Monthly Archives: March 2007
Windows Vista Part I
A couple of people recently have mentioned to me recently that I’m yet to review Windows Vista in follow up to the feature that I did regarding the beta (test) edition last year.This isn’t an oversight on my part but something I did intentionally as a true review of an Operating System requires the writer to use it day in day out for an extended period before giving his opinion.I’ve now been using Windows Vista since its launch date at the beginning of the year so I’ve now had a couple of months to get used to the replacement for Windows XP and am ready to give my opinion.
My first observation would be that I am completely unable to ascertain why such a development took so long – Microsoft started production on their new OS way back in 2001 and it seems bizarre to me that it took their … Read the rest
Firmware
A consistent problem that we’re having at Refresh is customers purchasing DVD discs and then returning them as being ‘faulty’ because they refuse to work correctly on their machines.Once they come back in to store we then run a couple of tests and they check out as being absolutely fine meaning that quite often a customer has just returned to us dozens of completely fine discs.
The reason for the media being incorrectly identified as being faulty is that each brand of DVD disc uses a different dye on the bottom of the disc as well as differing plastic compositions and silver reflector density.As such the DVD writer has to adjust its laser for each different type of disc and if your DVD burner doesn’t recognise a particular disc then this process becomes quite difficult for the writer to achieve.
This week I’m going to show you how to do … Read the rest
Making the most of Google
Whilst the development of the Google search engine has been pretty stagnant recently it is still my search engine of choice and this week I’ll be telling you how to get the most from it.I’m sure all of you at one stage or another have used Google (www.google.co.uk) although by just using limited search terms you are restricting the features on offer to you.Please note that the inverted commas are just used for the basis of making this article a little clearer and you wouldn’t type them in to Google.
-The most basic feature is to simply type in your search phrase – ‘herald express click article’ for example which will return a list of pages that contain some or all of those terms.
-If you type a phrase in to Google in between a pair of quotation marks then only pages with that exact phrase … Read the rest
Web OS
It was suggested to me this week that perhaps I should do an article on the fairly recent developments in the field of web Operating Systems although I’ll be honest that I started out not really understanding the point of such a concept and even after researching this article I’m afraid to say that I still don’t.
A WebOS is a virtual Operating System that runs in your web browser.The term ‘Operating System’ is a little misleading as a WebOS is in fact a set of applications running in your web browser which together either mimic or supplement your existing desktop environment.
Obviously a WebOS is unable to replace your existing Operating System as all the existing functions present in an Operating System such as Windows are required in order to boot the PC and get it to a stage where you would be able to launch an Internet Browser.This … Read the rest
Desktop Publishing
Back in the day I used to publish an amateur fanzine dedicated to the old school Commodore 64 computer and whilst it wasn’t the way most teenagers spend their time it was something I genuinely enjoyed doing.This was a fanzine which enjoyed worldwide, low scale distribution and those who are even slightly interested can still find some information about this 12 year old magazine by looking up ‘Zine 64 on Google as some of the articles were voluntarily archived by our readers online.
Rather than bringing you here to talk about the past, my reason for mentioning this old fanzine was that I used to spend a great deal of my life using the Serif PagePlus Desktop Publishing (DTP) utility to create the fanzine and since stopping publication I haven’t had the need to touch a similar piece of software.It occurred to me this week that I haven’t yet covered … Read the rest
