Windows Media Center 2005 woes

I managed to acquire, for the price of a nice lunch, a brand new Elonex media center Artisan LX a couple of days back. I was initially very excited because up to then I had still been running my first media center was really just an experiment, built from scratch containing mostly old components I had around my place. A year and a bit on, I am firmly hooked on a PC based PVR system the cornerstone of my entertainment system. It contained an Athlon 2600+ processor with 512Mb of DDR coupled with a DVB-T Hauppage tuner and an 80Gb drive for recordings running the open source MediaPortal software. So as you can see, there was plenty of room for improvement.

This was the first time I have really had a tinker with the Windows Media Center range of Operating systems that Microsoft produce and I went in with few expectations, apart from wanting at least as comparable an experience in terms of functionality and flexibility as I have enjoyed with MediaPortal.

The first thing that struck me was how fickle Windows Media Center 2005 was, even with all the roll ups (essentially what Microsoft call Service Packs for Media Center OS) installed. Wikipedia sums up the ‘capabilities’ of WMC 2005:

‘Media Center originally had a limitation of 1 analog tuner, but was raised to 2 analog tuners with Media Center 2005. With Update Rollup 1 for Media Center 2005, support for a digital tuner was added, but an analog tuner must still be present for the digital tuner to function. With Rollup 2, up to 4 TV tuners can be configured (2 analog and 2 HDTV). All the tuners must use the same source, for example they must all be off an aerial or a set-top box using the same guide data, you cannot mix Sky Digital and DVB-T for example.’

XP Media Center really shows its age here - I do not watch any analogue transmissions, so for a Media Center to require a legacy piece of hardware just to be able to access DVB (digital) seems preposterous. But that was not the worst thing! Windows Media Center 2005 is not capable of pulling EPG data OTA (over-the-air) instead requiring an overly elaborate system that relies on a permanent, always on Internet connection. This also raises some privacy concerns as ‘anonymous’ data, which is not entirely anonymous as Microsoft asks for your postcode during set up, is fed back to Microsoft which can include recording / watching trends and general EPG usage. Hitherto my media center system has not been networked. Considering it is in the opposite corner of my house, and I do not stream my recordings or have formal media shares, I never felt the need to network it. It was nice to just have a static, secure system without any security programs or periodic updates - now security monitoring of my media center has been added to my list of digital chores.

None the less, I was determined to give it a fair go, so I added a wifi adaptor, added some plug-ins and configured everything. After spending eight hours getting everything working, playing around and testing… I went back to my custom build. Not all the problems can be put squarely at Microsoft’s feet however. Elonex declared bankruptcy shortly after launching this range and the malicious part of me can see why, if this mediacenter is the sum total of their expertise.

Whilst the case looked rather nice from the outside, the hardware and the design of the internals is what really lets it down. The only element Elonex got right was the noise (or lack thereof) - the media center barely gives out a murmur when idle due to only a since fan which is housed inside the power supply. It runs at 690rpm, which draws air over the CPU heatsink (which has four heat pipes) and directly out the side of the case. However, I stressed ‘at idle’ before for a reason. When the media center does anything the incredibly noisy hard drive starts very audibly clicking and crunching away and it completely lets the machine down.

However that’s not the worst thing about this mediacenter. Due to the fact that there is only one very slow fan the airflow in the case is restricted to circulating around the motherboard tray, the processor then out the power supply. The harddrive and PCI / AGP cards are completely neglected. This point was slammed home when the harddrive consistently reported temperatures of high 50s to 62 degrees Celsius!!! Worse still, when I idled the system, that heat didn’t dissipate. The hard drive is locked into place with a pretentious plastic locking mechanism which neither improves the accessibility of the drive bay nor decreases the vibrations from the drive. There is no thermal (or thermally viable) contact between the hard drive and the case and as such, the hard drive is left smouldering away with no way to cool down predictably with next to no drop in temperature. There is a valid point that maintaining electronic components at a set temperature prolongs their life by avoiding constantly repeating thermal differentials (i.e. heating and cooling) however the fact remains that 60+ degrees centigrade is far too hot for a hard drive. Although my brief research on this did not yield any definitive threshold, most sources agree that 50-55 degrees Centigrade is about the absolute maximum recommended operating temperature.

Couple this practically zero thermal conduction with a lack of airflow and you have a recipie for a very short hard drive life. Even worse, this thermal issue was not limited to HDD, the south-bridge and GFX heatsinks were equally poorly cooled and get unpleasantly hot to the touch.

Worst of all, it is just slow. CpuID and the BIOS disagreed with each other about the exact Intel processor that powers the system. I believe it to be either an Intel Pentium 4 530 (at 3.06Ghz) or a Celeron D 345. There is no way the much older Athlon 2600+ processor with the same RAM should be out performing this setup and yet it does so without breaking a sweat.

All in all, very disappointing. A remarkable demonstration of technical ignorance on the part of Elonex. But hey, I didn’t pay for it and now I have an extra DVB-T tuner back in my original, self built machine.

Design (cosmetic) : 8/10 - Pleasing, with a nice Hi-fi look.

Design (technical) : 2/10 - Poor components poorly arranged.

Cooling : 6/10 - Great CPU and powersupply cooling, but everything else is woefully neglected.

Acoustics : 6/10 - Silent until it has to touch the harddrive, still a good effort though

Connectivity : 8/10 - Lots of connectors for digital Audio and Video

Capacity : 5/10 - 200Gb harddrive with a portion taken for recovery. I wouldn’t trust it though and by modern standards it is rather anemic.

Overall : 2/10 - Great for free, if I paid anything for it I would have been annoyed.

Post XP SP3 Update problem

Despite all the problems circulating the web about Windows XP Service Pack 3, I thought I would go ahead anyway on a new installation. The installation part went fine and the system restarted properly with no lock ups, stops or looping restarts. So far so good, unfortunately I celebrated my good fortune too soon - Windows Update stopped functioning. Whilst updates were being downloaded, Windows XP would fail to actually perform the update.

I did a bit of googling and whilst I didn’t find any accounts exactly matching my problem, I decided to follow the advice on this Microsoft KB article.

First of all, stop the automatic update service from the command prompt.

1. Open up Start Menu > Run

2. Type “cmd” and press Enter.

3. In the command box, type “net stop wuauserv”, should should get the following confirmation:

Now we need to reregister the DLL involved in the Windows Update process.

4. Type in “regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll”. The following control box should pop up after a moment:

Now we need to start the update service and hopefully all should be well again.

5. Type “net start wuauserv” which should yield this confirmation:

Thats it, updates started working for me immediately afterwards. If this didn’t do the trick for you, follow the alternative methods on Microsoft’s KB article linked above.

Another Vista Oddity

Remember the classic Win9x / NT / XP Windows themes? Of course you do, many including me are still running such operating systems. One of the largest differences between these old themes and the new Vista Aero theme (apart from transparency effects and desktop compositing) is the lack of a control icon in some dialogs and Windows. This in itself is unremarkable, after all, new theme, new design right? Wrong.

I appears Windows Vista Aero still has an invisible icon in the top left hand corner of the window. Windows without control icons like Windows Explorer still have this invisible area where, if clicked (or double clicked) will react. Try it yourself!

Of course this is not particularly useful. We have not been double clicking control icons to close windows since the days of Windows 3.x, even still I find it amusing that the functionality remains if only to support the legacy themes that can be used in Windows Vista.

Making you grateful for Windows Update

Whilst periodic checking of a manufacturer or supplier for updated programs and drivers is useful, it is annoying when so little information is provided by the tool itself. Lets face it, this could mean anything:

At least with Windows Update there are brief descriptions with links to knowledge-base articles for further information. If you trust MS is being comprehensive in their notes.

Ubuntu on the A1650

Despite some rather exciting progress made of late getting Linux to work on the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo A1650, regretably after three weeks of using it, I am back to Vista. The reason for this is my conclusion that running Linux (more specifically, Ubuntu) on the A1650 is a painful process due to the maturity of hardware support. Its (finally) possible to get all the hardware working, unfortunately doing so feels cumbersome and unnatural. The biggest culprits are the graphics card (an ATi x200m) and the wireless (Broadcom 4318 mini PCI) card.

The ATi graphics card has long been criticised as being ‘defective by design’. Getting any hardware accelerated graphics on this laptop formerly required running XGl with a long series of complicated hacks and even then it was not possible to run desktop compositing effects like Beryl or Compiz. Eight (or so) Months ago, that changed with a redesign of the X Server (in X.org 7.0) when XGL back rendering was no longer required for hardware accelerated rendering. More than that, it greatly simplified the process meaning even the most inexperienced Linux user could have beautiful desktop effects, in some cases, out of the box. However, due to an annoying glitch somewhere, the ATi restricted drivers caused diagonal tearing whenever a window rapidly refreshed itself.

It says something about the maturity of hardware support under Linux when Vista, commonly (and unjustly) thought of a resource hog, runs better. Anyway, this is all academic now as I have retired my Amilo A1650. Its been a great laptop but after three years it was time to move on. I will play with Linux on my new laptop soon and post the results.

Changing Vista’s RSS Gadget

Its unusual to see such a user-unfriendly way of managing (or changing) the default settings in a program. Windows Vista ships with Vista Sidebar, a gadget/widget engine which brings limited but extensible functionality to Windows Vista.

The main criticism I had initially was with the RSS widget - there seemed to be no way of changing the default feeds that shipped with Vista from the default and fairly bland MSN rss feeds. Despite tinkering with the widget and sidebar program, I eventually conceded defeat and did a bit of digging.

It turns out, rather counter-intuitively that the way to change the RSS feeds is via Internet Explorer. Fire up  Internet Explorer and hit “Control+J“, this is the keyboard shortcut to bring up the feed window.

Once here, you can add / delete / modify the RSS feeds that Vista shows to your heart’s content. In doing so, you expose the greatest weakness of Vista’s default RSS widget, it does not scale very well. Whilst in “at-a-glance” RSS perusal for a few feeds works rather well, its over simplification is its greatest downfall.

There is no easy way to change between RSS feeds / groups (it has to be done via a menu each time) nor is there a way to dismiss headlines which have been read. This greatly limits the usefulness of this widget for any serious RSS subscriber.

I had a brief look, but I could not find a 3rd party, general purpose RSS feed widget on the Microsoft Live Widget site. Whilst this gadget is certainly of use, its limitations greatly diminish its usefulness.

Choosing your next PC’s Operating System (the 64bit fiasco)

I am in the process of building a new gaming PC. Well, I should come clean, I have been in the process for almost 5 months now - I am mostly decided on the specifications but minor incompatibilities / annoyances cause me to stall. When this happens, real life typically takes over and by the time I look at my ‘final’ specification again, I normally rip it up and start from scratch due to new hardware being released or price drops. *exhale* I am finally on the verge of finalising the specification, the only things still holding me back are the graphics card (after news of ATi’s 4xx0 series) and the amount of RAM to put into my machine. The latter is heavily influenced by the Operating System I plan to run.

There are two crucial elements to any computer system which must work in harmony, the software and the hardware. Whilst this hardly an earth shattering announcement, I never cease to be amazed at the backlash in the form of blog / forum posts from people who forget this. Realistically when building (or buying) your next Gaming PC at the moment your choices are limited to Windows XP or Vista. Both Linux and Mac OSX suffer from platform compatibility issues with major new games and whilst the former enjoys fair server support for online gaming, neither really has much traction in the desktop gaming market.

The difference between Vista and XP is far more than cosmetic, whilst many are quick to criticise Vista for a number of reasons, I am actually a fan of Microsoft’s latest Operating System for a variety of reasons. Sure, it is feature-poor compared to initial designs and has it’s own annoyances, but the number of extra features and advances make it decisively the better Operating System. There is a caveat, for Vista to run comfortably for gaming purposes needs at least 1 Gb of RAM for itself. This on its own is no big deal - RAM is extraordinarily cheap at the moment, however the issue of platform (32bit/64bit) is now rearing its ugly head.

64 bit computing is nothing new, infact AMD processors have had 64bit extensions (called x86-64) for a number of years since the K8 platform back in 2003. Intel did not catch up (despite starting earlier than AMD) and produce viable 64bit chips until the Pentum 6xx series (late 2004), having stumbled initially with their IA64(T) specification developed for their Itanium platform.

Given this was four years ago, why are we not all running on 64bit XP or Vista? The answer is simple, in the same way that driver support initially crippled Vista’s adoption, 64bit drivers are fairly few and far between. What this means, is a lot less hardware will run properly under a 64bit Operating System. Given this situation, why do we even care about 64 bit computing? Why is it not relegated to high end computing and server farms? Mathematics.

Unfortunately, with a 32 bit Operating System, there is a mathematical limitation to the amount of memory the system can address. At most, Vista (or XP) in 32bit will only address 4Gb of total RAM. This includes both the graphics card and the main system memory. This brings my point about Vista comfortably using one Gb of RAM all by itself to sharp focus. Whilst Yes, the price of RAM is cheap there is something about me that dislikes buying 4Gb of RAM (to enable dual channel mode) only to have a quarter of it not accessible by the system. I wrote about this in detail in a previous post.

So what is the solution? Whilst I am huge fan of Vista (and have recently bought a Vista laptop) I do not think it is suitable for desktop gaming. With Windows XP, I have had fairly bloated a driver / runtime loaded installs using no more than 300Mb of RAM which realistically enables most PC gamers to get away with 2Gb of system RAM with no perceptible loss in gaming performance. This unfortunately would not be the case for a similar system running Vista and as such, unfortunately scuttles Vista for this market in my humble opinion.

Attack of the (EEE) Clones and the future of the EEE PC!

Well, it has been a fair few months since the first ultra cheap ultraportable sublaptop was released by ASUS, namely the EEE PC - few thought this single, largely under-hyped launch would change the face of mobile computing in the way it has. Personally I am delighted, I am a fan of both gadgets and small portable devices like this. I tried out an EEE PC at PC world a few weeks ago and was impressed at the build quality and size. More surprisingly, I was impressed with the screen which was the main source of my disdain being only 7″ and having a non standard resolution of 800×480. One thing I could not try out was surfing the internet- which a device like this is primarily designed to do.

Before the hate mail comes in let me explain, whilst the unit is very capable for a variety of uses, many of those will be in the ‘cloud’ and as a result, reliable and efficient internet browsing is essential. Since most webpages are designed for 1024×768, the 1st generation EEE PC and even the second (900 series) to an extent, will always be lacking in my opinion. Which is a shame. I really want to buy an EEE PC, but I know such a purchase would be based on a long festering impulse rather than any real need or desire. I carry around my 15.4″ laptop whenever I need to do any computing away from my home and it serves me rather well. Of much greater interest to me is where ASUS goes from here. Whilst other companies struggle to release their own clone (more about this later) of the EEE PC, the engineers at ASUS are clearly scratching their heads wondering where they can take this platform from here. In my opinion, there are two directions ASUS can go.

Direction one : More more more more! In a way, ASUS have already indicated this is their intention with the 2nd generation EEE PC laptop, the 900 series. It has a bigger screen as well as a number of other refinements which are great to see, however they still do not bring the machine upto par with an ultra-cheap full-sized notebook. Given the two units sell at comparable prices here in the UK, there really is no incentive to buy the 2nd Generation EEE PC. This coupled with some of the better specced models only being available with Microsoft Windows XP is also short sighted. If ASUS continue in this direction, then we will see a similar development to Psion’s 5(mx) -> 7 / Netbook with a larger, similarly underpowered system being produced. Off the top of my head, I would predict either a 9″ or 10″ screen, 20Gb flash HDD and no doubt other tweaks. There is no doubt, if the screen is of better quality (i.e. resolution and dpi) and the laptop is not substantially more expensive, it could make for a great addition to the EEE PC range; however, I am more interested in Direction two.

Direction two: No this is not some shadowy Orwellian organisation in the basement of a Cinema called “Freedom”* but rather, what my plan would be for the continuation of the EEE PC range. The expression “Stick to what you are good at” comes to mind, ASUS have found a niché which, in business parlance equals profit. More than that, by getting into bed with the open-source crowd, they have a lot of “value-add” through third party modders and hackers - one just needs to look at the number of Operating Systems that now have been run on the EEE PC to see this. In six months time, there should be a new EEE PC, lets call this fictional product the 71x series (so 711, 712, 713 and 714 to match current 1st gen model numbers) and put a higher resolution screen maybe in a 7″ or 8.4″ form factor into it. RAM options seem perfectly adequate at the moment, but allow the addition of traditional platter HDDs as well as the 1st Generation flash drives as options. The idea that, as higher capacities of flash discs drop slightly, they are immediately incorporated into the next generation of EEE PC device is frankly ridiculous, the cornerstone of the EEE PC philosophy was value - something ASUS seem to have forgotten with their 900 series laptops. Using the same flash hard drive capacities as the first generation (e.g. 2, 4 and 8Gb) or offering traditional platter harddrives (in 10, 20 or 30Gb sizes) would lower the price of the product whilst preserving the original fanbase as well as enticing new customers.

The only downside to direction two is the number of companies eager to get a slice of the pie. Recently,  DELL, HP and ACER added their names to the list of companies developing laptops for this formerly niché market. Whilst companies like Acer (in my experience) have never been particularly concerned over quality, others like DELL, HP, VIA are. Its not just these companies who are after a slice of the market, Elonex, MSI, OLPC and others have either expressed an interest in or have released comparable products. The question remains - stand still and possibly get left behind or innovate and put the price up. There is no easy answer, but I believe the EEE PC brand has a lot of clout for being both first and for being good quality. These two factors will keep ASUS onto of this niché market, provided they keep on track and continue to impress us.

On a side note, Cnet have a great side by side comparison that’s worth glancing at.

*Believe it or not, there actually was a secret Soviet KGB/GRU interrogation facility in a Cinema called Wolność (Freedom) in Krakow during the Communist era - its the kind of thing you just can’t make up. Apparently they always had a habit of playing their films a bit loudly there…

Vista SP1 and the Red Herring (+ breaking the 32bit 4Gb limit)

We all knew it was looming, the mathematical limit to address referencing in 32bit computing. A 32Bit number can only be between 0 and 4,294,967,295 which neatly adds up to 4Gb and what this means is, using existing architectures, a program (or Operating System) will not be able to address more than this number of bytes of system RAM via the existing system called byte addressed memory allocation.

What this means for those among us who do not speak geek, is a system which is built or shipped with 4Gb of RAM (and some other cases*) will not be able to fully utilise all of that space.

Lets take a trip back in history and imagine a room with a cupboard containing 256 drawers. Each drawer could hold one bit of binary information and was administered by a librarian. Anytime anyone wanted a piece (or pieces) of information, they had to ask the librarian. What I am describing here, is the era of 8bit computing circa late 1970/ early 80s with the cupboard representing system memory and the librarian representing the Operating System’s memory management system. During day to day running of the system the librarian takes data in and returns data to people (program threads) from the corresponding drawers where the information is stored. Everything works, everyone is happy.

Now what happens if we introduce a second cupboard containing another 128 or 256 drawers? The librarian can only keep track of information stored in the first 256 drawers and as a result, nothing can be stored or retrieved from the newly added cupboards; in effect, they do not exist. Time to get a new secretary i.e. goto 64bit computing (or in this example, replace the 8bit librarian with a swanky 16bit one - who will even ever use 65536bits of RAM? )

But wait, there is more… I read today that Windows Vista SP1 changes (depending on hardware configuration) the total amount of displayed RAM from 3.5 Gb (current the RTM limit when 4Gb is put in the machine) to the full 4Gb, although this still does not help, given the limitation previously discussed. But this made me curious, if the Operating System could see RAM, then surely it was not a BIOS / mathematical fundamental limitation. Turns out I was at least half right …

You see, although the fundamental mathematical limitation can not be breached, there is a rather interesting technique called Physical Address Extension. Using this process, a 32bit Windows system can address more than 4Gb of RAM upto a (present) maximum of 128Gb. To explain what Physical Address Extension (PAE) is, lets go back to the previous example and introduce a new figure - an administrator.

The role of this new entity, is to allocate and manage the time of their underling. Lets also assume we are still running a 8bit system (with the 256bit limit) and have 1024bits of memory i.e. four times the mathematical limit. On the face of it, the extra memory is invisible to the librarian however the administrator is smart enough to both know about the extra memory and who (i.e. what program) is currently using what amount of it. As such, any person (program) can request the full mathematical limit 256 drawers for their own use at the same time as another person (and another …etc) requests more memory.The administrator can instruct the librarian which series of drawers to use per person (program).

This is loosely referred to as 36bit computing and, as the non power of 2 number suggests it is a bit of a tweak. The physical address size was increased (on a 32bit processor) from 32 to 36bits back during the days of Pentium Pro (circa 1997) and most modern CPUs have maintained this legacy. It is important to point out, this does not make all 32bit processors 36bit processors as the change happened in the MMU (memory management unit). Modern Operating systems use page tables to store information about the Virtual Memory system and allocate it based on processes requirements. In effect they act like the administrator from my trivialised example and allow multiple processes to benefit from a pool of memory which traditional 32bit systems (without PAE) would not.

I know what you are thinking, you are rejoicing at being able to avoid the negative aspects of migrating to 64bit computing, but hang on, there are a couple of important caveats. Firstly, each thread (person in our example) can only access a maximum of the mathematical limit of RAM. That means, in a system with 16Gb of RAM, you could quite easily have 3 or 4 processes each taking up 4Gb, but no one process taking up 8 or 16Gb. The other bad point is, it is not supported** in Vista or XP. In-fact, to use such a feature, you would need to be running a Server Operating System from Microsoft or a Linux equivalent. Interestingly enough, Linux contains support for PAE since kernel version 2.6 although I will not discuss it further in this post.

Presently, the only Operating Systems with suitable (or rumoured) PAE support are :

Windows 2000: Datacenter Server and Advanced Server Editions

Windows Server 2003: Enterprise and Datacenter Editions

Windows Server 2008: Enterprise and Datacenter Editions

As you can see, non are particularly home desktop friendly. So, despite Vista displaying the correct amount of RAM in Service Pack 1, it is still fundamentally limited to the 32bit mathematical limit despite Microsoft having the technology to at least improve on the functionality of such systems.

On a side note, I brought this up with a few people at my head office. I work for a large UK retail company that sells PCs and Laptops. I was surprised to see when our first 4Gb models came into the stores a few months ago that they were running Vista 32bit Editions. The UK is not a litigious as the United States, but I can’t help wondering how long it will be before the lawsuits start flying. After all, it is misrepresentation in my book to sell something that, due to a software shortcoming, can never be fully utilised to the specification it was advertised at. Particularly since an alternative is available to OEMs and yet, all retailers not just the one I work for seem to be taking a cavalier attitude towards this.

*The total amount of addressable space inside a 32bit system must add up to 4096Mb, this includes system and Video RAM, so if you have an all singing, all dancing SLI graphics card with 2Gb of Graphical RAM, the total amount of system RAM you will be able to address is around 2Gb.

**Actually this is not true, ever since Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft has used PAE for security purposes coupled with the NX bit. This is a hardware security feature built into a processor which allows program and system developers greater control over what they designate to be executable and non-executable user/memory space. Microsoft has set a fundamental limitation of the amount of RAM being used by home versions of 32bit Operating Systems to 4Gb regardless of the fact the technology to increase this is in place.

Into the Red(mond) cloud…

Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about cloud computing of late (I will talk about my take on cloud computing another time) and it should come as no surprise that they are testing an online storage solution. Perhaps the best known product on the web that allows for remote storage of files and documents is Amazon’s S3 (standing for Simple Storage Service). This coupled with the Jungle disk front-end makes enabled this reasonably priced service from Amazon to be quickly adopted by enthusiasts.

So what is Microsoft doing? Naturally, it is playing to its strengths by tightly integrating this online storage service to the existing Microsoft Live framework which I have never been a fan of. What started off a few years ago as a Live ‘passport’ to enable MSN (Windows Messenger - which I use) and email (hotmail - which I most certainly don’t use) to be integrated in one service. Windows XP was the first Operating System to feature true integration by allowing each user account to associate a .Net Live passport with a user account.

Of late, Microsoft have really stepped up their work on the Live platform and have turned it into a real Web 2.0 fan’s dream. Not only can email be accessed, but a whole load of (Microsoft hopes) Google app-killers such as Photo Gallery, Spaces (myspace style blog) as well as others. Although, the most telling thing about Windows Live Services, is Microsoft’s choice for subdomain : “ideas.live.com” reinforcing (either intentionally or unintentionally) the experimental ‘young-hip’ approach which has served Google so well up to now.

I guess the biggest thing that irkes me about Microsoft Live services, are not the services themselves (which are actually quite good) but the corporate mentality behind them. This is best summed up in the way in which one would set about using one or more of Microsoft’s Live services. For example, I wanted to give Microsoft Live Writer a go to see if it was a more comfortable way of posting to this blog, so I went to the appropriate (the specific writer program page) and selected download. What downloaded was not a setup binary for Writer, but a generic installation program called WLinstaller.exe . This then tried to convince me to change my default search engine to Live Search and set my home page to MSN in Internet Explorer. Good luck with that.

This is what annoys me, unlike a company like Mozilla who would happily provide you the install to any of their free programs on demand, Microsoft try to convert you. Even if you want to install one program then Microsoft will preselect everything including service integrations. That is not to say they do not have good software and services, just their aggressiveness puts me off - I do not install software randomly on my systems and I strongly dislike the principle of bundled crapware.

But anyway, I am getting away from the point. Windows Live SkyDrive is free and offering 5Gb of storage with (presumably) no bandwidth restrictions. The service can be slow in places: creating new folders is sluggish, sometimes taking almost half a minute to allow access into the corresponding dialog. However, Once the folder is created, uploading was fast as was browsing existing folders associated with my Live account. Pictures are automatically viewed with another Microsoft Live Service namely Photo Gallery which allows for thumbnail views of your uploaded images. This is a handy, unobtrusive feature.

What particularly interests me is the way in which you can share files per users. There are three main ways to share files (of any file type), by whitelisted contacts, by the entire Internet or “for your eyes only”. When specifying which contacts have access to your shared files (which you upload) you can add in a type of user privilege system. If you white-list a friend / user as a ‘reader’ they will only be able to view / read the files you have allowed them to see. They are unable to make any changes to your files unless you allow them ‘editor’ privileges.

This dramatically streamlined system allows a great deal of flexibility and I am impressed with how smooth the whole experience is. Microsoft seems to have really got this service right. I can think of a multitude of situations where this service could be useful, however I will not be using this service personally. For casual file sharing between contacts (who already have Live accounts from MSN) this could prove invaluable, but I will save a discussion of the cloud computing concept (and my reasoning behind this) for another post.