It is with great pride that the Joomla! community announces to the world the immediate availability of.
Joomla 1.5 Stable.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD format wars have come a few steps closer to an end with Blu-Ray taking approx 90% of the market in disc and player sales in the last two months alone, after signing a deal with Warner Bros as an exclusive distributor.  Blu-Ray also has the backing of the other main players in the home theater market, shame it has taken almost 4 years.

Buying tips.

The PS3 will play Blu-Ray discs out of the box.

The Xbox 360 HD addon (£125) will add support for HD-DVD

Any of the HD players will also play DVDs

If you still unsure, Multi-Format players are now avaliable at a premium.

Remember when buying a HD player that Blu-Ray looks set to take the market, so the extra spend on a Blue-Ray would be a wish choice. It's also worth remembering that all of these players also play back regular DVD discs, converting them to higher resolutions, which can sometimes improve video quality.

The wcug site is now starting to take shape most of the main work is done, some content has been added, more is on the way. If you think you would like to help then please if your not already a member then Sign Up now !. Press the "Read More" for a list of Volunteer Job openings we have at the moment!

Chippenham & Beyond is a great news resource site covering the latest news in the area, with hot links, RSS feeds and the most up to date events!

It is good to see a local site using open source community software drupal, a CMS very much like Joomla!
sn15.org is designed to help the local community. To make use of this freely provided resource, visit the link below.

Visit www.sn15.org

2007 is coming to and end and I have to say it has been a great year for technology, We have seen the new Duel and Quad Core CPU's launch, LCD's screens become the norm, the first 1 Gigabyte graphics cards, 1 Terrabyte of storage on a single hard disk, Apples iPhone, HSDPA mobile broadband become available at reasonable prices, Podcasting taking the world by storm. So what is in store for 2008 ?

For 2008 podcasting will continue to expand and develop into a more stable and available media platform, for many it has already replaced tradition media like TV and radio, I for one get most of tech news, education programming and entertainment from pod and video casts, I would estimate that im watching 1-2 hours of TV per week and 10-20 Hours of podcasts.

Computing advances, by mid to end of 2008. We will be seeing 8-Core and above as standard on PC and MAC. 4 Gigabyte of RAM will seem average. And a 1-2 Gigabyte video card will be needed to play the most advanced games, Physics cards will be ready place in most gaming PC's while the mobile version's will be available on high end laptops.

The iPhone will see its second generation launch with better storage capacity, high CPU and graphic speeds and the mobile Internet platform will be expanded to cover more networks and protocols.

Windows Mobile and Googles Android will both be competing for the mobile market. While microsoft will be polishing its WM7 software and pushing for faster and more advanced devices from the networks, Googles Android will be pushing the open source and free development of its platform, its going to be great to see who comes out on top in 2008 my bet is microsoft however I think Android will not be far behind and within 2 years will be a real contender.

Thats all for now. have a merry xmas and happy new year.

The word on Vista is to avoid at all costs. Well I would have to say yes and no on this. If you are thinking of upgrading to vista then I would say NO! If however you are buying a 100% new system then I would say yes. So just to make that clear If you have a 3Ghz CPU and 256Mb graphics card and a gigabyte of RAM. Then NO you should not be running vista, If however you have a T5500+ Core 2 Duo or AMD equivalent a 256Mb ATI or Nvidia graphics card, 4 gigabyte of RAM and a copy of vista Home Premium then yes I would recommended vista.

Why not ultimate edition ?
The ultimate edition has an extra 14 services running as standard compared to Premium, It has a much higher demand on your graphics card RAM and CPU, and offers little bonuses to the GUI, and Media experience, while eating on average 20-25% more system resources for day to day tasks.
Ok so why not Home Basic ?
Home basic is designed, for systems with lower spec graphics cards, Great right ?.... No because it needs to get that speed from somewhere, So it does it will pass all the work to the CPU making your PC run like a dog because the CPU is so busy doing all the GUI work. This is not just an option it does not matter what graphics card you do have home basic will ignore it and pass the work to the CPU anyway, along with a lot of other stuff like phys and sound processing.

Home Premium ?
Without doubt Microsoft released vista a year early, XP was doing just fine the hardware requirements for vista have only JUST reached us in December 2007, If you have a PC purchased before December 2007 you will be getting mediocre results from vista to be honest, unless it had the highest configuration. Core2 Duo and Quad Core are absolute minimum specs to run vista, Myself im running a 3Ghz Core2 Duo Laptop with 384mb Video RAM and 4 gigabyte RAM, Duel 200Gb SATA Raided Disks, and it runs like a dream. I duel boot Linux as well.

The long awaited Vista service pack 1, Is here.... Well almost RC1 is now public. This is a pre-release of SP1

This pack include:-

USB Fix's - This is the only BIG problem I have had with vista to date.
General speed improvements
Better driver support
Faster graphics DX 10.1 Support
exFAT and 4GB+ RAM support
Security Improvements with reduced UAC requests
Application Compatibility Improvements
Better power saving on laptops (boosted by battery life by 10-15 minutes)
Better hibernation support (bugs fixed, I still don't use)
Better ReadyBoost support for systems with 1Gb + RAM
Faster file copying. The network isssue does seem fixed but I still find file copying in vista slower than XP
And loads more stuff, much I have not tested yet so I wont post here.
Full list here

Click the link below to download a small update that will allow vista's built in windows update to detect the avaliability of SP1 RC1, then do a windows update check and download of the SP1 will being.

Download

Overall the SP1 RC1 has improved vista a whole lot. Its just a shame its a year late. It is very much better late than never, maybe vista wont be the next Windows ME.