Ever wanted Firefox to blend in seamlessly with Vista or Windows 7’s aero theme? Now you can in the shape of the ‘All-Glass Firefox mod, based on Glasser’.

Firefox 3.5 users can download from here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/ga-IE/firefox/addon/12181

Firefox 3.1 users can use this previous version:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7336

If you couple this add on with ‘Personal Menu’ you can make firefox look really nice you can download personal menu from:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3895

I promised I would do a video of how fast your laptop can go with a good SSD drive. Here it is…

Again, does it count when I don’t actually get the thing out of the box?!  It’s a processor and a heatsink – what’s the point?!  This is going into my new HTPC build.  It’s the perfect CPU – 2.6ghz so plenty of horsepower for Vista HP for now, and Windows 7 once it’s stable enough for the living room.  The other benefit of course is that it’s 45nm, so runs very cool, sips lightly at the electricity, and requires very little cooling (therefore very quiet).

Dan

New background spotted on the installation process in Windows 7.0 Build 7057.

Sorry no posts recently – too much fun playing the SSD!  Lots of unboxing to come though…

It occurred to me the other day when I was testing the SSD that the most significant element of the boot up period was actually the Dell initialising it’s BIOS, and obviously that time is a constant on the boot whatever the hardware attached.  So I thought I’d time it, and it turns out that the BIOS takes a full 16 seconds to initialise!

That means the final scores on the doors are:

Vista 64 + Seagate Barracuda: boot up time (excluding BIOS) = 3 minutes 0 seconds

Windows 7 64 + Samsung SSD: boot up time (excluding BIOS) = 0 minutes 25 seconds

Does make me wonder if other motherboards get through this quicker – anyone have any other experiences they’d like to share?  Pop them in the comments.

Dan

Initial reactions are - it’s amazing…

My brand new Dell Studio XPS i7 is a beast, but I suspect it has a rather cheap and cheerful hard drive.  It’s never been that quick to do things, which is rather surprising given it’s a Core i7 with Vista 64bit (SP2RC) and 6gb RAM!  The drive is a Seagate Barracuda, but with Vista it just isn’t that quick:

Vista 64 cold boot: 3m16s

Of course, that’s with all my apps, Antivirus and MS Mesh installed.

I installed the Samsung 64GB SSD, and Windows 7 (build 7048) 64bit, and the result was:

Win7 64 cold boot: 41s

Wow! Of course that’s a clean install of a new OS, but the difference is significant.

It’s worth adding that the install takes up 18.4GB on the disk, and that the installation took 18m48s in total.

More to come I’m sure tomorrow, when more hardware arrives

Dan

Does it reallycount as an ‘inboxing’ if all it comes in is a Jiffy Bag and antistatic wrap?!

I picked up this Pinnacle 7010ix dual 2x DVB-T / 2x DVB-S tuner from an Ebay seller, as they don’t seem to be on the market any more.  In fact, it seems to be quite the sleeper card.  The only decent information about this card seems to come from an AVForums post.  Pinnacle seem to have forgotten that they ever sold it on their website.

I’m excited, because in Windows 7 this card should give me four tuners, including the opportunity to take HD from Freesat, all for free without any subscriptions.  It is also one of the few multi-tuner cards that doesn’t suffer from incompatibility with the currently available builds of Win7. Given that it was also cheaper (£37) than my original dual Hauppauge Win Nova-T, then it’s win/win situation!

More information as the new HTPC gets built.

Dan