Datz Not Good

August 16, 2009 | Comment

It’s been a while since I have written about Datz, the all you can eat music service. The last time I posted, back in May, it was to give a review based on my early findings looking for favourite music of family and friends. I found it to be hit and miss. I also bemoaned the clunky interface which was difficult and time consuming to use.

After reading the post Datz contacted me to say that a number of my points would be addressed “within the month or so”. That would have been sometime in June and it is … Read the rest

Getting Software onto your Netbook

August 7, 2009 | Comment

A friend of mine recently bought a netbook and was wondering how he could install software onto it that he had on CD.

There are a number of ways to achieve this: buy an external usb-CD/DVD drive to plug in, share the disk out from another machine and access across a network or create an image of the disk and transfer this to the netbook.

The former is probably the simplest solution but requires an additional outlay which, quite frankly, is probably not justifiable for the small number of times that you are going to have to do it. It … Read the rest

Services I use and Recommend

July 9, 2009 | 1 comment

In a previous post I talked about the freemium model and how it has affected my attitude to software purchases. I wanted to go through the services that I use regularly and pay for and highlight them.

This is obviously just a personal selection. Over the years I have tried out numerous applications that rival the one that finally made this list. In the end it is just personal preference as much as anything else. You may prefer something else but these are the ones that made me put my hand in my pocket and purchase a subscription

So in … Read the rest

Paid Apps and the Freemium model

July 1, 2009 | 2 comments

Over the years I have tended to avoid paying for applications because the up-front cost was prohibitive. So I either went without, used an older version that may have been given away with a magazine, or found an open source equivalent. However, I am now finding myself committing to a number of applications because of the small up-front cost and, quite often, after a period of using the service for free – the so call freemium model. The question is whether that is good value for money.

The applications below are all ones that I use on a regular basis, … Read the rest

Netbook as a eReader

June 2, 2009 | Comment

Always on the lookout for ways to extract the most from my Netbook and having eyed up the Sony’s eReader in Waterstones I thought I would see whether the former could act as the latter.

eBooks are all the rage at the moment, particularly in the states where Amazon’s Kindle seems to be doing a roaring trade. I have to say that I am not a particularly big reader and so to have the ability to carry and number of books around and dip in and out what the mood takes me appeals to me. Also I carry my netbook … Read the rest

Datz Music Lounge

May 2, 2009 | 4 comments

At the Gadget Show Live recently was a company called Datz who were offering unlimited music download for only £75 per year – discounted from £99 for the show. I love music and am a regular downloader and so this sounded like a great deal – it would pay for itself in less than 100 downloads at iTunes prices. It sounded like a deal that was too good to be true and so it turned out.

The way that the system works is that you are provided with a USB “dongle” and music can only be downloaded when this is … Read the rest

How to minimize iTunes to the Windows Taskbar

April 22, 2009 | Comment

I discovered something about iTunes today that I should have realised long ago must have existed – namely the ability to minimise it to the system tray. More than that it is also possible to put a little widget on the taskbar that allows you some simple control over the playing track and volume. It works perfectly and I wish I had found it years ago.

Full details on how to set this up can be found here.… Read the rest

Travellers Kit

April 15, 2009 | Comment

Being away from home there is some kit that has proved to be essential while travelling, which you can see on the left here. What is also interesting is the software that I have come to rely on over the last couple of weeks while away.

The most useful item by far has been my Netbook which has performed admirably allowing me to stay in touch with those at home (via Skype, Messenger and blogging via Windows Live Writer), provided entertainment (Spotify and Hulu) and also dealing with all the picture and videos that we have … Read the rest

Solving Problems with Windows Live Writer

April 12, 2009 | Comment

I have long been a fan of Windows Live Writer. I tend to start blog posts and capture bits of information before creating a fully formed article to post to one of my WordPress blogs (here or here). WLW lets me do this easily and with a little setup I can also share the draft posts between all my machines ensuring that the latest changes are available wherever I want to work.

While most of the time it works without fault there have been a couple of persistent problems that have come up when posting.Having now found … Read the rest

Does Free Lead to Buy?

November 20, 2008 | Comment

A fairly common practice for software providers is to provide older versions of their software for free as a taster to encourage you to go on and purchase the latest versions. This applies equally to online apps as it does to desktop – the delivery mechanism is different but the principal is the same. But does it work?

Reading a story on the web recently I was reacquainted with the Softmaker products which are equivalents of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The story pointed out that Softmaker were offering a copy of their previous version of TextMaker and PlanMaker for … Read the rest