Rihards Online

Some of you, especially those that browse a lot will have by now probably noticed that more and more webpages have started switching from flv based videos over to divx based videos. It’s quite easy to notice it as well, for one, you need to install a special plugin to view these videos, and also you get to see a big divx logo first.

At first I didn’t like this at all (I don’t like most things that require a plugin to be usable), but after getting the plugin and watching some videos, especially those on Stage6 site, I must say that I’m very pleased with this new web video format. Now divx itself is quite old of course, but it is new to the web, and beats flash video and sound quality any time of the day.

After discussing whether I should or should not upgrade my PC a day or so ago, my 3D card on my gaming rig decides to just kick the bucket. So I’ll be getting a new 3D card sometime next week (suggestions are welcome), but in the meantime I didn’t want to lose the ability to play games, or just in general, to have access to a Windows OS. The perfect solution for me? Apple’s Boot Camp.

For those of you who don’t know, Boot Camp is a set of tools that lets you use Windows XP and Windows Vista on your Apple hardware (be it the macbooks, the iMacs, the iWhatever). Aside from the annoying Windows XP setup, the whole process is quite painless and quick.

In the end you basically have a partition that has your Windows OS on it, with all the drivers for every single piece of mac hardware installed. Even the remote, and the built-in camera. And best of all, it all works flawlessly from what I have seen so far. Really great for gaming, so there’s no real reason why people who have decided against macs purely because they lack the gaming factor.

You can now, with the help of Boot Camp, quickly boot into your Windows XP partition, play your games, and once you are bored you can boot back into your Mac OS X partition for some serious working.

I remember saying on SGN that I won’t try Vista out until Microsoft, nvidia, or the makers of STALKER and Gothic 3 release fixes that make those games compatible with Vista. But then I realised that I haven’t played either of them in quite a while, especially Gothic 3.

So I thought to myself, hey why not try out Windows Vista, you have an hour or two to spare today to install it, and have been looking for an excuse to re-install your main OS for quite a while on your gaming rig anyway. So I did, and my first impressions of Vista can be summed up by the following two words, flashy and annoying.

Flashy is quite straightforward, Vista’s Aero interface is very flashy, and shiny. It reminds me a lot of Mac OS X, basically a very cute/pretty pastel(in Mac OS X’s case it’s white) coloured interface with lots of round corners and transparency. At first it seems quite the overkill but one gets used to it quite quickly and then it seems nice. I just wonder how much longer it will be till I start finding it to be annoying and useless.

Now to the annoying bit. I’m a power user, emphasis on the power bit, I like to turn things upside down in my main gaming OS. I use shell commands, clean up services, edit the registry by hand, and a lot other things, and this is where Vista really gets in the way. “Do you want to continue” pops up just about every step that I make, luckily that can be turned off somewhat, but even after turning it off I run into it.

Overall, I think that Microsoft is actually going into the right direction with Vista, making it even more accessible and usable for the average Joe user. Not to say that there aren’t enough improvements for the power users.

Thought I’d talk for a change about software that I use, and that I wouldn’t part with. RocketDock is something that most Mac users have had for quite a while now, it’s that shiny dock with big glossy icons usually situated at the bottom center of the screen. RocketDock is a windows application which acts and does the same as the Apple Mac OS X.

It even comes with a “Minimize to dock” option, which basically creates a small thumbnail of the application that you just minimised and puts it on the dock, quite nifty and keeps the taskbar clutter free.

The above screenshot shows how I have my RocketDock setup at home. The really cool thing about is that there are lots of styles/skins to chose from, and if you don’t like any of them it’s quite easy to make your own as well. In addition to the styling there are also a lot of behaviour settings and customisation.

It’s a great way to keep you desktop clean, without having to resort to using the start menu which in most cases is very slow, clumsy and you can’t find what you need most of the time either. Plus, RocketDock coupled with some shiny dock icons looks gorgeous as well.