It happened to me once a long time ago, and my colleagues, and now my brother-in-law’s Microsoft Office Outlook also hang or having extremely slow startup. This is what happens when you don’t archive or backup your email correspondence and let your main outlook.pst file burgeon into one big fat file! (more…)

Windows 7 vs Vista, my evaluation so far

My Windows 7 evaluation so far, between Windows 7 vs Vista, well the interface looks a little sleeker. Changes were made of course to make the Windows 7 feels newer and different from Windows Vista. I’m still playing with it and trying to understand some of the differences. Basically you could start using Windows 7 straight away if you have been using Windows Vista. The file location is similar except that they now come with the library folder. That one is a little confusing because it will bunch several locations that is designated as same group. Eg folders that are for documents will be bunch into the library document folder. The library document folder should not be confused with the actual document folder. Same goes with the picture, download, music, videos folder and etc.

From what I understand, Windows 7 is supposed to be less processor intensive than Windows Vista. But I find my Dell Inspiron 1501 running a little slow. Especially dragging the windows about, I notice there was lagging which I didn’t experience when it was running with Vista. (more…)

I heard from Fresh Gear shop that Palm was launching a new mobile phone called the Palm Pre using a new platform called Web OS. It still hasn’t reached the shores of Malaysia so I’m still waiting for the shop to have stock before having a good look at it. Perhaps as a long time fan of Palm devices like my current Palm Tungsten T3 and Palm Centro which I am using, I wonder if the new Palm Pre with its new Palm Web OS would be nice to use. (more…)

It is very important to keep backup of files that you use regularly whether it is for work or personal files. You never know the files may get corrupted. Files in your PC are easier to backup while those in your web site of course it becomes more complicated. However many people do not seem to know how to use the build in function in Windows to make simple archival backup files. (more…)

I guess eventually it will come to this. I actually wanted to pass this old PC of mine to somebody who could make use of it. My IWILL BD100 plus motherboard running on Pentium 3 CPU with four pieces of assorted SD-RAM totalling about 288MB, a 20GB hard disk and a 32MB NVIDIA graphic card was pretty good at that time back in year 2000.

It was pretty much my workhorse computer at that time plus I did many experiments and exploration, plugging in and unplugging various hardware equipment, and I even installed a 5-1/4″ floppy drive which I salvaged from somewhere! With as many as five PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, 1 AGP slot and 4 memory slots, I could install quite a lot of hardware cards from old ISA cards to the newer PCI cards. I even had a RAID PCI card in an attempt to speed up the computer hard disk data transfer rate. The motherboard only had a bus speed of 100MHz, while the motherboard hard disk connection was going at ATA66; using the RAID card, I tried to improve the speed connection to ATA100. (more…)

Lena’s Nokia 6500 mobile phone was giving her trouble since day one when she bought it. It would hang while being used and the ringing tone would automatically revert back to the default Nokia tone. She finally call it quits and decided to change her phone. Going to her favourite mobile phone shop in SS2 Petaling Jaya, the Atlantis Communication shop, she was having a tough time trying to figure out which mobile phone to go for. She was also considering Sony Ericson range of hand phones as well. Thinking of style and functionality at the same time makes the selection pretty tough.

At first she looked at the Nokia N series but didn’t like the bulkiness, while Sony Ericson range were nice but without the slide feature which she took quite a fancy. So I suggested looking into the Nokia E series which my friend Eric used to owned. (more…)

John did something to Victor’s laptop and Windows Vista couldn’t hibernate. At first I thought it could be enabled by going through the advance settings in the Power Options from the Control Panel. Going through the list, I just couldn’t find either of the Hibernation or Hybrid sleep feature. (more…)

For the previous incarnation of Windows, you could use the little powertoys called tweakui provided by Microsoft to tweak your system including the autologin feature. It helped automate your startup process and frees up your time to do something else like mix a cup of coffee while the computer boots up. (more…)

I have always wondered what the sleep vs. hibernate vs. the shutdown mode in Windows Vista meant. The last time I used the sleep mode it frozed my PC and it wouldn’t shutdown or startup properly. So while visiting a relative in Kuantan with nothing else much to do, I decided to explore the above three shutdown mode with my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. (more…)

Since I don’t see my current slow and sluggish office PC will be upgraded any time soon. I’ve decided to do a full trial of using Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux and see how it will compare against the Windows XP. Naturally, there will be lots of incompatibility, but I do need to boost some of my productivity and keep some sanity from a slow and sluggish computer. (more…)