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Archive for the ‘Computer News’ Category

My DELL520 laptop conked out, went extreeeemly slow; blue screens of death came up indicating a random error.  Normally one would re-install Windows as that is the conventional wisdom (TIME is MONEY for IT support). I coaxed the problem along and decided to transfer everything to a new, larger hard-drive using CloneZilla.

Booted twice and everything runs fine now.

The Geeksquad  would have zapped everything and charged $$$.
Then it would have been a pain reinstalling everything.

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Looks like I’ll be looking for a good deal on a 750GB or 1TB laptop hard-drive for a multi-boot OS computer.    The DELL520 is a rugged computer; I don’t have any major complaints.

I have a few more laptops that I’m getting ready for special jobs.    One I’ve been using is the DELL LatitudeXT, a nice little swivel screen tablet.   Whenever I need to edit some graphics on the fly that tablet fits the bill.

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When I tax my software projects in Windows I use different boot-ups.   Here are my boot.ini options:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro 1GB” /fastdetect /maxmem=1024
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro 512MB” /fastdetect /maxmem=512
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro 256MB” /fastdetect /maxmem=256
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro 128MB” /fastdetect /maxmem=128
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro Safe Mode” /fastdetect /safeboot
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Pro VGA” /fastdetect /basevideo

 

Electronics used to be one of the greatest hobbies ever. There were literally hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people who used to play around with electronics as an avocation or part-time interest and activity. There were at least a dozen magazines supporting this group and plenty of parts and kits suppliers to keep them happy.   Kids learned electricity and electronics in school. As a result, when they ended up getting the bug, they ended up not only adopting electronics as a hobby, but also made it into a career. You don’t see too much of that going on anymore.   So what the devil happened to the electronic hobbyist?

I started playing around with old radios in junior high and got interested in ham radio.    I built the classic crystal radio and ……………

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