Edit: It was a great bike but a touch on the small side for my 6’2″ frame.  It has been sold and I’m now in the market for a 2012 bike.

Here is a screenshot using the GTK-compatible theme.

I’ve had ONE crash so far, but when I restarted Chromium, it picked up where I left off without a hitch.

Yes, I know it’s basically Windows Vista under the hood, but I’m most excited by the hood itself.  The new taskbar is a stroke of genius in my opinion and is possibly the biggest  innovation in Windows since the Start button was introduced.

Performance is better than Vista SP1 in my meagre Sempron 2800+ box (I’m hoping for a replacement soon) and I think this is partly down to the new memory management scheme.  From what I’ve read and seen on Channel 9, the kernel developers changed how Win7 loads services so rather than loading them all up at start-up, they are loaded more on demand.  This makes for a snappier overall feel and faster boot.

At the moment I’m just trying it out at home, but I have switched full-time to 7 for my work.  I’m a web developer by trade and I haven’t had any problems doing C#/ASP.net development on 7 with Visual Studio 2008.  In fact the mere inclusion of IIS7 makes developing web applications easier.

Once I have backed up all my data, I will seriously consider a switch back to Win7.  After all the bad press about Vista, I expect Microsoft are hoping 7 will be their lucky number.

Overall, I’m very pleased with Hardy.  The performance on my meagre hardware is streets ahead of Vista (and I thought THAT was good).  I have Compiz set up nicely and it just hums along.  Like last time, I have VirtualBox running with XP so I can log into work.

Click the thumbnail to see my current desktop.

So I sought out the grips online and found a local shop that had them at a good price.  I put my order in and they arrived the next day.  I ordered the large size because I have pretty big hands.  With unpadded gloves (Fox Digits), they fit perfectly.  The large rubber blade out the back supports the meaty base of my palm and flexes nicely to cushion my weight.  I bought the GR2 model which has the integrated bar-end.  The grips are a lock-on type so they can be removed and repositioned easily.  Correct positioning is crucial to these grips working.  In fact, Ergon recommend that you take an allen key with you when you go for your first few rides so you can adjust the position.

I’ve managed one ride on them so far and although it was a short trip, they definitely felt better than my previous grips.  I feel more connected to the bike – in the way that clipless pedals feel over flats.

Overall, I’m very impressed.

Firstly there was the data loss I incurred from doing “something” to my /home partition.  Thankfully I only lost a handful of files, but it made me nervous.  I realised that although I can find my way round Linux, if things go really pear-shaped, I’m completely lost.  This is not the case with Windows because I know it so well.

Secondly, we have the Microsoft Launchwave 2008 events here in Wellington, NZ a few weeks back and we all walked away with a copy of Vista 32 Bit w/ SP1.  Feeling all charged up on Microsoft, I installed Vista again and settled back in to the bosom that I know so well.

Then I started reading about people using the 64-bit version of Vista and saying how much better it was.  I was skeptical, but on digging some more, it piqued my curiosity.  I have a 64-bit processor, so why not use it?

I downloaded the 64-bit version from MSDN and installed it to a test partition – after all, if I didn’t have native 64-bit drivers for my hardware, it would be dead in the water.  All of my hardware except my wifi card and on-board sound were recognised out of the box.  Luckily, my on-board LAN was functional, so a quick trip to Windows Update pulled down the wifi and sound drivers and I was fully installed.

I had read somewhere that running 32-bit software on 64-bit Windows was seamless and I would have to agree with that statement.  Most of my software is 32-bit and it has all installed and run without a hitch.  I gather this wasn’t the case with Windows XP 64, so Microsoft have obviously put a lot of effort into compatibility.  In fact, if you didn’t know it, you couldn’t tell the difference.

Having SP1 already integrated into the install was a nice addition too.  In operation, the OS is snappy and the hard drive light only goes when it’s needed.  There is not the endless chugging that other people report.  I may just be lucky with my hardware.

Which brings me to the ultimate question.  Why bother with 64-bit if most applications are 32-bit.  Well, for me it’s about “potential”.  By running Vista 64-bit, I can run the whole range of 32-bit apps out there but also any new 64-bit ones that come on the scene.

UPDATE #1:  I’ve been running Vista x64 for a few weeks now and it has yet to give me ANY problems with it’s 64 bit-ness.

After the dead-simple installer had done its business on my drive, I rebooted to the Grub and let it go. At the desktop, I was pleased to verify that all my hardware was working as expected – even my desktop wireless card (see my Level One review for details). A notification popped up saying I need to enable restricted drivers for my NVidia GF6200. One click and a reboot later, I had Compiz running sweetly on my desktop. I couldn’t find the application to tweak Compiz, so I did a quick google and found the apt-get command to install it. All good.

Because I use Gmail for all my email consolidation needs, I use Firefox and GmailChecker to read and monitor my inbox. Firefox needs no introduction – it’s the same on all platforms, but GmailChecker is my preferred Gmail applet. It runs in the system tray and pops up a useful panel when new mail arrives. This panel also lets me perform actions (ope, mark as read and delete) on the new mail without having to fire up Firefox. This makes it simple to delete all the watchlist reminders that my sons put on lego sets on TradeMe!

I’m still undecided as to which the best music player is. Rhythmbox is the default and looks the most like iTunes. Exaile is very good too, but its playlist system is confusing. Double-clicking on an album or radio station opens a new playlist tab. Why? I also love me some online radio, so I installed StreamTuner which can list lots of online streams and allow you to launch them in your player of choice.

I investigated the various dock options that are available and have settled on Avant Windows Navigator. I’ve tried Cairo Dock as well, but Avant just seems to sit better with me.

All this Ubuntu love is good and all, but when I have to log into our work VPN, what do I do? VirtualBox to the rescue! To be honest, VirtualBox is the one killer app that has convinced me that I can jump 100% to Ubuntu from now on. I read up about virtualisation options such as VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox and settled on the latter for a few reasons. For one, it’s a German company and they always make quality stuff, right? Secondly, it’s 100% free and there is even an open source version (minus a few features). Finally, my XP virtual machine runs so fast, you’d think it was native! This last point really makes virtualisation a joy to use. I can have my VPN connection terminal server connection to work in my XP machine, and easily switch over to my other desktops to do other tasks. All with no perceptible slowdown.

So all in all, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with Ubuntu 7.10 so far. Installing, updating and removing apps is simple. The desktop experience is clean and fully customisable. My only step now is to wipe my Vista drive (40GB) and copy my installation to the drive from its current partition. One command ought to do it…..

UPDATE:

Actually it was more than one command – about 6 or 7 in total. But I am now 100% Linux. I had to borrow a portable hard drive from work to transfer my stuff off the big drive in a “Towers of Hanoi” fashion. But finally I have Ubuntu on the 40GB drive and my “/home” partition on the 120GB drive. One interesting thing I found was that the built-in NTFS support in Ubuntu doesn’t seem to recognise changes in free space. Or perhaps the space isn’t free, but deleted stuff isn’t actually trashed, just moved/hidden? Either way, it was odd to have moved all my stuff off the 120GB drive and be told that it had 16GB free! Some more investigation is needed, I think.

There were a few niggles which I managed to solve.

The first was putting the PC to sleep at night.  Under XP I could just press the Sleep key on my keyboard and it would take a few seconds and then sleep.  Under Vista, it would take a few seconds and then restart.  I did some Googlage and found that adjusting the power settings on my USB mouse helped it stay asleep.

The second niggle was more of a preference thing.  Again, under XP I have moved “My Documents”, “My Music” etc to a separate partition so that I could reinstall my OS at will without affecting my data.  To do this under XP, I user the TweakUI PowerToy to change the “Special Folders” entries.  Under vista this is much simpler now.  I just  right-click-dragged everything from my personal folder to the root of D:.  After some chugging as it shifted about 20GB of data, my personal folders now all resided on the D: drive.  Safe.  I now have D:\Music, D:\Documents etc which is simple and it works.  it would be nice if you could tell Vista to store ALL of the user data in a new location but this may come in a tweaking program somewhere.

One other niggle is that whether or not you use transparency in Aero, the goddamn task bar changes shade depending on what windows you have open.  For example, I use two monitors and the second, smaller one often has a maximised Media Player 11 window open.  By maximising it, the task bar goes solid even though it’s not on the same screen!  I tried other combinations of colours, transparency and Aero (on and off) and they all seemed to behave with odd results.  However, I finally settled on a solution that pleases me.  I use the Frost theme with transparency and have a very dark background with black under the task bar.  This means the task bar never appears to change colour or transparency regardless of what the windows are doing.

Aside from these niggles, I am pleased with Vista now.  It’s clear that the windows updates have delivered some improvements from my earlier explorations.  Vista is subtle in its effects on how you use the PC.  I recently went back to using XP for a bit and found myself hankering to get back to Vista.

So, unless I find something seriously wrong with Vista that prevents me doing what I want, it’s here to stay.

The Taho shoes is a mountain bike shoe inspired by hiking boots and as such it has a slightly flexier sole than a hardcore shoe.  The area in front of the cleats is also flexy which makes walking in them extremely easy.

I had a bit of trouble finding some in my clydesdale-size 47, but one shop had them so I went to try them on.  They are extremely comfortable to talk around in and I knew they were the ones as soon as I put them on.

Once I was home, I excitedly put them on, got into my riding gear and headed off.  20Km later I was home again feeling very good.

One thing I will say though is use these shoes with either toe clips or clipless pedals.  They are useless for platforms because the sole, while being flexier, still slips and slides all over platforms.  My first ride in them was wet and I didn’t have much grip on the pedals.  By the way, look for an upcoming review of Shimano M520 clipless pedals.

Bottom line: an awesomely comfortable shoe for all mountain bike riding which you can wear to the café afterwards and not look like a try-hard.