Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

It’s hard to believe that Microsoft is still working on XP so many years after it originally launched. Their latest work with the operating system involved making a version that worked well with the XO Laptop (One Laptop Per Child project). Over 40 engineers were involved with the project, and as Ryan mentioned back in December, their hardest task was to get the operating system on a small drive and writing drivers that would work with the laptops’ specialized hardware.

Those engineers completed the task, and as they say, a new Windows XP has gone gold! According to BetaNews, Microsoft wasn’t the only one who had work to do to get XP to work on the XO laptop, the OLPC organization had work as well. They say, “Microsoft spent a year modifying XP to ensure it would work on the XO laptops without problems. But OLPC had work to do as well, including boosting the memory and making hardware adjustments. The switch from Linux will increase the production costs of the XO from $188 to a little over $200. XP itself will cost $3 per each XO shipped.”

Unfortunately, for those who already bought the XO laptops, like all of the people who participated in the Give One – Get One program, they will not have the option of switching from Linux, which their computers came with, to XP. This is likely due to the hardware adjustments that were made so that the laptops could work with XP. Part of the reason that XP is such an attractive option is that many more people are familiar with it than they are Linux.

Windows on the XO laptop is expected sometime in September.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Computers are continuing to get more and more powerful, but a lot of people don’t need that extra computing power that the advances in technology bring to the table. At home most people only do things like check their email, chat with friends, and other basic tasks. Dell has recognized this, and the new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 will fill that need.

The Dell Inspiron Mini starts at a reasonable $349 price if you want Ubuntu Linux for the operating system, otherwise the XP version starts at $399. The laptop comes with a Solid State Drive (SSD) in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB sizes. That’s more than enough for most people.

The computer is 9.13 x 1.25 x 6.77 inches and weighs in at a mere 2.28 pounds. It’s definitely a good size, and to sweeten the deal even more you can grab the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for just $99 when you purchase a select laptop in the U.S.:

If you can wait until 6 a.m. Central tomorrow, Sept. 5, you’ll be able to get a Mini for only $99 with the purchase of a Studio 15, XPS M1530, or XPS M1330 laptop through 6 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 9 (U.S. only).

The XP version of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 will start shipping on September 19th, and the Ubuntu version will ship on October 10th.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Naturally Windows XP users have been wanting to upgrade to the latest and greatest Service Pack 3, but it seems as though some users are getting an unexpected surprise. If you have a desktop by HP/Compaq with an AMD processor you may find that your computer shows a blue screen of death (BSoD) when starting up. And to top it all off it won’t stop rebooting.

The problem is that HP ships both AMD and Intel desktop computers with the same operating system image. AMD and Intel processors use different drivers for power management: Intel uses intelppm.sys and AMD uses amdk8.sys. Up until XP SP3 this hasn’t been a problem, but for whatever reason after installing the Service Pack all hell breaks loose on any AMD desktop machine that has the Intel power management driver running. Upon booting up the computer you’ll receive this error message:

After the error message is briefly shown the computer will restart. This cycle continues until you turn off the computer, and you’ll end up having to bootup into Safe Mode to temporarily get around the issue.

How do you correct the problem? HP has posted a workaround which primarily consists of disabling the Intel power management driver. Here’s a quick overview on what you have to do:

1. Boot into Safe Mode by pressing the F8 key when starting your PC
2. In Windows Explorer navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers, and locate the intelppm.sys file
3. Rename the file to something else, such as XXXintelppm.syx
4. Reboot the PC

If you’re about to install XP SP3 on your HP computer (with the OEM operating system) then you might want to be proactive and follow these steps. It can save you a lot of headaches down the road.

It’s unfortunate that you have to go through all of this to get XP SP3 successfully installed, and I’m left wondering who’s to blame for this. Is it Microsoft’s fault for changing something that causes the error, or is it HP who was apparently too lazy to create separate OS images for AMD and Intel based machines?

Thanks for the tip Omar!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Earlier this month we asked CyberNet readers, “How old is your primary computer?” Over 950 of you responded and as it turns out, 30% of you, larger than any other group, are using a computer that’s less than one year old. Coming in next was 21% of you who said that you are using a computer that’s 1-2 years old. In all, over 50% of you have a computer that’s between less than a year, and two years old. Judging from the results, it looks as though many of you do what you can to keep up with the latest technology.

Now it’s time for a new Poll and the idea for this one came from a Tip from Asgard (thanks for the tip!) who thought it might be interesting to find out how many people are using Vista 64-bit compared to Vista 32-bit. In the message, he said “Guru3D had poll like that some time ago and it gave very interesting results. Over 80% had 64-bit. It would be nice to see if it’s just graphics fanatics who have or is it more common. Also it would help people to be less afraid of 64-bit systems because 64-bit Vista really has advantages over 32-bit.”

We thought it was a great idea, but decided to extend the poll further to include XP and Linux because there are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those operating systems available.Some of you may not even know the difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit processor, so we thought we’d give a quick explanation of that first. We found a great explanation over at “Build Your Own Computer Tips“:

A bit is short for “binary digit.” It is basically how a computer stores and makes references to data, memory, etc. A bit can have a value of 1 or 0, that’s it. So binary code is streams of 1’s and 0’s, such as this random sequence 100100100111. These bits are also how your processor does calculations. By using 32 bits your processor can represent numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295 while a 64-bit machine can represent numbers from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.

There are several benefits to using 64-bit processors and one of the most popular is the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM in your computer. Computers with 32-bit processors are limited to 4GB of RAM while those with 64-bit processors are “limited” to 17.2 billion GB of RAM which is about 16 exabytes.

For our new poll, we’re taking a look at how many of you are using 64-bit operating systems to take advantage of the capabilities that your processor has to offer.

Which are you using, if any:

• 64-bit Vista
• 32-bit Vista
• 64-bit XP
• 32-bit XP
• 64-bit Linux
• 32-bit Linux
• none of the above

Cast your vote in the sidebar or if you have Flash enabled you can vote right here:

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft/Mac Monday

In the past we’ve written about Windows Photo Gallery and what a great job Microsoft has done with it. Not only is it a great way to manage photos, but it is also helpful for “fixing” (cropping, removing red-eye, etc.) them as well. You can even use it to upload photos to popular photo-sharing site Flickr (Windows Live Photo Gallery only), now how convenient is that? To continue our series on comparing features from Mac computers with those you’d find if you’re using Windows Vista, we’ll be comparing Apple’s iPhoto with Windows Photo Gallery.

About Windows Photo Gallery

As you might expect, Windows Photo Gallery is a feature that is included with all versions of Windows Vista. There’s also Windows Live Photo Gallery which is a downloadable version available to those using Windows XP and Vista (it has more features than Windows Photo Gallery). Overall it’s a photo management tool but they’ve incorporated features like the option to edit, tag, and add captions.

Navigating Windows Photo Gallery is simple and most of it is done either at the top or in the left-side navigation bar. There are also a few controls at the bottom for moving along to the next photo or rotating a picture. Right from the gallery is the option to print your photos using the Print Wizard or ordering copies of the photo online. Users can create and view slide shows of their photos.

About iPhoto

iPhoto is a product of Apple and is part of the iLife suite of applications that all new Mac owners receive. iPhoto is supposed to help you organize, edit, print and share your photos. Like Windows Photo Gallery, they offer basic image editing tools like the option to remove red-eyes or crop and resize photos. Their organization system involves placing all photos into groups which they call “Events.”

Other Apple applications are incorporated into iPhoto like the option to import music from iTunes to incorporate into dynamic slideshows. You can edit those slideshows in iMovie or you can also burn them to DVD using iDVD right from iPhoto.

Disadvantages of using Windows Photo Gallery

One of the nice features about iPhoto is that there’s an option to create a book, calendar, or card, right from the application. This is something that Windows Photo Gallery does not offer, although they do offer the option to send your pictures to a company online for printing which may offer similar features. Below you’ll see an image of what you’d see if you were to make a book in iPhoto. You can choose various themes, background colors, a layout, and more. Once you’re done, you can buy the book and have it professionally printed.

Disadvantages of using iPhoto

Perhaps the complaints we list today with iPhoto are because we are used to the ways of “Windows” , but in general we like control over how things are organized and iPhoto somewhat takes away that privilege. iPhoto wants to manage all of your photo files (which is like iTunes – it wants to manage all of your music). This is probably fine for most people, but for those of us who like to have control over how things are organized (Power Users), this can prove to be frustrating, especially if you like using a folder/sub-folder structure. We’ll get into that a little later.

If you want to work with your photos, you have to import the images (which is the only way you can get them into iPhoto). iPhoto ends up copying all of the photos into it’s own directory which means that this method takes up more of your memory. I should mention that there is an option in the preferences under the “advanced” tab where you can uncheck “copy items to the iPhoto library” so that when you import photos it doesn’t actually copy the file into the iPhoto library. Instead it will show you a shortcut, but the only problem is if you move the location of the original photo then the shortcut is not going to work and in turn, the photos will not show up in iPhoto when you want to do something with them.

Another “disadvantage” as we see it is for those who have their own system for organizing photos. Using iPhoto requires getting used to the “Mac” way of doing things which is essentially letting the application take control over how things are organized so that you don’t have to worry about it. iPhoto ends up organizing photos by the year that they were taken. You also have no control over file names. If you import images directly from your camera, it will keep the same file names that your camera gave the photos which is usually just a bunch of letters and numbers. There is a batch change feature which allows you to change the name, and you can append a number to it, but it won’t change the actual file name. If you happen to have your pictures organized into folders and sub-folders, iPhoto will ignore any folder structure that you have and only uses the parent folder of where the images are located as the event name.

Yet another downside is that if you go to edit a photo, it doesn’t actually touch the original. In the iPhoto library is a “modified” folder where all of your modified photos are stored. It’s good in the sense that you can always go back, but when we edit photos, we like the original to be changed because that’s likely to be the one you’d want to access more frequently. Windows Photo Gallery always modifies the original in the location where it’s at which is convenient, and then it saves a copy of the original in its own folder which makes more sense.

Wrapping it up

After comparing iPhoto to Windows Photo Gallery, for our purposes Windows Photo Gallery is the winner because it provides the user with more control over the organization of the photos and is great for navigational purposes because your folder structure is available in the left side-bar.

So far we’ve taken a look at the following Leopard vs. Vista Comparisons:

• Vista and Leopard Search Features Compared
• Apple Front Row vs. Windows Media Center
• Windows Contacts vs. Address Book

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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