Why Vista really Sucks

Well i thought it was about time for me to get my 10cents worth abour Vista, you can travel from San Francisco to Edinburgh and you will be hard pushed to find anyone with a good opinion of Vista. I have had the misfortune (like many) of getting vista pre-installed on my new laptop.

No dont get me wrong when you initially see Vista and its transparent effects and shiney toolbars it does look pretty cool but thats where the good points end. Soon you begin to realise that this is not a step forward for Microsoft its a step back.

Take for example the boot up time for Windows, everyone who uses a computer hates to wait and the quicker things go the better. You would then have thought that Vista would endevour to be quicker at booting up than XP after all this is an improved upgrade? But far from being quicker it can actually take around 3 minutes to boot up and thats using a 1.5ghz dual core processor and the latest kit! I have seen anything so slow since the days of Windows 3.1!

Then once you have Vista booted up it time to perhaps play a game, maybe Half Life 2. Well when you have 2gb ram and 384mb of graphics you would think this would not be a problem, WRONG! You see all the shinyness and transpartent effects in Vista actually use up a vast amount of system resources so really you can half all your specs straight away because thats what it takes to just run vista. So basically unless you have a really high end graphics card the only games you will be playing are soiltaire or minesweeper!

So next you may think lets surf the internet, i mean thats pretty basic any machine can do that. using the latest IE you surf away and at first it all seems fine until suddenly it locks up and Vista tells you that some various problem has been detected and that it had to close IE. This same problem seems to happen with applications too, then when you are given the box to check online to see what the problem is the answer 99% of the time is “unknowen”.

So in summary, you can play games, software and the internet crash on a daily basis, it runs slower and oh yeah i almost forgot old printers and games dont work either. Bloody brilliant eh?

If it aint broke dont fix it

I run an accommodation based website(s) with my main one being Rooms in Scotand which as the name suggest focuses in Scotland.    For the past month i have been heavily invloved in SEO to improve rankings and i am glad to say my efforts have been rewarding with my main keywords being T20 on google and getting close to the front page.

As a small site i have to pick my battles and the main accommodation provider is VisitScotland, which is massivley out of my league in terms of being competitive.  Not surprisingly they were no1 and no2 for “accommodation in Scotland” which is one of the top keywords.  But imagine my surprise when i check the rankings and see them down to no4 and now only ranking for one page!  It turns out they did a recent site reesign and have removed 70% of the text from their pages and replaced them with shiny images.  The problem being pf course that google dosent read images and thus they have dropped down the rankings.

It is a classic mistake, of basically making changes for changes sake, at the end of the day if you have a usable website that is no1 and no2 in google then leave it alone!  I mean you can continue to get links to your site and promote it but to make drastic changes is just asking for trouble.  But in this case i am not complaining because i moved up to no3 thanks to their mistake! 

Success with Fresh Content

I have been doing an experiment latley in regards to fresh content and the effect this has on SERPS and crawl rate by bothe Google and Yahoo.  Basically i have added a latest news section to my homepage and it gets updated about every 3-4 days with company news.

I will be checking the results of the crawl rate of the google spiders on my site via the webmaster tools on Google and the idea is that by keeping fresh data on the page it should make for more frequent visits from google!