Another of my recent toys has appeared by way of work - a Dell M1330 laptop. My boss is very good about appropriating what is required, and even humoured me by way of fulfilling my request for a laptop. I prefer them for work - easy to cart into meetings and ensure work gets done, and to take home when required and avoid polluting one's home system. But, of course, you always suffer in terms of power and especially disk IO. So after my initial attempt at acquiring a MacBook failed, I went browsing to find something small, powerful and cheap. And unusually, got most of what I wanted.

The M1330 is Dell's trendy 13“ media portable. I use the word trendy without any intention of it being taken seriously - this is no Apple box, and one could charitably describe it as ugly. Rather than stick with the cheap, professional and practical lines they're known for they've tried to make it cool. So we've got plastic contrasted with a horrid metal veneer, and rounded off with the most unattractive keyboard ever found outside of a ZX Spectrum. The 'cheap' doesn't end there either - it comes with a remote (a credit-card style remote gone horribly, horribly wrong) and they missed a bay door on the SD card slot, instead opting for a cheap filler card. And the worst part is, for minimal savings, they've made it look much tackier than it ever should.

And that's because the hardware makes up for a lot of bad aesthetics. If you skip the horrid glossy screen, there's not much else to complain about. Core 2 Duo (only 2.0Ghz, but it was ordered in November), 3Gb of RAM, slot-loading drive (which are godsends on laptops) and a nVidia 8400 mobility card (because friends don't let friends use on-board video). It would have been nice to have a DVI port rather than the dodgy VGA and HDMI ports they've thrown in, but otherwise it's really rather smashing. And only 13” at that.

And there's one cheap thing that is very nice - at slightly over £700 it's cheaper than a MacBook. Yes, you're not going to win geek chic awards with it, and you have to put up with the monstrous creature that is Vista, but otherwise it's reasonably fast, portable and plays WoW for those quiet moments. You could do a lot worse in a PC laptop, especially for the price.

Of course, you could buy yourself a MBP, but that's something for a future post.

Oh, and apologies for the horrid pun in the title. I feel horrid about it, really.

Valve have recently added GTI Racing and Xpand Rally to their Steam library of games. I've a bit of a love/hate relationship with Steam - it's rather convenient and most of the games are well priced, although it's very slow to load and offline play is best avoided. However, it does make things easy to obtain, track and does away with CDs in drives and other such copy protection. Or at least I thought it did...

One of it's current problems is that with most of the third party games demos are conspicuous in their absence. And so I downloaded the demos for both, only to find Xpand Rally wouldn't run on XP x64. Why? Starforce copy protection. And in a demo at that.

For those who don't want to know, Starforce is a copy protection scheme that does nasty things in Windows - it sits at a level very close to the hardware and has large amounts of problems attributed to it. Interestingly, it's the only copy protection scheme to gather such a large anti-following, and perhaps that's because most of the others don't rely on the driver-level to do their thing.

What's worse is that this is present in a demo. Why? And it did get worse - GTI had a newer version and both the Steam games appear to have it in place. Why? It's certainly ensured I won't be purchasing a copy.

On another interesting note, Xpand Rally seems to be written in Java. Most intriguing...

There's been a lot of talk recently about Ubuntu. Claims have been made that it is the one distribution to rule them all, that it spells the final death knell for closed-source operating systems and there have even been some switchers from Mac OS X. Given the noise I thought it was about time I gave it a try (especially since my DSL has just been upgraded to 8mbps). So I pulled down the live CD for AMD64 and spun it up on my games machine.

I must admit it was a nicer experience than when I last tried a Linux desktop. Most things were there, sound worked, the display worked and almost all default were sensible. AA text wasn't up to OS X standards, nor did it default to sub-pixel AA, but that's fairly minor really. I couldn't read my NTFS partition but that was survivable. And all ports on my card-reader were detected, which was more than one could say for RedHat 9 (yes, somewhat old these).

So I was left with two quibbles, one minor and one a show-stopper. Firstly, I loaded up GPartEd. The thought “I wonder if this can resize NTFS partitions?” leaps across my frontal lobes. So I click the “Help” option. The results were not quite as expected - “This feature is not yet supported”. It then suggests I look on the web-site. So I load up my web browser - and this lead to the show-stopper.

No WiFi. I've got a common-as-muck RT2500 based card in the machine. The WiFi control panel showed the driver and gave me a chance to enter SSID and key. Unfortunately, while it said the connection was now active there was arse all happening. Indeed it confirmed it just wasn't talking to my DHCP server when it gave the card an IPv6 address. Whoops.

Some browsing of the Ubuntu forums revealed that apparently the RT2500 driver doesn't work with the control panel. It's a shame they didn't add a message to that effect. Or, indeed, that an appropriate error message wasn't shown when the card didn't connect. I had thought Mac OS X took the biscuit for the most useless error messages when WiFi went awry, but it has been outdone. Which is a shame as it really spoiled the experience for me, and up until that point I had been very impressed with the work that had been done.

But don't get me wrong - this is certainly an impressive package and this is how Linux is going to get mind-share: distributions that just work. The computing world would be well served by having no single dominant operating system and this is certainly a nice addition to the pack.

My last employers were kind enough to give me a cheque upon leaving. This makes a nice change - normally there's guessing involved and it's all rather inconvenient. What's more, the company topped up the sum donated by my kind colleagues - an example more should follow. So, money to spend in London. Whatever to do?

What I ended up doing was what any self-respecting geek would do: I bought a new keyboard and mouse. My old keyboard was a Natural Keyboard Pro, one of the best of the group, but getting a touch noisy having just reached 6 and a half years of abuse. I had held off replacing it due to the industry's current avoidance of split keyboard - Logitech only produces the Cordless Comfort Desktop set (which Polly has) and Microsoft recently revamped their line with the appalling Comfort Curve - what's the point of that? Conveniently, they soon followed it up with the excellent Natural Keyboard 4000.

The 4000 has a couple of nice enhancements. Firstly, the keys are not just split but nicely curved for the hands. Secondly, it comes with a stand to raise the front, thus keeping your hands flat while typing. It looks a touch odd, but is very comfortable. Add the faux-leather wrist rest and the dirt-hiding black colour and it's well worth the £35 odd quid from PC World (cheaper than Amazon even). Even Polly is impressed with it.

I also invested in a new mouse. My Renaissance mouse was snapped during the flight to Heathrow and was thus working due only to the tape covering the break. I did consider a G7 (wireless, but batteries need to be changed every day or two) and the G5 (laser with silly weighting system) but in the end went for last-generations corded spectacular - the MX518. Changeable DPI, buttons galore and a stylish cover - what more could one want? The only catch is it suffers from Logitech's current fad of only shipping Windows drivers, hence I'll need USB Overdrive to change the rest.

Even better, to polish the day off, England's football game meant that even with 'Severe Delays' the Misery Line was half empty and reasonably quick. Made a change from being unable to stand up this morning, anyway. So, for the first time in my life, I say let there be more football! (or more tube trains...)

Microsoft have released the public beta of WIndows Vista, the much delayed successor to XP. As such, being mad, I downloaded and installed it. Of course I didn't want to break my games machine, so I installed in over the XP installation on my MacBook Pro. Luckily my important data wasn't summarily wiped, so I now have a working dual-boot system with Vista.

Installation is a bit odd and documented on a Microsoft blog... you have to delete a mystery partition and do a repair after the first reboot to fix the MBR. Then Windows Update will find the WiFi drivers, the XP sound drivers work and your guess is as good as mine as to what the remaining unknown devices represent.

It does look a lot better than I had expected. It does go over the top in eye-candy, favouring looks over usability. For instance, the transparent window backgrounds are sometimes distractingly transparent. And the window fade in animation is neat at first, but fast becomes annoying. It's fast and very smooth for a beta, but then I do have a Core Duo and a 256Mb X1600. But first impressions are that it will certainly make Windows a much more pleasant place to be. And the new mine-sweeper is very nice.

Other annoyances, from the 15 minutes I've spent playing post-setup:

• It's still very US centric. Despite selected the UK settings on the first setup dialogue, each later step assumed I was in the US. Come on, give us some sensible defaults!
• The loading screen has no text, just a progress bar.
• First startup I suffered a black screen for 3 minutes, a reboot then another black screen, followed by a desktop. Subsequently there have been no repeats of this, so I presume they just left the progress bar out...?
• The currency widget does not make it easy to change currencies.

Of course one wonders if Mac OS X Leopard will steal its thunder come August...

Given the presence of a long weekend and Polly being tird up with work for the majority of it I was left with little choice but to give in to the little demons egging me on and install BootCamp on my MacBook Pro.

This was silly for a couple of reasons. Firstly, BootCamp is beta. And even in these crazy times when beta means everything from 'may open a portal to dimensions best unspecified' to 'a product by Google' one should still be wary of any beta product that plays with your partition map. Secondly, DiskWarrior hasn't been ported to the Intel macs as yet, leaving you in the uncertain hands of fsck-hfs should the worst happen. And lastly, I've got a purpose built games PC sitting right under the laptop - so why bother?

But geekdom got the better of me. And so I ran up BootCamp, partitioned my harddisc and rebooted back into MacOS while I burnt a slipstreamed XP SP2 disc on the games box. Well, that was the plan.

It probably doesn't need stating at this point that it didn't work out. MacOS didn't boot due to an extent problem on the drive. Disk Utility refused to touch it, fsck wouldn't do a damn thing and so I ended up mounting it via FireWire on the PowerBook, pulling off my data and reinstalling MacOS while watching Top Gear.

The good news is that now it's all working, with dual-boot WinXP and MacOS. The downside is it's still a bit raw - hacks are needed for the right click on the laptop, a few nicities don't work and the keyboard mapping is bollocksed. But at least I can play Civ IV on the go now...

Yep, Blizzard strike again. Just as my Christmas break came to an end and I was due to head back to work I discovered that FilePlanet are offering 10-day trial keys for World of Warcraft. The problem: these keys are only for those in the US (bloody US-centric tits and so on). Solution: use a free proxy server to make it think you're in the US, then, once you've got your key switch back to your standard connexion and download the client. Works rather nicely, although it does mean I'm playing on US servers rather than the European ones.

As for the game: lovely. The graphics are cartoony and all rather pretty, the game is shockingly addictive in the vein of Diablo II and it runs on both my PowerBook (1.5Ghz G4/Radeon 9700 Mobility) and my games PC (A64 3200+/GF6600GT). Of course it does look somewhat nicer on the latter. There's also nice variety - lots of trades, lots of fighting, decent mix and generally friendly people, which the standard hazard of spotty thirteen year olds and their superiority complexes.

The downside: £25 for the game licence & first month followed by £9 per month. There's no facility to suspend half way through a month and there's no support for casual gamers (you can only buy in monthly blocks). And while it's fun, I do have something resembling a life as well as other things to do. Of course it would have been great when I was a student - and I wouldn't have been able to afford it then. Cést la vie...