Installed Hardy Heron today on some laptops I have at home — I had decided to try and rip my entire CD collection again with consistent naming and organisation, and the best tool for the job — ripit — is linux based. The wonderous wubi makes a quick installation for a single purpose possible. There is not risk to your machine, and no painful partitioning to be done.

Hardy worked pretty well. X worked fine, as did the new resolution switchers. They have moved the location of the "no, no, no, don't autoplay the CD, not under any circumstances, just don't do it" dialog from removable devices and media to the file browser. They need to rename something—a CD is "removable media" in my book.

I couldn't get the wireless to work which was pretty disappointing, but this turned out to be because I had clicked the wrong button — if you single-click the network on the panel and pick the relevant network it all just works. If you right-click and fiddle with the settings yourself, it doesn't. Hardy actually got all three of my cards (spread between two computers) with no problems.

Neither computer is upto much, and each CD is taking ~20 mins, which is much longer than I expected. Still can't really blame hardy for this.

Just tried the BBC's iplayer for the first time. Pretty good, actually. It basically works, the image quality is good, download speed is fine. The download manager is pretty clunk and limited — you can't control how many things it downloads at once for instance. The DRM is a pain because you have to use windows media player to watch stuff back; normally I am a VLC man, and I miss having the keyboard shortcuts.

Shortly after downloading a few things, my download speed plummted. I think Virgin have chocked me for blowing my download limit, which is the first time this has happened. I managed to get a "0" reading on a download speed diagnostic; strangely, it also showed I have a 2MB upload which makes no sense at all. Is cable not asymmetric?

Update

Take it all back. IPlayer installs kservice.exe as an automatic systems service. This spams the outgoing connection even after terminating iplayer. Moreover, it's a CPU hog, that turned my machine to treacle. This rather disingenuous blog post mentions the problem, says "it's outside the scope of this article" and suggests you firewall it out. I have a better idea; the BBC should switch the damn thing off. Very, very poor.