The week in technology

I'm what you would call a heavy user of the internet. I use it all day at work and I easily go through my 25GB of bandwidth my ISP kindly allows me each month .

When you've got an iPod touch, a Nintendo DS, a Playstaion 3, a couple of desktop computers and a couple of laptops leaching bandwidth you can see it's not hard to rack up the gigabytes.

But, even by my standards, this has been a heck of week!

First up I did what, I suspect, not many have actually done in New Zealand and purchased a game on the Playstation Network through my Playstation 3.

I'm not one of those who feels the need for a physical disc (although, interestingly this does remove the ability to sell it in the future - but I'll leave that for another blog entry I think) and so decided to take the plunge.

I scored the game for quite a bit less than can be bought for in the shops, and the actual purchase and download was a simple process. It's definitely something I would consider doing again.

The fact that it's so painless means you don't have to be technologically minded to actually do it, so kudos to Playstation for setting it up well.

More important this week, though, was the release of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) 1. This is Microsoft's follow-up to Windows Vista - in my opinion Microsoft's worst operating system since Windows ME.

Being a release candidate, this means the software may not necessarily be 100 per cent ready for use on your computer - there could be some bugs that need fixing.

However, anyone can register for a product key and download the software, and it'll work until June next year before you have to pay for it or go back to your previous operating system so there are some plusses to trying it out.

Given rebuilding my laptop has become an almost weekly task (it tends to fall somewhere between 'going to the toilet' and 'eating' on a geek's normal schedule), I decided to give it a go.

The good news is that it appears pretty stable, it looks really good and it has some excellent features.

However a Friday afternoon is no time to be getting into the depths of operating system testing, so look for a full review, and screenshots, on Monday.

Other interesting news was the court case between Vodafone and Telecom that played out, briefly, in the High Court this week before ultimately being settled out of court.

There's nothing I like more than playing with mobile phones and trying to break them, so I'll be keeping my geeky eyes on what happens in New Zealand's mobile phone industry over the next few months as the battle for customers plays out.

Anyone who subscribes to my Twitter feed would have got an early heads up on this next piece of news - Amazon's UK store (I haven't tried the US store yet) now allow you to pay in NZ dollars, which saves the cost your credit card company charges you when you buy something in a foreign currency.

On a $22 purchase, I worked out I probably paid about 50c extra given Amazon's exchange rate was slightly lower than the banks - but this is less than the credit card would charge, so that was a bonus!

And, last but not least for this week, TorrentFreak are reporting that the European Parliament has voted for an amendment which will prevent member states from implementing a three-strikes law for disconnecting alleged copyright infringers from the internet.

You may remember a similar law here was rejected by the National Government after a successful blackout campaign on the internet forced a rethink.

I'll leave you with what will become a regular feature on this blog, the WoW Award for website of the week.

If you've never visited Lifehacker then I suggest you take a trip there soon. It has tips on technology, but does cover things like how to save money, cooking tips and, my favourite of this week, how to make a beer cocktail for Cinco de Mayo. Mmmm, beer.

On that note, have a great weekend and may your laptop never run out of batteries!