Valters Bože

Today I got myself a new desktop PC. Since I had a lot of hard drives and a few CD/DVD roms, I ordered a PC setup with smallest HDD available and skipped DVD/RW drive. Once I got the PC I found out the Gigabyte motherboard had no IDE ports. So I searched for alternate installation methods of Windows. I had tried installing from uSB flash drive before but didn’t succeed, the methods were too complicated and with lots of issues. Today I found a nice utility – Novicorp WinToFlash – and it works like a charm!
Dowload here: http://wintoflash.com/
Install WinToFlash, select folder or CD drive where your windows installation files are and create thumb drive with a few clicks. Plug your USB drive in the destination PC, choose “Text mode” on first attempt, install, then choose “GUI mode / continue setup / 1st start” on two next boots. Done!

I just wrote a post at information security awareness blog about anti-virus comparison test at virus.gr. It had some suspicious results that were extremely positive for Kaspersky competition (Norton at #22). On 2nd place was Active Virus Shield by AOL which is the same engine of Kaspersky`s, but uses AOL brand and is completely frēe! Might be a good thing to those that have difficulties choosing among freeware anti-virus software. I`ll give it a try tomorrow and if it will get one nasty virus out of my laptop (DrWeb doesnt detect it, AntiVir! detects it but doesnt cure), I`ll post it..

Microsoft has started a new service – Soapbox. It`s a YouTube future follower, as Soapbox is still in beta and available to limited invitations (you can go to the site and request an invitation). Funny, that once again Microsoft announces a product way before it`s ready, and once again only a product that follows some other market leader. For example, previous it was (maybe still they hope) for Adobe Flash, which Microsoft tries to compete with its Avalon products. Check out – on soapbox.msn.com the video player is in Flash! I have no idea why is Microsoft spending so much money on probably worthless products, though they still keep a big part of internet users on MSN.
Just my 2c.

Today I atteded a presentation in Tallin about Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. Both were beta previews. Of course, the presentation went a bit off the road of presenting the Windows features and more on advertising Avalon – Microsofts web and application development suites. I got Windows Vista beta2 and MS Office 2007 installations with product numbers (i`m sure they will not work for final version). Everything seems to based on XML or XAML and base everything on something called Windows Presentation Foundation: