We see so many broken displays showing their Windows backdrops, it’s a refreshing change to see a Mac one.
Btw, does everyone else still remember when Bed used to be Gatecrasher? I’m so old…
From time to time, Firefox might try to update itself and get itself stuck an a loop where every time you try and open it, it tries to upgrade itself, fails, closes and then you have to try and open it again and the same thing happens.
95% of the time, this problem is caused by Logitech webcam software.
I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but the problem has hit my system several times and every time after some googling, the suggestion to try and close my Logitech camera software comes up and as soon as I do, Firefox is able to upgrade itself and open fine.
Eight years ago, I was outgrowing my current hosting package, and needed to find pastures new. So I headed over to a web hosting forum and found a post about a company named Real Value Hosting. They seemed to have everything I needed, and a reasonable price, so I decided to give them a go and sign up.
Little did I know at the time, but I was actually their second customer to sign up!
Eight years later and I’m still a happy customer. There have been a few glitches over the years as you would expect with any host, but overall I am more than satisfied and their support response times have always been reasonably quick and consistent, which is probably the biggest concern when selecting a hosting company.
As I’ve now migrated my entire online portfolio onto the LAMP stack, I’ve recently retired my reseller account with them, but I would highly recommend it to those looking for a Windows hosting provider.
I love Windows. Windows XP is an amazing operating system. Vista was a bit of a disaster but then it was always going to be when it had to follow XP, possibly the best operating system ever in the history of computing.
If you’re thinking this is heading towards a Linux bashing blog post, you’d be right 😉 .
I mean seriously, all I want to do is play media. The kind of thing you can do fresh out of the box on any Windows install. Let’s ignore the fact I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu to play DVDs for years. Let’s just take a look at what happened on Saturday.
I brought up a computer to use as a media computer to play through the sound system so we could access all the music. Actually I bought two, an Ubuntu box and a Fedora box. Two distros, one of them must be able to play a simple MP3 file right?
Of course, given the nature of my writing, they couldn’t. What was really interesting though was not the fact that Linux can’t even play MP3s out of the box, but how hard it is to get Linux to play them. It took us three, count them, three, computer scientists sat round for an hour to get them playing. So you can’t even use the excuse “oh it’s just you Chris” because there were three of us trying to work this one out.
We managed to get it working in the end, albeit it not very well though I’m not sure if that was Fedora’s fault or not so I’m not holding it accountable for that one. But there you go, XP for the win.
When you use Windows, disk space randomly disappears.
When you use Linux, disk space randomly disappears just as rapidly. Luckily, when you are using Linux you can use the disk usage command to see which folders are eating up all the disk space. Chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it, but you can at least look at it.
I’ve wanted something similar that I could use on Windows to give me an overview of my directories and tell me where all the disk space was actually going. Recently I found a tool called WinDirStat which scans a drive and gives you a breakdown of the space, files and sub-folders of each directory as well as a graphical representation of where all the space is going.
For example, on my system the fact that half the map is blue suggests I really need to clear my WoW downoads out while the amount of green suggests Windows comes bundled with too much crap. More importantly I can see at a glance that Program Files is using 42% of my disk space while My Document is using 31% and I can then break it down into the various sub-folders and find the offending files.
It uncovers some interesting things – for example Thunderbird is consuming a crazy 4.3GB of space simply storing my emails! World of Warcraft uses 8GB. Windows by comparission only uses 4GB.
To find out your ip address:
Select start and click run.
Type “command” and click ok.
Once the command promt appears, type ipconfig and press return. This will then bring up a list of different ip address’s. You will usually be looking for the port you connect to the internet through.
When you first boot Windows up, all the fonts must be loaded. If you delete or move unwanted fonts, Windows will load up quicker.
If you don’t want all your programmes to automatically boot up when Windows starts, hold control key down to skip loading them.
Sometimes you will have applications running when Windows starts up and some which you may not even be aware of. If you can’t find the application in Start > Programs > Start Up or you just want to see what exactly is running then try your MS Config box.
Goto Start > Run
Type ‘msconfig’ into the box
Hit the ok button
Wait for the box to load
Click the start up tab
This displays a list of all the applications that run of start up. Many are Windows applications which should generally be left alone. You can disable them from starting up by unticking the box next to it.