Another week gone by

Tempus fugit is the time honoured old Latin saying. Well, it sure did this last week. I have no idea where the time went. Between getting back from Prague to Ireland midnight on Thursday and a wedding anniversary on Monday (I remembered, I'm OK..), the time flew past. weather has been mixed with fair bit of rain. Not complaining though because it saves me from having to water the garden!

I have spent some time looking for a way to 'spruce up' my tired old Windows XP interface other than just changing the wallpaper all the time. After all, XP is 5 years+. However, I'm nervous about Vista as there are some issues with laptops and batteries that seem to be the current debate, plus I'm not sure my programs I use are all Vista capable and I only have 512Mb of RAM on my trusty old laptop. Thus, no upgrade just yet, although for the past 25 years that I have been using computers, I have tended to be at the forefront. The last time I lagged behind was switching from DOS 6 to Windows 3.1 (Didn't like the idea of using icons, pretty much like the Linux community today, but I've mellowed). Therefore the million dollar question was what to do?

So, I found this nifty section on CNet video that explained how to 'upgrade'without changing your Operating System using WindowsX (one of my early blogs). However, over time I got frustrated with my system seemingly slowing down and I eventually bowed out and reinstalled Windows a few weeks back.

So, what to do?

OK, so today I installed some Yahoo! Widgets. Then I set Windows Taskbar to 'autohide'. My desktop was cluttered with Icons, and it looked yucky. Tacky and worn. With my new widgets I now changed the settings on the Desktop to not show the Desktop Icons anymore (right click/Arrange Icons By/Show Desktop Icons). Result? A neat clean desktop with some neat widgets showing the weather in Dublin, some stock ticker results, a small window showing Flickr photos, and of course the obligatory analog clock. Then you go and browse the Widget Gallery and it is mind blowing stuff. There is just so much, your head spins. But, what the heck, you can easily delete them again, so this is like 'window shopping' in the 'Yahoo! widget mall'!

OK, I must admit that I then decided that I wanted to change the WindowsXP theme for a more Vista look, mostly for my taskbar, but I wasn't interested again in going through the whole system file change thing. One small problem. Windows will prevent you from loading 'unapproved' Theme files. So, you have to modify the uxtheme.dll file in /windows/system32. There is a file changer that will do that to enable it to accept other Theme files. It is a bit risky, so I am not going to detail that here at present, until I am satisfied that my system is stable. If you want to you can run a search on Lifehacker. Anyhow, then I found some Theme files, and found that I could not install them from Desktop/Properties but had to select the Theme then open it for the system to 'install' it into Desktop. First time round I had some problems, but after a second reboot, it worked! So, now I have a neat desktop again, widgets to do stuff and the Vista Aero look and feel for my desktop. Great! And, it still feels 'quick'! One of the things I recently did was to defragment my hard drive (I do that weekly) and then use a security utility to wipe the free space by overwriting 'deleted' files on the hard drive to clean it up (Windows only deletes the reference to the data, it doesn't actually delete it from the hard disk, which is why you can 'undelete' files). And, as my drive was getting a bit old, I also ran chkdsk /R from the command prompts to check the hard disk for errors and fix any problems it finds. It can only do it on a reboot and it takes up to an hour depending on your disk size, so be sure to have a cuppa and something to read if you do it. But, the results are magic. My disk performs as new again!

Anyhow, Stumbled again, and found a few interesting ones. Browsed Lifehacker's blog again and he covered an interesting utility called 'Pistaschio' that allows you to tweak Windows.

Also found a site with some beautiful and unusual images taken in China, an area that few of us will ever see, and scenes that even fewer of us will get to. These images capture some spectacular moments in time that are worth browsing. I 'Dugg' it with Digg and saved it in my Del.icio.us list. All these magnificent images are making my fingers itch to get my hands on a really good camera again. I currently have a Canon Powershot A90, which is great for the price, but looking at some of the pictures people have taken, and some of the scenes I sometimes see early morning in particular when I'm driving to work, I am getting the photography bug again.

So, now I am using Pixmania.com to hunt for cameras again. Love the idea of a good Canon or Nikon, but previously had a Pentax, but also used to dream of an Olympus. However, the Olympus does not seem to have the same features and ISO range as the others.

I am still indecisive and browsing/windows shopping! Any advice, feel free to drop me a line. I am going to head over to Flickr and have a look see at some of the comments there and perhaps Yahoo! Groups' photography section and DPReview.com too.