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…)

Recently I just got the Dell Inspiron Mini 10v and some of my friends asked how it was. I have been thinking about getting a netbook for awhile. Sure I got my laptop, the Dell Inspiron 1501 about 2-1/2 years ago. With its big 15.4″ screen it was quite a dead weight to carry around. Although I wanted portability, I also wanted a generous work space on the screen. And of course usually laptops that are bigger are generally cheaper despite the fact that LCD screen space is more. There was a time that bigger screen was more expensive; however in order to cramp more hardware component into smaller spaces meant that notebooks would be more expensive than laptops. (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…)

Windows 7 is out in the market for some time now. And from what has been reviewed, it seems to be very popular and much more user friendly than Windows Vista. So without much ado, it was time for me to upgrade to Windows 7, well at least for my laptop and give it a quick spin.

I was not about to destroy my Windows Vista installed in my Gigabyte AMD desktop PC. It has way too much stuff. Since I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop which I have been using for the past 2-1/2 year (how time flies!). I used mainly for travel and don’t store my data inside at all. So this was a good candidate to try out for an upgrade to Windows 7. (more…)

“How can I convert a CD to an MP3 format?”

Actually it is a very easy process. There are many ways to convert audio CD into MP3 and there isn’t any shortage of free software to do it. If you plan to use your Windows Media Player that came with Microsoft, then just too bad because Microsoft emphasis is on their own proprietary WMA format which I find that not so many MP3 players support it. Microsoft Windows Media Player can play MP3 but their conversion from audio CDs into MP3 do not have so many options. They are geared more to WMA format also. So when it comes to conversion to a compact audio file, better stick to the MP3 format which has a pervasive following. (more…)

My dell computer laptop is about two years old already and I’m running a little short on storage space. I have been dual booting the dell computer laptop with Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista, however I didn’t think it out thoroughly on the partitioning and thus I have linux partition here and there in between Windows Vista partition. At that time, storage space wasn’t an issue and I could use it without any problem. However recently, I have installed more and more software and it was running out of space. I also noticed it was running slower with less space. Usually when there is less space there will be less page file for swapping out the main memory into the hard disk. (more…)

The computer time was not up to date for the pass one week or so, and I wondered what was wrong with my PC. Usually if the time was not keeping, it meant that the CR2032 flat button battery in the Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard was either weak or dead. So I went out to get myself a new battery. (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…)

I inadvertently switched on the On-Screen Keyboard when I resumed the Windows Vista PC from its sleep / hibernation mode. Somehow the sleep / hibernation mode disabled my Dell Vostro 200 USB keyboard whenever I resumed from it (this makes another minus point for using sleep / hibernation mode). I had to switch on the On-Screen Keyboard to key in my password to access my PC. However after enabling it, every time I start up my PC, the On-Screen Keyboard would start up too. How irritating. There is no settings on the On-Screen Keyboard to switch it off. The only way to do it was from the Ease of Access Center. (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…)