Month: April 2009

I recently installed one of the above motherboards into a client machine to a replace a first generation P4 Intel D845WM, and there are some points that I would like to make. The Asus board is a Micro ATX type c/w integrated video, sound, network port; all the usual stuff. It is at the budget end of the scale, and Asus like to think of it as ‘budget business class’. I would not recommend that this motherboard  is installed into an older small tower case. Here is why: The components to the North of the main power input are so … Continue reading Hardware Installation Review – Asus M3N78VM..

We all need it, but how many really want it? The good ole days of Windows 98, iIf a computer user wanted to transfer a file via MSN, Yahoo, AOL Buddy or ICQ to another user and it wouldn’t transfer, what was the the first thing that both users would do? If your answer was anything other than ‘turn off the anti-virus and firewall applications’, you are wrong. One way or another, the file was going to get through. You could warn people of the dangers of doing this until you were blue in the face, but it made no … Continue reading Internet Security..

I am assuming that you know how to and have made the necessary share permissions on the computer which is hosting the printer. To share a network printer being hosted by a computer running a 32 bit operating system with another computer running a 32 bit operating system, Vista or XP, you would go to Control Panel > ‘Printers’ > ‘Add Printer’ > ‘Add a network printer’. Apologies to any of you who consider that I am stating the obvious. In fairness, it is obvious. Sharing a printer being hosted by a computer running 32 bit Vista or XP with … Continue reading 64 bit issues.. Printer sharing

Windows 2000 machines aimed at business would sit on the shelves with 128mb fitted. When the corporate buyers came along, more memory would be specified, maybe 256mb. Windows 2000 would rattle along quite nicely with 256mb powering it, but if it was fitted with 512mb, it would fair fly. But bear in mind that almost all of these machines had a video card sitting in a slot. The 256mb only had to push programs and data around. This was also true of Windows 98/ME machines of the day. They may have only been 2 or 4mb Matrox Mystiques or similar, … Continue reading How much RAM?

I have a spare box kicking around at the moment, not too well specified but OK. So I thought that I would install Ubuntu 8.10 on it. That goes well as long as one choose the option to use the entire disk, and in fact it did. Then I get a popup telling me that some of the hardware drivers necessary may not be free. They are free for Windows users. Ha. Rather than wait for Ubuntu to discover updates, I manually started Update Manager. Two hundred and ninety one updates, in numbers 291. No wonder Ubuntu is served as … Continue reading And some say that Windows 7 is really Vista SP3 and that Vista is useless!!

A recent report has come up with an interesting fact. Eighty four percent of IT Pro’s will not be upgrading to Windows 7 this year. This should not be a surprise, bearing in mind that Windows 7 has not even reached the RTM stage yet. I have no doubt that one or two of those questioned are still wrestling with the decision to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP. One has to look at reports like this in context. If your company is running processes today on reliable equipment, there are no plans to change or add to the load … Continue reading Fun with numbers..

I don’t know very much about the world of espionage, be it ‘Bond, James Bond’ style or plain old boring commercial skullduggery. I do know that all sides went to extraordinary lengths re technology in order to gain an edge. In the days of paper and filing cabinets, if a spy wanted to get copies, he/she would have to use a small camera like a Minox. Cute, and with excellent resolution, these little cameras could provide a useful working copy of any document. The problem in using one of these is that you had to be on the premises, and … Continue reading Oh, the fragility..

How to disable the keyboard scroll wheel after having gotten it to work by installing the Win 7 driver until the next reboot. BTW, this is the ultimate detrimental side effect. Depress the SLEEP key.. Now, when one wakes the computer by swishing the mouse around, the keyboard scroll wheel does absolutely nothing except take up real estate on the left side of the keyboard. Possible workarounds: Never put the computer to sleep Change the keyboard for a less annoying model Carefully shape a piece of duct tape and apply over the scroll wheel (Canada only) Shoot the scroll wheel … Continue reading Vista and keyboard scroll wheels.. part 2

Yesterday, many users of the Hotmail e-mail service thought that they had lost their mail accounts for good. There is no direct link to Hotmail, so some took to the newsgroups. Let’s face facts here and accept that it had to be the fault of Vista, IE8, and Windows Live Mail. Everybody knows that Vista is crap and one only has to resurrect blog and newsgroup postings from the early days of the operating system to prove it. Some excerpts from the Vista Mail newsgroup.. “I would like to know if there is a way of retrieving our old mail … Continue reading A Cloud burst?

I wrote about this when Vista first appeared. It took a while for the manufacturer to produce proper drivers for Microsoft keyboards, and when it was finally released, everything worked except for the scroll wheel. Subsequent driver releases were made, but the scroll wheel never worked. Up until now, I had given up on it ever working in Vista. Tonight, I received an e-mail from a Vista 64 user asking if I ever found a solution. I replied back that I hadn’t, but it gotten me thinking. I knew that it worked in XP, and via beta testing Windows 7, … Continue reading Vista and keyboard scroll wheels..