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

8th November 2008

November 8, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 8th November 2008:

… Read the rest

25th October 2008

October 27, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 25th October 2008:

You can see the rest of my reading list here.… Read the rest

12th October 2008

October 13, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 12th October 2008:

You can see the rest of my reading list here. … Read the rest

More VMWare Woes

September 8, 2008 | Comment

Further to my previous post regarding getting VMWare Server up and running on Vista I spent a while over the weekend trying to migrate a Virtual PC image.

VMWare kindly provides a tool to carry out the conversion called VMWare Convertor. My first attempt was met with a message: “Unable to Determine Guest Operating System”. I had a root around for logs or an entry in the Event Viewer to shed more light but there was nothing to be found. However, help was at hand on the ‘net suggesting that an install of MS XML 4 might resolve the issue … Read the rest

VMWare on Vista

August 29, 2008 | Comment

Just got a new laptop running Windows Vista Business and while it hasn’t been as painful as I had expected (having 4gb of ram helps) I did spend all of Wednesday morning trying to resolve a problem with VMWare Server. Installation was fine but as soon as I tried to start an image the machine just died but there was obviously something going on as the hard disk light was working overtime.

A quick search (once I had regained control of my machine) showed that this is a known problem and is due to Windows trying to page out the … Read the rest

Windows Virtualisation with Sun VirtualBox

July 4, 2008 | Comment

Virtualisation has become all the rage recently. Running multiple instances of a system on a single piece of hardware is a very compelling proposition as everyone try’s to get more out of their investments. While virtualisation is typically applied to server environments there is no reason why it cannot be used on a suitably specified desktop PC or laptop.

In the past I have tried out virtualisation using with Microsoft’s VirtualPC or VMWare’s offering but I wanted to give VirtualBox, principally because it is open source and I knew that it was available for Mac so if I move … Read the rest

Xobni (L) LinkedIn

June 26, 2008 | Comment

There has been a new update to the Outlook companion Xobni that adds information from LinkedIn. It can now import pictures from the business networking site and also provides (brief) details on the selected individual, typically their title and company. This clearly only works where the email address that they have corresponded with you matches the one recorded in LinkedIn, nevertheless it is still a useful addition.

The Xobni blog also suggests that future updates will provide further integration between the two services when you are logged in but stops short of saying what this will provide.… Read the rest

Skydrive and Folder Share

May 8, 2008 | Comment

Microsoft has a couple of similar services that help you access your files (documents, pictures, mp3s etc). These are Skydrive (stupid name, I much preferred Windows Live Folders) which is an online document storage facility with 5gb of free space and FolderShare that allows folders between multiple machines to be synchronised. However, there is one area of clear overlap and that is in that they both allow you to share documents in a folder with multiple people – the difference being that with Skydrive they are held in the cloud and with FolderShare they are on you PC.

I have … Read the rest

Xobni – the Essential Outlook Plugin

April 22, 2008 | 2 comments

Over the last week I have been trying out a new beta plugin for Outlook called Xobni (Inbox backwards) that helps you make sense of the mess that is your email.

Xobni appears as a column down the right hand side of Outlook that displays information about the sender of the currently selected email. At the top is a picture placeholder which is a little redundant in my case as I don’t collect pictures of my contacts. Below this is details of your email activity with this individual and their rank.

The next block has telephone number details (if available) … Read the rest