Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

Microsoft release Virtual Server 2005 R2 beta version was release a while back. It has a nice web interface which allows to access all your virtual systems on the server. You can test drive it yourself at Microsoft. Virtual Server is more flexible then Virtual PC 2004. You have the ability to create a larger virtual hard disk up to 127 GB. A big upgrade from the 16 GB that was offered in VPC 2004. A new addition to the Virtual Server website is downloading virtual Hard drives from their website. This will save the time of creating a virtual machine from scratch. There is also the addition of creating virtual network enabling you to put virtual machines on that network. Virtual server is great addition to the Microsoft Line up and should work well with a Windows server 2003. This is an important release for me while majority of my tested beta version are done on a virtual PC. I really like the web server interface and allowing me to take remote control right from the site. But even with my 2 GB's of ram I felt Virtual Server lag a bit more then using VMServer. Which is available for free.


Verdict: Definitely worth testing out Virtual Server since the recent addition of down-loadable virtual hard disks.

Google Writely

Google recently purchased Writely in there continuing efforts to make office type applications available to everyone via the Internet. Writely is like Google Spreadsheets but appears to have progress much further in features. It has all the basic features that anyone would need to word process. I really liked the auto save feature (Office 2003 - sometimes lags when it auto saves) Writely Autosave is quick and doesn't affect the performance. So I actually typed this in writely. I also liked the fact how you could publish to your blog. While I am on blogger and Google own both products I think the post worked well. I didn't have a chance to test with another blog entry on Writely! The spell check is pretty accurate but said 'Writely' and 'Google' were misspelled. Just like MS Word you can use the right click button almost anywhere on the text area. You can save the file in popular formats such as MS Word, Open Office, and even PDF. Visit Writely to test drive the web application for yourself. Writely beta is 62% complete, I will post updates as they become available.