Technical Digital Media Consultant
Microsoft
Windows 7 doesn’t seem to like zip files
0
On every other version of windows I've used over the last 12 years or so, you've always been able to double click a .zip archive, open it up like a folder and drag and drop any files you like out of it to anywhere else on your hard drive. A very easy procedure, and I use it all the time.
I don't know if it's just me, but on the 64 bit version of Windows 7 this process seems to screw up somewhere and takes FOREVER to complete...
It's fine if you just extract the whole archive to another location but if you want to drag and drop selected contents it simply doesn't seem to like it... it just hangs there....
If anyone else has experienced this and knows how to solve it, please leave me a comment below 
Windows 7 64Bit – Impressions So Far…
1I’ve been using the released version of Windows 7 for about 4 days on and off now and have to say it seems to be a massive improvement over Vista.
In my opinion it’s what Vista should have been (the whole release of Vista vs. XP being akin to the release of Windows ME vs. windows 98 i.e. a bit of a joke, with the real improvements come in the next version again – in that case XP in this case 7).
Anyway, things to note so far are:
- Battery life seems to be improved – Win 7 seems to require a lot less juice to run well
- Stacked taskbar icons make the management of multiple applications easier
- Icon themes are nicer than Vista
- Network management is much improved over Vista for those who change networks a lot
- Start up screen is fairly funky
- User Account Control and other Security options are less intrusive
- Windows Media Centre is included in the Pro Version (Vista Business excluded it…)
- So far ALL of the applications that I used to run on XP and Vista seem to run without issue, even small 3rdparty standalone tools (programs that don't require an installer to run)
That’s a fairly short list so far but just for those improvements (minimal though some of them may seem) I’d say it’s worth it.
I’d recommend upgrading for anyone who’s currently using Vista, especially on a laptop and for those of you still running Windows XP, though in your case you might also need a hardware upgrade too.
Google Chrome’s Future Support for Extensions
1This is an interesting article from the Google operating system blog about plugin support in the Google Chrome Browser:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-google-chromes-future-support-for.html
With this approach however I have to ask myself, will Chrome ever exceed the abilities of Firefox?
It'd be nice if it did, but it seems like Chrome will always be in a lagging position, unless Google can really add something noticeably ground breaking...
Google Chrome – Released But Not Polished?
0Google chrome is a new lightweight browser released by Google, which is meant to be faster, safer, etc. and optimised for web apps such as Google provides (and I use).
I judge a browser by it's speed when I'm using it on the train (into and out of work), via my mobile broadband and what I can actually do with it in terms of functionality, and unfortunately I'm not impressed.
I don't like bloated software, but I don't like software that's so minimal I can't really use it.
So, though seemingly very fast on a standard internet connection, google chrome has been very slow on my mobile broadband, noticeably slower than firefox but not as slow as internet explorer. Gmail is comparativly slow as are other google apps such as igoogle.
Features wise it's not much better - Â so far, it's so minimalistic it's almost unusable. Don't get me wrong, it has a few nice things in it but it's missing all the things I need and use every day.
So what's the answer?
Well I may be able to spped up the browser by turning off the usage statistics reporting (though this is on in firefox without issue), so I'll give that a try soon.
And if google produce a plugin API for chrome and developers actually code for it that'd be great. But saying that, what would be better (for me at least) is an interface that allows you to use native chrome plugins if they exist but, also import firefox plugins where possible.
As it stands, unfortunately, I'm quite underwhelmed with the usefulness of chrome and kinda wish it'd been released with a bit more usefulness than it currently has, at the very least it could have google toolbar options built in...
Lets hope they build on it quickly or else it'll just become another niche product for die hard googlephiles.
MRemote – The Best, Free, Desktop Manager
24 years ago
When you have a number of different servers to administer (yes administer - administrate is not a real word!), all across different platforms, switching between different client programs can get very tiresome very quickly.
As a result there are a few programs out there that act as all in one clients for Windows Remote Desktop connections, VNC Connections, SSH, Citrix, etc. These can be REALLY useful in this situation and can save a lot of time and hassle while in some cases reducing the chance of user error when switching between apps.
We worked with a commercial tool, iShadow, for about a year, for this and soon realised its utility but although it was commercial, it was clunky and very very temperamental when it came to storing/loosing passwords and connection profiles. So we set out to find an alternative.
Thankfully, Kelvin, our Technical Manager found MRemote, a free, stable and nice to use client which does the job very well. Yes, it is basically an interface on top of a lot of existing open source client programs which it loads as components, but why re-invent the wheel when these things in their own right work, and work well?
So without raving about it much more, if you manage a load of servers and want to simplify the process somewhat why not give MRemote a go. The only thing I think it's missing, from my point of view, is an interface to the NX Client which I use on some of my machines, and maybe database servers such as MySQL, but aside from that it's fantastic!