Is it possible to upgrade a notebook? Until a few days ago, I’d say only hard disk and memory. But guess what, there is more! I’m not talking about PCMCIA cards here, no, real upgerades just like in your desktop pc.
Scratches are the one thing you definitely don’t want to have when you get a new PDA. A screen protector is a must have. There a 2 kinds of screen protectors in general. One kind are the cheap ones, €1 for 10 protectors. The other kind, the kind that actually protect your screen, costs €10 for 1.
I got a new phone! Well… it really is more of a mobile computer than a phone. Lately, I find myself more and more addicted to the internet. I used to do so much stuff offline, now everything I do on my computer has to do with the internet. Right now I’m blogging, online, of course. It’s not hard to see that my addiction had to be satisfied when I’m not home or in front of a computer. That’s why I bought myself the O2 Xda Diamond, which is the branded version of the HTC Touch Diamond P3700.
Question 2 of the Google Treasure Hunt is out and is fairly easy compared to the last question. They request you to sum up numbers of a specific line in files where the path or file name contain a specific pattern and have a specific file ending. I quickly wrote an PHP script to do the job.
Anti-Virus is good business. There are so many companies fighting to get their anti-virus software on your computer, you might even think that they release viruses just to improve their revenue. But when you search around the web, you can actually find free anti-virus software. AntiVir Personal by Avira is one of the best examples. Its bigger brother was tested by c’t, which actually gave it a pretty good grade and ranked it before other better known software like Kaspersky or Norton. So why pay money if you get something better for free? Read more »
Windows Photo Gallery is the default program for viewing images on Vista. It’s pretty simple and works great. But it only works from the Windows Explorer. What if you want to use it with other Tools like WinSCP to preview images from different, maybe linux servers? I started looking for an Executable file to open the previewer, but the only one I could find is the Photo Gallery itself, which doesn’t open the selected image but the hole gallery. So how do I open the previewing version of the Photo Gallery?
Many people have a GMA as their graphic card on their notebooks. There are usually some special drivers shipped with the notebook for the graphic card, which usually work just fine with office programs. But when you start using 3D-acceleration, you might encounter weird graphic bugs. So the normal action an experienced user would take would be updating the driver. But a lot of suppliers don’t allow switching to official Intel drivers, like Dell or mine: Toshiba. When you try to install them, an error message appears and the setup exists. What then? Well, you can either wait for them to release a new driver (which won’t happen usually) or trick the Intel driver into installing. With new drivers, everything might even work worse than before or break your windows, so be sure you really-really need the update.
XPS is Microsoft’s version of Adobe’s PDF. Its major advantage is that it is preinstalled on Vista and XP SP3. You can easy print everything as an XPS for later viewing. But Firefox users might encounter a weird bug when they try to open a XPS file. When a XPS is opened, Firefox starts and asks if you want to download or open this file. If you click download, you can save it somewhere and if you click open, Firefox opens a new tab and starts asking the same question again. Why is Firefox the default viewer for XPS if can’t open them?
The reason is simple: Microsoft Internet Explorer is the built-in XPS viewer, but Firefox takes all Internet Explorer file assosiations when installed as the default browser. So all you need to do for viewing a XPS file is to right click on it, select “Open with…” and choose Internet Explorer. You can make it the default application for XPS files too, then you don’t need to worry again when you open a XPS the next time.
I always say that you can easy distinguish a computer amateur from an expert by looking at his taskbar. If it has only one row, he’s an amateur. An expert knows the advantage of multi tasking and needs a lot of space in the task bar to navigate through the programs.
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