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Photos: Packard Bell's new line-up
Here are some images of the new PCs on show by Packard Bell at its big re-launch event today. These were snapped by camera phone, so apologies for the blurry quality of some of the images.
First up are the new netbooks, with two examples of the dot s model with a 10.6in display nearest to the camera, while the third is the dot m with a larger 11.6in screen.
The dot s is available in both black and red colour schemes, the latter shown in the second shot.
White is also a colour that Packard Bell is keen on, with a nod to Apple's influential MacBook models. This shot shows one of the new EasyNote models, while the shot alongside shows three more on display at the event.
This rather indistinct shot of a desktop shows Packard Bell's compact iMedia chassis design, which brings out many of the ports users will need to access to the top front of the case. There is also a recess on top to hold external drives, as you can see.
The final image is of Packard Bell's iPower system aimed at gamers.
These systems will be available from June in retail outlets only.
Virgin.com goes social with new site
Virgin has been showing off its new Virgin.com web site. The firm has jumped firmly on the social media bandwagon with a host of new functionality designed to create a more two way relationship between the firm and its customers, and facilitate customer-to-customer dialogue.
At the Thinking Digital Conference in Gateshead, Virgin's head of online marketing, Alex Hunter, told attendees all about it. Although, sadly, we did not get the chance to play around with the site first hand, the emphasis appears to be very firmly on creating "a content and community platform" to put power back in the hands of the customers. Now the idea of a company allowing its customers to have conversations with itself and its other customers terrifies some firms and is usually botched by others, so it will be interesting to see the finished result from Virgin when it launches in a few weeks.
But from what we saw, they're ticking most social media boxes fairly reasonably. There are capabilities for users to upload content, there is a social currency engine, which awards users points according to their level of participation on the site (which presumably will be redeemable for goodies), and there is a recommendations engine, which calculates which pages people are saying good things about and makes appropriate suggestions.
Virgin is also extending the platform via Facebook Connect, allowing users to send information in real-time back to their Facebook profiles, and it is also talking to the Open ID guys. But the site will definitely seek to "augment not replace" users' favourite social networking sites, said Hunter. Interestingly, one semi-disgruntled spectator asked Virgin whether it was a good idea to make the site so obviously yoof-oriented.
"When you give people the opportunity to interact with a brand they will take it," said Hunter. We shall see.
Working with PDF the easy way
There are numerous alternatives to Acrobat for creating files in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), but most of these tend to focus on simply converting a file to PDF from some other format, such as Microsoft Word.
What happens if you're not an expert, but you want to change something inside a PDF or add a page from a separate document?
I've been trying out gDoc Fusion, a recently launched tool that is designed with this in mind.
The user interface presents just four main options, selected by dragging a Word, Excel, PS, PDF or PowerPoint document onto them.
Drag the file to Quick Convert, and you can change it to PDF, XPS or Word format. Drag it to Page View, and you can change the text by highlighting it and typing replacement text into a dialog box, then saving it to any of the formats just listed.
Document View lets you open several documents at once and simply drag-and-drop pages to re-order them or insert them from one document into another. Yet again, you can save the final result as PDF, XPS or a Word document.
The final option is Flick View, designed to let you quickly skim through a file visually to find the information you are looking for.
As usual, it also puts an option on the menu bar of applications such as Word to let you save the file you're working on as PDF or XPS as well.
While gDoc Fusion isn't free, it does seem to make creating PDF documents much easier than getting to grips with Acrobat.
Hands on: Using Windows XP Mode in Windows 7
The Windows XP Mode that Microsoft is planning for Windows 7 does allow you to access applications straight from the Start menu as promised, and it also enables you to save files straight to the hard drive of the Windows 7 host, I can confirm.
However, in my tests at least, performance was not entirely impressive, with a distinct lag between keys being pressed and the application inside the virtual machine responding.
Windows XP Mode, for those that don't know, is a tool designed to help users moving to Windows 7 if they have any compatibility issues with applications they are currently running.
Still currently in beta, it sets up a virtual Windows XP environment using Microsoft's Virtual PC software.
Users can then install applications inside the virtual machine, which will be available from the Start menu of Windows 7 afterwards.
The first hurdle a prospective user faces is hardware requirements. Not only does Windows XP Mode require at least 1.25GB of memory (2GB preferred), but it will only run on systems with hardware acceleration for virtualisation. This means you must have an Intel processor with VT-x extensions or AMD processor with AMD-V technology. These must also be enabled in the system's Bios firmware.
I tested Windows XP Mode on a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which was already being used as a testbed for the Windows 7 Beta. This has a Core 2 Duo L7100 processor that supports Intel's VT-x, but I had to enable this in the Bios.
After installing the new Windows 7 Release Candidate, I downloaded and installed the Windows XP Mode installer, which turned out to be about 445MB in size. Users can also now download it here.
After installation, a new Virtual PC folder appeared in the Start menu, but clicking on the 'Virtual Windows XP' option revealed that Virtual PC itself had yet to be installed. Fortunately, this was automatically downloaded, and a short while later I was fixed up with a pre-configured XP environment.
At this stage, the virtual machine has no applications other than those that come with Windows XP. To install applications, you need to fire up the virtual machine in its normal mode, where the XP screen appears as a window on the Windows 7 desktop (see screenshot).
As you can see, the XP machine automatically maps to the drives available on the Windows 7 machine, allowing you to install software by DVD or hard disk, or by downloading from the Internet.
For test purposes, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the OpenOffice.org suite in my virtual machine, then closed it down. As you can see from the screenshot alongside, the applications now appear in a sub menu on the Windows 7 Start menu.
Clicking an application name starts the virtual machine in the background, but all you will see is the application itself, as if it was running natively on Windows 7. The giveaway is that the application window retains the look and feel of XP, as you can see in the final screenshot below.
The good part about Windows XP Mode is that you can create a document, as I did in OpenOffice Writer, and save it to the My Documents folder on the Windows 7 machine along with all my other files.
The downside is the virtual machine's performance. I found that as I typed text into Writer, nothing would happen for several seconds, whereupon all the characters I had typed suddenly splurged across the screen in one go. This is quite off-putting, and I would hope that Microsoft will address this before the final release is made available.
If you have an application that just won't run under Windows 7, then this solution will get you by, although I personally have found very few applications that don't work with the new platform. However, it remains to be seen whether end users will be satisfied with this. Waiting for an updated version of your application is still likely to be the best option.
