1989, Tim Berners-Lee with the help of Robert Cailliau used the ideas of hypertext and connected it with TCP & DNS and saw the opportunity for the internet. 12th November 1990 they put there plans forward to Mike Sendall there manager of CERN. Berners-Lee & Cailliau also designed the first web browser, editor and web server. 6 August 1991, the worlds first website was online it explained what the world wide web was and how you could make your own web server.

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”

Tim Berners-Lee Website - www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

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The first thing that surprised me is that the minimum specification of the product is 512mb of Ram and 60 GB hard drive compared to Windows Server 2003, although the minimum specification is 256mb Ram. I find this rather odd as the Windows Home Server is a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003. It won’t be doing as many tasks and providing as many services as the full blown Windows Server 2003 product does in large network environments.

I began the installation simply booting from the DVD. Windows doesn’t let you customise the partitions of the hard drive and it takes over not giving the user the choice were to install it. The first part of the installation the countdown timer was stuck on 51 minutes, no big issue but still a glitch. The installation took a lot longer than I thought I have done many installations of Windows Server with my job. This cut down version look a lot longer to install than the full product. Before the installation was finished it rebooted 4 or 5 times. What was little a frustrating.

Before I installed the product I read the Microsoft Windows Home Server reviewers guide written by Microsoft. The guide gave the impression the product is an all singing all dancing product. But I found the product to be a major letdown. The main feature of the product is to perform remote backups and allow these backups to be stored on the server. All the other features you can do on a standard Windows XP & Windows Vista computer.

The server allows you to share folder and apply permissions to the folders. For example you could allow Joe Bloggs have full access to a folder but do not allow Andrew Smith do anything to the same folder. You can do this in Windows Vista computer no not a Windows XP computer.

Another feature the product has is remote access. You can only use this if you have a static IP address and unfortunately most consumer broadband packages don’t have this. Most have a dynamic IP address, the IP dynamic address changes every time you connect to the internet or over a period of time. You can use a similar feature in Windows XP & Vista called remote desktop web connection with this you can control the computer from any remote computer. In fact you have flexibility with remote desktop web connection and do allows you to do more than the remote connection in the Windows Home Server.

On the whole the product is a letdown and to be honest I would not recommend this product to anybody. I would recommend using an existing Windows 2000, XP & Vista base unit as a server.

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Windows Vista

As mentioned the most publicised and most biggest release was Microsoft Windows Vista. There seems to be two groups of people with Vista, the lovers and the haters. Windows Vista has many exiting features including the gadget bar on the right hand side of the screen. There are many free gadgets on the internet and some included with Vista, you can get gadgets that include: Sticky Notes, Calendar, Traditional Clock, Weather for your local area, Photo gallery and many more. Another exiting new feature is the support for Microsoft xBox controllers. This new feature in Windows gives “hard core” gamers more enjoyment in playing there computer games. The controller in my opinion is more comfortable than using the conventional keyboard and mouse. The xBox controllers can also be used with the Windows Live maps found on www.live.com this also seems to be more convenient when searching the map but not something you would always use.

So far I have described Windows Vista as the all singing all dancing perfect operating system, but to be honest it is far from it. My personal opinion Windows Vista was released to early. The developers of Windows Vista were rushed to release the operating system that they have been working on for many years. As a result of this Windows Vista is pretty unstable with many users complaining they are receiving the “blue screen of death” a lot more frequent than any other release of Microsoft Windows excluding Windows ME. In the first half of 2008 Microsoft plan the release Service Pack 1 that will hopefully address these issues. Another problem with Windows Vista is that to run at its best it requires a more powerful, higher specification computer. I recommend nobody should not run Windows Vista if it doesn’t have a minimum of 2GB RAM.

Windows Home Server

The second major release from Microsoft this year is Windows Home Server, as you have already probably gathered it is designed for servers at home. I haven’t personally used this product as yet I will be trying it out in the next few weeks and will be making another blog post for this product shortly.

Click Here To View The Windows Home Server Blogg

Apple OS X Leopard

On the 26^th October 2007, 6:00pm OSX Leopard was released in the UK. I have seen an installation of this new product live on the internet. The install approximately took 45 minutes to complete, and the results of this are pretty impressive. Apple have improved the user interface of the product and made is more “friendly”. This I consider very important because this is what the majority of the public look for and if Apple want to make there products more popular this is what they needed to do. Again there is going to be another blog post aimed at this product including a step-by-step installation guide.

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A few weeks ago I was working as an ICT technician at a local computer centre aimed to increase the education of the children in the local town. The centre had around 120 Apple Mac computers between two buildings.  The last time I had used a Mac was around 8 years ago and I think the machine was running Mac OS 8 and to be honest I hated it. So when they gave me a Macbook Pro on my first day I thought “Blast a Mac, but look on the good site I can boot into Windows with Bootcamp”

I opened the machines box and unpacked everything placed it all on the desk. The first thing I then picked up was the charger. I like the idea that you can just put a plug on the unit that reduces the power and not have the long flex in the way. The unit also has two little pegs were you can wrap the wire round. Both features are very convenient. I then unpacked the laptop its self, well what can I say it certainly looked the part! Then I plugged in the charger and noticed it was a magnet, very convent if someone trips over your wire and pulls the laptop of the table.

So far I am very impressed with what I seen already, but little did I know I have not seen the full potential this machine has. Once the Mac was configured I started to use it. This was probably the most incredible laptop I have ever used and it was lightening fast. Mac OSX is fantastic it’s fast, clean easy to use and from what I can remember from OS 8 it has improved dramatically.

The Bootcamp application is a fantastic piece of software free from Apple that allows you to either boot in Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or Linux. This makes the Apple the master computer, the only computer that can run the 3 major type of operating system. This can eliminate the need for more than one computer for people who use more than one Operating System. For example a friend of my is a journalist and he carries two laptops with him a Mac & PC. If I he was to purchase an Intel Macbook or Macbook Pro he will only need to carry one laptop around appose to two.

If you would like to run Microsoft Windows in a Virtual Machine I would recommend “Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac” found at www.parallels.com. This product in my opinion runs much more smoothly than any other Virtual Machine software I tested including VMware Fusion. You can download free trails of both products so you can decide for yourself.

I found something what surprised me a little is that Microsoft Windows XP seems to me run much better on the Mac than the PC. I don’t know if this is me or if anyone else noticed this but it didn’t seem to crash as often or freeze up. Upon review the full technical specifications of the product the hardware used seems to be generally good durable hardware. Another factor could be how well the drivers were developed.

However, I there are a couple of setbacks with the product. I am not overly impressed with the Mac web browser Safari. I found it to be a little slow and not very user friendly. I knew the speed wasn’t due to the internet connectivity as the connection is 100meg. So instead of using Safari I decided to use Mozilla Firefox as an alternative what does the job fine. Something else I found a little annoying with the product was when you closed a product it seemed to be still running in the dock, to resolve this I used to force it to quit. If that was the right thing to do I am not sure.

In 4 weeks I come from totally hating Macs to loving everything about them. Unfortunately when I left I had to give the laptop back. The Mac grew on me in such a big way next year I will be purchasing my very own Macbook Pro.

If you haven’t tried a Mac before you should give them ago. Visit your local Apple store they will be more than willing to let you have a try on a display machine and I think that you will be pleasantly surprised. If you still find the Mac OSX software isn’t for you, I would still recommend buying the Mac and run Windows XP or Vista only, as mentioned I found that Microsoft Windows runs much better on Apple products.

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