Yesturday I tried to renew my xbox live gold membership using www.instantlivecodes.com as they were cheap. I was wary of buying xbox live codes from anyone but microsoft. After some googling I found some other peoples positive feedback of  instantlivecodes.com so I thought I’d try it.

I paid for a 12+1 months gold subscription at through paypal at 11:00 and recieved an email asking me to reply and confirm who I was. I did this straight away and waited for my instant xbox live code to be emailed to me. At 16:00 I’d still not recieved a code so sent an another email. 20:00 still no answer, send another email. At this point I thought that I had been tricked and was never going to get my instant live code from this site.

Finally, I did get it. The email was sent at 6:10 the next morning, 19 hours later. This wasn’t a problem just very misleading. The support pages says:

Q, I want my 12+1 Xbox Live membership . Like, right now! Do I HAVE to wait?
A, All Xbox Live membership codes are emailed to you instantly, please check inbox as soon as you’ve payment.

This just isn’t true. I’m not telling people to not use this company, just to expect a wait for XBL memebership.

The below is taken from www.digitalspy.co.uk:

The Red Dwarf crew will be returning to Earth when the cult sci-fi show returns to TV later this year. Red Dwarf: Return To Earth will reportedly see last human Dave Lister (Craig Charles) achieve his life-long goal of touching down on his home planet. The two-part special, which has been commissioned by digital channel Dave, will reunite original cast members Charles, Danny John-Jules, Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn one decade after the iconic comedy ended. Speaking to The Sun, Barrie confirmed the plot, saying: “Yes, Lister’s dream is about to come true. But like everything in Red Dwarf, nothing is straightforward.” Written and directed by Red Dwarf creator Doug Naylor, the special episodes will kick off a special Easter weekend of Red Dwarf on Dave. Return To Earth will be followed by Red Dwarf: Unplugged, which has been described as a “no holds barred” episode with no sets, no effects and no autocue. The weekend will close with Red Dwarf: The Making Of Back To Earth, which will give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the new production. The programme ran from 1988 until 1999, winning numerous awards including an international Emmy. It has sold more than seven million DVDs and videos across the world and at its peak, pulled in eight million viewers.

I’ve had an iMac for about 2 years and have recently noticed that it’s getting a little slower at booting up. So I’ve spent so time trying to improve it. This is what I found and how I recommend speeding up a mac in the future.

• Check login items for your user account and remove programs that you don’t need. This can be found thorough systems.app then user accounts. I found that I still had software running at start up for a scanner that I didn’t have anymore.
• Time spent loading with grey and blue boot screens aren’t usually related to programs running in the background.
• Use a maintenance program like Cocktail or Leopard Cache Cleaner both are shareware and can be used without paying for although I’d recommended buying 1 of them if you find it useful to support the developers. Both programs are very similar but Cocktail has a built in scheduler to run maintenance scripts and power down your system which is a nice feature. Leopard Cache Cleaner can run an antivirus scanner so you may want to run bits of both programs.
• Delete programs, movies, albums that you no longer want. A hard drive more than 75% full seems to slow down the system a little. Using a program like Tidy Up can make this easier.
• Reboot the system then run a program called console straight away. It come with the mac. Just search for it using spotlight and click run. This will give you a log of what your system has been doing. I noticed that there were about 20 log entries for VMware fusion, a program that I’d removed a few months earlier. A quick google search and download later and I had an uninstaller program to remove VMware fusion properly from my system.
• Run the activing monitor program that came with your Mac and watch for programs that use alot of CPU or RAM of anykind. If you don’t need the program or can find an alternative that uses less resources remove the program from your system.
• Unplug any devices attached to your Mac except for your mouse and keyboard. Restart and see if this improves boot time, if so then reattach items one by one rebooting in between until you find which item is causing the problem. I found that my USB hub added an extra 20 seconds to the boot time. If this happens to you consider getting another USB hub or just be happy knowing that you’ve found part of the problem and that it’s nothing to worry about.