I downloaded the beta version of Windows 7 yesterday and installed it onto a new VM under VMWare and it does look a bit like Vista, a sort of cut down simplified version.

Just starting 7 is hardly a test of it though. What I need to do is use it in anger. Give it net access, set up email, newsgroups, install iTunes, rip and sync some music, download some iPhone apps and see if I can get 7 and iTunes to sync with the iPhone (Are you crazy? This is beta software. Ed). Good point. Not sure if I can be bothered with testing Windows 7 as that’s my day job.

After the shambles of Vista a lot of people seem to like the idea of Windows 7. Maybe their getting nervous having not bought in to Vista and realising that XP is a bit long in the tooth and maybe they’re getting left behind a bit so have decided to ‘like’ Windows 7. But if it’s so similar to Vista, which they disliked……….

Our local HMV, which was originally a rekud shop a long time back now includes console and PC games and appears to be selling games more than anything else. I can see in a couple of years time someone’ll spin off the games part into a HMV Games outlet or something like that. They do seem to be selling a lot of games and to a very broad spectrum of people. Seems that games no longer have a geeky reputation going by the people that appear to be buying them these days. Or maybe they just work better.

I was bought a soccer PS3 games at Christmas but there was no way I was playing that. I tried returning it to the shop where it was bought and to get it changed and that wasn’t easy but finally managed to get it swapped for Midnight Club Los Angeles. I has a quick go in arcade mode and the graphics are terrific, I was able to recognise places that I’d been to and even a house I stayed in.

I got a subwoofer to go with the 42″ TV, Blu-ray player (PS3) and pseudo home cinema with the stereo. As usual I ended up spending more than I wanted to but the sound is great. The subwoofer was made by a Chinese company called Gale, $220.

When I first started playing a DVD the noisy studio logo played, I hadn’t realised how loud the volume levels were set to, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The sound wasn’t a TV sound at all, it was enormous. I then demo’d it with several clips from films and also the Zeppelin DVD – ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ – and also The Who’s Kids Are Alright. It felt as loud as being at a friggin’ concert. 

After 10 minutes of me playing with this rig there was a knock on the front door. Oh no, I’ve already started to annoy the neighbours with my racket. But no, it was somebody collecting for charity. Did I pay him off well.

The Microsoft interview is back on tomorrow. So what happened to the outsourcing to India line?

Had another go at connecting up the PS3 to the Internet and this time succeeded.

Rather than use the Easy connection option I went for the Custom option which allows you to enter all of the IP addresses, including Primary and Secondary DNS’s. I was OK with the PS3 IP address, as well as the subnet mask and router IP addresses but not the DNS’s as these are dynamically allocated. Therefore out of the 5 addresses it wanted I left 2 blank.

The trouble with that is that without filling up all 5 addresses you can’t save these settings. Well that is my take on it as with 2 blank I could not find any way to save this data. So gave up and did another Easy setup which took longer this time.

This time it found all its IP addresses, connected to the Internet and proceded to download a second O/S upgrade which installed OK. One of these days one of these system upgrades is going to fail, what happens then? I then fired up the browser and the default home page was loaded OK. Stop. Not much more you can do really. Somehow I got the pointer to the URL field but without a keyboard there’s not much chance of entering a URL with a PS3 controller or a Bluetooth remote control. Experiment over.

Quote of the day

‘All generalizations are dangerous, even this one’ Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)