Burning Sleep is here!

burningsleep is a brand new music blog, dedicated to a wide genre of music, ranging from little known UK Indie bands, to globally dominating multinational superbands. LosHavros and I are very excited about the project, and hope you visit the site in the near future.

Britney Spears – You are STILL a disgrace to the music industry

Britney Spears, I would love you to read what I’ve written below, however unlikely that may be.

Why did she bother coming to the UK to ‘perform’ on the X Factor last weekend? Seriously, she did not sing one word of her latest tripe offering of a song. Every contestant on the show sings to a very high standard every week, put 100% effort in, and pray and hope for the opportunity for a career in music. Britney got lucky. She was cute and could dance, she was in the right place at the right time. She doesn’t write or even sing her own songs!

She did not mentor any of the contestants – unlike Take That, Will young, even Mariah Carey, the biggest diva on Earth, helped out the contestants with advice, offered encouragement, and actually performed live. Britney swans in at the last moment of the show, prances around in hot-pants for a few minutes, shaking her ass in everyone’s face and somehow thinks everyone loves her.

I know this was last week, the reason I’m writing this article this week is because Paramore performed live recently with their new song, Decode, and completely wiped the floor with Britney’s ‘performance’. With the likes of Britney, the Pussycat Dolls, and all the other big-boobed or long-legged talentless whores in the music today, it’s a relief that there are some skilled people left out there.

So, I just switched to Vista….again

You might want to read this before you continue, but it’s not essential. To summarise, I switched to Vista about 16 months ago, but found it very hard work and my system generally ran very slow, and there were general driver and software incompatible issues. Last week, I decided it had been long enough, and bravely took the plunge (again) into the murky depths of Vista. I’ll try and highlight the key points between the two OS’s and anything else I found along the way.

Upgrading to Vista, (unlike downgrading to XP) was as easy as anything. Just shove in the CD, put in your code, and press next. Done.

Vista instantly looks very good without any customising or setup. This could be because XP is actually very old now, and looks dated by today’s standards. Even so, Vista looks very flash right from the go. After installing key drivers from a CD (supplied with my machine) connecting to the Internet was a breeze, and from there I downloaded all my usual applications such as Firefox, Steam, and such, without any problems.

This was the point last time where I got stuck. Gaming was slow to the point of being unplayable, Firefox worked but was slow, and many applications crashed all the time or were totally incompatible – even with the ‘XP compatibility mode’ enabled. Within a week I had had enough and went back to XP.

This time around however, it was very smooth sailing. Updates all downloaded and installed fine, it looks great and I can’t think of anything that doesn’t run as well as it did on XP. Even anti-virus software, which was a real pain initially, now runs perfectly. If you’re running Windows Aero the Explorer menu’s looks fantastic, and there are so many neat touches (transparency, windows switching, application previews etc) and considering there is no lag in performance when compared to XP, its pleasantly surprising.

So, if you are still on XP and your hardware can manage the demands of Vista, I would highly recommend you make the switch.