Month: December 2011

I am using this article as the basis.. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223066/Tech_Trends_You_ll_See_in_2012?taxonomyId=158&pageNumber=1 1.. Dual-Core Processors Become the Norm in Smartphones This is great news, Nothing better than a high power phone. Quad core? Way to go. Do these smartphones come with flip out magnifiers such that people with less than 20-20 vision can see what is on screen? No? Bring on 16 core. It will all mean diddley squat to me. I don’t have 20-20 vision. 2.  Optical-Disc Drives Disappear From New Laptops The end of burning recovery disks? Wow. So everybody has to get an external hard drive in order to save … Continue reading Tech trends in 2012?

.. you may just have been given a shiny new computer. After the Windows 7 configuration part finally completes, remember to download ALL Windows software updates first, followed up by an anti-virus solution. I always suggest that Microsoft Security Essentials is used. When all is completed, you should be good to go..   See? Santa is busy setting his new Windows 7 machine up, and he is doing it right.   you may have to trust me on this one.. Have a great time, try not to eat too much, and try not to fall over much either. You may … Continue reading Tomorrow, December 25th..

I took the title from here.. http://www.ghacks.net/2011/12/20/how-will-we-control-the-computers-of-tomorrow/ To be honest, I am getting a little tired of being told how I should interact or will have t interact with MY computer. It would appear that others are too. Why didn’t cars of the future travel on a cushion of air? Well, directional control is an issue.. Why didn’t cars become personal flying machines like you see in Space movies? Because you would need traffic lights as high as CN Tower, and human beings do not all want to in the same direction at the same as time (as per Starlings).. … Continue reading How will we control the computers of tomorrow?

No, I have not lost my mind and bought one. I was asked if I could get it to connect to a Wi-fi network. The answer.. yes and no. I couldn’t get it to connect at the client location, but it connected to my wireless network in seconds. I have some work to do at the client location. So, it’s small and black. If you are OCD, the finger marks on the screen will drive you over the edge. The power button is to scale, miniscule and with virtually no travel. Unless you are looking at the front face, it … Continue reading Tablets.. The Blackberry Playbook..

I have a four year old grand-daughter who took a shine to computers three years ago and some. She used to watch me fix them, and when she was old enough that she could walk, she would hold a flashlight for me such that I could see what I was doing inside a desktop case. I used to tell her that she was a great helper, and when the computer would finally burst into life, she would exclaim ‘Poppa, its workin’. She graduated from flashlight duty to playing the three games in Windows 7 ‘Purble Place’, and it was quite … Continue reading Mice for little hands..

Ha-ha. Pull the other one. More like ‘out of the pan and into the fire’!! From the point where the Toshiba laptop started to lay down its Windows 7 –64-bit image from the recovery partition, it has taken over five hours.. yes that is … 5 hours.. and it has JUST finished installing the first round of updates. The image laying hardly took any time at all. Configuring the various internal components, which included several reboots, seemed to take forever. The fifty three updates plus two  optional updates seemed  to take forever. While the above was plodding along, I did … Continue reading Out of the box and ready to run?

This is an interesting article.. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222756/Dell_pulls_back_from_netbook_market?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29 It talks about the demise of the Dell netbook range. As it states at the end, Dell was not a big player in the netbook market, but it does show that the netbook market is losing its heart. Could it be the fact that netbooks are too small and too slow? It pays to have good eyes and dextrous fingers to get anything out of something so small, and the machines themselves are dogged by slow performance because the size and heat dissipation of small machines is not good enough to allow better. Could … Continue reading Small screens and low power..

The modifications I made to the Styrofoam base appear to have worked. Just to put you in the picture.. The black part is the case, the brown part is the floor, and the white part is the modified Styrofoam. The idea behind it is to keep the case off the floor such that it doesn’t suck dust in so readily. Showing is the back part of the case, the power supply sitting in the area directly behind what you can see. The cut-outs enable the power supply to breathe better, and I did the same on the other side. The … Continue reading No more Kernel power (Event ID 41) errors

When it has been Metroed. I was walking through the Nuclear Medicine department in one of our local hospitals recently. There was a technician sitting in a large cubicle. She had the task of monitoring two MRI machines, and had two large LCD panels in front of her. Both LCDs were running multiple windows. I wondered how she would cope with Windows 8, with everything wanting to run full screen and no task bar for easy access. Maybe she should ask for a couple of tablets. Think how easy her job would be if she could wander around holding a … Continue reading When is a desktop not a desktop?

This is a Silenx EFZ-120HA4.. supplied with one 120mm fan This is what I have in my main system. It works well and I can’t hear it. I like that.. The ends of the heatsink, the sides that you can’t see, are shrouded. This prevents heat falling out over the video card and chipset heatsinks which is a good thing. I bought it fro around $40 + tax from my local TigerDirect store. This is also an XtremeGear HP-1216B.. supplied with one 120mm fan. It sold for around $30 in the USA during 2010. This is a Spire Thermax Eclipse … Continue reading Badge engineering, but it’s the fan and CPU technology which cut the mustard..