An insanely brilliant combination – I spent quite a bit of time yesterday evening playing InkBall, that game that comes with Windows Vista.

Just one problem though, and it’s a big one – I got too carried away, and didn’t notice the end of the pens casing snapped off (thinking about it, I must have really been enjoying myself on it). Didn’t think too much of it and just bluetacked it back together – relatively normal process.

That was until I started to write some notes in Microsoft OneNote (the 2003 edition, I prefer it to the 2007 one, which I have installed also) and only to find out that it wasn’t calibrated properly. Its fine in other Windows programs and Windows its self but only in the writing programs, obviously like OneNote but Windows Live Messenger’s handwriting function, NetSupport Manager’s annotation thing – and of course InkBall.

So what to do now? I don’t think there is any way of calibrating it…

Yep, it sure is the best of both worlds, with Vista providing me with that eyecandy and DirectX10 while XP is there providing me its lightning fast speeds on my 2GB RAM and DirectX9 for those older games I play.

Not forgetting a while back I installed XP and OpenSUSE 10.3 together on my laptop.

I’m quite getting the hang of this dual-boot thing now. Not to mention about 6 months ago I was scared to death of breaking my HDD or overwriting my Windows installation with Ubuntu, after a bad experience where I almost lost a lot of data.

I might install some form of Linux on my PC aswell – it may well come in useful, who knows. As long as I can get the WLAN drivers installed so I can actually browse the web, it should be great.

Still need to find those damn sound card drivers though – as I didn’t get a utility disk with my machine, instead its like one of those all-in-one disks you have to burn yourself with Vista on it – gah it requires a DVD-R and lots of time…

Next step: OS X on my PC – more in the future, bye for now.

You’ll probably have seen numerous posts around the web if you came here by search engine.

I, for one, like my computer to boot up fast. I realised that on my fast PC, that Vista wasn’t too fast, but I’ve came up with some tips to help you make your copy of Windows Vista boot up quickly.

Lets start off by getting rid of that horrid screen with the green bar at the bottom when its loading. To do this, press Win + R, which will then launch “Run…”, in the box, type in msconfig and then press return. A smallish window will appear and all you simply have to do is choose the tab called “Boot”. Now check the box labled “No GUI Boot” and set the timeout to 15 seconds. Now press the button appropriately named “Apply”. Now you can restart your system to see the changes take place – and hopefully your computer will boot a lot faster.

I know that a new computer never seems to stay new for long, by that I mean all of those “startup” programs that slow down your computer while the desktop environment is loading. So in the same msconfig utility, find the tab called “Startup” (not services) and uncheck the names of programs you don’t really need that YOU’VE installed, the reason for this is that if you didn’t install it, chances are it was preinstalled with your system and therefore required when you turn your computer on, most probably by some hardware.

After completing these few steps, I found my computers boot up perfomance increased – all without the need for those awful “system tuning” applications (especially registry cleaners, which in most cases can cause more damage to the system than the current registry database).

So I’ve finally got round to installing some form of linux on my laptop.

I’ve chosen openSuSE 10.3, GNOME edition, because it’s functionality during my live CD test was very good on my, now getting-on-a-bit, laptop.

It’s a shame my laptops graphics card isn’t in the Xgl database; which as a result means I can’t use the “virtual box”, that really cool 3D desktop. Another problem is getting my laptops wireless card driver installed, its one of those Atheros built in ones; which in turn means I can’t browse the web (if your thinking I can use a direct ethernet connection to my network, then unfortunately I can’t because my laptop is in my room upstairs and my wired network resides only downstairs, with the router).

Overall I’m impressed, and it didn’t resize my Windows partition to some pathetically small amount – instead a fair 18.7GB, not bad considering its hard drive is 40GB.