7 posts tagged “computers”

It's been a long week, and I have several things running around in my head that I just felt like sharing with someone, or anyone. Some of it will update you on stuff I did this week.

1)

I heard this radio blog thing on a local radio show, well they were calling it a blog, but it's just like any radio show talking about random stuff. Anyway, they were talking about digital cameras and convenience, and being able to store tons of photos and print the ones you want. And this lady was supposedly some expert, or self-proclaimed one, who had a thousand photos on her machine, but sent them away to be printed. She mentioned she didn't have one of "those printers" that could print them out, so offered up alternatives for people. One was a 400$ digital frame that also printed photos. The show even piped in fake dot-matix printer sounds... lovely. She proclaimed she did all her research. But she never mentioned you can get printers capable of printing good photos for UNDER 100$!

It just bothers me that these people presume to be providing advice to the average listener out there. Personally I found their advice insulting as a computer geek. I remember talking to a friend's brother in law who refused to buy one of those printers cause the cost of it, and the paper wasn't worth being able to print one picture, or one greeting card. Duh!! you use the friggen thing for other purposes and it's also convenient. Our world is filled with gadgets that makes life more convenient, and we buy them up. Of course this guy also freaked out when his wife went to put a pink-tinged shirt on their 2 yr old son, because he didn't want to "make him gay".  I rest my case on that nut-case.

Anyhoo, enough of that first rant.

2)

I found a new favorite flavor combo: Guacamole on Perogis!!!

Nom nom nom nom!

3)

I think the universe is conspiring against me. We finally got a girls night out arranged (it was last night). The day after we picked a night, my daughter got a birthday invite for the morning after our night out, at 11am. And I drive to the next town over for this so that meant I would have to leave to come back at 9am. On the way out of town last night, I turned back to grab sunglasses, because it was bright, and the roads wet. And I also found Lee's dad's ... um... oregano smoking kit... if you get my drift, in the glove compartment. Im too paranoid to drive with that in there, especially if I hit a drinking and driving checkstop. Then after getting the sunglasses, I got the car stuck in our driveway trying to turn around. Finally got the car out. And finally made it to town for our night out (Actually it was a night In at my friend's). We had originally planned for me to bring Guitar Hero World Tour in to play, but Lee broke the drum... but out of desperation, cause he loves to play, we duct taped the yellow cymbal back together and switched it with the orange one.

Oh, and Lee broke the passenger side windshield wiper. Well, it's bent or loose or something. But the drivers side one worked. However at one point the two got overlapped and the driver side one bent, so I had to bend it back into place. It works ok and I can see when I drive, but the passenger one doesn't work at ALL!

The night in was a lot of fun however.

My daughter ended up getting some stomach bug last night and threw up several times, and this morning. So she couldn't go to the party. Poor girl.

I accidentally left the sunglasses at my friends.

4)

On a side note, I finished a song on Guitar Hero... on the guitar... on Expert!.

"Eye of the Tiger" baby!

I didn't do that great. Almost got booed off. But I finished it after a couple attempts.

Now I bet I have to prove it to Lee. heh

5)

Wednesday night, Lee and I had a few drinks. Vodka, Lime and water. And I did not feel very drunk and even stopped after 3. But either I made them stronger than I thought or something else I ate that night didn't agree with me, cause I was SICK all Thursday. Bleh

He wanted to have a drink cause we found out friends of ours who finally had a baby boy a few months ago after trying for years and years, and eventually sought (expensive) help with conception, found out that she has a brain tumor and might have 2 years to go. She was diagnosed 2 days before her C-Section, cause she had been having seizures. She's doing her treatments now, but it's all up in the air.

It's so sad. She's such a sweet person.

6)

I'm trying to drag my ass to do more work for the office that I don't like.

But our business is going well. Word of mouth is spreading. It will just take a little time, but we're very optimistic about getting clients . We have about 4 web pages on the go right now. And possibly 2 more tech contracts for maintenance work with comapnies. Woooooo.

7)

I'm enjoying the superbowl commercials.

I found the Jack in the Box one a little overly morbid, and possibly offensive to anyone who lost someone to a tragic traffic accident, and am considering sending an email to them.

8)

The weather here is warming up, stuff is melting. The driveway still sucks, but I think I might start walking to take my oldest to kindergarten again here soon.

9)

Found a new lol cat. Hope someone else hasn't posted it yet:

Ok, In addition to a craptacular weekend, i had a behemoth of a craptacular day yesterday.

We were worried that my machine may still have a virus. And so we've been running scans for several days. It found one the other day and removed it and the next one was clean. But the computer has been acting up. Then my virus scanning software froze and wouldn't work, and when we rebooted, it wouldn't go into windows past the moment it tried to load the virus scanner.... it just FROZE. So Lee had me reboot into safe mode and try to uninstall and reinstall my virus scanner... which itself has a virus. Oh the irony!!!

So I got it uninstalled, and I went to delete the folder for it out of program files... and the machine rebooted. Now, I may not be a computer hardware expert, but I do know it's not suppose to do that.

So I booted again into safe mode, reinstalled the virus scanner and tried to run scans... its still acting up. Yesterday morning Lee started another scan, it found 10 viruses. THen it rebooted on it's own. When windows XP comes up, it logs me into windows, thinks for literally 2 seconds, then logs me out of windows. That was about all I could do...

So I took it to lee, down at the office, since we do run a computer service company. Somehow my Windows activation Key became invalid... He tried to see if he could fix windows without reformatting. No such luck. He backed up all my files (fortunately I keep all my data on the D drive, not the C drive), and reformatted the whole friggen thing.

Then he got windows up and running before bringing it home.

Well! Then, it would boot into windows. I started to reinstall stuff, copy my files back... and it would shut off. After a couple tries it would only get 2 seconds into a boot and say something about the CPU temperature. The Heat Sync on my motherboard was loose (it's a funny looking metal thing usually with a fan attached, that sits above the CPU Chip)

I got a virus from the internet trying to find a copy of a joke that yesterdays post reminded me of. Firefox and Internet Explorer would not load anymore and I couldn't get rid of the virus.

So since last night I have been backing up all my files to my 2nd drive, and to other computers in the house, and have been reinstalling ALLLLL my programs. Wheeee

Still not done.

Computers 101

This is by request. I had some good feedback on my Projectors 101 post a while back and I some people find all the different internal parts of a computer confusing.

Here's a quick and dirty breakdown.

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CPU - Central Processing Unit - this is the little chip that is in the computer, the one in Mhz or Ghz (megahertz or gigahertz). It can also be called the Processor. This is what the "Intel Inside" commercials are talking about. The wiki definition of Hertz is "a measure of frequency". For computers, it's the clock speed, the speed at which it can process data and calculate. Once you get up to about 2.1 gigahertz, any other increments above are hardly noticeable. Its the other components in your machine help determine final speed.

RAM - Random Access Memory - this is the memory, where information is stored temporarily as your computer works away, and the more programs you have open, the more memory is used. This is much different than ROM, which we will get to. Windows itself uses up a bunch of memory and the very least you want to have is 1 gig (gigabyte) of RAM, however it's best to have 2 gigs with Vista, and I would recommend 4 gigs in order to truly have a fast machine. Ram has different number of Pins, which are the gold little things along the bottom (the part that plugs into the motherboard), so if you want to add more to your machine, you need to find out what you already have. If you have a 2gig memory chip in there, then you need one more 2gig of the same brand and model. Or take it out and get a single 4gig chip with the right number of pins.

ROM - Read Only Memory - This is more recognizable as a DVD-ROM (digital video disk - read only memory) or CD-ROM (compact disk - read only memory). Once you write the data to these disks, you cannot remove it or write more to it, which is also why they use the term 'burn' when data is written to them. These are great for distributing software because they can hold sooooo much more than the old floppy disks. You can get DVD-RW (read / write) disks but you also need a special read/write drive in order to read and write to it. Useful if you just want to use it for yourself. Almost all DVD drives will read CDs... but CD Drives will not read DVDs. So best to go for DVD drive. If you want to burn your own DVDs, you will need a DVD Burner or Writer. Blank DVDs sold separately (They will also burn CDs) DVDs will hold a little more than CDs, and if you want to play a movie you made in your regular DVD player on your TV, then best to burn to a blank DVD disk. Music should be burnt to a CD Disk... hopefully I didn't just confuse the crap out of you.

Hard Drive - This is where your actual data is stored. Its readable and writable and there is a speed factor to it. Most specs will talk about the # of bytes it can transfer per second, and the RPM (rotations per minute). Most will have 7200 rpms and can transfer like 120 MB (Megabytes) per second or more. (I'll get to bytes later). As programs get more fancy they require more disk space to store themselves on. So it's best to go no smaller than 500 GB (Gigabyte) drives. Eons ago (like 15 years) a 500 MB (Megabyte) drive would be enough... not anymore. and 500 GB = 500,000 MB. You can have more than one in a computer too. We had 4 in one machine, with different things stored among them. If you have lots of music or movies, then you might need more than 500 GB. You can get up to 1.5 TB (Terabytes) on one single drive now. 1.5 TB = 1,500 GB.

Case - This is the large box that sits on your floor. My mom used to get CPU and Case mixed up... the case is just the box that holds everything. At the back will be holes for various plugins. The various components are inside the computer and designed so that the plug part hangs out the back. You want good fans on your case... Antec makes a nice one with lots of ventilation. I can't wait until the Antec Skeleton is available!

Motherboard - This is the large electronic board that sits in the bottom of your case. the CPU Chip plugs into a special slot on this board. The RAM also fit into special slots on the board and different boards will have different sized and number of slots. There are also a series of slots for other cards (sound, video, etc, we will get to them). Some will have them built in, which are handy, but then you are stuck with what is on board. If you don't need anything fancy for your sound, then an onboard sound is ok to go with. Basically everything plugs into the motherboard, and the mouse and keyboard plugins are built into them.


Power Supply - This is a small box which plugs into everything as well to power them all. Since hard drives have these neat disks inside them that need to spin, each hard drive needs to plug into the power supply separately. Some cards may need to as well if they require a lot of power.


Video Card - This is what controls the picture on your screen. Not necessarily the monitor, it just translates it, but it controls how clear of a picture you get, and how fast animations (like in games and movies) will be processed. Many high end video cards come with their own little CPU and on board memory to help with the processing, and a fan, to help keep them cool, because CPUs will get hot fast. Especially with complex games like FarCry. A video card might have specifications like 710Mhz and 256Mb, that is it's speed and on board memory. the GForce brand of cards from Asus are good ones for gaming.

Sound Card - Quite often the ones built into the mother board are good. If you want a media PC, where you can hook up to a projector and play movies on, you might want a good one that supports surround sound.

Keyboard, mouse and speakers kind of all speak for themselves. You can get Keyboards and Mice for pretty cheap. I'm particular towards the Logitech ones. The laser mice are nice, and I like the cordless ones. I wouldn't necessarily recommend bluetooth ones tho, unless you want to use them with a PDA or something i guess. The one I had at work was a little glitchy.

Bytes: This is a common unit of measure of memory and disk space in computers. There are bits and bytes, and I dont know how much you need to know them... But 1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1024 Bytes. 1 Megabyte (MB) = 1000 Kilobytes. 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 Megabytes. 1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes.

Never get less than 1 gig of memory (RAM), preferably never less than 2 gig. And go for 500 Gig of hard disk space at the least... sometimes it may be worth an extra 50 bucks to get a 750 Gig drive... it will be longer before you fill it up and have to add another drive. If you do mostly email and web browsing, you wont fill it up any time soon.

USB - Universal Serial Bus - You probably hear this a lot. It's a new type of plugin for components. Mice and Keyboards used to all have serial cables. It's the plugins that are round with a bunch of little pins. Now most of them will come as USB plugins. It's a small, flat-looking plugin. And most computers come with 4 or more of these slots. You can get printers, scanners, and tons of other peripherals that will plug into them. If you have a lot of peripherals that use USB, you can get little USB cards to pop into the machine, that fit into the motherboard, which will had 2 or more slots in them. My machine has like 6 usb slots in the back and 2 in the front.

Would you ever consider having your life taped for a reality show?

Well not only would I bore the crap out of people, like MJ would, but I bet I would confuse the crap out of a lot of people. True that a large portion of our population is comfortable with computers, navigating, using internet and email... what I do is a lot more complicated than that.

My dual screen monitor chock full of open windows when I work would be enough to make people wonder, how on earth do I keep track of all this??

And this one isn't even as busy as some of my other desktops, I'm still in the process of installing all my programs since I rebuilt it over a week ago. We've just been slacking off in August, but now September is here, and my oldest is in school and I want to move ahead on some personal projects I'm working on. I also have one more web site to build for the company.

Oh, I just remembered, did anyone have suggestions for another computer post? I did one about Projectors recently, and thought maybe I could do another one soon.

I've been awol a little for 2 days, but I am here.... somewhere

Today I formatted my entire computer and reinstalled everything. It was the only way to truly clean my machine from all the crap I had installed from my previous job <Insert maniacal laughter here>.

So far I have email, firefox and my instant messenger, Pidgin, installed.

Next is office, adobe and vb.net 2008.

Phew.

I did take a quick read through today's blogs. Hopefully later, or tomorrow I will respond to some!

Show us the last thing you bought.

Well, Lee bought it, but it was for my old computer cause he borrowed it's monitor so he could use dual monitors (since it was the exact same model as his), whichleft me with the only choice of VNC'ing into it remotely because it had no monitor. Also, since I work, and he is being house-dad, i pay for his visa. So haha

It's very pretty, shiny, and very bright! And widescreen! You can find it Here.