garan.org

These days I spend most of my time working on machines running XP that have more than one monitor hooked upto them. XP's support for multiple monitors is pretty good apart from one little niggle. You only get a toolbar on the primary window. To get around this I use a piece of software called Ultramon. It adds a toolbar per window and little buttons to the tops of windows that allow you to switch them across to other screens easily. There are more functions in Ultramon that I don't use like screen saver and wallpaper functions but I don't need them.

I've installed Ultramon on my Vista setup at home and whilst the toolbars work, they often get confused. Also the 'swap window' buttons don't display (they are there but you can't see them, especially if you are running the Aero interface).

Realsoft, the company behind Ultramon have come out with a beta release that has more Vista support. Something else to fiddle with :)

http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/relnotes/3.0.0.asp

I installed Vista on my main machine at home a couple of months ago, installing XP, Vista and Ubuntu, each on their own disk. Originally Vista was the RC2 release, a late beta that wasn't 100% stable, so last week I installed the Business edition that I've had kicking around for a couple of weeks. So far I've been fairly happy with it, not booting back into XP once since the install. There are a couple of funnies; HP don't have any 3-in-1 software for my printer/fax/scanner that will work under Vista (going to try and install the software on an XP VMware instance for those once in a blue moon times that I need it and failing that I'll borrow Jen's scanner!). The other funny is that Ultramon (multi-monitor app) has problems displaying wallpaper on screens to the right of the primary monitor. Wierd!!

Today I tried burning a CD for the first time. Under XP I always relied on Nero to burn my disks, never having had any success using the built in application. So I thought I'd try the built in functionality under Vista. Three failures later it's time to find out if Nero works under Vista!

I'm a big fan of the Windows SSH client PuTTY. It's a small, single executable that doesn't need admin rights (I've used it in EasyNet cyber cafes before now where the security is pretty rigid) that simply works. The SSH tunnelling works well and gives me a lot more flexibility in 'corporate' environments.

But it's just gotton better!! The latest version (0.59) supports serial connections. This means that I can now throw away hyperterminal and use something that is more focused on Unix terminal emulation. Also a CRC checksum error bug that I was seeing when downloading large files through tunnels has gone away so now it's perfect. Heh.

Looking through the Change Log there are a couple of other new things that I've missed:

Ability to configure font quality on Windows (including antialiasing and ClearType).
Bug fix: 0.58 utterly failed to run on some installations of Windows XP. ROFLMAO!!! I love bugs like that!

Looking at this site in IE7 isn't very pretty. The bar on the right shoots off the edge of the page. It's a little annoying as this page passes W3C Validation.

More news on IE7 here.

After fiddling around with Linux I decided to keep things simple and went for a complete XP based build. I've got a spare hard drive in the box and I'm planning to put a Linux partition on there so that I can play around without destroying my work environment.

I've discovered that Linux is improving, but, at the moment, Windows is still a nose ahead when it comes to putting together a complex web of hardware and software requirements for desktop use.

I started having problems with my desktop PC last week. It was getting slow, sometimes hanging or rebooting itself with no apparant pattern. I tried a rebuild with both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux and had problems with both. The CPU would go to 100% for no particular reason.

I tried re-seating cards and memory, pulling cards out to see if that helped but kept wondering about the hard drives. That particular part of the case was very warm to touch. So I've now removed the Raptor SATA drive that I was using as the Windows system disk and replaced it with a WD Caviar IDE drive. So far everything's looking a lot better.

At the moment the box is running Ubuntu AMD64 Linux. I managed to get both video cards working and all is looking well. But the AMD64 support is still in its infancy. So it's either get VmWare Workstation up and running with XP, rebuild the box on 32 bit Ubuntu which will improve matters but still need VmWare or just go back to running Windows (boo hiss!).