A Trio of Reviews!

Took longer than planned but here’s a trio of reviews. Starting with Delain:

I am a rather large Delain fan. Seen ’em four times now and they’ve been good or great everytime. Last week was no exception. While I am not a big fan of their last two albums they are still excellent live. The later songs still sound really good live and between Charlotte (vocals) and Otto (bass) they always put on a great performance. A really varied set with something off every album and Charlotte especially was on fire! Very strange seeing them in a supporting set role rather than headliners!

Within Temptation was the second time seeing them but the first time actually getting to SEE them! Last time we were stuck far away from the stage and because of how the Academy in Brum works could barely see anything the whole night. This time (went seated!) got to see the whole show. Bloody hell they are good! Really impressive set and really cool how they worked the duet songs into the set. And We Run is absolutely brilliant!It shouldn’t work but DAMN it’s great! Both bands put on a brilliant set and I am hoping to see both bands again as soon as possible.

Now to bring some geek on! My new laptop is an Asus X552C and frankly it is impressive. A Core i5 backed up by 6gb of memory with an nVidia GeForce 710M to finish off the specs. Doesn’t sound amazing but the whole lot work together really well with Windows 8… Now, bare with me here… When I started I had the bog standard Windows 8. I hated it, it was terrible and useless as I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do. All in all I felt I’d made a mistake going for W8… I then decided I had nothing to lose going for W8.1… This was a nightmare as in order to get 8.1 I had to fully update 8 which refused to update! Cue lots of swearing! When it finally updated and installed 8.1 -which took 4 hours!!- I could actually find things… Not only that just I could set things up how I like them! While there are some things I still don’t like -I really miss having the old style Start menu- I am much happier as I can actually use the laptop now and not swear at it. Oh, also the sound is Amazing!!