British Snow Leopard...

So Apple's latest OS X update arrived on Friday with a little less roar than expected.
I'm not sure I should have been expecting anything extravagant, but for £25 I did expect to notice something at least! I suspect it's like the snow we always get in the UK...which is always lacking a bit.

I was frustrated at first by the fact that my Mac refused to boot from the disc that was provided. I had to take a copy of it and burn a new one on my desktop (Windows 7 recognises it...how'd you like them Apples?).

I then spent 45 mins or so installing it (choosing an upgrade over a fresh install mainly because I could not be arsed with the set up of all my apps again).
Then it booted up for the first time and...well, it looks the same as it did before.

Apart from a bit more free space on my hard drive (around 7GB I think) I haven't seen any real difference.

Oh...there is a new default background, which is just slightly different to the previous (Leopard) default background (see below), but I'm not sure this justifies the £25 spent.

Leopard:

Snow Leopard:


EDIT: Having used it for another day, I do have to say that it feels a little nippier than its previous incarnation, and not just the file exploring. Things like the extraction of .rar files and the opening of some apps do seem to be that little bit faster. Suffice it to say, it's redeemed itself (at least a little bit) in my opinion.

Geek status creeping back up...

After my debacle with my iphone you'd wonder why anyone would trust me with theirs.
However, my younger brother had managed to smash his glass (or is it plastic?) to bits and couldn't afford the £150 that Apple wanted to charge, so asked me to do it.
Thankfully the parts are available cheaply from HK (£15 in this case), only my geek confidence was gone.

However, it seemed someone believed in me, since I successfully removed and replaced the glass (I'm sure it's plastic) front last night...so partial geek status has now been resumed!

Windows 7 baby...

Having used the Windows 7 release candidate (32bit...64bits is just 32bits too many for me) for a few weeks now, I have to say I'm impressed.

When I first saw Vista (many moons ago), it was a pile of steaming shite. It was slow to respond, a memory hog and overall just completely crap.
Windows 7 is a whole other bag. It's responsive, easy on the memory (under 1GB used when idle on my machine, with a fair few things running) and a really nice user interface.

I'm liking the taskbar application preview (something I hope Snow Leopard introduces for the Mac) and I also like the sidebar gadgets (which I know Vista has already, but it will be new to XP users).

The networking and firewall side of things isn't fantastic, but I can see why they've done it the way they have (dumb users). I'm hoping the profressional version I have on order will mean I have a few more options to switch off when I eventually install.

Anyway, for now it gets my seal of approval and I'd recommend it for anyone using XP at the moment who has a decent enough machine...2Ghz + and at least 1GB of RAM as well.

Geek status revoked...

It would seem I'm not as much of a geek as I'd thought.

Having recently got a second hand iphone 3G I was a little disappointed to see it had a load of dust under the glass. Considering I watch a lot of movies/TV shows on it, it really started bothering me.

So last night I decided to open it up and clean that dust out...what a mistake.

I'd read loads of guides on how to do it, and how easy it was, so was feeling fairly confident about it. What I hadn't read about (and now obviously wish I had) was the risk of one of the little connectors getting stuck to the underside of the screen when opening it up. It basically results in the little connector sticking to the screen, the other end staying where it's supposed to be, and the little ribbon cable caught in a game of tug of war resulting in it breaking.

At that moment I felt quite a bit of panic, but it seems that it's fairly common, and the replacement part is only £7.50 (or thereabouts). It does involve soldering, which I am not enough of a geek to attempt, but a local place will fix it for £15.

With this in mind, I feel I must revoke my geek status until further notice. ;o)