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So if you have a reason to upgrade, and the money to do it, you should spend a little bit of time to work out just what needs upgrading. In the examples from Upgrading a Computer, Part 1, there’s not a lot of point in buying a new computer if all you want is more space. Most computers have extra hard disk connectors so you can simply add in a new hard disk.

For better game play, you can add more memory to your computer or purchase a new video card and see a remarkable difference in how your machine responds. Most games don’t actually (more…)

The first question is, I guess, should you upgrade. If you look earlier in these posts, you will see ways to improve the performance of your computer which don’t cost anything except some time. (see Old Age or Clogged Arteries?)

So, should you upgrade? Well if you have a burning desire to spend money you could go out and buy a high specification computer and then cripple it with Windows Vista. Look to spending well over a thousand dollars to get something that will probably (more…)

So it’s late, I’m at home after a busy day and, after a phone call to Mr JM, he’s going to be late.

Why is it so?

Well, he’s busy with a computer (more…)

How many computers do you have?

How about printers?

What about scanners?

In the 1980’s personal computers became a reality. In the beginning (more…)

You’ve seen some of this before in how to freshen your PC… see http://www.homecomputertalk.com/old-age-or-just-clogged-arteries-part-2/

From Mr JM
Way to fix Windows problems so you can get back in and (more…)

When computers first became personal (according to Mr JM) they were rather expensive. You can get a cell phone now for one tenth the cost of his first computer and the phone will out-perform the XT computer in every way. With a printer, he paid nearly $3,000 for a one megabyte, twin floppy drive XT computer. The floppy disks held 360kb (that’s right kilo-bytes, not megabytes) each.

His first hard disk came six months later and was a whopping thirty megabytes!

Not only was $3,000 a lot more money back then, you (more…)

I asked Mr JM about his work – he does Helpdesk for an Aged Care company. He says he helps people to use their computers; they call him a Desktop Support Engineer. Specifically I wanted to know what is the best thing for people to do before they call for help.

His response? ‘If the computer is not responding, NOTHING!’

What he means is that, quite often, things are recoverable if help is called before anything changes. But mostly computer users will fiddle and try to fix things they know little about and in the process spoil the chances of getting back the document or data.

Of course, if your computer has given the much talked of BSOD, (Blue Screen of Death) there isn’t likely much you could have done.

He also thinks that not enough people (more…)

When Mr JM began computing, the Apple computer company was in its infancy. According to him, they made an almost fatal mistake – they locked down the architecture, sued the pants off (or threatened to) anyone who dared to try to imitate them, (in spite of the fact they ripped off the WIMP interface from Rank Xerox) and over-priced their machines to almost absurd levels.
(WIMP = Window, Icon, Menu, Pull-down)

IBM, on the other hand, introduced a much inferior computer, opened the architecture, & didn’t care if people copied them. Consequently, today, there are at least 50 Windows PC’s out there for every MAC.

There were a few other faux pas as well; inability to expand the machine you’d paid $5,000 for, holding onto a nine inch grey screen even when the standard everywhere else was a fourteen inch 256 colour VGA screen, and eventually a clunky single button mouse when even IBM was releasing a two button version.

Mr JM says also that you can tell someone who began their computer experience on a MAC by the fact they bang the mouse on the desk before they move it. (Apparently the MAC mouses had ‘sticky’ balls,  and you had to lift them & tap them on the desk to get the pointer to begin moving)

Now they have the MAC-Air. Lovely looking machine, light, thin, everything a catwalk model should be – and about as intelligent.

To quote Tech Republic, Computer Guru site… (more…)

OK, so we’ve talked about the bits that matter when choosing the computer. Why do they matter?

Well, it’s possible to go out there and buy a top of the range computer with all the best items in it. But unless you have seriously too much money in your pocket, or you’re a games geek with a burning need to push the boundaries of what’s possible and do it all at an inch short of light speed, the chances are you’d be spending money you don’t need to spend.

Most computer users will tell you all about how you need the latest and bestest and that if you don’t get it you’ll be behind the pace within a few weeks. But unless you want to buy into the Wintel game, that horse don’t run. (more…)

It’s that time. You’ve finally decided to go and buy yourself a home computer. The first and probably most important question would be… For what purpose are you buying a computer?

It’s more important than you realize if you’re new to the computer world or if you’ve only ever used a work computer running Word. The use can determine how much memory (RAM) hard disk space, which chipset you need, whether you need a whiz-bang video card and if you need a network card.

What are we talking about?

Memory or RAM: The Computer loads instructions from programs and executes them to give you results. RAM is the area where it does the processing. The more RAM, generally, the less to and fro the chip (CPU) has to do to get things done, so the faster you get your results. (more…)

In Part 1 of Old Age…? I talked about defrag and the speed increases it can give. Here is the process mentioned in Part 2

What is needed is to restore Windows to something approaching the condition it was in when it was first installed. Remember how zippy it was when you first got the computer? So what we need to do is to start the computer using the Windows CDROM rather than the Hard Disk. To do this we interrupt the normal start up procedure.

(more…)

When I moved to Australia I had a laptop computer with all my music from years of downloads on it. Unfortunately, not long after I arrived it stopped working. The power supply was the problem that we couldn’t seem to fix and Mr. JM provided a different laptop for me to use. He tried to swap over the hard disk but the IBM didn’t want to know about it.

So I downloaded what I could and found other music from his collection, but there was always the hope that I could get back my music. But time passed, we got married, I worked on Fiction Scribe, Write Anyway, Book Stacks and Long Relationships and eventually Web TV Hub - but every so often I missed my music.

A little while back, Mr. JM went looking on eBay for a USB hard disk enclosure so he could access my old HDD and get the music for me. Along the way he came across something much better. (Yes, he did get the HDD enclosure and uploaded my music for me. Yay!)

On eBay, under the description ‘Portable 2.5″ HDD DivX Player USB MP3 TV DVD MPEG-4 CD’ was an awesome idea. It is a Media player that talks to PC, DVD or video player or TV. It plays all kinds of multimedia, including Xvid & DivX, MPG’s, MP4’s, VOB’s, VCD & SVCD files as well as MP3 files. (For those who are a bit confused, these are all types of video standards, except the MP3, which is a compressed sound file.)

(more…)

Let’s face it, notebooks are sexy.
They get the advertising, the cool folk have them
and you can show them off wherever you go.

But… do you need one?

The PC industry is based around getting people to buy things they don’t need. For that matter, the entire western economy is based around the principle, but as in the car industry, the computer world has made an art form of getting users to buy the latest, the most powerful, the… well, you get the idea.

In fact, the PC world now has you buying product that isn’t even ready yet, then they release the fixes after you tell them what’s wrong. Imagine if Ford didn’t put brakes on the new model and waited for customers to tell them before they decided to fit them?

For more info on the pictured laptop, check Apple Reporter

Do you need a notebook? Even one as sexy as the MAC Air? If you travel and need to work as you go, you can justify it. If you only need to access your email while on the move, with an occasional web access, buy a phone. The new ones provide all kinds of goodies and you don’t need a shoulder bag.
Desktops, for an equivalent price, are faster, come with better specifications and will include anything from a 19 inch to 24 inch widescreen monitor. You can expand a desktop PC without having to pay a technician and usually you can simply add in the extras, not replace what you have as you need to with a laptop.

It’s very unusual for a PC technician to have to repair a dropped desktop, but a slight miscalculation as you turn around can send your sexy laptop to the morgue in a blink. They can usually be revived with an expensive injection of parts, but most companies don’t warranty against accident unless you pay a hefty insurance premium up front.

With a desktop, the most common part getting nuked by accident is the keyboard – for $20 you can buy a perfectly good replacement.

A rule to start living buy is, buy what you need, not what they want you to buy!

Continued from yesterday…

MS Vista and MS Office continue on the upgrade path, yet talking to Mr JM, and by experience among friends and colleagues, nobody actually uses more than 10 or 15% of the features included. Most people would be just as productive with Windows 98SE and Office 97, yet release after release is sold and the ongoing chase for your hard-earned cash continues.

When Windows XP first released, it came with a need for 64MB of RAM and could actually be run on 32MB. With Service Pack 3 just released, (see here for details if you’re technically inclined) you’d find it difficult to get decent performance with less than 256MB of RAM and 512MB would be better.

Vista is released with a suggested minimum of 1GB of RAM, but anyone trying to run it in that configuration will be very disappointed with the performance – practical resources would be 2GB or better. Office 2007 runs reasonably in 512MB of RAM but is happier with 1GB or more.

We’ve come a long expensive way from 1MB RAM in your desktop!

So, what to do about it? Well unless you’re a gamer, or your business is high end computer use such as graphics design or video editing, simply ask yourself, ‘Is my computer doing all I need of it?’ And remember, internet browsing is distinctly NOT one of the high end reasons for a top-of-the-line computer. If your PC is doing all you require of it, stick with it. A standard desktop should last 5 years (or more) and laptops in business use commonly have a turnover time of 3 years.

If your PC does all you need but does it too slowly, bookmark this site and call back regularly – I’ll be covering things you can do to speed it up, to clean it up, to upgrade only needed parts, and to protect your PC and information from outside interference.

Remember, you can ask questions or post experiences and I will answer them – if I can’t, Mr JM will be able to help and I will pass along his experience.

Windows, Office, ungrade