Up until recently I’d been using the Windows 7 Enterprise Trial from TechNet on my home PC. Unfortunately it was due to expire, so I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium as I don’t need Ultimate or Professional at home.

Not wanting to loose my settings I tried to downgrade but was presented with the following error;

After some Googling I stumbled upon a post with a simple registry hack to allow the downgrade.

Once I’d configured the relevant registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion (see image below) I was able to perform the downgrade. I am now happily running a licenced and activated Windows 7 without having to install a fresh copy.

You may argue that a fresh install would be more sensible but frankly its running as well as it did 3 months ago so I really didn’t see the need. Oh and for the record moving to Windows 7 is well worth the effort.

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Posted via email from Jim’s Posterous Blog

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Had the following email from Orange…

Thank you for registering your interest in the iPhone.

Orange isn’t just bringing you the iPhone. Together with the UK’s
biggest 3G network, covering more people than any other, we’re
bringing you a winning combination.

You will be eligible for an upgrade on 25/12/2009, so when the time
comes, you can enjoy one of the best handsets on the market.

Posted via email from Jim’s Posterous Blog

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This weekend I joined the Netbook crowd with the purchase of a HP Mini-Note 2133. It was just under £200 from PC World. This particular Netbook has been largely ignored due to the comparatively poor processor and poor choice of OS namely SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED).

I don’t really care about the processor speed, what I care about is the superb screen. The 2133 is the only Netbook I’m aware of that can do 1280 x 768, which for me is the ideal resolution for such a small device, other Netbook’s with their pitiful 1024×576 resolution just don’t cut it.

Oh and being a HP Netbook the keyboard, speakers, track pad and smart aluminium chassis are all well made and of a high quality.

Now I hate SLED, it’s slow, has bad package management and poor usability, it had to go. This brings me to the second reason for purchasing this laptop, the 120gb hard disk, no tiny 8gb SSD for me! I’ve carved this up into three partitions; one for Windows 7 (which runs surprisingly well) , one for data and one for Ubuntu Linux.

I installed Windows 7 from an 8gb USB stick, it took less than an hour. To my amazement after running Windows update everything worked! The only thing that needed tweaking was the sound card which wouldn’t detect the headphones when they were plugged in. I installed the Vista sound card driver from HPs website which cured the problem.

Next comes the Ubuntu install which I’m sure won’t be anywhere near as straightforward. I’ve already read about numerous problems, although all of them seem to have solutions.

All in all I’m really pleased, although I’m already considering upgrading the memory from 1gb to 2gb, well it’s only another twenty quid.

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I’m a sucker for lame quizzes so when the latest email from Jobsite offered a test to determine ”if you need to readdress your work situation and learn how to make positive changes to achieve your own happy work life balance.” I jumped at the chance.

60 questions and about 5 minutes later…

You’ll be pleased to learn that you match the profile of a:

Contender

As a Contender, you’re likely to believe at times it is necessary for work to come before the family, with the knowledge that the family will benefit in the long run from your success.

You believe that in a world of opportunities, the strongest thrive. Fortunately, you’re a person that makes things happen. You’re able to set goals and focus on achieving them, not afraid to make difficult decisions or take risks. The last thing you want is a dead end job, you want to move on up and be rewarded for your efforts and ability.
 

They go on to say that they’ve prepared four detailed reports covering my current situation in life and work, but to be honest, I just closed the browser and went to spend some time with my friends and family….

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I spotted a post from Nadeem about this book meme thingy. 

So I had a quick go,  

The rules are 

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

I’m lazy so only followed rules 1 and 3, It showed that I’ve read about 25% but I actually own more like fifty. I think it’s time I stopped buying books and started reading them.

Oh and I’ve no idea where the list came from.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (good, but not that good)
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 

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Over the last six months there’s been a wealth of mini laptops appear on the market. I’m fully intending to get one. Question is which one? At the moment I’m leaning towards the Acer Aspire one which certainly seems to offer the best value for money.
I guess I’ll just have to be patient and wait and see.

Alternatives are the Asus EEE PC, the Dell Mini Inspiron and the HP 2133.

Update: I forgot about the MSI Wind and here’s a post about about Dell’s offering.

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I noticed this graph in an article on the BBC’s Website and I gotta say it makes depressing reading. I’d like to see an annotated version for the reasons behind each rise in costs. Also note the gulf in the costs between Diesel and Petrol, this was one of the reasons I switched back to a petrol car a couple of weeks back – a 2.0 litre Golf GT. It’s not the most environmently friendly or fuel efficient but I got fed up trying to source a 1.4 TSI which was what I really wanted. Patience is not one of my virtues

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A mate e-mailed me the Jung Typology Test the other day. I’d seen it before but thought I’d go through it again.

My Type is INTJ

Most of the suggested career choices were acurate.

• Computer Programming
• Natural Science
• Engineering

• Management
• Entrepreneurship

• Natural Science Education
• Law
• Librarian

Hang on, Librarian! Where the hell did that come from?

[tags]Jung Typology[/tags]

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