Tag: computer

Microsoft can’t be buying Yahoo!

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Microsoft put in a bid to purchase yahoo, this was all over the news and the internet but not everyone has heard this yet. What does this say for the current state of yahoo stock ? Did this do anything to Apple stock? There was a crash in Apple stock right at the same time as the offer purchase. Did the Microsoft stock rise? Did everyone bail out on yahoo?

Is google really on top of the game like everyone seems to be saying?.. I think not. I do not think they have the banks behind them financing them as Msn or the big Y!  have behind them.

I do not believe that Google is beating Yahoo or Microsoft at anything. I work on mess loads upon mess loads of computers every year. What I see when I boot up these computers and open the browser is always the same thing. Yahoo for the home page and Yahoo toolbar.

I would even go so far as to say that one in every 20 computers I work on in a year, have something else other than just plain old Internet Explorer. I mean, if more computers used Firefox (which everyone is saying is the fastest growing browser) than what I see, I would assume that more people are using the default Firefox start/home page, but they just aren’t. We all know that all start pages have search boxes.

Do I believe Google has a superior search? Well, no. Not really. It’s not like it finds stuff that the other search engines do not find.

Microsoft used to have chat rooms. These chat rooms where mostly split by the city you live in. Each populated city had a capacity of 50 people per chat room. If the chat room exceeded 50 people, an overflow room would be created. Some days there where up to 15 overflow rooms. In each room there where three advertisements with “rotating banners,” Microsoft created this line of code. The rotating banner means that the ads displayed in the ad-space would change to a new advertisement every 3-5 minutes. Most “chatters” would stay in the chat rooms for hours or days, just leaving their computer on and never exiting from the chat room. This must have been huge revenue for Microsoft, but they shut the doors on the free chat rooms and decided to put a fee on them. People where there for the free place to congregate, not because they where addicted. MSN closed the doors on the whole chat room idea simply because they have the money to toss around like that. The whole idea of being free and meeting local people in a moderated area was dead.

Yahoo, on the other hand, still has chat rooms divided by location, but not in such detail that MSN had. Yahoo divides by state. Yahoo also mandates you use their messenger because the ads are integrated in the messenger. My opinion, this is a bad idea. You can no longer just join the chat room from a link you find on the internet and install a small flash program then be on your way. You now have to download a massive install program with tons of hidden crap that you can opt out of during the install, if you read closely. This, of course, is another nail in the coffin for yahoo chat. People want their chats simple.

If Google made a city chat that was moderated by humans on an I.R.C. service like Wylderide, there would stand a great chance of zero tolerance of porn bots, additionally age verification could be worked out. Google has nothing that keeps people staring at their stuff, just glances. If Google would acquire Chatcity or revive Excite chat, hell even create something new and better, I would have no doubt in Google being on top.

Next time you are in a computer repair shop, ask the guy behind the counter “What is the most common start page and toolbar on computers you fix?” you will have your answer. Oddly enough, I find myself saying what everyone else says “Google” but truthfully it is not the most common. Not by far.

If they change their home page at all from Msn, it’s Yahoo…………………..

The Parents’ Computer!

Posted onAuthorTruXter3 Comments

Maybe my parents are weird, maybe this normal.

They have a dell, a 900mhz Dell CD ROM and 15 inch CRT and Windows 98SE ME bundle.

Well they keep getting pop ups and spyware. I keep trying to fix it. that was some frustrating stuff. I mean it is said all over the net that the hosts file is located in the windows directory. Well on their machine, it was not. It was no where. S I download mvp’s hosts from his site. their computer had nothing to uncompress zip files. No wonder they think computers are useless. I mean they can’t even get a bundle of Christmas pictures because no one can send them a compressed file.

Ok 7zip came to the rescue. See you can not tell them you are installing stuff you just have to do it. If you tell them you are putting stuff on there ” that ain’t gonna slow it down is it?. does it take up much space? is it a virus thingy?” so just wait till they go to the bathroom and BANG!

Well the hosts file does go in the Windows directory, even if there isn’t one already.

Well now mom opens here browser and sees in the little boxes where the ads used to be “page can not be displayed” and gets mad because I made it ugly.

WTF!

so I tell her I didn’t do it and something must have broke.

I tell her I will look and see if something is broke inside the computer, because “I thought I smelled something burning earlier.”

I open the computer and pull out all of the dust and hairballs and fuzzy stuff. and clean from motherboard to hard drive, yank out the PCI slot modem because I know they have cable. I throw away teh pci slot modem and close the computer and boot up and surf the net a bit, defragment the hard drive run spyware and online virus scanners , when all is done I shut it down and leave.

for the next week I will not be answering their phone calls.

REvived my Video card

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[tags]512mb, 7600, benchmark, bfg, computer, gamer, gaming, gs, gt, make computer faster, nvidia, overclock, pcpitsop, performance, pny, results, speed up computer, test[/tags]

If you read my earlier post about my cat killing my video card.

You would pretty much assume that the card could not be saved. The card was so bad off it was like the “degause” button was stuck and well you pretty much assume the card was french fried. After 4 hours of wiping with a cotton swab and water then going back with window cleaner the very next day and doing this for about four hours only to give up and say “screw it” and start spraying the video card soaking it in glass cleaner even in the dvi socket and vga socket and s video socket, then going back with a paper towel and dabbing up the glass cleaner after it soaked for a minute then sprayed again and dabbed again. Final spray was a soaker of the entire card to rinse off remaining coffee residue. I dabbed after a two minute soak and drain , then went back and wiped with a paper towel and a hand full of cotton swabs until the card looked brand new. I mean under a microscope you would not find any dust, not one drop. I let the card sit for one more night, and a whole day of work.

Of course I tilted the card so that what ever fluid/liquid that was still in the card in any of the sockets would drain downward back the way it entered.

I dug out my BFG nvidia drivers, I put on fresh heatsink paste (the only heatsink paste I found was the cheap tube I had in my parts box) reinstalled my heatsink 01-30-08_1751.jpg

Snapped card back in, connected fans and power to card and booted up and installed the bfg nvidia drivers.

Went to pc pitstop and did my usual bencmark

here is a past work

here is after the clean up and reinstall

To see quick results, go to “compare” at the bottom.

here is the temporary card .

My son’s computer specs

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We are building him a computer right now.

Well he is , I am just telling him how to do it easier. He spent his Christmas and birthday money  on this build.

We had to go to fry’s and to wal~mart . Wal~mart for the monitor because he had like $200 in Wal~mart gift cards.

He got dual 2.2 x2 Pentium processor , two gigs of of kingston pc2-5300 memory , nvidia 8500 gt pci-e with 512 memory.

He is right now in the middle of snapping the motherbaord in and cussing up a storm .. lol  that’s my midget!!!!

Should go good with the tower I bought him for Christmas  with the 500wt power supply and 3 ( I think it was 3) case fans. with the dvd/cdrw combo .

Right now the only thing on this machine that is old, is the 80 Maxtor hard drive.

Not bad for a 14 year old kid, but guess who his daddy is? :-P

Working on website

Posted onAuthorTruXter

Well everyone, I am not going to take all day explaining because I really have a bunch to do.

I revamped my website and went with css.  well the index is css only. The rest of the site is still html, until I get around to that section. I do have a few pages mostly converted but they are stored in a folder on my desktop labeled “wired”. The issue is I have less link for my site than what I really want.

I like the bubbly look of it right now. Won’t be but four or five months and I will make another change. I really do have an awesome plan in mind (I mean come on listen to the web address) but i also have a job and am not ready for the commitment of  all the services just yet.

Online Flash Video Games

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I created a page to fill up with games . The idea was so I could have something else going to keep my brain from from slouching while I am at work waiting on the server to get fixed,or blue print to print or just stuff to do on days when I bring my lunch.

Games

http://iworkwithpeople.com/games

Well one of the ladies at my job walked up while the game was open (but I wasn’t playing at that exact time). She asked me what it was and I explained that it was one of like 5 games I uploaded to a hidden section on my own website. After like 3 days, another one of the ladies from my job walks up and says “hey is that all the games you have on your site?”.. I didn’t know how to answer. I mean if I said “nah I plan to upload a buttload and waste my time on the clock playing stupid games all day. So I paused for a second and said ” well I was thinking of putting up new stuff every now and again, but not a whole bunch of stuff” she said to me ” can you get like a bingo or a tic-tac-toe game?” I busted out laughing. I mean it, really. Doctor Pepper shot out of my nose. Well I started uploading a game here and there and different people came up telling me what was lame and what they want. I was like “dude get your own frickin’ server” but then I realized that I now have a hobby when I am home… making this stuff work.

After a bunch of complaints I removed a lot of the games and just kept the ones everyone liked.

Well if you have a request or know of a site that I can get more games from, help me out — the natives are getting restless. lol

Choosing a Linux distribution

Posted onAuthorTruXter

http://www.helium.com/tm/554548/making-choice-distribution-linux

Making your choice of distribution of Linux is not near as big of a deal as it was 3 – 4 years ago, even though for some reason all of the tech guys lead you to think it is.Really i think it is because of pc repair minded political correctness. The ease and interface is not varied by such a greatness that only techy nerdy guys can use one version and regular people can use another. Anything on one distribution can be used on another.
Let’s break this into 3 popular core distros.
1.fedora
2.debian
3.novell

On fedora you get the two main players. Mandrake and redhat. You get excellent support on either one, there is a slight difference in the look but not the feel. The installs have gone smooth for me every time and easily on many different machines, from mother board and wifi and video card variations. even the freshest of Linux users can install and use fedora smoothly and easily.

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on debian you get a few main players. Knoppix, Linspire, Xandros, and the Ubuntu family.
ubuntu I have to say has the best of all splash screen when it boots up, after that it is really not worth the install.ubuntu is heavy bloated and really limited to what types of installs you can use. pretty much limited to .deb files and source. That operating system is slow, but has some high dollar hype or public viral advertisement. Linspire is a transition os made to make the swap from windows to linux easy. it’s alright and makes alot of usage really easy. Knoppix isnt much different but is a bit more pro feeling. Xandros is the ultimate operating system for those who like a fast operating system without bloat-ware,basic file install works easily with .deb and .rpm with no code to type in or lines to edit.

On novell you get suse . and a bunch of add on software. suse is foreground user of .rpm but recently also took in the use of .deb installs. Suse is the mid mark between ubuntu in it’s nice looks and excessive bloated addons, and Xandros with it’s ease of use and fast performance.

The question you need to ask is “Do I need Performance and speed? or do I need appearance?” if you can not make your mind up on which is more what you want, then go the midway and get suse. after you use suse for a while and get a feel , you might want to think about what you do need and don’t need. You could even consider getting the faster operating system and then adding on only the stuff you would like to see on it. to pretty it up.everything on linux is tweakable. 90% of the addons are free. Sourceforge will be your best friend eventually.

The choice is yours and there is nothing to fear about linux and every big distributed version is safe and easy to install and use. They all can be strong tools and beautied up if needed.It really is not a huge ordeal and adaptation comes quick.

Learn more about this author, TruXter

Upgraded Linux Xandros To 4

Posted onAuthorTruXter

I was using Xandros 3.4 for over a year. I purchased my disk from Fry’s electronics for like $29.

Well I saw in all of the help forums for modding of Xandros desktops and boot screens tons of help but it was all for 4.0 so I installed 4.0 . It really looks good and comes with a blue launch button as opposed to the default red I had to use with v3.4 . Quite nice. I changed the start button to a modified that I found through the links of the Xandros forum. with 3.4 when you changed the launch button you kept getting a notice to upgrade service pack, even if you already have. When you do the service pack upgrade it changes your launch button back to default. but with 4.0 , no you do not get forced into the change. Nice addon I like this.

When I installed wine again, not a hiccup one. Not one issue. It went great. My Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas both play nicely and my III does not freeze up on the video configuration like it did with 3.4.

I am happy with 4.0 it was a very good move.

I was there at Fry’s to actually by a new motherboard and nvidia video card so I could prepare myself for Vista. Thank god I did not get into that mess. Xandros is really good. I did of course remove my Ubuntu partition. Ubuntu is not pleasant at all. Even though Ubuntu is Debian just like Xandros; it does not come close in comparison to Xandros with features. I am satisfied and I hope this helped you decide what you will do to you computer.

enjoy.

Precautions For Building Computers

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Use lots of overhead light. Once you have all the parts together, find a flat, smooth, clean, static-free surface. Make sure your clothes are not polyester or you stand a chance of building up buttloads of static and having a merciless discharge turning your junk into… well… junk.

I like using Gatorade lids to hold my screws and small parts in. Yeah Trailer Park Boys-ish, I know, but it works. Working above tile is good, also, so you can hear the small parts when they drop and kinda locate them easier by where the sound comes from. With the tower open and all parts scattered on the table, lower the motherboard in. Take small pin nails and set them through the mounting holes to mark your spot — should take like 6-9 of them depending on board size and tower abilities. Pull motherboard back out and try to not disturb the pin nails. Replace each nail with mounting studs, lower board in, and screw it down. Follow instructions in the manuals for motherboard and instructions from tower to set up power switches and USB connectors. you may sometimes need to split the end connector for the tower speaker so it fits the prongs. Tie back wires so they stay low and out of view.

Insert RAM, CPU, and heat sink. Simply put: Be gentle, be slow, bend no prongs, and scratch no boards

Set in all drives: CD-ROM / DVD / hard drive / floppy drive. Place the power supply in, and take the board connecting the wire strand and try and map the cleanest, least visible route. Then plug it in. Do not crack the motherboard (yes, it can happen)! Do the same with the drives. I tie them to the rack as I go down the line. Keep hard drives away from all magnets — even the case speaker magnet!

The Video card is done pretty much the same way as the RAM. The slit(s) in the card tells you which way it should face.

Get a good look at the inner case. All air paths need to be clear of anything — even wires. Now plan the path your air will flow and then look at your fans to see which direction the blades should face to achieve the airflow you planned.

Close the case, cross toes, plug in all devices for first boot, and press power button. Pray for BIOS/CMOS boot. Press delete and watch temperatures for about ten minutes or until you see that it is getting really hot.

More stuff to keep in mind.