Saturday, March 07, 2009

Microsoft plans multiple Windows 7 versions - The Inquirer

What version of Windows 7 will work for you? Or should I ask what version will you buy?
Like in Vista Microsoft is going to be coming out with 7 versions of Windows 7.
It looks like only us Geeks will be using Windows 7 Ultimate. (It looks like we will be paying dearly for it.)
They will start with a very limited version for Netbooks and low power PC's it is called Starter. The version go up from there.
You can read all about the 7 different versions of Windows 7 here.

I am running the Beta 64 bit (build 7000) on one of my computers and I like it a lot. It looks like it is working much better than Vista did.

Not only will Microsoft have 7 versions but they will also have 32 bit and 64 bit versions as well. If you think that is going to be confusing look what they will have for Europe:

"In the EU, which has already required Microsoft to offer its Windows OS without Media Player (MP) bundled, there will be 22 versions. And if the EU further requires Microsoft to unbundled Internet Exploder (IE), as is beginning to look likely, the number of EU versions will jump to 44 - 11 versions with both MP and IE, 11 versions without MP but with IE, 11 versions with MP but without IE, and 11 versions without either MP or IE. That'll be even more fun."

I'm still looking forward to the new OS from Microsoft called Windows 7!

AlaskaJoe

Slashdot | Symantec Support Gone Rogue?

This story is not a surprise.
Rubenking was trying to install Norton 360 version 3.0 on a malware-infested system when the computer crashed with a blue screen error. He connected with Symantec tech support and was told that they could fix the problem, but for a fee of $100!
When this guy contacted support he was told to go get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, it could fix the computer.

Didn't I tell everyone about Malwarebytes Anti-Malware a long time ago, It can clean a lot of Malware other programs can't. This was the only program I found that could remove Anti_Virus 2008 etc...

AlaskaJoe

Thursday, March 05, 2009

What has 8 TB and is the size of a toaster?


Answer:  Western Digital's new 8 terabyte ShareSpace network attached storage (NAS) device.  About the size of a small microwave oven or toaster, the four-drive version costs $1,699 at the WDC store today, and will be at other e-stores soon.

With RAID 0, 1, and 5 support, the NAS is targeted at small businesses with 5-10 users as shared storage and backups.  However, it will not surprise me to see this in media-hungry households.

It's a bit hard to date myself with the comment about how many years I got out of a 10 MB hard drive back in the days of DOS...

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

10 Tips for Better LCD Image Quality - 3D Graphics, Audio & HDTV by ExtremeTech

"10 Tips for Better LCD Image Quality"
This was an interesting read, I think most of us have LCD monitors now.

If you adjust your display it might take you a few minutes. (I think they said 10 minutes.)
But you will be happy you did. I know I have seen people that needed their resolution set. My monitors are about 12" farther away than they should be from my keyboard.

I hope you enjoy your LCD and remember there is nothing wrong with a 22" or 24" monitor to read your email or surf eBay for a deal!

AlaskaJoe

Monday, March 02, 2009

Sanity check: Are netbooks quietly driving us to thin clients and cloud computing? | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com

We talked briefly for a bit about Netbooks during the show this week, and what it meant for corporate types.

Techrepublic released this article today discussing some of the same points we made on the air.

I find this all very interesting.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

OnComputers Radio show Podcast 03-01-09

This is the On Computers Radio show podcast for 03-01-09. You can listen live every Sunday from 10AM to 1PM Pacific that's 1PM to 4PM Eastern. Join us for the live show and chat. If you prefer, you can download the same MP3 file here via ftp.

Folding@Home is Five PetaFLOP Supercomputer


I chuckled earlier this week when I saw an IBM TV ad talking about its petaFLOP computer.  The joke is that Stanford's Folding@Home distributed computing application for protein-folding research recently hit five petaFLOPS -- 5 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.  For the past two decades, scientists have been manipulating proteins to better understand how the nanomachines, I mean cells, that make life work and how diseases manipulate cell processes.

Folding@Home (and sister Rosetta@Home) reached 5 petaFLOPS by harnessing the multi-CPU power of today's graphics cards: nVidia GPUs represent over 2.18 petaFLOPS of computing power on only 18,333 computers. The future will bring real scientific advances through the raw, brute computation capability of distributed clients.  Now, if we could only get a 24 hour weather forecast for New England with better than 75% accuracy (1965 accuracy was 74%), but that's a NASA problem.

If you leave your computer on most of the time, I urge you to experiment with FAH or Rosetta. It's a lot of fun tinkering and you are contributing to science (and heating the room).

Full disclosure: yours truly is #2 contributor at the #5 team on Folding@Home. And that's with an immature folding driver on an ATI graphics card.

Links from the Gregg Zone

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