About two weeks ago I ordered myself a new laptop and a water-proof backpack for it. After some problems between LaptopShop and my bank, it eventually arrived here on Thursday afternoon

I booted it up, went through all the Windows XP OOBE stuff and then the Acer software installation wizards, created the recovery DVD and then formatted it with an nLited XP Pro CD, which I created from an ISO provided by my University’s MSDN. It installed fine, but it took me a while to find the drivers for the hardware and then copy them over on my USB stick. After that I had to call up Microsoft as I had activated the XP code on a VMWare installation - I forget why :P Once Windows was done with all the software I like, and then put Fedora Core 6 on the 25GB free space I had left while formatting.

I copied over my Steam installation from my PC, and a couple of other games - I tried Half Life 2 at 1280×800 (Widescreen): I got over 60FPS on it… Considering this is a laptop, that’s amazing
GTI Racing was a similar story, once I’d stopped it trying to load at 1280×1024 - runs perfectly at 1024×768 (no widescreen support).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t work so well - not that I really expected it to. It runs *ok* at 800×600 and medium settings, but nothing more. I didn’t buy the laptop for gaming though - it’s for writing notes, coding on, and other stuff I need it for at University.

After doing all the above on it, it was quite late, and I went to bed, leaving it plugged in to get a really thorough first charge. However, when I woke up, and tried to turn the laptop on, it refused to even make so much as a beep or idle whirring noise!

The power LEDs under the “on” button and on the front panel flashes for a fraction of a second when I try and turn it on, but nothing else happens. So I’ve been in contact with Acer Support several times, and they asked me to send the charger back - they will then test it, and either send me a new one, or repair/replace the laptop, if it isn’t the charger that’s causing the problem.

However I borrowed a multi-laptop charger (one of those £100 iGo things with about 15 different “tips”) and tested my laptop on it, but it didn’t charge properly, nor would it turn on. So it would seem that it’s the laptop that’s broken. So I will send Acer back the laptop, not the charger… Hopefully they’ll fix or replace the broken part(s) quickly, and not send me a new laptop - I don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff, and spend 20 minutes on the phone with Microsoft again :P

Because of this problem, I haven’t been able to test stuff like the battery life, or even how good movies look on the screen (games look great though) - I will update this post when I have a working laptop again

Along with Firefox 2, Fedora Core 6 was released yesterday

So far it seems pretty similar to Core 5, apart from the changes to the graphics. In particular, the new login background is a lot nicer

Once I’ve upgraded my Fedora Core 5 installation on this PC, I’ll post a screenshot or two

Well it’s just been released, and so far I love it

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling - it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks - I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better - I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu - it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!

I have added a new Tags page, which shows which “tags” are the most and least popular using a variety of font sizes and colors. Clicking on a tag shows the post(s) tagged with that particular word.

Tags are essentially keywords for each post - for instance, a post about a visit to a park somewhere may have tags like “bird”, “animal”, “dog”, “tree”, “wildlife” etc. This allows various search engines, as well as other tagging tools or tag-supporting services (such as Flickr) to categorise and then later find your post.

I forget who, but a user on the Neowin.net Forums gave me an idea - to create a fancy diagram of my LAN, showing all the switches, routers and links between them.

So here is the outcome:

I also created a future diagram for how the Network will probably be like after I move rooms later this month: