A few months ago I decided that it was about time to upgrade my second-hand, iMac desktop (G5 2.0 GHz single-core PowerPC, 1GB Ram, 200GB hard drive, 17” display.) The computer had spent about a year suffering through problems booting and subsequent bouts of kernel panic. I probably could have reinstalled OS X but there would be little to gain from it. As configured this aging desktop was stuck with OS X Tiger…
Desktops & Wi-Fi
A couple of weeks a friend was telling me about a problem with her home computer. She said that she had internet access through her cable company and she has been connecting to the internet with a laptop for the last couple of years without incident. Recently she got a new desktop computer and started running into problems.
She has not been able to get the desktop to connect to the internet. After reaching out to cable company, she was told a tech would have to come out at a rate of $150+ per hour to get to the root of the problem. She decided to hold off on that to see if there was…
Paperless Billing
I was recently paying some bills and realized that I had not received a current invoice for my phone service. I logged into the company’s website and found (much to my surprise) that the account had been switched over to “paperless billing”. As I do not recall anyone ever asking me to opt-in to this service, I chose to switch it back to paper.
The Joy of Patching
For the last couple of months I have read various reports saying Windows XP SP3 will be released in the near future and I have to say that it is none to soon.
This week I helped a co-worker setup a new Dell D630 laptop that thankfully arrived with XP, not Vista. I found that Dell is still building these machines with aging image, which includes IE 6 and Windows Media Player 9.
World Computer Exchange
Yesterday I spent the day with the folks from the World Computer Exchange. We tested and packaged up quite a large number of Pentium III and newer computers. These used computers were donated by various organizations in the metro-Boston area and they are being shipped out to people in need throughout the world.
Choosing a New Hard Drive
I went to the local Office Depot to pick up a new hard drive for a PC that I am rebuilding. As I have not really needed a drive recently, the specs that I had in my mind were: IDE interface , 7200 rpm, and a capacity of about 80 Gigabytes (GB).
“Pass the Buck” Tech Support
A friend of mine (we’ll call him Ted) recently dropped his laptop off with me for help backing it up. I asked Ted why he suddenly needed to back it up and he told me that he is changing over
AntiVirus Software
Over the course of the last week, I found myself removing Norton antivirus software from a couple of machines that belong to friends of mine. Both machines had similar problems with being incredibly slow. By slow I mean that they
Waiting for FiOS
The other day my mother mentioned that she doesn’t really use her computer at home because it takes too long to connect to the internet. You see, she is still using AOL dial-up. I suggested that she (well, I) take
The Joys of Upgrading
I have been teetering at the brink of upgrading my home computer for a while now. This has mostly been due to the amount of noise that my current system generates (loud fans), but that wasn’t quite enough to make
