The Metro UI

First things first, Metro is your main entry point whatever your hardware – and that’s going to annoy a lot of people. It’s large, it’s almost childlike in its design, and it’s so obviously meant for tablets that it feels slightly insulting to anyone who’s comfortable with the ins and outs of the Windows environment.

The concept of full-screen-only apps makes little sense for any device above tablet size, as anyone who works with Outlook, Word, Tweetdeck and Chrome permanently open will quickly realise. You can split apps so that one occupies two-thirds of the screen, but that’s not particularly helpful on larger screens. The desktop itself is technically an app, so you can have that occupy two-thirds with several traditional windows within it. It’s not something I found useful, though.

Metro is a bit iffy to navigate with a mouse. While the live previews in larger tiles are great (giving quick access to tweets, emails and the like – and they can be put on your lock screen too), the icons themselves are big and boxy on a 15in screen, and finding an application to launch manually – even once you’ve dragged them all into related groups of tiles – means much scrolling left and right.

Of course, that’s not the quickest way to launch an application from an idle desktop. In Windows 7 I simply press the Windows key and start typing the name, and the good news is you can still do that here – the difference is no Start menu appears. Or more accurately, the Metro UI is the Start menu, and a press of the Windows key (or a click of the now pretty useless bottom-left Start button) always takes you to that grid. If you’re fast you can ping the full-screen Metro interface up, type the app name and be back on the desktop again in a second, which begs the question why it needs to appear at all when the old, less graphically demanding and space-intensive system worked so well.

The closest thing to a traditional Start menu on the desktop arrives if you instead hover over the Start button. There you get a few menu options, along with a different way in to that search function, which here attempts to search within the currently active app. If that’s not where you want to search – and it usually won’t be – you pretty much have to end up with the full-screen Metro search taking over again. It needs work.

Changing your ways

As you’ll quickly discover, if you want to spend the majority of your time in the traditional desktop, you’re going to have to get used to doing things differently. More specifically, you’ll want to make extensive use of your desktop and taskbar. As we’ve seen, any application not pinned to one of those two locations is tough to launch without returning to the Metro UI in some form. Whether you pile your desktop high with shortcuts will largely depend on how annoying you find that big green grid on a daily basis.

At every opportunity, Windows 8 reminds you that Metro is its new baby: plugging in a USB stick brings up a green tile over the desktop, and further settings are all laid out in the Metro style. Selecting any of the menu options on that previously mentioned mini Start menu produces a vertical Metro bar to the right of the desktop. (Don’t even get us started on why a button in the bottom-left opens a menu on the far right, another design decision made seemingly without the mouse in mind).

All the talk from the launch event has been from people using Windows 8 on tablets, so the quick gestures are getting a lot of love in LA. Back in the real world of PCs and laptops, you can hover over the left edge of the screen to see the last application you had open, and either drag it out to switch to it or right-click to snap it to the right-edge column. It works okay, but other gestures just don’t translate: swiping upwards to unlock, for example, is just horrible with a mouse. Thankfully, a press of the keyboard’s up cursor does the same job, and as far as I can tell most existing keyboard shortcuts still work.

Improvements

Whatever you think of Metro, there are also several smaller changes that really do make a difference on a PC or laptop.

The new Task Manager is excellent, keeping the existing performance monitoring tools but adding heatmapping (think Excel’s conditional formatting) so you can instantly see which processes are using resources, and several graphs, including live wireless throughput. It adds detailed tabs for app history and user activity, and finally brings the Startup options of msconfig into a much more accessible place. Crapware can now easily be prevented from starting up with Windows.

Explorer windows bring back the Up button they’ve been sorely lacking, and while a lot of people hate the ribbon interface I’m not one of them. The file transfer dialog has been improved, with a dynamic graph now showing the transfer speed second by second, and an estimation of time remaining. It rolls multiple transfer jobs into one window too, which is a vast improvement on having them stacked up.

Finally, boot and resume times are excellent, at least on this test laptop. About a year old, and with nothing fancier than a 320GB mechanical hard disk inside, it boots to the lock screen (if you’ve set a password) in around 13 seconds, and to a ready-to-go Windows 8 in just under 19 seconds. Strangely, the only way to power the laptop down appears to be to go into the Power option in the Settings menu; presumably, Microsoft is hoping laptop users will simply close the lid and make use of the improved sleep mode.

Windows 8: the tablet OS

The biggest realisation from a couple of days with Windows 8 on a laptop is that if you’re not willing to throw yourself into the Metro interface with gusto, you’re really not going to see the kind of changes to the OS that everyone else will. Those who just want Windows 7 but better are going to find that, at least behind the fancy new UI, it doesn’t feel a whole lot different.

The desktop is still there, your existing applications can still be run, and most of the noticeable upgrades are to background elements of the environment. We’ve no doubt prettying up the Control Panel and various other tools is long overdue, but what Windows 8 seems most intent on is changing your ways to suit the direction Microsoft is taking. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certain to split opinion among long-time Windows users.

This is a very early build and I’m well aware that I’ve not spent nearly enough time with it to make a proper judgement. But it’s no surprise that Microsoft installed Windows 8 on a tablet to give to attendees of its Build conference, as that’s clearly where it’s more at home.

Am I the only person who finished reading the Security Development Lifecycle Progress Report and immediately conjured up an image of Microsoft developers throwing stones in a big glass house?

The Microsoft SDL is, obviously, a good thing if it helps to reduce vulnerabilities in code. But I got the feeling that Microsoft was saying that Windows and Internet Explorer are such popular targets for attack because developers are not applying all the SDL techniques and technologies available to them.

This is where the glass house theory comes in. Microsoft claims that Vista was the first Windows OS to benefit from the SDL in practise and as a result, after the first year, had 45% fewer vulnerabilities than XP. Great, but who uses Vista now? And more to the point, look how many people still use XP. Vista really isn’t best example to hold up and wave about, is it?

Vista really isn’t best example to hold up and wave about, is it?

And then there’s Internet Explorer, hardly a piece of software with a great track record of being secure and vulnerability free. Using the SDL may help make it more secure, but Microsoft really does need to get its own house in order before preaching to the unconverted.

ASLR versus DEP

But what, exactly, is Microsoft preaching anyway? Microsoft appears to be saying that developers are not making good enough use of Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR), which can help prevent exploits that need to use things such as DLL files in order to be successful.

The Microsoft SDL Progress Report shows that of the popular applications it looked at, only 34% had enabled ASLR, with the same sort of percentages for browser plug-ins. So why is this? No doubt ignorance plays its part, with some developers not fully appreciating the security benefits of implementing ASLR. However, I also wonder if cross-platform development complexities and costs also come into the equation.

The report highlighted another technique that is used to prevent arbitrary code execution, Data Execution Prevention (DEP). This was fully enabled in 71% of the applications Microsoft looked at. So why implement DEP and not ASLR? It’s that XP factor again. The older OS doesn’t use ASLR (as far as I am aware) whereas DEP works just fine and dandy.

House in order

Microsoft states on the MSDN Security Development Lifecycle blog: ”we believe our SDL tools and processes add value and should be shared broadly with the security ecosystem – a collective effort is needed to meet the threat to computer users worldwide”. I cannot argue with that.

However, getting one’s own house in order has to be part of that process across the board, and giving the impression of blaming other developers for Microsoft shortcomings is not really helping matters.

I don’t consider myself an IT expert. I consider myself to be an enthusiastic user of technology who just happens to know a thing or two about specific IT subjects and has an ability to communicate that knowledge to others. Not everyone is so shy in stepping forward to don the ‘expert’ hat though, and that is causing problems for businesses.

The Urban Dictionary definition of Expert Syndrome is an ailment that is characterised by “the need to expound on a given topic beyond actual knowledge” and that advanced sufferers are “often unaware of the condition, losing the ability to distinguish opinion from fact”. Before you dismiss this right now as being just another of the many somewhat jovial opinion pieces fuelled by an excess of seasonal cheer, there is actually a rather serious side to IT Expert Syndrome. To grasp the seriousness of the problem you first have to appreciate the duality of the learning theory concept of transfer.

Transfer is taking a newly taught skill set and transferring it from the theoretical into the real world, or putting what you have read about or been taught and putting it into a hands-on, practical and appropriate context. The problems really start when you consider negative transfer, or taking what you have learned in one context and applying it totally incorrectly in another, where it hinders advancement.

Hands up if someone where you work thinks they know more about IT than the IT department? Hands up if you are a junior IT support worker and think you know better than the IT admin guy? Hands up if you are the IT admin guy and think you know better than the IT director? OK, that last one was a bit of a red herring as you probably do, but the point remains that IT Expert Syndrome is not only infectious, but in danger of reaching epidemic proportions in many businesses.

When independent research firm Dynamic Markets, commissioned by Informatica Corporation, surveyed 300 sales and marketing managers and 301 IT professionals, the results suggested that UK business employees are increasingly taking on the role of DIY IT expert in order to get quicker or more convenient access to the company data they require. The research reveals that IT Experts Syndrome most often reveals itself in the sufferer making use of unauthorised online applications and cloud computing services, so as to better manager their data access requirements.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data

As Mark Seager, vice president of technology at Informatica says “the rise of new models such as cloud computing will create a headache for IT departments if they are not integrated in an overall IT strategy. Business users now think it should take hours not weeks to implement new technologies. When they perceive IT to be behind the curve, they’re going off under their own steam and purchasing software without realising the implications this has on their company”.

According to Informatica, 39% of those who admitted to buying, installing or using their own software in this way did so because of a perceived sluggish response from the IT department. If your temperature is now rising, your cheeks are getting a little flushed and you are experiencing an overwhelming feeling of ‘quite bloody right as well’ then I’m afraid you are also displaying signs of the infection.

The real IT experts (and, as far as the average business is concerned, that definition has to apply solely to the IT department) are finding themselves drowning in a veritable tidal wave of data created by new applications and software flooding the corporate infrastructure.

Before I go any further, yes, I have to agree that perhaps the ‘expert’ tag is misplaced if the IT department has not put measures in place to prevent the installation or use of unauthorised software. It’s not exactly difficult, after all, and to not do so is leaving the business wide open to potential security breaches. But that, perhaps, is something for another blog entry.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data. I’ve always thought that data ownership is pretty clear cut: corporate data belongs to the company in terms of both the physical possession of it and responsibility for that information as well. Yet 56% of the business users asked in that Informatica study believed that data ownership should rest with the employees that use it. Unsurprisingly, IT managers didn’t share this view with more than half insisting that the IT department was the right place for data ownership to fall.

The trouble is, quite apart from the administration overhead that this data ownership uncertainty introduces, that a fragmentation over who has first dibs on data is likely to replicate itself as a fragmentation of that data itself. Without full access to all business-critical data it becomes impossible to maximise revenue for the business.

And it doesn’t take an expert, self-proclaimed or not, to appreciate that.

I’ve decided to fix the tech industry. All of it, right now. Here’s how.

If it’s been done before, do it better

Company exec: I have an idea for an eBook reader. It’ll be like the Kindle, only rubbish and more expensive. Happily, our customers have the intelligence of drunken sparrows and are easily confused by colour. The Kindle is white, ours will be white. They’ll never know.

CEO: Sebastian, you’re a genius. The money I was going to invest in research and development I can now use to buy another yacht, from which I can sip champagne and watch as my company goes down the pan quicker than the contents of a banker’s pockets after a knock on the door from the fuzz.

I guarantee this conversation is going on right now. And it’s not just confined to eBook readers, but laptops, all-in-ones, smartphone OSes, you name it. Monkeys exhibit similar behaviour in zoos, clapping their hands because the first monkey to do so got a banana. Only our tech monkeys aren’t even managing to clap their hands, they’re just wiping their bottoms, throwing the contents at the glass and expecting us to pay for the results. You know who you are tech monkeys. Now stop clapping and start dancing.

Appoint a common-sense officer

It’s my theory that like mobs, companies get stupider the larger they are. Decisions that would have been laughed out of the room in a five-man company appear messianic when preached by one man to five hundred followers.  To combat this, I suggest that every company hires a common-sense officer. Preferably British. Preferably northern. Preferably my dad.

The common-sense officer would sit around drinking cups of tea the colour of rust, and vetoing 99% of the ideas companies have. To give you an idea of the value of a common-sense officer, let’s imagine how this noble position could have prevented some of the tech world’s more recent gaffs.

2007:

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s called Beacon and when you a visit a website, Facebook tells all you friends.

Stu’s dad: [rolls up his copy of the Daily Star and smacks Zuckerberg over the head with it]. Next!

2009:

Phorm engineer:  It’s perfectly secure, but we do kind of know what sites you’ve visited.

Stu’s dad: Smear yourself in honey, find a bear and kick it in the face. The results will be the same.

2010:

Steve Ballmer: So it’s Window Mobile 6, except there’s some hexagons, and it was designed on the back of a napkin. We’re calling it Windows Mobile 6.5.

Stu’s dad: Just stay home and polish your forehead, Steve. Trust me on this.

Take the “chew your own face off” test

Large companies would have us believe they spend millions testing new software to ensure it’s friendly and intuitive. This is clearly nonsense. New software is as friendly and intuitive as crocodile dentistry. Which is silly, because making your software user friendly requires only one person taking part in the “chew your own face off test,” which runs thusly.

Stick a normal person in a room with your software for ten minutes. Once the test is concluded, if that user would rather spend the next ten minutes finding ways to chew off their own face than carry on using your software, you’ve failed. Alternatively, just fit them with heart monitors and measure their rage for the duration. A single spike represents failure. Either is acceptable, and either would make your software … you know, good.

Tell the truth

This is very simple. Every broadband provider should be forced to put up an interactive map allowing you to click on your area and find out what their average broadband speeds are at different times of the day, based on actual usage data collected from existing customers. ISPs should be forced to do this by Ofcom. Ofcom should realise its long held dream of not being hopeless.

Incompetence discounts

The vast majority of shop assistants will never be any good, so how about this instead? Every time they give you a factually incorrect piece of information, £10 is knocked off the price of your purchase and you get to hit them with a stick. This would encourage customers to swot up before going anywhere near the store, and shop assistants to spend less time lathering their head in product and more time learning what that shiny, bleepy, electronic thing in the corner is. The store with the offer on would probably find foot traffic increases tenfold.

The next step

Right, that should get us going. My aim is to publish a tech manifesto that will lead to a better world, full of better people using better gizmos designed by better companies, and I need your help. In the next few days I’ll offer up my rules for we the public. Feel free to post your own suggestions below and after we’ve all had a nice, old bicker and plenty of tea, I’ll pull them all together and see what we’ve got.

Bombast be damned, Scrivener is brilliant.

It’s a word processor. No wait, that’s like describing a waterfall as big, wet and noisy. Scrivener is a fundamental rethink of what a word processor should be. The idea is that instead of trying to plop all your text onto one page – like word diarrhoea on an endless sheet of literary loo roll – you create a series of smaller documents within Scrivener, then arrange these how you see fit, according to how you write.

Personally, I write random paragraphs whenever they occur, usually starting with a conclusion so I know where I’m going, followed by an astonishingly tasteless joke that will never be included, so I know what to avoid.

To each of these scraps you can attach tons of additional information, including notes, links to research and a synopsis of what’s going on in that chunk. Different viewing modes allow you to display these scraps as a single document, or view them as flashcards pinned to a corkboard –the synopsis showing for each – so you can instantly see if you’ve successfully led readers through your prose maze, or tossed them into a Kafkaesque abyss of conflicted meaning.

Research – including videos, text files, pictures and web pages – can be imported into the Research Section of Scrivener and opened within the program. These items can also be cross-linked to the individual scraps, so that opening the section that deals with tasteless jokes immediately leads off to an article on Manchester City… for example.

There’s loads more. Scrivener is a big, tasty word pie seasoned with great ideas. My favourite is the ability to set a word-count target, which then appears as a progress bar that creeps up as you work; nothing like a bit of software bullying to shame you into finishing a chapter. There’s also templates and tools for every sort of creative writing, from screenplays to poems, giving you a scaffold in which to assemble that masterpiece.

Scrivener does what the original Firefox did so many years ago. It takes something you thought you knew, and shows you how much better it could be. Even more impressive, it’s the work of a handful of people, which makes supporting it essentially the same as adopting an orphan, or rescuing a drowning kitten.

Scrivener has been knocking around for the Mac for ages, but it’s now in a free beta for lovely PC folk. I suggest you go play with it, and see how much happier your life could be.

The reality is that customers like buying from a curated store, with easy installation, payment and updating. And they like the low prices that this method tends to bring. In addition, developers love it because it allows for them to concentrate on app design and not on website design, credit card handling, and the huge overhead of keeping in touch with customers for updates.

However, if you’re in the business of selling packaged software, then you are about to have your Titanic moment.

Microsoft is already using its Application Virtualisation technology to stream Office out to devices. Take a 3rd party app, and wrap it in the same virtualisation technology, and you can be up and running within seconds of hitting the Buy Now button. Of course, with increasing bandwidth speeds, downloading a couple of gigabytes is not such a hardship, so there’s no reason why you can’t make a traditional purchase, download and install if you don’t mind the download delay.

All of this opens the floodgates to time-based licensing, and a radical change to the entire business model.

But one thing is clear – all the money will go to the e-shop and the developers. The place for the boxed-product vendor is about to disappear.

The press release said that a survey of 600 sales, marketing and IT professionals from companies in the UK, France and Germany had revealed millions of pounds were being wasted every year on unused applications. Actually, it said millions of Euros but I knew what it meant. Actually, at first I didn’t know what it meant as my thoughts turned to smartphones and while I appreciate that the iPhone, BlackBerry and assorted Android devices are doing well, I wasn’t swallowing a survey which reckoned that business were wasting millions every year on apps they don’t even use.

Then I read the document again, and everything became clearer. This was a story about data governance rather than Angry Birds in the office, and don’t even get me started about that one or the wife will kill me. According to Informatica, the outfit that provided me with the research data, some 81% of those IT professionals questioned said their corporate networks were hosting unused applications and data. Which isn’t really any surprise at all, is it? I’ve just looked at my own corporate network and it’s full of applications that sounded like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a waste of money as they are never used. Microsoft Office 2010, for example.

Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me

Yep, I invested in a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, as you do when you are a small business running on a Windows platform. It was only after I had installed it that I started wondering why I had bothered; this was a knee-jerk purchase rather than a business-needs driven one. Now please don’t file this under ‘Microsoft Basher’ as that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. Both my kids are happily using Office 2010 Home and Student edition, and I’m quite happily running the equivalent of a small zoo full of Microsoft software here.

But as  a professional writer, as well as a consultant,  surely Microsoft Word gets used to within an inch of its life, I hear you pondering. But no, I’m writing this blog entry in my text editor of choice which happens to be NoteTab Pro. Yes, I said text editor rather than word processor, because my business-driven need for writing happens to be getting words onto a blank page with minimum fuss. That means I want a clean and compact interface without annoying distractions, and I want text entry to be straightforward and equally distraction free. By the time I have turned off everything that Microsoft throws in my direction by way of interface and text-entry distraction I could have written a small novel. NoteTab Pro has a spoil chicken (you know, the thing that checks your spellings), it has a word count function, and it has all the letters of the alphabet that I need.

Yet Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me for being a slave to something (truth be told, I’m not even sure what). Am I really so gullible that I fall for the marketing hype, or such a predictable geek that for me ‘upgrade’ is the same as ‘fix’ to a junkie? I suspect the latter, although why I was upgrading from something I hadn’t been using to something I wouldn’t be using, at considerable cost, on the off chance that I might be missing something, I have no idea. It’s not even that I cannot view Office documents without it when they arrive, as I can.

Back to that report, and the suggestion is that unused applications and data on your corporate network are ‘inefficiencies’ which place a significant cost burden on your business in terms of resources, power and management time. The bigger your business, the bigger those inefficiencies and the bigger the bottom line. Eighty six per cent of those asked agreed that removing unused applications would result in their IT systems running more efficiently. Mind you, so could preventing sales and marketing droids from installing unnecessary apps in the first place. The findings revealed that, and I quote, “sales and marketing departments are prone to side-stepping the IT department when it comes to adding new software and applications to existing systems”.

I can’t use that excuse: I am the sales and marketing department here. I can, and indeed have, used the research as a catalyst for having a long overdue clear up of unnecessary and unused applications from the servers. Which revealed that I am a pretty average kind of business guy, I guess, as just as the survey predicted the unused application detritus accounted for around a quarter of the total number of applications installed.

Also, just like 46% of those surveyed, I wasn’t keen on removing all the unused apps just in case I needed them for something at sometime in the future. Yes, you guessed it, Microsoft Office 2010 is still there and I’m still not sure why. It’s as if it has an uninstall block imprinted on my brain, and I remain convinced (for absolutely no good reason) that to remove it would be folly.

Go figure…

The call started amicably enough: while I didn’t like having to hand over my email address, phone number and postcode in order to register an account, the operator was friendly and chatty.

Immediately afterwards he started talking, casually at first, about the software I was registering and how I planned to use it, before moving on to the benefits of the latest version of the same application. I was pretty non-committal – after all, I’d only just installed the application and hadn’t actually used it. His computer then told him that I’d registered an account with the company back in January, although I’ve since forgotten.

He then proceeded with the hard sell, both for the updated version of the product I was registering and the now-forgotten free application I’d installed in January. The full-fat versions of both applications cost around £80, and I want neither. It’s worth mentioning that his selling technique was to repeatedly run down the software I was registering in comparison with the new version, even if he didn’t specify one new or improved feature.

When I turned down his offer, the operator sounded incredulous: why on Earth would I not want a pair of such outstanding products? After all, he’d spent all that time reading his script, and now I was knocking him back like a cheap floozy in a bar.

The Hard Sell

His attitude swiftly changed from amicable to sarcastic, and I was told that plenty of other applications are available if I just wanted free software. He also couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to spend £160 on these two tools, neither of which I’d actually used yet. He then put me on hold so, presumably, he could fetch my registration code.

When he returned, he told me that his supervisors had been listening to the call for training purposes – yeah, right – and they were prepared to offer me a special deal. It equated to around £30 off each application. I turned that down, too.

The operator then expressed his shock that I’d turned down his offer, baffled by why I wouldn’t want such stellar products gracing my desktop, and gave me the registration code I’d wanted 15 minutes beforehand. He then sharply told me to have a nice day before hanging up.

It was, in short, not a very nice experience, and one that I don’t wish on any consumer who has the misfortune of phoning up for a simple registration key rather than to spend a significant amount of money on software they don’t want or need. It also could explain why the company chooses phone registration over the normal email system. It’s far easier to bully people into sales when you’ve got them on the other end of the line, after all.

Don’t ask me to the name the company because the operator may just have been having an off day – I’m sure that dozens of other people on the end of the same phone lines are far more cordial and far less abrasive. And it’s not as if this particular company is alone in using these sort of techniques to hoodwink users. Other examples are easy to find.

Not alone

Take CCleaner. I think it’s a brilliant piece of software: it cleans your PC of unnecessary files and clutter, and it’s installed on all three of my computers. It’s also free. Try and install CCleaner, though, and you’re greeted with the option to add a CCleaner Yahoo! Toolbar.

CCleaner isn’t the only piece of reliable software that’s become filled with this sort of rubbish. AVG AntiVirus, for instance, makes one of the world’s most popular free virus packages. The application does carry an advert for the full version of the software, which is fair enough, but other pitfalls lurk during the install process. Once again, you’re asked to opt for Yahoo! as your default search engine, and the option to install an AVG toolbar is available, too.

Countless other applications invite you to install invasive toolbars throughout the installation process, and dozens more open web browsers and ask you to take surveys if you have to temerity to uninstall their software. I also regularly receive emails from most of these companies, and most of those merely wipe their feet on my inbox before finding a regular home in my Deleted Items folder.

Like the encounter I had with the telephone operator, it smacks of a desperate hard sell. Don’t get me wrong. These companies do have to make money and, in a world where companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google control mighty chunks of their respective markets, it must be trickier than ever to make a reasonable profit.

But, whether it’s over-the-phone badgering or multiple requests to install “extras” I don’t want,  are these tactics really the answer?

Quite right, Joe, and apologies for the lack of fanfare. This series of questions and answers should cover most areas, but if not then feel free to comment.

Is the EcoDisc really eco friendly? And why is it so much lighter?

The main reason for the lightness is that it’s a single layer of polycarbonate plastic, instead of the two bonded layers found in a conventional DVD5 disc (DVD5 denotes a single-sided, single-layer DVD with a 4.7GB capacity, and is the most common type).

According to EcoDisc, that means manufacturing one disc produces 52% less carbon dioxide than normal, and it also means the discs are fully recyclable as they don’t contain the non-biodegradable resin needed to bond the two halves of a normal DVD5 disc together.

As you can see from the “EcoDisc Carbon Calculator” above, the total amount of carbon dioxide “saved” per year, by PC Pro alone, equates to over 30,000kg.

Aha! If it’s half the size of a DVD, does that mean it only holds half the data?

Nope. Just like a normal DVD5 disc, its capacity is 4.7GB. To quote EcoDisc, the “second half of a conventional DVD5 is only a dummy, which does not contain any data”.

Will it work with my PC?

As much as we can guarantee anything in this world, yes. You can download a PDF with the full testing results of over 400 DVD players and drives, but I’ll save you some time: the only drive to fail was the Sony DVP-S315, and that’s a domestic DVD player.

So why is PC Pro doing this? To save the planet or save money?

Arguably, we should have done it some time ago, but we were still cautious about the EcoDisc’s compatibility. Those concerns have now been fully answered.

Does it save us money? Yes: while I can’t reveal exactly how much we pay per DVD5 or EcoDisc, the latter works out at 0.5p per disc cheaper, which isn’t to be sneezed at over the course of a year.

What about CDs? And going without a disc altogether?

EcoDisc does produce a CD version, but right now it’s only suitable for audio. A CD-ROM is in the works and when it’s released we’ll evaluate just how reliable it is.

Regarding removing the disc altogether – it’s something we do look at on a regular basis, but the simple and unavoidable fact is that people do like to own media containing the software.

From my point of view, then, it still makes sense to supply the magazine with a cover disc. That may yet change; as I say, it’s a question we tackle every single year.

Where can I find an issue with an EcoDisc?

Every DVD edition of PC Pro includes the EcoDisc now, whether you’re a subscriber or you buy the magazine on the newsstand.

We switched to the EcoDisc as of issue 190, pictured here.

1. Paint.NET

Windows 7 may now include a version of Paint complete with a fancy Ribbon interface, but it still doesn’t offer the features I need to quickly enhance photos and mould screenshots to my whims. Paint.NET does, and it also supports plug-ins for RAW files (and more), making it my top photo-editing choice.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Sorry Internet Explorer 8, but you’re too slow (as Microsoft’s own engineers accidentally admitted by saying they’d focus on performance with Internet Explorer 9). And frankly, I don’t use all those fancy right-click shortcuts that Microsoft has built in. I far prefer the faster Firefox, complete with all the Extensions such as Echofon for Twitter.

3. Windows Live Writer

I know it’s basic compared to some blogging tools out there, but Windows Live Writer is the perfect partner to our WordPress-powered blog. It’s easy to use while still offering all the power and features I need, such as retaining my favoured settings for photo formatting and links. To download it, type “live essentials” into the Windows 7 or Vista search box.

4. Adobe Reader

I’ve tried to like alternatives to Adobe Reader, such as FoxIt Reader, but against all my best instincts I keep on coming back to the bloated and comparatively slow Adobe offering. And that’s despite the fact I hate the way its install routine tries to sneak in a Yahoo toolbar and those annoying updates. The best thing that can be said about this program is that it works.

5. FileZilla

There may well be better FTP utilities than FileZilla, but as far as I’m concerned everyone can halt development right now: FileZilla is free, it works, and the interface – while doing for good looks what Bob Hoskins does for swimsuit modelling – is plain and functional. As far as I’m concerned, this is the poster child for open-source software.

6. VLC media player

I haven’t actually needed to use this tiny application since rebuilding my PC, but it won’t be long before a media file comes along in a form that Windows Media Player can’t recognise (one obvious example being FLV files). VLC media player, on the other hand, is fantastic at handling pretty much anything that’s thrown at it.

7. Spotify

While I still can’t bring myself to pay £10 per month for music I can’t keep, Spotify is my first port of call when it comes to distraction in the office. After all, a man needs to listen to something to drown out Stuart Turton’s whines about Liverpool’s latest failure (this weekend excepted), Jon Bray muttering to himself as he tests mobile phones, and Barry Collins ranting about various watchdog authorities.

8. BBC iPlayer

Travelling home by a train, sometimes I can’t quite force myself to do anything useful. Luckily those kind people at the BBC have built the iPlayer. With HD shows available for download as well, I’m in the odd situation where TV is better while travelling than at home. Note: this service is only available in the UK. If it’s any consolation, our weather’s awful.

9. Skype

I’ve moaned about Skype’s habit of grabbing my credit unless I use its pay-as-you-go service every six months, but this remains an essential tool in my foreign-trip armoury: much as I love my children, I’m not making 30-minute calls home on mobile roaming rates! With Skype, it’s free to call other Skype users and just 1.7 Euro cents to UK numbers.

10. Windows Live Mesh

I approach Live Mesh with a certain amount of trepidation: press Delete at the wrong time and it has the capability to permanently lose files with almost as much as speed as it allows you to share them. But if you, like me, flitter between different machines at a whim, then having one always-accessible copy of vital files can’t be underestimated.