surprised to see that Microsoft was going to release it, due to the terrible state Vista was in. However, I was very pleased with Microsoft’s announcement, I am still using XP. I have a Vista Home Premium disc in my house, but I am not upgrading until 2009 (when XP support ends).
SP3 adds a bunch of new features, mainly security.
For the end-user, most of these new features are not terribly useful. Most users probably haven’t a clue what they are and how to use them. Although, it does upgrade Internet Explore to version 7 and upgrade Windows Media player to version 11. I had already have done this, early last year, SP3 would offer me nothing new. Although I was going to upgrade anyway, since I like to have the latest and greatest of any piece of software. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, until I was eager to install SP3, Microsoft claimed it had a 20% performance increase. This would be excellent if this is true, my PC was running slow now. As a PC gamer, speed is everything.
At long last, XP SP3 is released. I downloaded and installed it from ‘Windows Update’, it took an hour to do on a multi-user PC. Once restarted, I logged in. No speed change yet, until I reached the desktop. My PC was fast again. Moving through the start menu, browsing through files, loading applications was now far faster. There was no real performance lag anymore. Even shutting down seemed to be faster.
After browsing around my fast PC running SP3, the only end-user change I could see was that desktop users can now Hibernate their PCs. Not totally sure if this was a new feature for desktop users, but it was for me.
Microsoft have done a great job with this service pack, down to the performance increase. Although, there is no FPS increase in games. Even without the performance increase, I would still strongly recommend all XP users to upgrade just for the security updates.
Happy Linux Wednesday, I have managed to drag myself away from the lovely British sunshine to write this week’s post about Linux. Today I am going to be telling you about a piece of software called TimeVault. It is not a review, I have not been able to use it, this post is this going to explain what it is.
TimeVault is a backing up software which is very similar to Apple’s Time Machine. Basically, if you have not seen Time Machine, it is one of the best feature I have seen on any Operating System. It backs up your data every hour, but when you lose the file, you can go back in time and find the file at the last save point. Time Machine does it in very fancy way, but TimeVault works the same way. It takes snapshots of your computer, and creates an achieve so you are able to go back to where a certain was.
TimeVault is designed to primarily run on Gnome systems using the nautilus file manager, so if you want to install it on a KDE or Xfce system you will have to install Nautilus, this is something I did not want to do. However, Once installed. You basically setup TimeVault to what you want to backup (it will make suggestions), where you want to backup and how often. Once done, it will back up those files when you want to, no need to worry about backing up. Although, there are a few issues is that you can not encrypt the backups and there is no way to restore these files without TimeVault.
TimeVault is an excellent tool which I believe is something which should integrated into linux distributions to make it easier for users to backup. Although it is still in beta, so it could be abit risky, and could definitely do with support for KDE and Xfce, it is definitely a tool for the future.
Sorry for the lateness of “Linux Wednesday”, been busy with school work and the release of Gfire 0.7.0 (its now out, gfire.edhewitt.co.uk). This week, I am going to do my review on the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 Hardy Heron. This release is meant to be the most substantial release of Ubuntu ever, plus it has Long Term support, of 3 years on desktop & 5 years on server.
I upgraded to 8.04 from 7.10 on Wednesday, the day before the release to “beat the crowds”. It downloaded and installed fine, until I reached the cleanup part, network manager would not shut down, so the updater crashed. I restarted my computer, and found that the install did work. I had successful install Xubuntu 8.04. I spent the next 2 hours clearing out all the old packages. So far, not a great start.
As I spent the rest of the night looking around 8.04, I noticed that for the end-user not a lot has really changed. There was really no new features, unlike 7.10. There was of course, all the latest versions of application, including FireFox 3, which runs really quick on my computer. But apart from that, for the average user there is not a lot to get excited about. Although, we have been told a bunch of new features will come with 8.10. However, I was impressed that see that my computer was slightly faster and I now get more fps when doing glxgears. Although, I think there is memory leakage. I think Ubuntu 8.04 does not utilise RAM very well, but this maybe fixed in 8.04.1.
Overall, not a lot to say about 8.04. Its good that we have another LTS release, which i will make Ubuntu very stable and secure. It is now easier for Windows users to try Ubuntu, thanks to Wubi. If you are still on 7.10, I would upgrade to 8.04 just for the newest versions of applications and the LTS support. If you are on 6.06, deferentially upgrade, you will see a huge change with your Ubuntu desktop, since you will experience all the new features which was on 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10.
