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1. 
   Review - Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Pro (64-bit)

   2008 Public Beta (Aug 19, 2007)

   Tried installing on Vista x64 (as that's what it's for) but part of the installation failed as the drivers it tried to install weren't signed. What the hell? Seriously? Anyway, the installation continued and then I restarted. Now the connection, as expected, is completely hosed.
   
   Can't access a single thing on the network or the internet. No problem - I'll just uninstall it, right? Nope. Uninstall fails. I'm preying that System Restore will fix this mess otherwise my 8-month strong install of Vista will have to be flattened, and I'm NOT a happy bunny.
   
   I used to use Outpost pre-Vista, so I was a fan of it. But the problem is, when Outpost goes wrong - it goes VERY wrong. This time, it went wrong. I've now learnt not to touch any non-final Agnitum software releases.

2. 
   Review - WoWus

   0.98 (Sep 5, 2006)

   The hosting server went splat; it should work now. Menting's problem has been fixed in the v0.99 release, so if anyone else had the same thing - it works now.

3. 
   Review - Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express

   Beta 1 (Aug 30, 2006)

   Sorry, I'm not even vaguely impressed. Going through the included SpaceWars game - which, incidentally, doesn't work for me because it requires an Xbox controller - source shows that it still requires huge dollops of code to do even the simplist things. Because of this, I regard this as a way of using VS 2005+ to write games for Windows and the Xbox as opposed to making games quicker to write. One of the flavours of Blitz still seems to be the way to go in creating non-triple A games.
   
   Edit: Well, I wasn't exactly thinking along the lines of Click & Play, but more so utility libraries and such; having to mess about with visualisation matrices seems kinda silly (excluding for advanced effects) when we have tools like this available and you just wanna plonk down a viewport camera.
   
   I forgot to mention: this requires Visual C# Express Edition to work. This annoyed me as I already have Visual Studio 2005 C# (and all the rest) installed and it didn't make use of any of it. I see *why* it didn't, but, well ...

4. 
   Review - Windows Updates Downloader

   2.21 Beta Build 256 (Aug 16, 2006)

   Like VictorAnderson says, it seems the program comes with .ui files that contain links to the updates but there is no way of automatically updating them. It's a shame that the author doesn't have a forum for this (he doesn't even acknowledge his software on his site at all as far as I can tell) as I would like to contribute to it in some way (interface updates; downloading of .ui file updates; etc) as I'm also a .NET developer. I've given this a 3 as it has so much potential but unfortunately it isn't being realised.

5. 
   Review - VioLet Composer

   0.41 Alpha (Jul 15, 2006)

   Sorry to give such a low score, but it doesn't really seem to work on my PC. Clicking Save in the settings wizard at startup causes an unhandled exception. Clicking Cancel causes a handled exception but audio doesn't work. Unfortunately the program suffers from the typical Open-Source-bad-interface syndrome. It looks very dodgy, and even doing something simple like closing the About window hard locks the entire system for a couple of seconds. The menu looks mental (what's with the gigantic spacing?). As it's open source, I can actually help out rather than just blabbing about what should be done - so that's good!

6. Comment - Mozilla to Issue Firefox Security Fix

   0.41 Alpha (Apr 30, 2006 - 5:23 PM)

   You've got TWO programs open doing constant I/O on every single accessed file, and you're saying HE has no idea? Really, disable one and do scans every few days or so.