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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

MrCell+61.417.212181

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1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

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windowsvista

SP1">Paul Thurrott on Windows Vista SP1

Inde­pend­ent review, worth the read.

Project General Melchett: Stage 2.

As the 8800GT is on back­order, time to bor­row Liam’s old ATI Radeon 1950Pro and start the install­a­tion pro­cess. Also a good time to clean up the cables a little inside.
Good news. Gen­eral Melchett boots. BIOS finds all the hard­ware bit first time around. The CPU is not fried.

Vista takes an impress­ively short amount of time […]

Weekend Project: Windows Media Center

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.
Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
Gigabyte […]

Toshiba Hard Disk Upgrade

As my internal 100Gb hard disk on the Toshiba M400 (T2400) had only 5% free space: even after archiv­ing pho­tos and pod­casts, I could not reduce the free space to under 10%.
Time for a new HD. Pur­chased from Aus­p­cmar­ket, 200Gb 7200 RPM Seag­ate Momentum drive.
As much as this Toshiba has lim­it­a­tions that are start­ing to annoy […]

iTunes, iPod Touch and Windows

It’s nearly a week since I upgraded my iPod from a gen­er­a­tion 3 to one of the cool, uber-geek iPod Touch devices. As a 99.5% Win­dows Vista user, I am impressed.
The iPod Touch works on our home wifi. In the morn­ing I check emails and other overnight hap­pen­ings from the com­fort of my bed in […]

Flikr, Windows Live Photo Gallery is goodness

As Larry men­tions in his post, the latest beta of Win­dows Live Photo Gal­lery is out.
After installing it, the first fea­ture I tried out is the new “upload to Flickr”. I am a Flickr Pro user: the abil­ity to see and com­ment on my friend’s pho­tos is like attend­ing slide-show even­ings from the com­fort of […]

MINI, The Geek Stories">John Gallagher: MINI, The Geek Stories

JohnG, the nicest man on the planet, will­ing let me into his house to film another epis­ode of The Geek Stor­ies. Mayling filmed a behind the scenes show… which will be inter­est­ing to see, too. Server racks and a com­pac­tus in the games room. Now that’s impress­ive!
So, do you have Australia’s geeki­est house?
Tech­nor­ati Tags: mini, thegeekstories

PC with 512Mb of RAM? Install Vista Home Basic">PC with 512Mb of RAM? Install Vista Home Basic

Ed Bott, from ZDNet in the US recently tested Win­dows Vista Home Basic on a 2002-vintage PC with 512Mb of RAM — and found the oper­at­ing sys­tem respons­ive and usable.
Sur­pris­ingly, even the visu­als on this sys­tem were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this sys­tem was cap­able of run­ning Vista’s Aero graph­ics. But because […]

Microsoft Windows Vista support with Adobe Applications

(Link thanks to John Dowdell) Bridging my old world to my new world, this doc­u­ment details the sup­port for cur­rent Adobe applic­a­tions with Microsoft Win­dows Vista. It is well worth a read, espe­cially as Adobe products: Flash Player and the Adobe Reader are very com­mon installs.
Sum­mary: no Acrobat 7 sup­port for Vista, only Acrobat 8: […]

ZoomIt: For presenters and visually impared.

If you are demon­strat­ing, or present­ing screen based tech­no­logy: some­time you need to zoom in to high­light a dia­log box, or some piece of small stuff that is, well, small.
ZoomIt is your friend. Works on Vista, too. Free.