Geoff Garside

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Delerium in London

I went to see Delerium last night at the Islington Carling Academy. Was absolutely brilliant.

It took a little while to fill up so I managed to snag a nice spot near the front and grab a quick pint to whet the whistle. The pint at £3.35 was quite fairly priced for London.

Met I couple other people while I was there, rather unsurprisingly there were quite a few who had come from far a field, well further a field than I. Birmingham and Peterborough I have to admit aren’t that far a field but still.

Once the support acts came on things got a bit more interesting, don’t they always. Sadly I can’t remember either of the support acts names but the first was very good. It started off a bit flat but picked up as it went which was good. The second support act was basically just a DJ and while quite good did drag on a bit longer than it probably should have. A short break in his set might well have helped.

Then finally Delerium came on, I’m currently listening through the over 100 tracks I have of them to work out what the first song was. The second though was After All when their vocalist Kristy Thirsk magically pranced out from the back. It was absolutely great especially hearing both Silence and Incantation live. They are two absolutely amazing tracks.

My thanks to Facebook adverts for telling me of the event.

Windows Airport drivers improved

Seems like the Airport drivers provided for Vista x64, either the OS drivers or simply the 2.1 update, are far improved over the ones I was using in Windows XP.

With the XP drivers you had to be extremely careful not to let the machine enter any form of standby and closing the lid was just madness. Disabling the interface through a “Repair Network Connection” was also a big no-no.

Now though with these drivers I was able to safely close up my MacBook Pro and open it again a few hours later and be greeted with the internet at my fingertips.

Short Version: w00t I can use Windows properly on my MBP now.

Vista x64 on MacBook Pro

I have spent this bank holiday weekend upgrading my BootCamp Windows installation from XP to Vista. The pretty much sole reason for this was so that my full quantity of RAM would be accessible to Windows.

So I received my Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with SP1 on Saturday and finally got it installed on Sunday. The main issue it seems was the new EFI abilities. What would happen is when I booted I would be presented with the following menu

  1. 
  2. 
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:

and the keyboard wouldn’t work. Apparently the options should be

1. Normal Boot
2. EFI Boot

but due to the lack of functioning keyboard this information was a bit useless. It turns out theres some issue with ISO9660 file versioning and the bootable DVD. In order to fix this I had to re-install Windows XP as I’d already nuked the Windows partition once. Once in Windows XP I followed some instructions to reburn the Vista DVD. Armed with this new DVD I was able to boot and install Vista.

Once Vista was installed I needed to download the drivers from the Mac Pro Leopard DVD which includes the required installers for Vista x64. These drivers are currently homed on RapidShare which is really annoying if you want to download the files in any quick succession. I’ll probably end up sticking them on my server when I’m at work next. If I do I’ll update this post with links to them.

Finally once they were installed the new BootCamp 2.1 Vista x64 drivers could be installed. This part had me confused for a while, I was hoping to install from the BCUpdateVista64.exe file but unfortunately this won’t install without the initial BootCamp stuff being there first.

The whole process was completed with nVidia drivers from laptopvideo2go.com.

Update: Links to the BootCamp x64 Drivers

• ZIP Archive (380.7MB)
• Drivers folder