Month: September 2011

I lost it and it will not re-install. With the problems I had with VirtuaBox and now VMWare 8, I am tempted to give the preview a miss completely. or maybe set up a hard drive all of its own. Trouble is that I do not have a hard drive kicking around presently. So for now, there will be nothing from me on aspects of Windows 8 Preview other than what I have written already. To be perfectly honest, I would rather wait for the beta which will be much nearer to the finished product than the preview anyway. More … Continue reading Windows 8 Preview..

Wow, it’s an operating system. Cool.. The new GUI.. Like playing an intransigent sliding block puzzle which looks like a ‘Craps’ table. Make the icons smaller and move them around. They move but not always to where you expect or hope. Useless for desktop users who don’t have a touchscreen, and the green background? Who decided on that? It isn’t even a nice green. Click on ‘desktop’ and you get a more familiar view. Click on the Windows icon and you are back on the ‘Craps’ table. Please tell me that the finished version will NOT do this. Games/fun stuff.. … Continue reading Windows 8 Preview.. the FIRST impression..

When you have a fast system, processes can be running in the background which you don’t notice. A few days ago, I was looking through Programs and Features for junk to uninstall, and I came across Yahoo Toolbar. It had to go, especially as last time there was a Yahoo upgrade, I specifically checked NOT to install it. So I set the uninstall process running, and guess what? It has been running for days. It came to my attention when looking at Speedfan temperatures today. I was interested to see how the CPU was doing since refitting the fan and, … Continue reading Speedfan – Why you should install it..

All I wanted to do was crop a few photos taken by a cellphone camera. There was a time when any photo editor would have made the task simple, but not anymore. Windows Live Photogallery – a freebie I found out how to set the crop area, but could find no way to save it.. Tried a simple cut and re-paste into a new screen. Result = FAIL Irfanview – a freebie The crop area defaulted to the top right of the photo and I couldn’t move it to the area I wanted to keep. Result = FAIL XNView – … Continue reading Editing photos..

This is the CPU fan/heatsink that I installed a while back. It does a great job, BUT.. There is a design flaw and no obvious way around it. Look closely at the image and you will see that the fan is larger than the heatsink. Behind the mounting holes on the fan are four rubber mounting posts which slide into grooves on the heatsink. These rubber mounts are not easily slid into the grooves, especially after it is mounted in the computer, as there is virtually no room around it.  I found that applying a small amount of silicon grease … Continue reading Silenx EFZ-120HA4.. a design flaw

When organising member discounts with an ISP operative, do NOT believe a word they tell you. I intercepted in April what would be a higher charge in May of this year, a $40 increase over what I had been paying. I was told by the Rogers operative at the time that the price for my Internet, Cable TV and phone would be the same price out of the door as I had been paying. The above is NOT what happened. Rogers were going to get the full price out of me if only for one month. I am partly to … Continue reading ISP discounts..

If it sounds too good to be true, it IS too good to be true. “Win an iPad2. All you have to do is fill in your name and address such that we can send it to you, oh and include your cellphone number such that TriviaQuiz can send you premium charge text messages to your cellphone at $3 a hit. Oops, we shouldn’t have told you the bit about the premium text messages.” And there lies the problem. These ‘you’ve won a prize’ websites never tell you that what you have actually won is a $3 charge for every … Continue reading Claiming prizes online..