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--- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- jv16 PowerTools 2006 (note also: this is a free upgrade if you registered the 2005 version) --------------( the above is an advertisement )--------------
1) Incredibly Useful TweakIf you haven't had to do this already, then some day, some time, you almost surely will: You'll want or need to pull a file off a sick PC. If the hard drive is formatted in NTFS, you'll normally have to jump through hoops to get at the files and to move them safely to, say, a floppy drive or other location. It can be done, but it often involves extra steps and perhaps using a completely different OS (on CD or flash drive) to accomplish the task. But with one simple tweak, you can use XP itself, natively. The tweak gives you simple, direct, DOS-like access to your entire hard drive, and lets you move, copy, delete, or otherwise manage any file, anywhere on the drive. Want to move stuff to or from a floppy? No problem! Need to replace a corrupted file with a fresh copy? Piece o' cake. Want to act on a whole range of files or folders, using a simple "wildcard' command, such as using *.exe to represent all exe files? Easy! Full info, including a how-to to implement the tweak: Click on over! Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- Make your Internet
Faster! --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 2) Ready For A New Beta? (IE7)You have to imagine Bill Gates standing over you, a menacing gleam in his eye: "So tell me, punk" he says. "You feeling lucky? Well, do you?" OK, that's a little silly, but using any beta--- by definition, unfinished software--- always carries some risks. Early betas can be extremely unstable and incomplete; although later betas should (that's the key word) be approaching the quality of the final release of the software. Internet Explorer 7 is in beta 2, and is open to the public. It looks pretty good, and seems to be reasonably stable. It doesn't advance the state of the art in browsers much at all, but does bring IE up to current standards, incorporating some of the popular advances (such as tabbed browsing) introduced by Opera, Firefox, and the like. Like IE6, the new IE7 also integrates well with the Windows OS; which is either a good thing (because it offers more seamless operation) or a hideous flaw (because it doesn't stand alone), depending on your viewpoint. It has other benefits, too: It's much, much less resource-intensive than Firefox, for example. (Imagine: A Microsoft product more svelte and streamlined than a competitor's! <g>) But it *is* a beta, so you really do need to approach it with caution. If you have good backups or another form of safety net for your PC, the IE7 beta2 is available for free download here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx Click to email this item to a
friend 3) Feverish Laptop
The two most-common hot spots on a laptop are the battery and the hard drive. (The CPU gets hot, of course, but it's usually well ventilated.) My guess is it's the hard drive's heat that you were feeling through the case. Each manufacturer sets the acceptable max temps for a PC or laptop components. Usually, drive vendors warn against temps over about 50C (120F), so your readings in the low 50's C (high 120's F) may have been a little too toasty. But the only way to know for sure is to check either the vendor's tech sheets OR the actual hard drive manufacturer's spec sheets. You may be able to determine the drive make and model from software (e.g. http://www3.sympatico.ca/gtopala/about_siw.html , http://www.majorgeeks.com/download181.html , etc.) or you can eyeball it: Hard drive access on a laptop is usually via a door or flap on the bottom or side of the unit; you may need to remove a couple of screws to get at it, but you most likely won't have to take the whole thing apart: Usually, laptop hard drives are designed for reasonably easy access. Likewise, either the laptop maker OR the actual CPU manufacturer can tell you what the correct operating temperatures are for that chip. Many CPU makers spec max temps of around 70C (158F), so your temps were probably close to the max, but may have stayed below the imminently dangerous area. But again, you'll need to track down the specifics for your exact make and model. Please also note than "max" temp is very different from a recommended temp: With electronics, the cooler, the better. A component may not fail immediately at a "high normal" temperature, but sustained high temps will almost surely shorten the component's useful life. For the best longevity of any electronics component, you want it kept as cool as reasonable. With my laptops, I use whatever speed-controlling software tools the vendor includes, plus CPU-throttling software, fan management software, and a lapdesk. By not having the system work harder than it has to, and by having the fans kick on at slow speed at relatively low temps, and by using a lapdesk to ensure good airflow all around the laptop; the laptop never gets all that hot in the first place, and usually stays comfortably cool. For example, my newest laptop CPU maxes out at about 116F (47C) in sustained full-throttle operation; and the hard drive usually floats around 95F (35C). More info and tools: Free Temperature Tools Temperature Tools For Dell and Other Notebooks Curing and *Preventing* Laptop Overheating Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- "Fred: For security
reasons, I do not want to use my credit card over --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 4) "Network Neutrality"
Well, the issue is real, as buttressed by a note from another reader:
We've already seen a hint of this in AOL's use of "GoodMail" ( http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-02-13.htm#4 ), where email senders can pay to get preferred handling by AOL's mail filters. If you don't pay, your mail gets processed more slowly and--- gee, we're sorry!--- might get tossed as spam. Many, including me, view GoodMail as a form of extortion. The "network neutrality" debate extends the same concept to the web and net at large: Customers and site owners on certain portions of the internet--- say, ISP "X's" network, for example--- might get their bits delivered faster and more reliably than those that originate outside of X's network or that don't pay a special handling fee to X. If this is allowed to happen, the open and egalitarian nature---the "neutrality"--- of the net will be reduced or eliminated; and we'll instead have a tiered system where you'll pay not just to access the net, but to determine how well you want your data bits to be handled. If you don't or can't pay for premium service, your bits fall to the bottom tier: digital steerage. If companies were adding new, faster, better services for which you could opt to pay extra, that'd be one thing. But this is retroactively gating and tiering essentially the same service we have today. It's just a way for a few large companies to make more money from existing customers and traffic. Alas, under the current US administration's "profits above people" approach to nearly everything--- if it makes someone rich, it must be good, right?--- there's an excellent chance that tiered service will become a reality, and you'll have to pay more if you want your web experience to be the same as it is today. Click to email this item to a
friend 5) Upgrade Vs Replace?
It's a matter of what the increments are, Randy. When PCs were slower, incremental upgrades made a lot of sense and offered a lot of bang for the buck. For example, let's set the Wayback machine way, *way* back: One of the biggest kicks I've ever gotten from hardware was upgrading from a 4.77MHz processor to a model with a "turbo" switch that boosted the CPU to 10MHz. Wow--- everything was more than twice as fast! The "turbo" switch just doubled the clock speed; the rest of the hardware had enough "slop" in it to accommodate the speed change without trouble. After all, the absolute speeds just weren't that great to begin with. By analogy: A car rolling along at 2mph (or kph) can also roll at 4 with hardly any extra stress. But it's different with today's PCs. In your case, you could theoretically triple your PC's speed. But you'd be talking about a large absolute difference. To use the same analogy: Your car probably easily can go 100 MPH (160kph) on the right road, if you let it, but there's no way in hell you can drive at triple that speed. <g> The car's just not built for it. So it is with your PC: For large speed gains at the higher end of the spectrum, you'll run into issues of RAM timing, CPU timing, heat generation, and more. By the time you make all the necessary changes to accommodate the faster CPU, you'll probably have been better off just getting a new PC designed for the high speeds to begin with. For that matter, given today's aggressive pricing, it'll probably be cheaper just to buy a new unit, too. Example: You can get a brand-new system with half a gig of RAM, a 100GB hard drive, and an AMD 3200+ CPU for about $250 from places like TigerDirect, and others. I don't think you could even come close to that price by totally upgrading an older system. Believe me, I'd never callously suggest tossing aside perfectly good hardware just for the sake of an arbitrary upgrade. But there are times when it really is more sensible and efficient to buy new; and I suspect this is one of them. BTW, see #9, below, for an idea of how you might put that old PC to good use. Click to email this item to a
friend 6) PR Budget Still $0.00 <g>Long-time readers know this newsletter is a one-person
private project of mine: It's not part of some publishing empire's stable of
publications. It's just me here! <g> There's no budget, staff or facility to
handle outreach and promotions: The newsletter depends on word of mouth to grow. Click to email this item to a
friend 7) Zip Central, 7-Zip
Thank you, Holly. Indeed, the free ZIP tools have been getting better and better. ZIPcentral is nice; so is a different tool, 7-Zip ( http://www.7-zip.org/ ). I have a subscription to WinZip, so I still use that on my main PC, but I've been installing 7-Zip on other boxes as their WinZip licenses expire. Nice to have choices, isn't it? <g> Click to email this item to a
friend 8) They Just Keep Coming And Coming...Over five thousand of your fellow readers have now "Loaded
the code." Please click over to
http://langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join them! (If you've already
"Loaded The Code" and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the
Langa.Com web site, please see
http://langa.com/link.txt ) Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting At Innovative Computer Solutions (Alaska) freecycle Computer Help clarker net Productivity Talk North Carolina Real Estate Blog "uh oh" Cape Fear Tactical and Response What To See In Las Vegas Simple Security Solutions (au) Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList Free! ) --- --------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 9) Connection-Sharing Question
In the most common kinds of setups, you need a local network over which to share the internet connection, and that; by itself, requires one "network interface card" (NIC) in each PC on the LAN. If you connect to the internet by dial up, then you also need a modem and a phone line on the PC that will be doing the sharing. If you connect by cable or dsl, then you need a second network card in the machine doing the sharing. To share the connection, you use special software that sits as an intermediary between the LAN and the internet connection, translating the LAN addresses so that, to the outside world, everything appears to be coming only from the main, connected PC. But the software also works in reverse, so inbound packets also are translated and shunted to the correct machines on the LAN. This technology is called "network address translation" (NAT). I've grossly simplified the explanation here; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation for more detail. Because NAT technology disguises the true LAN addresses, it has the extra benefit of adding a modest layer of security to your connections. That's the benefit you're referring to; and indeed, I use a NAT here in my own office, for instance: I have a dedicated cheap, slow, old white-box PC (with nothing vital on it) actually making the connection to the outside world; all my other PCs connect to the internet *through* that PC. The outside world--- including would-be hackers and crackers--- "see" only the old, junk PC, if they see anything at all. The LAN-side PCs are effectively invisible from outside. (See http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180203313 ) For the last several versions, Windows has had an "Internet Connection Sharing" (ICS) tool built in; a simple NAT that does a perfectly acceptable job in many cases. It also integrates well with XP's built-in firewall; a plus for those looking for easy setup and maintenance of a shared connection: Setting up Internet Connection Sharing Internet Connection Sharing with Windows XP General search: There are other technologies that accomplish the same thing, such as proxies, routers, and so on; but in many, many cases, a simple NAT (such as Windows' built-in ICS) is all you need. Click to email this item to a
friend 10, 11, 12, 13, 14) Plus! Edition Only:
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