Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: vista

  • Linux Market Share Growing Faster than Apple! | Linux adoption rate beats iPhone

    I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%

    Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…

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  • What Should you Look for in a New Computer?

    This is one of the questions that I deal with at least weekly. Here’s where I usually start answering… First you have to ask yourself what you want to do with a computer. If your goal is email and internet access, most ANYTHING sold new today is much more than sufficient to the task. It will be hard to find something that won’t work for you. If you want to work with office documents, spreadsheets and other text files, you’re still looking at just about anything currently on the market. But what if you want to do some gaming or get into video or music editing?

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  • Print spool problem after windows update

    It’s been a while since I’ve had an “on-topic” post here, but as you might imagine quite a bit has been going on. I had this peculiar problem reported to me in the last week about print spool issues with certain models of printers following the official windows update day.

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  • Windows Vista upgrade clean install workaround

    You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media at hand. The install would stop to validate the install media and you could proceed. Very handy if recovering from a full hard drive failure, virus infestation, etc. Well the word was, Vista upgrade requires the previous OS version that you upgrade from to be installed on the Hard drive. This makes the rebuild process from such failures sound VERY nasty and tedious (read: just go buy a new pc…) However….

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  • Windows Vista Beta 2 download torrent

    After spending about 5 days using wget to resume the download of the vista beta 2 .iso file (which is a bit over 3 GB). I finally gave up seeing as how that 5 days had netted me about 2-3 MB of data. As I started looking around online, I found that Chris Pirillo had got a site up vistatorrent.com where he is hosting a tracker for a bittorrent download of the vista iso. Of course, Microsoft recommends that you order the dvd and wait, but Chris has provided md5sum information so you can check your download. I’m up to 25% done now *(I discovered the torrent about 24 hours ago, although last night I didn’t download.) I let it download part of the afternoon and then remembered to restart this morning. So, it’s making pretty quick progress.

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  • Microsoft touts Windows vista restart manager

    Okay – here we go…. Microsoft is talking about a new feature of Vista that allows you to …

    update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.

    Another angle at OSnews.com.

    If that works as advertised that’s great. Update something related to networking, just restart networking *(kind of like what unix based systems do “service network stop/start/restart…)

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  • Microsoft to bundle anti-spyware with vista

    Well it shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but Microsoft is expected to bundle their anti-spyware product (which will be renamed windows defender) with Vista when the next version of the OS ships. It’s probably not a big surprise given the headaches that people have with spyware and the potential for a subscription update service. For most people this will probably be the only anti-spyware application they have.

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  • Windows Vista?

    OK, I’m just seeing the news that Microsoft has announced the name for the next version of Windows which has gone under the working name of Longhorn. It’s going to be Windows Vista That may take some getting used to. I guess it’s better than Windows View? There are some funny posibilities though… (more…)