Chris Matchett

I downloaded and installed the new version of Windows, Windows 7 RC, on May 5th when it was made available to the public. I was pleasantly surprised at their decision to give it away for free…well free for a year anyway.

I guess they are trying to hook people in after the disaster that was Vista. Vista was to XP what Windows ME was to Windows 98, one step forward and four steps back!

I am enjoying Windows 7 RC however! All my hardware is running as should be and the system seems very snappy. I was worried that some of my older (but much loved software) would cause some problems but it hasn’t been the case. Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop 7 are running well which is a big bonus. I guess we are all suckers for a shiny interface as well and Windows 7 has one, I like the transparent window look.

So if you are thinking of having a go backup your documents and have a go. It’s only free for a year but a year is a long time in tech, we mightn’t even have desktop computers in June 2010!

My original goal was to try and access my podcasts, stored on a network share, on my Blackberry 8820. It turns out accessing network shares isn’t available on the current Blackberry 4.5 operating system but will be in version 5.0. So here’s my solution to make life a little easier in the meantime.

the quick version

• Setup a web server on one of your home computers
• Use Juice to keep your podcasts up to date (I’m not an iTunes fan)
• Make your music library accessible to the web server
• Configure your Blackberry browser to use wifi
  (I have two browsers, Opera and the Blackberry browser. I have one configured for wifi and the other as part of my data plan)
• Browse and play/download music and podcasts from your intranet server using it’s ip address from your wifi browser

the not so quick version

I have an old pc running Windows Server 2003 sharing my podcasts and music. I know not many people have a copy of windows server running at home but the following steps could be carried out on any operating system able to run the IIS or Apache web servers. If you aren’t familiar with running a web server your windows pc may already support IIS, if not Xampp is a good starting point. This is a good article for Ubuntu users on setting up a web server.

Once you have setup your webserver and have made sure your music library is visible through your new intranet site you can either simply enable directory browsing of your music folder or use some asp or php code to create a prettier interface. Currently IIS 6 doesn’t allow you to apply style to directory browsing. I use some asp code from ASP101 to style and allow recursive directory browsing of my music library.

Make sure you are in wifi mode on your Blackberry and browse to the ip address of your intranet server hosting your podcasts and music. Simply click on a link to one of your mp3 files and you will be prompted to open it or save it. If you open the file the Blackberry media player will start playing it. I tend to save podcasts as you have more control over fast forward etc.

And that’s it, one less wire to hookup and freedom to roam around your home listening to your podcasts!

I have just installed the beta version of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7 Ultimate, on the same hard drive as XP and Ubuntu (all three systems have their own partition). I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy Windows 7 Ultimate…

The window’s virus did of course wipe my master boot record during install but it was quite a simple process to restore my existing grub boot manager. Windows 7 will add XP to it’s boot mananger but not Ubuntu (hardly surprising). So at the moment I have grub booting XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu and some other stuff.

I had hoped to setup grub to boot straight into Windows 7. It seems the Windows 7 boot loader has planted itself on my XP partition (the system’s first partition). This means I can’t boot directly into the Windows 7 partition which is something I will have to fix. If I had thought about it this should have seemed obvious as multi-booting details are held in the Window’s boot loader files…I guess any master boot record points to a bootable partition and uses it boot loader. 

In conclusion, I won’t be rushing out to buy Windows 7 Ultimate. It seemed to perform well on my system, much better than my experience with Vista, but will it be worth the likely £200 price tag? If it cost £80 I would probably buy it, that seems like a fair price to me. It won’t though, so I will be sticking with XP.