.: Monday 20th September 2010

Wow! First new blog in over a year...

We've all been so busy here this last 15 months, that we never seem to have the luxury of time to update the little things like this :-(

And so much has happened and changed in the world of computing since the last blog. Perhaps the most significant change is the release of Windows 7, the first new version of Windows since Vista three years before...

I never quite understood why Vista always seemed to be so unpopular with business and home users alike. The main complaints I would get to hear about Vista on a day-to-day basis, were about it's sluggishness relative to it's predecessor, Windows XP. But initially, the people complaining about Vista's (lack-of) speed were often attempting to run it on something like an Intel Celeron computer with maybe only 1Gb of RAM! Vista did need more horsepower than XP, but give it 4Gb of RAM and a decent dual-core or quad-core processor, and it always seemed fine to me, performance-wise. And certainly much more secure than XP too...

But all of that is now in the past - as we now have Windows 7! It has been released to almost universal acclaim, and rightly-so.  Microsoft have really addressed the perceived speed issue people had with Vista.... in independent tests, the new Windows 7 has shown to be even faster than XP, never mind Vista!  Windows 7 also supports DirectX 11 for all of the latest games, plus many of the built-in applications such as MS-Paint and Media Centre have been radically overhauled and updated. And the new version of Solitaire is jaw-dropping! :-) Plus, the slightly annoying UAC (User Access Control) of Vista has been made less naggy, so that you are no longer continually pestered about whether you really want to run that perfectly harmless application you have just downloaded.  Plus... when you're finished Windows 7 shuts down very quickly indeed!

On a separate note, apologies to anyone who has been trying to use this site recently and has found several links not working. This was due to a recent change of host we undertook, (which left some links pointing to an empty part of cyberspace!)  But I've now checked and fixed the links so that all of them are now working.

We've also recently changed our email address, which is never a good idea for a business, but in this case we couldn't avoid it due to our previous service provider deciding to switch-off all their servers! Our new email address is fantasycomp@btconnect.com  Hopefully BT won't also decide to pack-up anytime soon! Feel free to drop us a line.

.: Friday 12th June 2009

Hope you like this new Fantasy Computers website!

Our old website was first designed way back in 1998, and until 2009 it never really changed very much, in design and layout. And by 2009... yes, it showed! All we had done for the intervening 11 years was to keep updating the content, the graphics and "artwork", (I used that term loosely), had never changed one iota.

Anyway, during a window in workshop activities in June 2009, one hapless tech was given the unenviable task of re-inventing the Fantasy Computers website. But, due to ever-present important workshop committments, the time-frame for designing the new site from scratch, and then bug-fixing it, and adding all the content, was set at a maximum of... TWO days :-(

...Does this miniscule timeframe show? Probably yes! But let's hope this new site will be able to keep us going for the next 11 years. And then, by the year 2020 AD, hopefully we will have a fully interactive 3D website that you can actually climb into, and all running on Windows 14...

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