Joe Wein’s blog

I had a scary experience today because one of my Windows PCs “blue screened”, i.e. it crashed. While the “Blue Screen of Death” was fairly common in Windows 95 and 98, it is unusual to see it on any healthy machine running Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or 2008 Server, Vista or Windows 7.
Since the [...]

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If you install Ubuntu on a machine that came with Windows pre-installed you have the choice of preserving Windows and chose each time you boot which operating system to run. By default, the boot menu will list the current Linux kernel, followed by any older Linux kernel versions, followed by a memory test and finally [...]

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I recently upgraded a secondary hard disk in a Windows machine from a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB drive to a Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS 1.5 TB drive. Mirror imaging the data off the old drive to the new drive using the Linux dd utility from an Ubuntu live CD went very smoothly and [...]

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Last week I updated my Gateway M-6750 from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 (“Karmic Koala”) and managed to get myself into a right mess, as I lost access to both my wired and wireless internet connections. I then burnt an Ubuntu 9.10 live CD from an ISO image dowloaded with uTorrent and reinstalled from [...]

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The new Acer AspireRevo R3600 (Acer AspireRevo R3610-U9012) that combines a dual core Atom 330 processor with the Nvidia Ion platform was introduced at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin in September. It is just one of several interesting new nettops coming out now that will offer significantly more processing power, especially for video [...]

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Last month my Gateway GT4014j suddenly died and I replaced it with an Acer Aspire M5201, which came with 2 GB of memory installed. That was less than the 3 GB I had in the Gateway and it affected some very memory hungry apps I use. So three weeks later I did a memory upgrade [...]

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I recently upgraded a Windows XP machine from Internet Explorer 6 to IE 8. Since then I’ve been getting warnings whenever I wanted to run any .EXE file that doesn’t use code signing off a network drive.
My main browser on that machine is FireFox, but that doesn’t matter. The warning that comes up is the [...]

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Last weekend I got IPv6 working on my US$60 router, allowing all my machines here to talk IPv6 to the outside world. That includes an Ubuntu Linux server, 4 PCs and one Mac.
The biggest incentive for upgrading to IPv6 is the fact that at the current pace we’ll run out of (IPv4) IP addresses in [...]

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“Does Linux stand a chance now that Windows 7 will run on netbooks?”, Shane O’Neill asks in an article in ComputerWorld on 15 January 2009 that overall sounds fairly optimistic on Microsoft’s prospects. However it largely avoids one crucial subject that matters for Microsoft in the struggle over market share in the booming nettop market: [...]

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Two months ago I commented on the non-availability of either of the two Linux versions of the Asus Eee Box 202 that had been announced months ago along with its XP-equipped sibling, which has been shipping for two months already.
It appears you can now also get Linux versions of this tiny energy saving desktop machine, [...]

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