What? Half price… I am now wondering if Dave will give me an expenses paid trip to China?

Apparently, due to high level of demand for the operating system there the retail price has been cut by half.

Interesting when the largest counterfeit operation of Vista was in China itself….

Dan Horton

Ok, I’m lucky enough to have got a new pc in the last week and being the techie geek I am I couldn’t resist trying out Microsoft Vista.

The version was Microsoft Vista Ultimate and to be honest the install was really a breeze with surprisingly even the wireless card being picked up, the pc information accurately reported.
I have heard so much bad press about Vista I was a little uneasy to say the least, but I have to say the overall experience of install wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I had anticipated.
All was going really well, I was like the cat that got the thick cream and a Cheshire grin illuminated the Horton household.

Until….
Well more disk thrashing activity than an enthusiastic dominatrix on speed. My PC drive was going into overdrive. No worries I thought, this must be down to something really simple, such as scheduled defragmentation or that the pc is indexing the drive and things will surely subside.
I left the pc on overnight….

Next morning…

My wife Catherine then needed to look at the bus timetable for a summer job she started this week, no problem I thought just open the document in Adobe and all will be well.
Well, shortly after my hair had turned grey and wrinkles had formed over my ready warn typing finger the document opened.
After a bit of online research the things to check are:

Scheduled defrag – what’s it doing?
Indexing- Turn it off – I did.
Superfetch turn off, which involves a bit of a registry tweak.
There is a way to disable superfetch in vista by setting the following registry key to a value of “0″:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnableSuperfetch
A value of 1 prefetches boot processes, 2 prefetches applications and 3 is for both.

This service is not beneficial to those having a memory less than 2Gb, what! Is my 1GB not enough?

For now this seems to have remedied the disk thrash but anyone else who has experienced this, I’d like to hear your work-rounds.

Dan Horton

I can’t tell if Rand has done this or someone else has, but these serps for SEOMOZ are really really bad. imo

check out Seomoz on google.co.uk

Screen Shot :

Ok he is my spin on this why I think it’s Bad,

1) Seomoz this is the snippet test, just to prove a point, I will blog about it once it kicks in :) Dave - Friday 3rd August

has great content and gives good advice, not many people will be knocking them
2) But having :

seomoz
dns-tools.domaintools.com/?q=www.seomoz.org&m=ping

seomoz
del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=seomoz.org&type=all

seomoz
www.newsvine.com/_vine/search?q=seomoz&searchIn=x -

seomoz
jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.seomoz.org&usermedium=all

seomoz
tailrank.com/posts/find/?q=seomoz

actually does Seomoz a great in justice.

3) on the plus side if you had a site saying something bad about Seomoz, then it’s a master stroke

DaveN

It’s got to that time of year in the UK again where weather wise it’s almost impossible to predict what’s going to happen. So climate change is the key issue then, meanwhile we have the government rather belatedly pushing Carbon Neutral.
If we go back about 18,000 years then most of planet earth was frozen and arid wasteland but now thanks to Global Warming we have forests beautiful areas of grasslands, woodlands.
Basically what I’m saying is there seems to be too much hype associated with “Global Warming” and it’s a readily used phrase to describe any change in weather that we have.
Antarctica (southern pole) will always be pulling us back to the glacial ice ages.
So was it a cataclysmic asteroid collision or Global Warming that stamped out life many years ago?
I doubt somehow that dinosaurs were speculating if Easy Jet was threatening their existence or the new BMW range was likely to impair their quality of life.

“Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I’ve been critical of global warming and am persona non grata.”
Dr. William Gray

oopps I guess, Brett didn’t like the cloaking thread and I guess I won’t be asked to speak at Vegas.. Darn it and I’m Forty this year, I guess my Birthday party will have to be else where

So I would like to wish all the Guys, Mods and Admins all the best for the future.. and Brett of course :)

Anyway I get this in most areas ( status: 10:You have reached a private forum or discussion. Please login to view threads in this forum.(daven) ), I know I wasn’t the best mod in the world but an email or a stickymail would have been nice,

anything from:

Dave your Fired

to

Dave we are re-structuring and you haven’t put enough time in really, so we are making you senior member.

Just a thought ya know.

DaveN

added i still have Sticky mail access, Brett you or Engine didn’t send me a sticky mail about banning me

The problem with having an IT background especially when you have worked in a reselling environment is that it never quite leaves you alone.

My ears always start to twitch if someone starts a conversation in the pub about best deals on printers and computers, if I learnt one thing out of selling IT products it was that the profit margins are so very small and you have to offer a service second to none.

(Perhaps I should have kept this history quiet as Dave has tasked me with finding a new photocopier for the office. )

Why is it then that a task which should be so straight forward as purchasing a photocopier turns into an online frazzle, with as much clarity as a swimming pool in Majorca at the height of holiday season where the guests all mud wrestle.

Ok im looking for a Canon Photocopier and so type the search term ” canon photocopier” into Google, the first place I come to just doesn’t allow me to buy it? I’ve got the money here I’m ready to make a purchase, so how come all I can do is enquire?? I just want to buy the item…

Pretty poor, do Canon know about this?

I know its not an impulse buy for most people but when you know the photocopier you need and prepared to pay the price why can’t you just buy it? I don’t want to make a phone call, I don’t want to enquire just please let me buy it!

I guess its time to contact my reseller friends in the industry and have a scout round.

Did I just see the worst TV ad in the world for Directline, the slogan said you won’t find us on any comparison website, which was rather ironic as the ad was shown in between Moneysupermarket and Gocompare.

Also I would like to add maybe just the reason you don’t advertise on comparitors, is that you are more expensive, I have moved my Car Insurance for my car and my wifes car in the last 12 months from Directline.

Marketing should always concentrate on the positives not the negatives

DaveN

While I was away at the weekend, spending some quality time with Becky, while my Mum & Dad had the kids, we decided to get round to upgrading 2 of our contract business phones. Becky and our engineer Rory both have the Orange SPV C550, and we have been looking for a while to upgrade but there wasn’t anything “special” out there. I have the Orange SPV M3100 which has a slide out keyboard which makes it really useful for texting and web browsing.

We just happened to pop into the Orange shop in York to find that they had just released a new business phone, the Orange SPV E650. This is a smaller version of the SPV M3100 and has Windows Mobile 6.0 on. Brilliant we thought and we spoke to the guy in the shop.

We have found before that the sales guys in the Orange shops are really knowledgeable and helpful, but are totally let down by the Orange Support who they have to ring to get upgrades and packages sorted. This day was no different.

So the phones start going through the upgrade process, and at the same time I was adding to the business contract a 3G wireless aircard for my laptop. Various forms and phone calls had to happen while we waited in the shop. The 3G card got added to the account, Rory’s phone was upgraded but the Orange Support flatly refused to upgrade Becky’s phone. They wanted a purchase order faxed over on letterheaded paper (which it’s not really the sort of thing you carry with your on a weekend away). After an hour in the Orange shop on Saturday we left without any phones and Rob from the shop said he’d sort it for us for the following day. We went back today (Sunday) and still not sorted. They needed more company info.

Now I’ve been an Orange Business contract customer for about 5 years now so enough was enough. I called the Business Centre at Orange and assertively (as apparently you don’t get anywhere by shouting) explained the situation. The guy I spoke to said the whole thing was stupid and couldn’t explain what was going on. Needless to say that Becky’s phone got upgraded straight away.

So firstly I’d like to thank Rob from the Orange shop in York who went out of his way to help us. He did chuck in a digital photo frame/video/mp3 player, £100 for the old phones (that we don’t have to return) and got 18 months 3G connection for the price of 12 for our troubles so that was good. The rest of the shop staff were great too, and I don’t know how they put up with some of the customers who come in off the street moaning at them.
But most importantly … if it wasn’t for the shop staff Orange probably would have lost my business due to their call centre who the shop staff rely on to be able to provide a high level of customer service. Something needs to be done about it … and hopefully before my next upgrade is due!

yes I know that clickability is banned in Google, it’s due to domain history ok .. Get over it ;)

DaveN

I hadn’t been to digg for a while so I was kinda surprised when I went there today,,,

front page Diggs, one on all oreilly books free to download (illegal copies), one on a Vista crack to help the pirate copies of it work and another to the pirate bay… Digg is a pirates heaven..

shortly after writing this Digg felt the floor force of the DaveN effect .. maybe they should install wp-cache or something .. dicks !

…

The connection has timed out

The server at digg.com is taking too long to respond.
* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
moments.

* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network
connection.

* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

DaveN