storage
Everyone who has ever purchased a hard drive finds out the hard way that there are two ways to define a gigabyte. When you buy a “500 Gigabyte” hard drive, the vendor defines it using the decimal powers of ten definition of the “Giga” prefix. 500 * 109 bytes = 500,000,
hardware
Due to fallout from a recent computer catastrophe at work, I had the opportunity to salvage 2 GB of memory. I installed the memory in my work box, which brings it up to 4 gigabytes of RAM – 4,096 megabytes in total. But that’s not what I saw in
windows
If you’re on the fence about the impending release of Windows Vista, I recommend trying before you buy. Every Vista DVD includes the ability to install any edition of Vista without a product key. When you install without a product key, you get an automatic 30 day evaluation period.
windows vista
Now that Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 is sorta-kinda available to everyone, let’s see what it takes to run it. Here's a comparison of the Vista hardware requirements with the hardware requirements of Windows XP: Windows XP (2001)Windows Vista (2007)CPU233 MHz800 MHz (1 GHz recommended)
disk defragmentation
I tend to ignore defragmenting my hard drive until I belatedly realize it probably looks like swiss cheese by now: Wouldn't it be nice if the operating system took care of defragmentation all by itself in the background when I'm not using the computer? Ah, to
operating systems
As I recall, the Blue Screen of Death was introduced with Windows NT 3.1 circa 1993: A blue screen of death occurs when the kernel, or a driver running in kernel mode, encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by a [hardware] driver that
operating system
When people find out I'm a big fan of AMD's Athlon 64 -- specifically the dual core X2 chips -- they often ask how I'm enjoying 64-bit Windows. They're always surprised to hear that I have no interest in a 64-bit OS
security
Maybe it’s just my OCD kicking in again, but it’s incredibly annoying how these phantom, zero-byte IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files keep showing up in the root of my c: drive on every computer I own. It’s a gentle reminder of the Bad Old Days. The