Jon Honeyball wonders why the Xbox 360 is better than Vista for the large screen, while contemplating Microsoft’s Live 2.
I decided recently to upgrade the television system that I use at the end of my bed. While some people find a laptop suitable for this role, I prefer a large flat-panel TV with a surround-sound speaker system. Without doubt, many readers will at this point be shaking their heads and describing me
as both weird and sad, but that’s alright, I can cope with the shame.
A couple of years ago, I bought a super-cheap 30in TFT panel, which worked very well when driven digitally from a PC or Mac mini. It offered a good resolution for a 30in screen at bed-length viewing distance, the only downside being that the LCD panel – a very early model – had a quite slow and unresponsive refresh time, so it suffered from visual smearing in fast-moving scenes. What’s more, its performance was quite variable as it warmed up from cold.
Given the arrival of HD DVD and a flood of new panels that claim to be HD ready, I decided it was time to upgrade my bedroom system – purely in the interests of research, you’ll understand. I took the plunge and bought a new screen, a plasma panel made by LG. At 50in, it’s a monster, spanning the full width of the foot of the double bed – and its weight is staggering too. It has a range of inputs, usefully including a pair of HDMI inputs with one of them optimised specifically for DVI operation.
So does this system represent overkill? Yes, of course it does, and yet it’s also a most workable and useful solution.
Things are different with Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which offers an optional HD DVD player add-on unit at the remarkable price of $250 RRP. The new Xbox 360 Elite finally supports HDMI output. Using my Xbox 360 with the large HD panel has cemented my opinion that this could, and should, become the Microsoft home platform for the future, though – it is so much better suited to large panel TV operation than Windows Vista Desktop. For example, navigation feels perfectly natural and obvious on the Xbox, while it feels faintly ridiculous to have a Start button that big on a raw Vista Desktop.
XP firewall
I had a strange problem with a box running XP Home last week. This is a box that’s done sterling duty, and is a bit of a dump when it comes to beta software and other rubbish that floats about on the Internet. I had some Ghost images of its hard disk from a year ago, so I knew I could restore it to a working configuration if needed – I wasn’t particularly concerned about it, but I can’t resist a challenge.
The problem was quite simple: this was an XP Home box, not connected to any domain controller or network, and yet its firewall configuration dialog box was greyed out. I couldn’t turn the firewall off, on or even reconfigure it. The dialog box resolutely told me that the settings were controlled by ‘Group Policy’ and, despite being the ‘Administrator’ of the machine, I was
still locked out. I had no idea what caused this brain scrambling to occur, but there were no means by which I could turn it off. A search around the web indicated that there was no way I could sort this out through the user interface, but that I’d have to dive into the Registry editor to make a manual tweak. Now, going into the Registry editor doesn’t faze me – and I’m sure it doesn’t worry a PC Authority reader like you either – but it isn’t really the sort of solution that one would want to recommend to a typical home user over the phone in a remote support-call scenario. Nevertheless, tweaking was required, and you need to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall.
Take a backup of the key just in case you need to reinstall it, and then delete the \WindowsFirewall branch, followed by a system restart.
What had caused this to happen? It appears that some viruses can cause this sort of behaviour, but it could have been a badly written uninstaller for some beta security software too. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that Registry tweaking can often help you sort out even the most intransigent of messes. If you’re running Windows XP Professional, you need to use the Group Policy program instead. Run gpedit.msc and navigate down to Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Network | Network Connections | Windows Firewall | Standard Profile. Set the following items to ‘Not Configured’, which is the default setting:
• Windows Firewall: Protect all network connections
• Windows Firewall: Do not allow exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Define program exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Allow local program exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Allow remote administration exception
• Windows Firewall: Allow file and printer sharing exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Allow ICMP exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Allow Remote Desktop exception
• Windows Firewall: Allow UPnP framework exception
• Windows Firewall: Prohibit notifications
• Windows Firewall: Allow logging
• Windows Firewall: Prohibit unicast response to multicast or broadcast requests
• Windows Firewall: Define port exceptions
• Windows Firewall: Allow local port exceptions.
Then exit the Group Policy editor. On the subject of which, I downloaded the latest version of Registry Mechanic, waved it in the direction of this machine’s Registry and it had a field day, finding all sorts of rubbish. Worst of all was a pile of stuff from old applications, where I know I had executed the uninstall program, which makes me wonder just how good a job most uninstallers do in real life. It wasn’t even the big apps that were the worst, but stuff like printer drivers that left a raft of debris on the computer. The startup of the machine was quite dramatically quicker once I’d given the Registry a good clean up, and there’s no doubt it was an overall improvement. But, I must again warn you, fiddling with the Registry is a recipe for disaster, so make sure you have a full recovery position in place.