Tag Archives: windows

My first impressions of Windows Vista

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My action pack update came in a few weeks back with the Vista upgrade disks and today I had a spare few mins so figured I’d do a practice upgrade*. So I copy one of the Win XP testing VMWare virtual machines boot it up and over lunch install Putty, Photoshop CS2, Fireworks, my PHP IDE, the MySQL GUI that I use and a little screen ruler app; not everything that I use but the stuff that I need to be productive. I then run the upgrade disc.

I get asked to enter serial number and then there are two options “Upgrade” or “Custom (advanced)” which is basically install from scratch. Unfortunately “upgrade has been disabled” because I don’t have 9.6 GB free on the partition (I give the VM 10GB as I thought it’d be enough for testing) so I click custom where I get to see the partition information, unfortunately from this route it says that I cannot continue because it needs 6.4GB free and I only have 5.3. After this message it also says “To make changes to partitions, restart windows from the installation disc”

So I do this (after some VMWare BIOS shenanigans getting it to boot from DVD) and eventually get the serial number entry box again. This time after typing it in I’m told that my serial number is only suitable for upgrading so I should load up windows and run the setup program again!

Gah! I’ll try again with a larger VM Instance the next time I have a ‘spare’ hour.

*For the record I’m not normally this anal, but I can’t afford to be without a computer for a day if it screws up.

Internet Explorer developer toolbar

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Microsoft have brought out a toolbar for web developers:

The IE Developer Toolbar provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages.

  • Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
  • Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
  • Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
  • View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
  • Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
  • Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
  • Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
  • Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
  • Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
  • Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
  • Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en

It sounds remarkably like the Firefox web developer extension which any self respecting developer will already be using.

To be fair to Microsoft they did have something similar, but not in any way near as powerful, a few years back for IE 4.