Ever since I installed Windows Vista and discovered that it didn’t like to play nice with my video games, despite me running a fairly capable set-up (AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2Gb RAM, 7800GTX graphics card), I’ve just slipped into my “comfortable old slippers” Windows XP partition and played them there.

This week, however, perhaps freshly fueled by my installation of Bioshock which ran (well, hobbled) like a spluttering, stuttering mutant — and annoyance with World of Warcraft playing at between 5-20fps — I decided to find an answer. And I did! At least in part.

After much trial and error I fixed World of Warcraft to run again between 35-50fps at 1900×1200 under Vista by doing the following:

Right clicking on the application icon and choose “Properties”, then clicking the “Compatibility” tab.

Enabling the check boxes next to: “Disable virtual themes”, “Disable desktop composition” and “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” and Windows turns off Aero and all that other resource-hungry GUI crap while you’re running the game.

Running it in “Windows XP compatibility mode” didn’t seem to make any difference.

With that fixed, I decided to take a look at Bioshock, which really didn’t play nice in Vista at all with the audio stuttering and the high resolution texture maps not showings up — no matter what resolution I ran it at or whether I chose the lowest quality settings despite it running perfectly happily in XP on the same machine. I’d assumed that there was something buggy with the on-board Realtek ‘97 audio drivers or the nVidia video drivers but, with my newly fixed World of Warcraft behind me, I thought I’d have a go at trying to get it to run properly as well.

Firstly, I changed the compatibility options as I did with WoW, above, but this didn’t seem to make much of a difference — if anything at all. Then I remembered reading something about disabling vsync when trying to fix WoW. I didn’t work for WoW, but I thought I’d try turning it off in Bioshock. I also forced it to load in DirectX 9 mode by using “-dx9″… and it all seemed to make a slight difference. Not enough to make it playable yet, but definitely an improvement.

Still… one out of two isn’t bad.

Update: I managed to improve game play in Bioshock further by using an X-Fi sound card instead of on-board sound upgrading my processor to an Opteron 180. I’d imagine that I’d be able to play it full-screen at 1920×1200 with maximum settings if I had an 8800 graphics card — or at least one with more than 256Mb of RAM. Half-Life 2 already runs much more happily.

Update 2: This Bioshock Tweak Guide might also help you gain a couple more FPS.

It’s been over a week since I posted anything? Doesn’t time fly when you’re trying to do two full-time jobs at once?!

Anyway, I just stumbled upon this fantastic Facebook App. I’m a big fan of technicolor visual representations of stuff and this makes just that out of my friends — at least the ones that are on Facebook anyway. What was most interesting to me was to see how segregated my friends are — different groups of friends had never met or been involved with other groups.

If you’re signed into Facebook, go to the Friend Wheel app page to check it out for yourself. (via Aleks‘ Flickr stream)

LEGO have a rather cool bit of software available on their site (for Windows and Mac OS X) called the LEGO Digital Designer (currently version 2.1) which allows you to mess about with all the bricks and other weird pieces that they have in their catalogue and make your own vehicle, house, town or whatever crazy idea from your imagination.

When you’re happy with it, you can check the price and, if you haven’t fainted from the price, buy it online to make at home. Fantastic!

Ever wondered where the hell the day went? Now you can become your own “big brother” and track your every move. If you dare!

Slife observes your every interaction with applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and keeps tracks of all web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

For Mac OS X. (via swissmiss)

WeFi is a new collaborative wifi mapping tool that records open wifi networks that your computer can “see” and uploads them to a central database. Anyone can then browse their website for access points anywhere in the world and see them on a Google-powered map. The ultimate goal is to “make open Wi-Fi act more like a wireless infrastructure that can compete with 3G networks, except freely created and shared by the users.”

Wonderful idea, though their site seems to think I’m in Slough. (via Boing Boing)

Disregarding all the other pointless versions, Windows Vista Utimate Upgrade edition:

Amazon.com: $249.99 (£127.13)
Amazon.co.uk: $466.06 (£236.99)

Er, Microsoft. We’re not stupid! How about you come back here and re-price the EU editions of your (already overpriced) new operating system? Thanks.

I’ve been using the DigiGuide TV guide software for years and was about to download install it on the, less capable, PC in the lounge to let me know what movies are showing on TV in the evening when I get home from work when I noticed they now had something called DigiGuide Lite.

Digiguide Lite is an application which lives in the system tray and updates automatically to show what’s on TV in the UK, regionally adjusted, over the next few hours. One of the best features, for me at least, is the ability to filter shows by type. This means that I can see when I get home from work, at a glance, what movies are on TV that evening. Perfect! The best part? It’s free!

I was recently looking for a simple solution for handing day-to-day tracking of quotes and invoices. I mentioned Mark Boulton’s upcoming Flow web app which enters Beta very soon, but I also re-discovered Side Job Track. It’s changed quite a bit since I last saw it and I’ve decided that I’m going to go ahead and use it for now — it seems that this app (of the ones currently available) is best suited to my present needs.

It’ll be interesting to compare the two upcoming apps, Pro Job Track (Side Job Track for SMEs) and Flow compare when they’re both released. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on them both.

Now, all I have to do is decide between QuickBooks and MYOB to handle my accounting… and find some time to do some design around all this paperwork!

Engadget has a little article on the glitches within the newly released iTunes 7. I have, so far, only encountered a couple:

Firstly, scratchy playback. This I managed to fix by opening up Quicktime preferences and turning off safe mode, which had inexplicably turned itself on after upgrading.

Secondly, and more annoyingly, I store some of my older music tracks on an external network drive. When I used to fire up iTunes 6 with my iPod installed and had forgotten to turn the drive on, iTunes would happily skip those tracks. They’d still be listed in iTunes and on my iPod, but they just wouldn’t update. Which was all good.

Now, with v7, if I want start iTunes with my iPod connected I have to make sure I’ve started up my network drive, opened the drive in Windows Explorer and then start iTunes… or it’ll just hang using 100% CPU. I have to then force quit the application and the helper before starting it up again.

I hope they fix that bug soon!

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s been announced by Apple this afternoon:

• iPod beefed up to feature 30Gb and 80Gb models.
• iPod Nano gets new, uglier, mini-style design. Presumably, as Grid212 mentioned, because of the problem the original had with scratches. It’s also been bumped up to 2Gb, 4Gb and 8Gb models and has a brighter screen.
• iPod Shuffle gets smaller and restyled to match the new Nano.
• iTunes 7: Movie downloads, Cover Flow (flip through your DVD and CD covers), updated interface and Automatic Album Art (which sounds rather scarily Big Brother: “As long as you have an iTunes Store account, iTunes will automatically fetch available album art for any CD you imported to iTunes.”).
• Downloadable games for iPod like Tetris, Pac-Man and Bejeweled.
• Movie downloads. Still 4:3, though a slightly higher (but still small) 640×480 resolution. It also, predictably, seems to be Disney content right now.

They also announced that they’re working on a sleek looking set-top box tentatively named iTV (no relation, I assume, and, pending a lawsuit from ITV, I am certain it will change) which transmits video from iTunes to TV.

As of today the eDonkey network has been shut down. MetaMachine, the firm who created the eDonkey 2000 software, has agreed to pay $30m to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry.

Under the terms of their agreement they can no longer distribute the eDonkey software or any of its variants. An attempt to run the software will inform you via a pop-up that the network is no longer available and attempts to uninstall itself in a self-destruct fashion.

Visitors to the eDonkey website are now greeted with the message:

The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available.

If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law.
Courts around the world — including the United States Supreme Court — have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal downloading.
You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material.
Your IP address is x.x.x.x and has been logged.
Respect the music, download legally.
Goodbye Everyone.

As of posting, a federal judge has yet to give final approval over the settlement.

Several file-sharing services have yet to reach settlements with the recording industry, including Warez P2P, Limewire and Soulseek. (via Associated Press)