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Today we were quite industrious. There were no shops open, and the documentary channels were debating Christianity. So how did I spend my Good Friday public holiday? Moving furniture!

Given the recent purchase of my television and its connection to the Satellite STB being in a different room to my computer, I made the decision that regardless of the house being on the market, I want my computer to be near my new television.

After talking to the husband, and dragging him away from the reglious debates happening on the History Channel, he helped me move everything down here to the back bedroom.

So here I am with my Laptop, connected to a Hyundai 19″ LCD and my desktop connected to my sexy AOC 17″ DVI monitor I got for Christmas one year.

What does one do when they have a collection of LCD screens? Try and do something different on each! One thing I wanted to do was sort out the wallpaper on my Laptop, which is connected to the 19″ LCD. Now my laptop is a 16:9 and the Hyundai monitor is 4:3 so everything looks a little odd.

After a quick google, I came across a really awesome utility called DisplayFusion. This handy piece of freeware allows you to have different wallpapers on each monitor while still connected to the one computer. You can also adjust the opacity of your task bar in Vista (assuming you pay for the pro version)

The bit I like about DisplayFusion is there is flexibility. With Windows 7 you have the ability to have changing wallpapers and this can be done in Vista with DisplayFusion, not just from your hard drive, but it can retrieve images from Flickr or vladstudio.com

Other options include changing the desktop to greyscale or sepia tones as well. So how do I rate this nifty software – I give it full marks!

So since I purchased a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007, I stumbled on this Office Live Workspace concept Microsoft currently have in Beta. To be honest, I haven’t heard much about it and thought this would be an opportune time to investigate further. You can read the press release here.

Like most people, I carry around a USB flash drive which has my personal files I take between the office and home, a few pictures etc. It’s the convenience of it all really. Lately I had thoughts of using Windows Home Server just to access my files from wherever I might be, but this looks like the next logical step in my data portability wrangle. I’ve had panic attacks when I can’t find my flash drive. It has my household budgets for the next two months at least on it, the same kind of panic attack when you have to go a day without a cellphone. You know what I mean.

But as I delve deeper into this, it’s part of the phenomenon called Cloud Computing – which has industry leaders like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on its bandwagon. Basically, it’s a virtualisation of services, most well known being Facebook, Flickr and Chrome.

With Microsoft Office Live Workspace, you have 5GB of personal storage space. That’s slightly larger than your average flash drive size. They tout that you don’t need Office installed on your PC and you can access your files from the poolside (Effects of Chlorine on Laptops?) It’s your virtual file cabinet, create workspaces and store and collaborate on school work or personal files. To share files, all you need is an email address and Workspace ensures that you are all collaborating on the most current document, so you don’t risk jeopardizing your project with out of date files or missed emails.

Office Live Workspace

If using a web browser isn’t your thing, and you have Office installed on your PC, I recommend getting the Live Update so that you can access your Workspace from your native Office applications without having to launch a browser. Installing this update can be a small drama. Last night on my Acer Laptop running Vista Home Premium and over a wireless lan connection, it took me about 30 minutes to get there as Vista requires an additional update before it can install the Live Update for Workspace.

How do I rate Office Live Workspace? I think the concept is fantastic, but overall, I haven’t gone head first into this service yet, but I don’t think it will be long before the other average internet users will catch on to this either. Personally, it will take me a while to get everything on my Workspace that I like, but don’t feel limited. You can put PDF files and images on there too. Sayonara Flash Drive.

But in this day and age of computing, we are not limited to Microsoft Products and as I mentioned earlier, the other major player in the dark skies of Cloud Computing is Google. I would hazard a guess and say that everyone knows Google, has considered having a Gmail address at some stage. But Google offers other services too. They have Blogger, Google Apps, Latitude, Docs, Sites, Calendar and Picasa. Of course, whichever cloud you choose to follow to, there is plenty written comparing Microsoft’s Cloud to the Google Cloud. Maybe I will look at Google over the Easter Weekend when I don’t have much planned.

For all those of you – like me – who couldn’t find the answer of how to dual boot XP with W7, heres the skinny. I have managed this and havent found a single clue on any forums.

1. Back up and create restore disks of your main OS (XP Pro SP3 in my case)
2. Burn whichever ISO you’re going to use to a bootable DVD.
3. Install separate HDD in PC (I installed a 2nd 80GB Sata drive)
4. Boot into XP. Still boots? Good! Check drive there. Yes? Even Betterer.
5. Shut down and boot off DVD
6. Follow the prompts. Select the drive you wish to install W7 on.
7. Follow more prompts. When rebooting for the 2nd time, remove DVD from drive and at the boot selector – Select Windows 7. It will restart again.
8. Repeat above.

I can’t remember past here, its a bit of a blur. I have never run Vista on this machine, so direct comparisons on this hardware are not really fair. But my initial impressions are excellent and I am impressed thus far with the themes, GUI and speed of which the machine runs. I also enjoy the lack of interruption from the UAC that youget with Vista. However, it is now 11.30pm and my shoulder is killing me. I will end this entry with a screen shot of my Windows 7 desktop as it stands tonight!

Virgin W7 Desktop

So I thought I would share tonight exactly what this compaq is. Obviously, its a Pressario and has a black case.

Athlon XP 2500+ (1.83ghz), 1gb ram, 40GB HDD (5400RPM) and CD-RW. Nothing fantastic, but Linux seems to enjoy it.

The main desktop is:-

Athlon 64 X2 2.4ghz , Asus M2N-VA HDMI Mobo, Asus GeForce 9400GT 512mb DDR2 Video Card, 4GB DDR2-800mhz RAM with 1x80GB 7200RPM Sata Drive, 1x 250GB 7200RPM IDE Drive and 1x Lightscribe DVD-RW.

Right now I am researching how to do a dual boot of Windows 7 and Windows XP Pro SP3 from seperate hard drives. Just from what I have been hearing, I think I will upgrade the main desktop and two laptops to W7 upon final release and add a dual boot for linux as well.

If anyone has any suggestions for a good dual-boot setup for XP Pro SP3 and W7 using two seperate HDD’s – please comment and let me know!