My dad has recently replaced his old desktop computer with a laptop, although it is not a perticually powerful computer it is more than capable of doing everything he would like to do, it is even ready for Windows Vista if they ever managed to remove the malware that comes pre-installed.

With a slow computer in a full ATX case, I have a spare Socket 939 ATX motherboard (which worked last time I used it although the network functinality is damaged). I have ordered an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2Ghz process, a 400W power supply and ASUS EN7300LE graphics card (Nvidea 7300, 128MB GDDR) for about £100. I also have a 160GB hard disk drive floating around and I have a very nice computer to play with.

I have been meaning to play around with a GNU/Linux operating system for a while and talking to a few people on the MicroMart Forum I think I will try PCLinuxOS, or more specificly PCLinuxOS MythEdition so I can in the future at a TV Tuner card and have a Media Center Computer.

No I haven’t gone made, I seriously want you to go to www.ie7.com. You were thinking that I wanted you to look at a website about Internet Explorer 7 didn’t you? Nope I am a Firefox man all the way.

I have have Microsoft Windows Vista for a couple of weeks but I only got around to installing it a few days ago, although most of it was because I was on holiday for two weeks. The install process looked good but was not overly pleasent (for some reason my first two attempts failed at around 10 percent). I then tried to install drivers for my wireless network card which were not compatable with Vista and killed it so I had to re-install it.

Appart from the install there have been few other problems. My only real complain is that it can be slow, but that is mostly because it is still in Beta development and not all the code has been fully optimised yet. Vista really does look nice although it is posible to achive a simaler look in Window XP it is nice not having to break some of the security to do it. I like when I press Alt + Tab (keyboard short-cut to switch between open windows) you get a thumbnail of the window, same when you run the mouse over the tabs on the start bar at the bottom of the screen.

I am not that pleased with the performance of Vista, I have one gigabyte of memory installed and the lowest I have seen the usage is 51 percent which is about 520 megabytes. On Windows XP I would normally expect a memory usage of around 350 to 400 megabytes. However, my processor seems to be making light work of it with normal usage around ten percent. I have been thinking about upgrading to two gigabytes of memory recently so I guess now is as gooder time as any.

Britt Systems and Technalign have come together to make pre-build computers with the base model coming in at $300 (about £160). The system itself is not that spectacular with 256MB of memory, 80GB hard disk drive and an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ processor. You might have noticed something, Windows XP really needs 512MB of memory, well it does not have Windows XP, it comes pre-installed with Frontier which is a distribution of Linux. That is why it is so cheap, I am surprised other companies have not tried this before.

Let me give you a little background information, Deepz0ne is a well know cracker and was one of the original founders of a cracking group called “Redium”. Redium was the first group to successfully crack Sound Forge 4.5 so that it could be used by anyone without paying for it (illegally of course). Sound Forge 4.5 leaves a signature like this “2000-04-06 IENG ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″ at the end of all music files telling anyone who actually views it in an editor what software was used to make it. The cracked version of Sound Forge 4.5 has the same signature but slightly altered signature like this “2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″.

Now lets get onto the good bit, if you check out the audio files the are part of the Microsoft Windows XP Tour which can be found in “WINDOWS\Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav”. Just open one of the nine .wav files in the folder in NotePad and scroll down to the bottom of the file (and across a little) and you will see the signature of the software that created the audio files, “2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″. I can not wait to see how Microsoft gets out of this one.

Microsoft has finally released Windows Live Messenger (the next version of MSN Messenger under new branding).

I have ‘fixed’ the problem with Windows not loading correctly. I am not sure exactly what the problem was but I solved it by formatting my drive and reinstalling Windows, I had intended to do that this weekend anyway so it was not really a problem. Yesterday I also ordered the first parts of my next computer, I decided to go via the upgrade root rather than buying all new parts next year. The upgrades are:

• AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 X2 4400+ Processor (2x 2.2Ghz with 2MB Cache)
• Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro Motherboard
• Zalman CNPS9500-LED Aero Flower Cooler
• Gigabyte 256MB NVida 7900GT Graphic Card
• Enermax Noisetaker SLi 600W Power Supply
• SilverStone J02S-W Silver Case

Researchers at Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania have developed a technique to store 12.2 petabytes (12 500 terabytes) per square centimetre. I would estimate that a 2.5in hard drive would have about 40 centimetres of storage space. Using the new technique I estimate that 488 petabytes (499 712 terabytes, almost half a trillion bytes) hard disk drives will become available within a few years.

I have also put that theory to an iPod, say an iPod’s hard disk has 4 centimetres squared space that is 50 petabytes (51 200 terabytes). If each song is 5 megabytes you could store about 11 billion songs on it. I think iTunes might need to stoke up a bit.

If I said that the average movie on a DVD was about 4 gigabytes you could have 127 926 272 full length movies with extras. If I then said that each of those movies was 100 minuets long that would take you over 243 centuries (24 339 years) to watch them all end to end. That hard disk can also store 20 468 204 single layer Blu-Ray disks, which is 3 894 years of HD video.

If you look at it like that it does put the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks totally pointless. Come to think of it, HD will also be pointless, the amount of storage would mean that you could have footage could be recorded in lossless formats.