For the last several years, I've been wanting a home theater PC. A few of my friends already had home theater PCs, through which they could play their music on their stereo, display their pictures on their TV, and play their videos on their TV. Some of these systems were based on the Windows Media Center edition OS. I didn't want a Windows-based ( Read more... )

A lot of companies are touting "the cloud" or "cloud computing" as the Next Big Thing in computing. Or even the Current Big Thing. But they don't take the time to explain what "the cloud" is ( Read more... )

A new laptop -- or a refurbished one -- has been on my wish list for over a year. I ordered one for myself last year around Christmas time, but I sent it back, unopened, as I realized I couldn't afford to keep it. So the only thing I was out was the return shipping costs. Oh well ( Read more... )

Not so many years ago, there was a shortage of computer programmers here in America. We were dealing with the Y2K problem at the time. So we opened our doors to immigrants from other countries who had talent in computer programming and software development. And thus, the H-1B Visa program was born. It was a good idea at the time ( Read more... )

Several years ago, I was reading InfoWorld or Computerworld or a similar computer newspaper or magazine, and I read about a consortium of companies that was working to produce a 120-megabyte floppy disk. The drives would be backward compatible with existing floppies, but it added a laser servo mechanism to read higher-density disks. I followed ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago, I had the crazy idea of getting another bare-bones Dell Latitude CPx laptop and outfitting it with the spare parts I had on hand -- battery, hard drive, and memory -- and using it as a "loaner" laptop ( Read more... )

tardis Mk III -- my Dell Latitude Cpx J650GT laptop -- is running intolerably slow. This is after putting in 512 Mb of RAM a couple of months ago. It's only recognizing the first 256 Mb of RAM. I've tried different memory chips, and it is getting a parity read error at locations 10000000 or 10000020. This leads me to suspect it's a problem with ( Read more... )

I've been using my "older" laptop this week. Tardis Mk III is a Dell Latitude CPx with a 650 MHz CPU, a 40 Gb hard drive, and 512 Mb of RAM. It's dual-boot Windows XP annd Ubuntu Linux.

Last year, I purchased the RAM form a vendor on eBay. It passed the Memtest86+ test, so I kept it. Two weeks ago, I purchased replacement RAM from ( Read more... )

One of the side projects I've been doing this past week is to upgrade a colleague's PC ( Read more... )

(I need a better computer icon. This one is supposed to denote complexity ( Read more... )