Windows 9 might go some way to fix the mess that Windows 8 is, but could Windows 10 – or whatever they decide to call it – bring a whole new era for Microsoft, or just more of the same?
Category Archives: Low End PC
In this modern age of multicore processors and gigabytes of RAM, I began wondering how low-end of a computer I could get away with using in 2014.
Microsoft is to end extended support for Windows XP in April 2014, but with so many people still hanging on to the decade old OS, what are their options?
I’m not a fan of Windows, and after a lot of headaches with the computer my children use over the past few months, I decided to switch them to Ubuntu and see how they get on. Good-bye, Microsoft?
WiFi might be great for laptops and smartphones, but in terms of speed and reliability it is still far behind ethernet. This is why I have installed ethernet cabling throughout my house.
Macs have had hard drives for nearly as long as Macs have been available, as is true of PCs, and a lot of those very early hard drives didn’t have great life expectancies. In addition to higher capacity and lower cost per data unit, hard drives have become far more reliable than those from the […]
I am a Mac user and have been for over a decade. No matter how much Windows changes, it will never be enough to pull me away from the beauty that is Mac OS X. But does Vista deserve the stick it gets?
This is the tale of three operating systems: Windows XP, its presumed successor Vista, and the recently displaced as king of the hill Windows 7.
Linux distributions (a.k.a. distros) are a great free alternative to Windows for both PCs and older Intel Macs. With hundreds of distros available, it can be hard to decide, but Elementary OS stands out.
The original Asus EeePC can handle Windows XP very well, but the 4 GB SSD can be a bit cramped. Here is how to slim it and tweak it.
I saw an advertisement on television a few days ago for the new Google ChromeBook. Originally launched in 2010, I had shown a small amount of interest in them, but the new price was the clincher that made me sit up and pay attention.
I haven’t always been a Mac user. I started my computing days out on a Commodore 64 and an Acorn 3010. I bought my first PC from my employer in 1997 – a massive, heavy beige tower containing a 486DX2-66 processor, 64 MB RAM, 500 MB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, and a 15″ SVGA […]
Is it really fair to compare a three-year-old operating system to a three-month-old one? Maybe not (for the three-year-old), but it is interesting.
Back in February, my first generation 13″ MacBook Pro died of logic board failure, and I was forced to sell it due to the fact that I was starting dual credit courses at my local community college and needed a small, cheap, lightweight laptop that could follow me around and take a beating. I was […]
2012 – According to Horace Dediu in The Evolution of the Computing Value Chain, Microsoft has had the dominant operating system almost since that day in 1981 when the first IBM PC shipped with PC-DOS, Big Blue’s version of MS-DOS. From DOS through Windows, Microsoft has held the top spot – until now.
What does thermal compound do, and why should you be concerned about it? Call me simple, but I had no idea what thermal compound was until about a year ago when I decided to upgrade the factory-installed RAM on my iMac G4. Apparently there is a two-part heatsink in the good ol’ Luxo Mac that […]
Swap space. Swap files. Page files. Virtual memory. It’s all pretty much the same thing: Extending your computer’s physical system memory (RAM) by swapping data to and from your hard drive or SSD.