Jan’s blogs about life

One thing about technological progress, your legacy devices will no longer work with the ever newer hardware incorporated with the new computers. Take for instance the PCMCIA PC Card, the new laptops do not support them anymore. They have come up with a new type of PC Card slot called the ExpressCard. Read more »

My dad’s been complaining of slow internet connection despite having signed with Streamyx broadband service. He was expecting a better user experience with the cyberworld with the broadband but unfortunately it was not the case.

In most cases like this, it is usually the old PC system that was the culprit. Read more »

Alright! Wasn’t too difficult to revert back to IE6 from IE7 beta preview 2. Instead of using uninstall, I used one of the restore points in the Microsoft System Restore program.

And now, my McAfee Viruscan 9 is working properly again. Trust Microsft to always go their own way against the standards they set as well as the industry standard. Just because their desktop operating systmem is the dominant platform for 80-90% of the world user doesn’t mean they can at a whim do what they like. No wonder so many developers and expert users rant and rave in the net about big brother Microsoft. Can’t do much with all the rant & rave, ’cause M$ has the big bucks and they can do just what they please. Read more »

It was slow first week after the New Year, but after that everything seems to get clog up with heavy rush hour traffic; customers request for speedy delivery of goods, unreasonable demands from work sure bogs you down.

Fortunately a New Year also brings new cheer and I got myself a new computer system freshly assembled from the local All IT Hypermart. Took me a few days to research a proper system and comparing cost vs. performance to finally getting a brand new system. Read more »

SyncToy was just what I needed. Having tested a slew of file synchronization software, most of them trial ware basis meant that after using them for a while, the sync ability was disabled with a prompt requesting you to purchase an upgrade or other limiting factors like syncing one folder only between devices and not able to save the folder path for future syncing. Read more »

I came across this from PC World and it looked intriguing. So I gave it a try and formatted my USB flash drive from FAT to NTFS file system. The steps were easy to follow, and by using NTFS I could get some additional features which the FAT or FAT32 did not provide. I could compress folders, encrypt folders or even set user quota, though setting user quota would not be very useful since I will be the only one using it. The files inside the USB formatted in NTFS system could also be indexed for faster file searches. Cool!

So here are the steps to format the USB flash drive into NTFS file system. Read more »

Finally, I upgraded my CD-RW to a DVD burner. Prices has been coming down, in fact it was cheaper than my DVD-ROM drive when I first bought it two years ago. Since my dad would like to learn a thing or two about burning CDs, I may as well start him easy with a CD-RW first. It takes time for seniors to learn. It was a good thing too, because there were so many DVD storage format that even I was initial bewildered about all the formats available. Read more »

Microsoft has come up with a way to measure your hardware and software performance based on its configuration with Windows Vista. I didn’t really pay much attention to it till one day I happened to noticed that my Vista in my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop was not showing any numbers at all. It took me several days to figure out why it was not working. It turn out that I have accidentally disabled this feature from the TweakVI software. Read more »

One should not simply just buy a Dell computer PC system without checking out the previous offers and also comparing the system on offer with other branded computer system. You may end up with a system that is more expensive and not quite what you want. However, if the offer is a good one, you should make the decision quickly or miss out on their offer. Read more »

I think I really messed up my Windows Vista installation yet again. Without using Dell PC Restore, I found out to my dismay that some drivers were missing from a clean reinstall of Windows Vista and was not included with the CDs that came along with my Dell Inspiron 1501 package.

To kill a bird in the bush I had to ravage the whole forest so to speak. My McAfee VirusScan Plus was having a conflict with the pre-installed trial version of Norton anti-virus despite the fact that I uninstalled it before installing McAfee. Read more »