Vista Woes

After the most recent big update from Microsoft (As of the date of this posting) my Vista machine returned to its old state of almost totally useless. It again returned to 20 minute start up times and horrendous disk thrashing.

Again I went through all the steps of ensuring I had disabled all the useless services such as the indexer, windows defender and came across superfetch which was also disabled.

I really begrudge having my machine thash itself to death just trying to keep the operating system from falling apart at the seams. Unless you use the pointless search function on the ugly new start menu or what your recently used progams forced into memory before you even ask for them then turning off these services is no problem. The windows defender is usually obsolete as soon as you install any half decent virus killer / spyware removal software.

Even after these changes it was still thashing away, diagnostics flagging up disk queue of 4 indicating the disk was in constant usage. I then ran scheduled a scan disk which took almost a day, from 10 am until 9 pm but after this the machine actually booted in a sensible time and is finally running again.

If anyone else is experiencing horrendous disk thashing on Vista, running a check disk may help, it did for me. Good bye to any actual work I would have liked to have done on it had to go back to a XP on a machine that doesn't spend all day holding the operating system together with duct tape.

Damn gorgeous Panhead!

The other day I came across this Bobbed Harley Panhead and just thought I should share with everyone. In an ideal world this is exactly the type I would have, though getting used to it's quirks would probably be a nightmare hehe, but just look at it !

Acer Aspire 150

Yay got a new laptop to replace the poor old dead Sony Vaio, my old P3 Vaio had battled on for the last 7 years very well and was brilliant to last so long serving me all the way through Uni and work in Germany.

Got myself a nice little 9" Acer Aspire 150, so far really impressed beyond what I expected by along way. I was originally going to go for the Asus the EEEPC, the version with at least some hard disk and without the tiny screen. However the Acer was the same price and the specs are so much more impressive.




So far during all the installations and copying about 40 gigs worth of data its been fine and usable.

Roma 2008

Just back from Rome last night and it was supurb as usual, highly recommended. I felt totally safe throughout the whole time we were there even walking all the way back to our hotel in the night, plenty of police throughout the city and never saw any trouble.

I personally found again that the Vatican and the various Basilica's were the most interesting sites, along with the Roman Forum. Some of the other ancient Roman ruins are not really as well presented as the could be with rubbish even sometimes nearby.


We used Ryan Air to get over to Rome from East Midlands airport and the whole route there was easy and no hassle at all, you do need to be a bit careful on baggage allowance with them though. On arrival, there is a coach that goes all the way to the main train station which was a couple of streets from the hotel.

I would recommend the hotel we used, although it can be noisy at night as there are bars nearby but the prices were good especially considering it's location, we didn't even need to use public transport the whole time we were there.


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Spybot S & D - Vista Slow Down

After hours of messing around and backing up files just about ready to format and re-install Vista, after experiencing horrendous performance I realised that Spybot Search And Destroy was to blame.

I have used Spybot alot in the past and always found it fine for detecting adware, spyware etc and having little impact on the machine's performance. Since installing it on my Vista machine recently, my re-boot time went through the roof, to about 15 minutes perhaps 20, even once into vista it would take an age and thrash the disk constantly while trying to even load the sidebar.

If anyone else has Spybot installed and is running Vista 32 bit and is experiencing serious slow down I would recommend giving it the elbow.

Pedal for pounds 2008

I am up here in the north visiting my sister and helping with a great event she is organising this weekend for Yorkshire Cancer Research, called Pedal for pounds, it's happening on the 7th of Sept in-case any last minute people are wondering Harewood Hall Nr Harogate.

It will be either a 25 mile, or 50 mile cycle around the local area, and hopefully the heavy rain will go away before we start!

Well this is now an update and the event went really well, my sister's first time to run the show and we had many positive comments, certainly from our water point 31 miles into the course.

The image now links to a small gallery of pics from the event if anyone is thinking of joining next year or supporting the charity.

Warick Castle

Last weekend Analie and I took a trip over to Warwick Castle, a place I haven't been to since I was 5, on my 5th birthday !



It was a gorgeous sunny day so got the chance to take quite a few rather nice photos of everything. I feel a few of them came out pretty well, mostly through luck hehe but have a look for yourself here.

Then had a nice time seeing Analie's other friends down there in Coventry. I also did some night time photography of the city centre of Coventry but have included it in my arty section.

Restoring Vista Default JPG Viewer

This may sound absurd but if you have ever installed an application such as Macromedia Fireworks and your default JPEG viewer has been changed it can be a nightmare to get back to the original viewer.

Officially it is the Microsoft Windows Photo Gallery, but attempting to change the default program back to this is not enough,, oh no, that will bring up your whole gallery of images.

Removing any user defined file extension default for jpg, jpeg or jpe within the registry editor (regedit) will simply take you back to square one,, with fireworks.

The only way to get back to the factory default is to actually carry out stage one (right click image and open with, then select default, but switch the view to not just "programs" but "all files" and within "Program Files" -> "Windows Photo Gallery" and then choose "PhotoViewer.dll" and at last it works again!