Articles Tagged with “computers”

Initially I wasn’t going to bother upgrading to Windows 10. I currently dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and use the latter almost exclusively. Mostly I use Windows 7 for SMART Notebook, and to play the occasional Steam game that will run on my 8-year-old laptop. Of course, I use Windows nearly every day on other computers. I’ve noticed that I feel somewhat uncomfortable on Windows 8 computers—the interface changed enough from Windows 7 that…

How was your Easter break? I spent a good portion of my four-day weekend fighting a ransomware attack.

My boss's computer at the art gallery (not at my other job) is still running Windows XP while connected to the Internet. This is, no joke, a terrible idea. But they are a not-for-profit organization with very little money—she is finally getting a modern computer in May.

Not soon enough. Last week her computer was hit by…

My computer is a Dell Inspiron 6400, and it turned five years old last month. It’s been good to me. I replaced the battery once, about two years ago, and the keyboard twice, once under warranty because I broke a key—er, it snapped off—and once because the space bar was getting worn out. Sometime in the past few year years, the left corner of the white trim on the palm rest cracked. Otherwise, this computer…

My summer research project involved extensive use of Macaulay2, a computer algebra program. Essentially, what Macaulay2 does is make it easy to do computations on different types of abstract algebra objects, like rings and ideals. Since there is no native version of Macaulay2 for Windows, my options for running it these past two summers have been: run it in Windows under Cygwin or, once again, dual boot Windows and Ubuntu (or Kubuntu). Ubuntu and…

Yesterday my laptop power adapter died. It was fine all day at work, but when I plugged it in after coming home, there was no joy. My computer blithely informed me it was draining its battery, oblivious to the fact that, if I did nothing, it would only have a few hours of life left. I suspect that the adapter was miffed that I was making a big deal of my computer's fourth anniversary and…

My copy of Windows 7 Home Premium arrived on Friday. On Sunday night, I began doing some housekeeping on my computer to prepare for the upgrade: I uninstalled programs I was no longer using, cleaned up unnecessary files, defragmented, etc. To finish it all off, I decided to finally delete that 10 GB recovery partition Dell put on my computer when I bought it. I've never used it and probably will never need it, so…

I've been very happy with my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop since purchasing it over a year ago. I bought it online, customized it to meet my needs, and this lovely machine has performed without complaint. There's a chip on the lower left edge of the white trim; I'm not quite sure how it got there. And I had to replace my keyboard once--Dell support was very helpful and shipped one to me by the next…

Right, so, I have a confession to make. I am a left-shift-key discriminator (or a right-shift-key abuser, your choice).

What is an LSKD (or RSKA)? Simply put, it is someone who uses his or her right shift key almost exclusively when capitalizing letters. Just reverse the terms if you abuse your left shift key.

I learned how to "touch type" (or whatever you want to call it) in grade 4, and I'm proud of my…

The long night has ended.

Two good events have occurred in the past week to counterbalance this annoying cough that's plagued me. Firstly, my new computer arrived on the 21st! Secondly, I am now officially done with high school.

With university approaching, I wanted a new computer. My former one, a Toshiba Satellite A70, was ... performance-challenged, to say it nicely. It was a nice computer in its own right, but clunky from the start…

My computer is starting to overheat and automatically shut down--again. >_< I had this problem last year, and thought it was gone.

Recently I installed a temperature monitor as part of an attempt at undervolting my laptop. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the Intel Celeron is a gutted piece of hardware junk, that's not possible. So my battery life remains short (which is fine, I can live with that), and my CPU…