A few weeks ago I received an email saying ‘Free Microsoft Software for CS students - really ‘ This got me thinking, CS students? that means Computer Science, I suddenly felt really geeky. Although I am considering getting the USB symbol tattooed on me! (if anyone ever tells you tattoos aren’t addictive - hit them). Then I got thinking about the free software - ‘goodie’ I said and signed up.

Two weeks later I received my user name and password in my inbox and set about downloading. I downloaded Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, Project pro 2003, Visio pro 2003 and I ordered VisualStudio .NET so I could have it in a pretty box! I still dont know what Project pro and Visio pro are so I’ve just burnt them to a disk and put them in a draw. What I really wanted was a copy of XP pro and .NET so I could practise programming on my own.

I’d decided to install XP on my mac. At first I tried boot camp in which the installation wasn’t exactly successful! I installed bootcamp assistant but when It came to formatting the drive it wasn’t having any of it, apparently my harddrives corrupt. All I had to do was put in my OS X disk and run a disk check but did I really want to do that?

In the end I decided that I didn’t want to have windows seperate from mac, so I went for parallels, sure it costs $80 but thats only ¨£40 and considering the windows was free (and legal) I dont mind. I’m still in my trial period. Its briliant! I can copy and paste from mac to windows and I can access my mac files on the windows PC, they even share the same internet connection and because its running as a virtual machine my windows installation gets the same virus protection as my mac does. It took me a while to work out how to get right click in the parallel windows (ctrl+shift+click) and it can be a bit slow sometimes but I’m upgrading my RAM as soon as I can. I have 1gig at the moment which means windows can only run on a max of just under 512mb ram which isn’t the best for windows.

I only installed windows to run visualstudio .NET and It took me a while but I’ve found the settings to make a c program compile! Its very temperamental though!

What I’m going to show you is a very unnatural site - you have been warned!!

Although the official release date of firefox 2.0 is Tuesday, I’ve found a sneaky link to the newest release.

If your …

If you have, or think you have spyware/adware you may find this useful.

From my time in a computer repair shop I can tell you that the number one problem we encounter is adware/spyware. From the problems we divided customers into two groups.
the ones with children, and the ones without.

People who did have spyware had children who used filesharing programs such as emule, kazaa, limewire etc.. This was a general rule, though sometimes it wasn’t right.