Old PCs, especially PCs from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, have a button with the curious label “Turbo.” On some PCs, a number on the front changes when you push it, or an LED toggles on or off. Why did old PCs have a turbo button?
Turbo buttons are a quirk of old PCs, kind of like their beige color that tends to turn yellow, but it served a functional purpose.
I see a few misleading articles out there promising to tell you how to scan your router for malware or viruses. Unfortunately they don’t really explain the problem. They also don’t explain the alternative way to solve the problem you want to solve. What you really want to do is clean malware from a router–and viruses too. And that’s something you can do pretty easily. For free.
Yes, that’s right. You won’t have to pay 50 bucks a year for a subscription to keep your router clean.
Early this week, Charter had a major outage affecting most of its customer base. Those who use third-party, non-Charter DNS servers were unaffected.
This is a case where making a performance-related change to your system also makes it more reliable.
Read More »Outsource your DNS to make your Internet connection more reliable
I wanted to like the Moto E, for sentimental reasons. The Motorola who made this phone isn’t the same Motorola who made the MC68000 CPU in my Amiga, and it’s not the same Motorola that built the hulking briefcase-sized bag phone Dad toted around in the 1980s, but the logo is the same.
The stingy Scottish miser in me wanted to like the phone too, because it costs $129. A few short months ago, the only phones you could buy new for under $130 were cheaply made no-name phones like the Blu Advance with half a gig of RAM, a low-visibility screen, a low-end processor you didn’t want and an Android that was a few versions out of date, encased in lots of cheap plastic. Next to the Moto E, the Blu phones lose what little appeal they had.
I’ve been messing with an Asus Memopad, the 7-inch version. I think it’s a well-built, good-performing tablet for $149, and when you can get it on sale for less than that–and this is the time of year for that–I think it’s a great tablet for the money.
It’s not a high-end tablet. It has a 1280×800 screen, a quad-core 1.2 GHz Mediatek processor, a middling GPU, and 1 GB of RAM, and importantly, it includes a micro SD slot so you can add up to 32 GB of storage to it. The specs are all reasonable, but not mind-blowing. Most of the complaints I’ve seen about it are that it’s not a Nexus 7, but it’s 2/3 the price of a Nexus 7, too. When you compare it to other tablets in its price range, the worst you can say about it is that it holds its own.Read More »The Asus Memo Pad HD 7 review: It’s a nice inexpensive tablet
After rooting a device and loading a ROM or two on it, it’s easy to start to wonder what tweaks and settings actually make a difference in performance or whether you’re just imagining things. For example, my devices all have the option to force Android to use the GPU for rendering (under Developer Options), but does it really help?
Benchmarks are a synthetic but objective way to measure the effect. I use Antutu.Read More »Benchmarking Android
If your web server is slow and you want to fix it, it’s nice to be able to quantify what you got. Enter Apachebench, which is part of Apache and probably already on your server.Read More »Use Apachebench to test your webserver optimizations
I’m looking at building myself a new PC for the first time in years. That’s a little bit of a misnomer though. Today, building a PC can mean bolting as few as two components into a case and connecting four cables. Building PCs in the 1990s was a lot more difficult. I remember in 1994, during one of my first builds, someone walking past in the hall, looking at the mess of cards and cables, and asking, “How do you know which one goes where?”
Today, the assembly is pretty easy. Figuring out what to buy is harder. In 1994, the differences between the various flavors of 386 and 486 chips available was confusing, but it all fit on an index card. Mainly the difference came down to the amount of memory the chip could address (386) and whether it had a math coprocessor (486). Beyond that all you really had to worry about was clock speed. Back then the research took 30 minutes and the system took hours to build.
Today there are two chip manufacturers (down from four) but they both have half a dozen product lines. And nobody really talks about clock speed anymore. That’s fine because clock speed was a crude measure of performance, but is throwing numbers like 560 or 840 or 965 on the chips really any better? Today the research takes hours (if not days) and the system goes together in about 5 minutes. Shake the bag right and it could just come out of the bag fully assembled.
Read More »Tradeoffs at the low end: Cores or Cache?
There are reports floating about regarding third-party DNS affecting downloads of movies and other media, particularly from iTunes.
So, if tweaking DNS settings used to be what all the cool kids are doing, maybe it’s about to become less trendy, thanks to advice circulating to ditch third-party, centralized DNS providers like Google and OpenDNS, because they “defeat the distributed nature of DNS itself.”
The answer of what DNS to use and why is more complex than that.
Read More »DNS and iTunes and other streaming media
Longtime reader Jim ` asked me a few more worthwhile questions while I was procrastinating working on yesterday’s post about RAID. Let’s go to Q&A format.Read More »4 more questions about RAID