1. The dock bar below is too big. Given that I use barely any of the applications, it takes up too much of the screen. I don’t like hiding it. Unlike the taskbar in Windows, which has a clock, task bar icons, a Start button etc., the dock just shows applications and hidden windows. When I want to maximise a window, it doesn’t get to use the bottom of the screen.
2. The window control buttons in the top left are fine where they are, but they are TOO SMALL.
3. The windows have no borders which makes it difficult to tell where the edges are in some applications.

That’s actually all there is. Mac OS X is a beautiful Operating System that actually runs quite well on an Intel Celeron chipset eMachine. I can only imagine what a real Mac is like. It is quite intuitive to use, but for the price – a PC can do exactly the same thing.

We’ve all been there – buying a new PC, and the sales assistant tries to stuff a copy of Norton 360 in your bag. They tell you if you don’t buy it, the goolies will eat your computer the moment you connect it to the internet.

Now – not to say that Norton 360 is a bad product (scough), but it might not be right for you. Here’s a run down of different anti-virus software on the market today with the pros and cons of each. Some of the packages are free too.

Leave your preferences in a comment.

Liquidweb EQUALS Reliable Web Hosting.

The first thing you’ll notice about signing up with Liquidweb is their attention to your satisfaction. Promptly after ordering my dedicated server, a Liquidweb representative called me to confirm my order – call me racist, but it was nice to speak to someone I could actually understand.

I received email notifications at every step, and the dedicated server was set up within 12 hours. If you’re looking for a shared hosting solution, the setup would be instantaneous.

At this point I was entirely satisfied by Liquidweb’s services. They could have stolen my entire wallet and I’d still have been happy.

But to my surprise, the next day, I received an email from my dedicated account manager. He just wanted to make sure that the server was working as I expected, and that I’m happy with the services so far. He also assured me that, should I ever have a problem, I could contact him directly.

Funnily enough, that night I had a question. I emailed in, and didn’t expect a reply to arrive until the next morning. Less than ten minutes later, an email was dropped into my box from a support engineer at Liquidweb, he told me that my account manager was out of the office at the moment and would be back in the morning – but that he could help me with my problem.

Liquidweb offers “heroic support” with all of their packages – and this makes it worth every penny.

The ping rate from where I am is also under 25ms, pages load ridiculously quick, and the server backs its data up every night without interrupting the services the server provides.

So for dedicated or shared hosting, I definitely recommend Liquidweb.

It is through great regret that I recommend that anybody thinking about renting a server from Leaseweb, should think again. The trouble I’ve had from the moment I said Go, has been unbelievable. And despite their very cheap prices, there is no value to be found here.

I joined Leasewebback in June this year, due to issues with my previous host – I was sharing a server with a friend, but it seemed I was paying the full bill every month. So for 80 EURO (approx. $120 USD) I ordered a dedicated server from Leaseweb.

Here’s the blunders:

1. I ordered my server on the 22nd of June, and assumed I’d be paying my bill on the 22nd of every month. No, this isn’t how it works! Once I paid, Leaseweb sent me another invoice for the remainder of June. My first payment was for July, and if I didn’t pay June’s payment my server would be shut off. This is a horrid way of doing things, and isn’t made clear when you sign up. The email is ridiculous, just reading the first line makes my blood boil:

Explanation:

As you might know LeaseWeb invoices per calender month.You have already paid one full month for your service which covers 7-2008. However the period remaining for the current month was not yet covered. This period is not known beforehand as it depends on availablity of the services as well as on the date your first payment was made.

2. Less than two weeks after my server was first installed, it crashed.And I’m not talking about any old crash, this crash took half the hard disk down with it; the main database was corrupt. Leaseweb were also indifferent to this catastrophe – I don’t remember an apology anywhere. Note:

Dear customer,

 

It seems that the server is having an kernel crash, so we would like to reinstall the server, if this is ok by you. Do you have a backup of the HD or do you want to copy the data after the new installation.

OK, so at least they have some idea as to what they’re doing, right? Wrong. I spent ages recovering my data, but they forgot to install PLESK! So I couldn’t set my website back up. When I say forgot, I can’t emphasise enough how ridiculous it is. Note:

Dear customer,

 

The server is newly installed, but we forgot to install plesk.

An engineer will install plesk asap and remove the old disk.

We also hope that this will never happen again, but we can’t control hardware failure, about the response time, we all working on giving fast and good service to our customers. 

We keep you updated about the status.

Obviously, Leaseweb has never heard of a checklist. Due to this blunder, I had to wait 3 days before I couldn’t even recreate the domain. THUS: Lots of angry customers.

3. Awfully slow service. Paying 80 EURO every month would suggest you’d receive decent service – but customer support isn’t even open over the weekend or during evening to morning hours! Worse than that, they’re in a different time zone, so you’ll have to wake up at the crack of dawn just to call them. Replies are few and far between, and often aren’t coherent with your original message.

4. No prioritised support even when they know my server is dead!I emailed them and told them, more than 12 hours later they emailed me back to tell me they’re looking into it. At this point, they should be working their butts off to get my server up and running again – but they’re not, so obviously they don’t prioritise problems by severity. Unfortunately, this speaks for itself, you simply cannot rely on Leaseweb.

5. Nobody offered any compensation despite my server crashing twice. It quite literally swallowed my entire website the second time round – it took me two weeks to get the site back up and running again. No compensation, not even an apology.

So as you can see, Leaseweb is far from desirable. I’m sorry to have to write this, but I really hope the warning is taken seriously by everybody. I have recently joined Liquidweb in the US – and my server, despite being statistically less powerful than the server I had at Leaseweb, seems ten times as fast. I’m very happy with the service I’ve received from Liquidweb – I’d definitely recommend you join them. Stay tuned for a review on their services; the grass really is greener on the other side!

PHP Expert Editor is developed by Ankord Development Group, and is one of the more serious entries in this field. And at 35 EUR for a life time license, it won’t shred your wallet either. (What? You didn’t expect it to be free, did you?)

The basics of the editor make writing a PHP script a breeze, with features such as code highlighting – where the difference between HTML and PHP is blazingly obvious, and identifying quotes that have been left open isn’t a needle-in-a-haystack job anymore. But other features such as the left hand side structure that allows you to close blocks of text off and just work with the text you need make editing considerably less stressful.

PHP Expert Editor also has an FTP client built in, enabling it to access practically anything.

What else is there? A built in colour selector, all the usual HTML form tools, HTML symbols, auto indentation, macros, syntax checking and integrated script checking. Basically – yes – this is truly the mothership. Get on board.

I think the most useful feature in this editor would be its knowledge of PHP’s internal functions. When you type ‘join’, a helpful balloon appears above the cursor showing you the appropriate parameters for the function. It does it with everything, and really helps the programmer concentrate on what matters – the coding.

If you want to try it, it comes with a 30 day trial, so you don’t have anything to lose. You can download it at www.phpexperteditor.com.

Chrome marks a new era of browsing, for once we have a company thinking outside the box and actually designing a browser that meets the demands of the modern world.

When you open Google Chrome, the first thing you’ll notice is the somewhat blank page that loads with a heading ‘Most Visited’. The pages you visit most frequently appear in this section, giving you quick access to common tasks. Chrome maximises the viewing area for the webpages you browse. If there’s one thing that becomes frustrating in browsers like Internet Explorer and FireFox, it’s the mass of tools at the top of the screen. Google have taken the basic browsing tools and integrated them into a single toolbar, and anything else is accessible using a drop down menu.

Instead of having an address bar, and a search bar, you have an Omnibar. Type a web address and hit enter, and you’ll arrive at the website. Type anything else, and Chrome will use your favourite search engine for results relating to the terms you entered. Simple, but so effective.

Instead of having a row of tabs, Google have removed the title bar and integrated the tabs there instead. But these aren’t tabs in the traditional sense either, Chrome is one step ahead and actually allows you to drag a tab outside of the tab area and into its own window! Or you can drop a tab into the tab area of another window. It’s so versatile, it’s ridiculous that other browsers don’t have this kind of functionality. I never bothered to switch to FireFox from Internet Explorer, because it always seemed to me that it was just more of the same. In my opinion, most security flaws come down to the user’s competence. But Google Chrome actually has some different to offer.

Perhaps one of the most noticeable features Chrome has to offer is its speed. Click Chrome, and almost instantaneously you’re presented with a browser window, even when Chrome isn’t loaded. Chrome runs every page as a process in its own right, so if one browser page crashes or starts to hog the processor, other pages generally aren’t affected.

My favourite feature of Google Chrome though, is the handling of JavaScript. It’s a fact that websites have evolved, and client side scripting plays a big part in the web today. Unfortunately, the handling of client side scripting hasn’t evolved at the same pace. Chrome compiles JavaScripts and runs them in machine code, which makes the JavaScript a whopping eight times faster! If you use Facebook or other JavaScript intensive sites, you’ll notice the difference. Even on machines with beasts for processors, JavaScript can really bog down performance.

So if you haven’t already, I’d definitely recommend trying Google Chrome.

Despite being powered by a power unit supplying a maximum of 65 watts of juice (less than most laptops guzzle), the DELL Studio Hybrid packs quite a punch and shouldn’t have any problems processing the day-to-day tasks of the average user.

It isn’t much bigger than an external hard drive which means there isn’t much space to air out the components. You’d think it’d have a problem staying cool in that tight chassis, but nope – the DELL stays quiet and cool, which is probably an attribute of its energy efficient nature. It looks cool, it runs cool, it really makes GREEN look COOL.

And on to the topic that really matters to the majority of novice PC users – appearance. What makes up an average buyer’s mind when it comes to purchasing a PC? Speed, capacity, and… yes, how will it look next to the lamp. 

The DELL Hybrid is small and sleek, and will fit in all the nooks and crannies you can find. I swear I could keep this thing in my pants and you wouldn’t notice! It might even add some shape.

The DELL Hybrid can stand vertically or lay horizontally, the smart technical stuff inside makes the front display of the word ‘hybrid’ switch. I’ll elaborate – if you stand it vertically, ‘hybrid’ lights up at the bottom; if you lay it horizontally, ‘hybrid’ lights up along the bottom. Do you get it? Illustration is a blogger’s best friend.

Buyers beware, you could mistake it for a sandwich toaster and given the cost you probably don’t want to spread butter anywhere near it. There are undoubtedly better equipped machines out there, but the DELL Studio Hybrid is a beautifully designed piece of hardware that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also practical for the average home and business users. And with DELL’s world-wide reputation, it’s money well invested.

As for me? I’ll be using my DELL Hybrid as my main machine, and will probably keep on using it ’til the day comes and I accidentally pack it full of bread.

Picking a host for your website is probably one of the most important things you’ll ever do. And fate forbid that host goes down, you’ll need all the support you can get. Actually, all you really need is somebody that is willing to investigate the issue in a timely manner, and timely is the category that Leaseweb’s technical support fits least in to.

Yesterday (Monday, 25th July ’08) the server stopped responding. I know I paid my bill because I have a receipt, so surely they haven’t cut it off?! Panic set in, there were people trying to access the server, I have two business clients relying on that server – one for the website, okay so that isn’t too bad, and the other for email! Lucky for me it’s the end of the working day, except – oh no, Leaseweb’s technical support is closed. They’re not in my time zone either, of course they can’t be blamed for that, it was my choice to rent a server outside of my country after all.

I power cycled the server, but still after five minutes of waiting my ka-billions of pings received no word from the server. At this stage just about every scenario is running through my head – the kind of scenarios where you imagine all of your work being swallowed by quick sand. I actually almost had a panic attack, and promptly (and I hasten to add unfairly) bit my wife’s head off. I didn’t realise that the stress of a server going down could cause me to feel this way. And now, I’m in their hands.

I email Support to tell them my server is inaccessible… I wait, and wait… and I wait some more. But no reply, not for Steve. The one waiting. The one literally peeing his pants because he needs that server to come back online. And finally, more than four hours later, I receive a reply! Quote:

Could you send us the login credentials to check this?

What? Are you kidding me? I thought they’d have this stuff logged! They sent me the password in the first place! And hold on, if they need the login credentials, the server must be up and running right? Well, I emailed them the password to the root account (which they defined originally anyway) and sat patiently on a reply. At this point you’d think they’d prioritise your ticket given your server is entirely inaccessible and they should ultimately be liable for issues that are their fault. But even after sitting up half the night, a reply seemed as likely to arrive as the real life postman delivering mail at three in the morning.

I decided to try to sleep – luckily, a kind gentleman at webhostingtalk.com offered some hosting services to me for free. I only really needed the mail server, and that was a relief. I couldn’t thank him enough.

I awoke at gone 9AM, to find an email I had just recently received. Looks like the server had been online since approximately 8.45AM. Good timing on my part, bad response time on theirs. But the response time is nothing in comparison to the response.

Dear costumer,

 

After replacing the UTP cable your server is back online.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions.

 

 

Kind regards,

 

*** ***** ******

LeaseWeb – Hardware Support

You have got to be kidding me. I can forgive the bad spelling and grammar, but that isn’t the issue here. We all know there will be language barriers when we’re working with people in another country. But to report that the server’s network cable was the cause of all this trouble – and to rub it in I had to wait more than 24 hours for the network cable to be replaced? The server, hosted in a datacenter, had a faulty network cable? Now, that is a hard one to swallow. I’ve never had to replace a network cable unless it has been interfered with, and unless Leaseweb have their network cables trailing to the floors of the datacenter I just don’t see how they could possibly be damaged. But more troubling to me is the fact that the server obviously wasn’t running during the time I couldn’t access it because my main site’s scheduled task didn’t log its work. Any other time where the server has remained live but inaccessible to the net I have had proof that this task has continued processing. I’m not suggesting Leaseweb are liars, but wait, actually, I am. But not officially, I don’t want to be sued, I just feel it’s a bit conspicuous.

There are definitely unanswered questions that, to be honest with you, I just cannot be bothered to ask because I have no faith in their support system or honesty. The first issue I had with this server was a disk crash, to which they did not apologise or offer me a refund, or any other kind of compensation. Their motto was “shit happens” – not in those words, but you catch the drift. I feel as though I had SUCKER written across my forehead.

A big downside to this is that I’m scared to use services in other countries now, I’ve almost become prejudist because of this experience. I’m sure that not all Dutch hosting services are like this, but I was hestitant to go outside of the UK in the first place, you can only imagine how I feel now.

I cannot recommend Leaseweb for a mission critical application. If your server going down equals loss of business (which presumably it would if you’re willing to fork out the money for a dedicated server in the first place), I recommend against renting a server with them with all my heart. I will be looking for a new host as of now, and this time I’m going to get one in my own country – I feel as though I have more leverage being that to sue them I don’t have to cross the border.

If you’re going to be looking for a host, check out www.webhostingtalk.com to get the low down on all the providers.

Has anybody else had an experience, good or bad? Let me and any other readers know by leaving a comment.

UPDATE: I am no longer a Leaseweb customer – after another crash, I decided it was time to vacate their data centre. I am now a member of Liquidweb, a US hosting company with a good reputation, and their service has been amazing. I can’t recommend them enough; stay tuned for a review.