If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you probably know that new PC sales are in the toilet–out of the five biggest vendors, the only one whose sales managed to hold steady in Q1 2013 was Lenovo, while the other four saw a sales decline. So now Slashdot linked to a ZDNet piece stating [...]
All posts tagged vista
Don’t read too much into the PC sales drop just yet
Posted by Dave Farquhar on April 17, 2013
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2013/04/dont-read-too-much-into-the-pc-sales-drop-just-yet/
Don’t look for me waiting in line to buy Windows 8 at midnight
Windows 8 is out. Yawn. I won’t be standing in line. I wait a minimum of a year to install new versions of Windows anyway, a practice that’s beein serving me well since 1994, and I skipped Vista altogether at home. I had it at work, so I know I didn’t miss anything. If Windows [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on October 25, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/10/dont-look-for-me-waiting-in-line-to-buy-windows-8-at-midnight/
Windows 8 won’t fail just because nobody likes Windows upgrades
John C Dvorak wrote today about the great upgrade upheaval, and argued that Windows 8 is doomed to fail because it’s just going to be too hard to upgrade, and nobody likes Windows upgrades anyway. I agree on the first point but not the second.
Posted by Dave Farquhar on October 4, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/10/windows-8-wont-fail-just-because-nobody-likes-windows-upgrades/
Windows 8 comes out later this year, but I won’t be moving just yet
So Windows 8 was released today. I won’t be moving to it anytime soon. There are some people who make a habit of waiting for Service Pack 1 to be released before upgrading to a new version of Windows. The trouble is, I can think of one instance, Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 1, that [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on August 1, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/08/windows-8-comes-out-later-this-year-but-i-wont-be-moving-just-yet/
Getting Firefox out of the doldrums
John C. Dvorak asks what’s wrong with Firefox, and suggests forking as a possible solution. It sounds to me like one or more plugins he’s running is causing problems. I run Firefox on Vista (unfortunately), with as few plugins as possible, and I don’t have the issues he describes. Memory usage does spiral out of [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on May 15, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/05/getting-firefox-out-of-the-doldrums/
Save memory and speed boot time by removing ghost device drivers
When you change or remove hardware from a Windows system, Windows keeps the old device driver lingering. You don’t see it in Device Manager, but the time Windows spends chasing ghosts increases boot time, in addition to consuming some memory, registry space, and disk space. It’s not as much of a problem as it used [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on May 14, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/05/save-memory-and-speed-boot-time-by-removing-ghost-device-drivers/
Speed up Windows XP, Vista, and 7
I was looking for something else entirely when I found this PC World article: Speed Up Windows by Stripping it Down. That’s a familiar concept. It includes several tips that apply to XP, Vista, and 7.
Posted by Dave Farquhar on May 4, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/05/speed-up-windows-xp-vista-and-7/
Why some people ‘cling’ to Windows XP
I typically enjoy the blog Ghacks.net, but its entry What do you like most about Windows XP? isn’t one of its finest moments. It starts off with a hostile tone, calling XP buggy and insecure, then states that some people will cling to it anyway, and never demonstrates its assertions about XP’s inadequacies. XP is [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on March 11, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/03/why-some-people-cling-to-windows-xp/
Living with a past-its-prime computer
I’m playing catch-up a bit. This weekend, Lifehacker ran a guide about living with a computer that’s past its prime. I’ve made a career of that. One of my desktop PCs at work (arguably the more important one) is old enough that I ought to be preparing to send it off to second grade. And [...]
Posted by Dave Farquhar on February 28, 2012
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2012/02/living-with-a-past-its-prime-computer/