windows 7

How I turned my Nook Color into a Cyanogenmod 7.2 Android tablet

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware , , , , ,

So, after most of a year, I finally revisited Cyanogenmod 7.2 on my Nook Color. Competent tablets are available for around $100 now, so perhaps this is less interesting now, but I had a Nook Color, and figured I might as well try it out before spending money on something else.

I was never happy running it from an SD card–it was way too laggy and sluggish–but Cyanogenmod 7.2 is competent when installed on its internal memory, at least for the things I most want to use a tablet for–light web browsing, reading e-mail, watching SD video, and reading PDFs–and it leaves the SD card slot open for storing the media I want to consume. Read more

What to make of this Black Friday’s sub-$200 laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s still a couple of weeks off, but we already know two retailers will be offering sub-$200 laptops on the day the United States gorges itself on bargains.

The question is, what do you get for your $200 on these minimalist laptops? I’ll answer those questions, then you can decide whether they’re worth $200 and braving the crowds, the weird hours, and likely the cold. (Yes, there are costs beyond the money you spend.) Read more

Cable connections are the last thing most people check…

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

Fed up with trying to host a network printer on a Windows 7 box on a mixed network, I broke down and bought a Jetdirect card for my aged HP Laserjet 4100. Don’t worry–used Jetdirect cards are cheap these days. I paid $7 for mine.

Of course I made installing it harder than I needed to. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home. Read more

Don’t look for me waiting in line to buy Windows 8 at midnight

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,
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 been 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 8 is worth having, I’ll know about it by this time next year.

Linus Torvalds likes SSDs, too

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

Linus Torvalds called hard drives evil, nasty platters of spinning rust in an interview this week, while saying he likes SSDs.

I didn’t say it. He said it. Though it’s no secret that I like SSDs too. Read more

Windows 8 won’t fail just because nobody likes Windows upgrades

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Read more

Office 2010, early impressions

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

I’ve mentioned several times that I hadn’t seen Office 2010 yet, so I couldn’t comment on it, and would reserve judgment until I’ve seen it. I’ve been working for companies that were a bit behind the times on that.

I’ve been working with it for a week now. I won’t be buying it for my own use at home.

Read more

Windows 8 comes out later this year, but I won’t be moving just yet

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

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 was much more problematic than its predecessor. And in more recent years, service packs have become more arbitrary. Knowing that practice exists, Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 based more on uptake than on actual need.

So I have a different rule I follow. Read more

The Dell Inspiron E1505 and its maximum memory

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Last year, I got a deal I couldn’t refuse on a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop. It’s old and quirky, but modern enough to make it serviceable. It has a dual-core processor and SATA2, so you can put an SSD in it. It uses DDR2 memory, which isn’t as cheap and plentiful as DDR3, but at this moment isn’t unreasonably expensive either.

Its biggest problem is that it’s officially limited to 2 GB of RAM. Officially, that is. Read more

Remove ghost device drivers from Windows 7

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

If you want a way to remove ghost device drivers from Windows 7, or other recent versions of Windows, it just got easier.

What’s a ghost device driver? 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 to be, but if you want your system to run as quickly and smoothly as possible, you don’t want it wasting time managing hardware you’ll never use again. (Don’t worry–if you change your mind and plug the hardware back in, Windows will reload the driver.) Read more