My brain is kinda fried from a series of incidents that have taxed me almost to the limit. A few days ago I received a call from an employment counsellor whom I have kept in contact with. It seems that he had a client who had recently purchased a used laptop and even though this person is a self-admitted 'computer-illiterate', could tell that the unit didn't run right.
This counsellor, a Mac enthusiast, is pretty savvy about computers in general, also. He had a look at the notebook and told me that it was so full of junk, e.g., all sorts of stupid, kid-type programmes that seemed to go nowhere other than sucking system resources and he suspected that it could do with a thorough system scrubbing and maybe a hardware upgrade in the way of some more RAM.
Well, seeing as how my schedule is wide open - a chronic situation of late, to my chagrin - I popped over to the office and met with the client. I had a quick look and the counsellor was right on with his assessment.
I chatted with the potential client and explained my rates and what I would do; they seemed agreeable. We shook hands and he handed me his Acer TravelMate laptop.
Since later model, proprietary manufactured computers are being marketed without the actual, physical Restore Disc(s), there is a section on the secondary drive that contains all the default, factory recovery information and operating system. They all seem to follow a general pattern: Two disc drives; the secondary usually being dynamic; and what I can't figure out is why they're formatted with the FAT32 file system - at least all the XP Home Editions are and some of the XP Professional in the older units. It seems that OEM reasoning is that FAT32 is a lot more compatible with other applications - phew! Check out what's happening today, not 15 years ago, fer chrissake!
Thank goodness for the "convert drive x: /fs:ntfs" command
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Tried to update my Windoze, but since the M$ webstite will only talk to IE, it was a failure. Using my other browsers, Firefox and Opera, I was able to gain access and download stuff with no problem. My Avast! and Spybot managed to update with speed and accuracy.
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USB 3 To Go FibreOptic?
The below is a link to an interesting article about how IBM, Sony and Mac are developing the integration of fibre optics into upcoming computer hardware design plans:
Intel & USB into fibre optics to your desktop via USB 3:
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Texas Cops to Go HiTech
Austin, TX Cops to take on bloggers:
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Browser Wars, Again?
For a nauseous & erroneous evaluation of the browser wars see this:
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Cellphones Fry Your Brains!
Everybody's got a cellphone, right? At the last estimate, there were over 4 billion cell phones in use on the Planet. Man, that's a lotta gabbing! Of late there has been more and more research and findings as to the long term effect they have on folks. It's been found that they emit certain degrees of radiation, some of them beyond what is considered a safe exposure. Have a gawk at the below sites and decide for yourselves:
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IBM markets Linux to Africa
Y'know, it's stuff like this that is getting me to like IBM more and more. I used to have a dislike for them just on the general principle that large, monopolizing corporations have no interest in servicing the general masses. In my opinion on the good side, they still bear a massive grudge against M$, maybe for what Bill et al did to DOS and for stealing the various other ideas that Big Blue had planned for an OS.
As a result, OS2 was never officially sanctioned by IBM. Instead, there was a small, dedicated group of IBM employees who undertook the development and support for OS2 on their own off-time. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of using that system, let me tell you that at the time, it put Win3.x and Win95 plus Apple's current OS at the time to shame.
Now, this article has IBM along with Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu fame, describing their current joint effort to bring computing to Africa. Conservative pundits complain that this is a profitless venture, but on the otherhand Shuttleworh claims that it's a vision for a burgeoning international market. Read on and decide for yourself:
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Rome Wasn't Built In a Day . . .
As you all know, I'm a Linux enthusiast and have been termed a Linux Fanboy by a good friend of mine; it's all true! My preferred computing experience is within the Linux realm punctuated by brief forays into my Windoze environment for professional and whimsical reasons. So when I come across articles like this, I feel compelled to share it with you, the great uninitiated unwashed.
It does my heart good to see shit like this - check it out, you windoze-weanies! Walk on the Wild Side!
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Why I Dislike IEx
I've never had a good experience with the Microsoft browser Internet Explorer in any of its forms. It is just a waste of the poor programmers' time to have to involve themselves just because they're contracted. Being a programmer of sorts myself, I've had to do distasteful projects, but I can imagine it being pure programming hell trying to attempt perfection within IE/M$ parameters - it just can't happen!
I've tried to update my 'Doze, or rather to check and see if there are any "Security Updates" that it may need. IE keeps crashing in that it can't get a connection. It seems that trying to connect to M$ Updates is iffy, if not downright impossible to attain if you don't have at least a minimum of a 256K connection. As mentioned, my other two browsers had no problem connecting and downloading shit from the Net with alacrity.
Well, that's OK. I really don't care. IE can bug up all to hell for all that it's worth. I'm going back to the sanity, the serene security, the solace for the solopsist, the only system that makes sense, that pacific ether - Linux!
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Nice Try, Symantec!
This is an interesting article on Norton Anti Virus trying to stage a lame-assed comeback. This should be of interest to all you Techs out there who've had to struggle to get the vestiges of Norton AV removed from a client's system. It boils down to using whatever 3rd party uninstall tools plus systematic and time-consuming manual location and removal of files to augment the next-to-useless uninstall utility that seems to be included in versions 2006 and up. The earlier versions didn't have that.
Needless to say, those AV suites, popularized by Norton and McCafee, suck up a lot of the system resources once they start up doing their thing. At least that's what I've come to observe, but that's only my opinion.
Check out the article - it has a high amusment factor as well as being informative:
For those who are interested, the below is a link to the "My Tech Quest" site where there's a tool to download that I've used in a recent client case:
It worked quite well and there were only a few harmless vestiges of Norton left which were easy to find and remove; registry references were easy to find and remove, also.
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Well, that's it for now. I think that I've made up for my absence but I've had things to attend to for the last little while.
Yakatcha later . . .
~A~
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