windows – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

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Andrew the Hopeless Techie > windows

Inspiration for new content?

March 10, 2021 0 Comments

For several years since having this blog, I have added content ranging from Life updates to my take on Linux distributions, as you may have noticed my frequency with which this content is updated is unpredictable at best. My goal from the start was always to just post what was on my mind and hope others found it somewhat interesting, the reality it seems is much more complex than I originally anticipated. So the new focus was on trying to bring my point of view (for what it’s worth) on things around me (I.E politics, technology, and so on), but this to was problematic as the internet became flooded with people who have much more valued opinions then Myself. It became clear the only way to continue to use this platform for anything other than a stream of consciousness for my mind was to find new and interesting ideas, this is where offshoots like the Category 5 fan blog came from, however, due to time constraints I was not able to see shows live and it became near impossible to keep that site up and a full-time job.

So I am turning to what few people actually come across this blog for ideas, I have an accompanying forum thread which I would prefer suggestions be made as this allows for searching and archival of responses a bit better than the comment system here. I am getting ahead of myself however and will get back to that bit more later, for now, I want to throw out a few ideas and get your take on them as well as any original ideas you might have.

Idea number 1: Continue to try and post about my experiences with Linux or Windows and try to give an honest down to earth view point on both of those areas. I would try to do at least 1 if not 2 or more blog entries a week on this topic and try to really drill down my point of view, I enjoy using both Linux and Windows and this would give me an option to engage more in those areas. The draw back to this idea (at least on my intial view of it) is that things may be to opinionated and sometimes seem less informative and more reaching for content.

Idea number 2: Treat this as more a day in the Life kind of blog and just write about my experiences through the day this would generate genraly smaller posts but more of them typicaly one a day, the content would be very opinionated as it would essentialy be a stream of conciousness of my thoughts for the day on things I have done. While this idea seems to be the one to generate the most content to me it also seems to be the one that would also generate the most drama related to people with differing opinions. Its not my first choice and regardless of what direction i end up taking this blog key events and things i deem noteworth will get mentioned anyway this just would generate much more content in between chunks people may find interesting (I live a largely uninterasting normal life ).

Idead number 3: I am not going to lie this one might be my least favorite option and generate the most controversy among readers. I would scour the news sites and technology sites and try to give a run down of whats going on and my thoughts on these things once a week. It would kind of be like a week in review, only instead of focusing on one topic it would encompass all aspects that affect me from Politics to Technology. I have views on both of those that may not sit well with some people but I am willing to share my thoughts on the topics I find through out the week, I want to make it cear however this would likely generate the most negative push back from people specificaly those politicaly opposed to my view points.

Well, there you have it those are my 3 ideas I am open to additional ideas as well and would love your guy’s feedback on which you prefer if any from the 3 above. I am not expecting a huge response from this but I thought I would put it out there because I myself and not really sure which direction I want to go. Again please use the forum thread to discuss this topic so we can get better content filtering for this. Normally I am all for using the comments system here but given the interaction I want to give to this discussion, I feel a Forum thread more appropriate for this. Click Here to go to the Forum Thread

General Stuff, Writting

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Linux, Windows and the ever-changing world of Operating Systems

June 7, 2020 0 Comments

Introduction

The term Operating System refers to the software used by a Hardware device to allow the user to interface with hardware and other software suites. Among these Operating Systems, often referred to as OS for short, many different varieties exist. Among these variations 4 Specific varieties are most popular, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and Mac OS.

Among even these 4 primary OS variants they are even subvariants and other deviations based on the main OS. A perfect example of this is Linux which is a Variant itself from the UNIX OS which is not as popular as it was at the time Linux was created. From Linux, different variations or distributions as they are called in the Linux Community exist which either add specific functionality or features to Linux or are target at being more secure or as small as possible so they can be embedded in devices like computers in cars and the like.

The above statement is an overall simplification of what Linux is but going into depth would be an entire post all on its own and the purpose of the paragraph above is to give a brief understanding of Linux. If you would like more information on Linux specific to what it is or how it works differently then say Windows you can google this as a wealth of information to this topic exists.

Windows is probably what most people who use a computer are familiar with it holds the largest share of the OS market as of the time I am writing this post. Again the point here is not to go into the background of Windows plenty of information already exists to this point. One thing that is important to point out though, is that due to its large market share a majority of Games and software are coded for Windows (though MacOS has a version of most of the same key software). This fact is what keeps most businesses from switching to a free alternative such as Linux.

You may have noticed I did not mention MacOS in much Detail above and this is because there are mountains of information comparing Windows to Mac OS online and me adding to that pile seemed irrelevant.

This brings me to the point of this post (I know a long-winded build-up), how Linux and Windows (along with a few others I mentioned above) have changed from the point of view of a consumer and not so much a developer (because I am far from one) or IT professional.

For the sake of making it easier to type future references to the Operating System may simply be referred to as OS.

Notable Changes

Linux

Linux I would say has undergone the biggest change here given its roots and what it is now, everyone uses it weather you realize it or not, how you use it may differ from person to person.

Without going into the entire history lets just say Linux when it was conceived was not very friendly to anyone other than developers and required a health understanding of the command line. It has undergone significant improvements in this area and now the average user could if they so chose to sit down at a Linux desktop and never touch the command line.

Variations of Linux such as Ubuntu have made this even easier taking a lot of the complex tweaking out of sight of the end-user allowing a more “it just works” type of experience out of the box. As this makes Linux more accessible to more people manufacturers start to see the value in adding support for Linux and some even start coding drivers to make their hardware work on Linux which in turn makes Distributions like Ubuntu even better and more seamless.

As is typical in Linux there are multiple flavors of Ubuntu and even some Distributions that are spun off Ubuntu. This may seem at first glance that it is rather redundant and in some aspects Chaotic, well if it was done poorly this would be the case for sure. I only mention this because the Debian Based Distro I will be talking about here is PoP_OS which is based on Ubuntu but has some notable differences. For the use of talking about Red Hat-based systems, I will use either Fedora 32 or CentOS 8. As the name implies Fedora and CentOS 8 are based on Red Hat and Ubuntu on Debian.

Linux is a very powerful tool and the more time that goes by the better it gets, now most of my use cases are supported by Linux something that just 10 years ago was very shotty. Ubuntu has even reached out to Microsoft and has co-developed a feature allowing you to run a Ubuntu shell on Windows. While this feature right now is primarily useful to developers they are slowly starting to add more and more features to it making Windows have an almost entirely feature-rich Subsystem.

The new subsystem should not be confused with a full Linux kernel as it lacks some of the more advanced features of a full-fledged Linux system. This brings us to the section of Windows something of a controversial topic as of late, we will dip into that a bit below.

Windows

I will briefly touch on this as most everyone who has used a computer in the past 10 years has at some point come in contact with some version of Windows.

While generally Windows had taken a more traditional software approach and released a new full release every 2-4 years, it has lately moved to a more modern approach both with its ups and downs. While Linux on the other had remained ever changing the core way to acquire and use it has not changed much over the years.

When Windows first entered the scene there was a command-line OS called DOS (Disk Operating System), back in those days HDD (Hard Disk Drives) was not common and in fact often cost quite a bit for a, by today’s standards, laughable storage size. You need to remember that back in these days computer code was small and in fact, an entire OS could be booted from a 1.4mb Floppy Disk (or less in the beginning), so many PCs (Personal Computers) were shipped with either 2 3.5″ floppy drives or one 5.25″ and one 3.5″ drive. This allowed for one drive to be able to boot the OS and the other for loading programs like a Word Processor or early game.

Fast forward to Windows 95, this was the first version of Windows that did not rely on DOS being installed and loading Windows from the command line as all previous versions did. While Windows 3.1 for example had the option to load automatically at the start of the machine it still relied on DOS to boot. Windows 95 did not entirely get rid of DOS in fact due to the small nature of DOS it was a core part of Windows 95 and in fact, would not be until Windows NT which eventually merged with 98 and gave us the disaster that was Vista (the pre-cursor to Windows 7).

As times changed DOS was slowly stripped out of the Windows Kernel all together in place was a Terminal which emulated DOS commands so that core commands could be done as though it was DOS, for example, listing a directories contents with the “dir” command or listing all directories inside your current director with “dir /w”.

This change from DOS to the NT Kernel (as I have come to call it) was not without issues, several programs build for windows 95, 98, or ME were reliant on DOS and were not optimized for NT. It’s worth noting that the NT kernel had been around in workstation and enterprise versions of Windows for several years it was not until Windows Vista (as mentioned earlier) that this was migrated to the Core Windows suite.

If we fast forward another few years we get Windows 10 which attempts to make a familiar-looking OS with new elements, for example, it uses the Desktop feature similar to Windows 7 but adds dynamic tiles to the start menu it calls Live Tiles. It’s also worth noting this was a result of user complaints at the radical new direction they attempted to go with Windows 8 and later slightly improved with 8.1. The biggest change with Windows 10 (and there are a ton of small and drastic improvements not worth mentioning unless you’re a software enthusiast) is that for a long time it was offered as a Free upgrade to Windows 7.

This may seem like a goodwill gesture on the part of Microsoft, however, there was a very strategic reason why they made Windows 10 so easy to obtain, some of which I will touch on but given the drastic amounts of changed from Windows 8.1 to 10, I will only touch on the most jarring or noticeable changes.

First, there are three ways a company like Microsoft can make money off an OS. The traditional way which Microsoft did for all their previous versions, this method involves selling major versions as new Versions of any OS. For example, Windows 95, 98, ME, 7, and 8 are all considered new versions. This method gives the developer a boost in cash for each version it releases which allows for a jump start to the development of improvements and iterations of new versions.

Second, is the version that Linux and many other Open Source projects use, Corporate sponsorships or donations by the community. This type of model does not require the consumer to pay anything upfront instead they focus on donations and trying to get corporate sponsors or selling support packages to larger companies deploying their OS on a large number of computers.

Third, the method Microsoft uses on Windows 10 is to give the OS away free at the firs to the consumer. This is monetized by gathering data on the user that is used to advertise or sell to other companies in an effort to make money. This is a controversial method because your privacy as a consumer is often brought into question. While later in the release cycle they do sell the OS for around $120 a pop they still collect your information. It’s possible to disable some of this data collection but if you really want to disable most of it you need to be proficient in registry editing and tweaking, however, this is often reversed by updates released to fix/update features and bugs in the OS.

Closing Thoughts

So as you can see from y brief summary tons of things have changed in the OS market allowing us to get where we are. As Linux changes and closes the gap between Windows and itself the choice between which one you use comes down to small things like Gaming or very specific software needs.

While Linux is becoming closer in terms of Gaming to Windows there is still a lot of work in this area that needs to be done. Businesses can however use a lot of tools that are open source on Linux to do their everyday jobs and save 100s if not thousands on licensing fees. The future of OS improvement all around is exciting as these improvements whether perceived or not play greatly into what you see every time you boot up your machine.

Next time you start your computer whether it be Windows, Linux, or Mac OS takes a second to appreciate the amount of software and hardware engineering involved with getting to where we are now.

Disclaimer: I am not a developer of any software listed below opinions are my own and this article was written over several days (given my schedule) so I have done my best to make sure it is consistent any suggestions or spelling errors can be put on the forums quick comments can be made below in-depth discussion should be done on the forums by clicking the link in this disclaimer. I encourage you to do your own research and dive into either of these OS yourself you may be surprised by what you find. If you find any of my information to be in error please constructively mention it in the forums and I will do my best to address it.

Android, Computers, Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Ubuntu

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Ubuntu 11.04 – review of unity interface

May 13, 2011 0 Comments

In a rather long blog post I wrote several months ago, I compared my first looks at the Fedora 15 Alpha and Ubuntu 11.04 beta. I also promised that once each one of these distributions was released I was going to do a more in depth review of each one. Ubuntu 11.04 has been out now for quite some time, due to the fact the Fedora 15 is not yet in its final stage I’m going to hold off for reviewing that.

This review is going to be focused primarily on the unity interface, my first use of the unity interface was a little skewed back in the alpha. This could have been due partly to the fact that I was running Ubuntu inside of a virtual machine, which is known not to work with the next generation desktop special effects such as unity in Ubuntu and Gnome shell and Gnome 3. To circumvent any problems that may arise with having Ubuntu in a virtual machine, I set up a small partition on a second hard drive and installed it natively having a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04.

First impressions of unity were not very good. There were a lot of artifacts on the screen, as well as several black spots blocking text, I found out later that these were due to the fact that the open-source driver for my video card was not up to par for handling the 3-D effects, installing the proprietary drivers using the hardware management tool and Ubuntu fixed this problem.

While I generally enjoyed the overall look of unity, it seemed to be way to stripped and too simplistic for somebody with my level of knowledge (though my level of knowledge is nowhere near as much as other users who use Ubuntu). There were a few things I liked about it, such as the remapping of the Windows key on my keyboard to pull up a search dialogue to be able to search for programs, if you ask me this was a brilliant remapping, the fact is a lot of Windows users switching to Ubuntu use the Windows key fairly often to pull up the start menu in Windows. While was entirely possible to remap the Windows key Using older versions of Ubuntu or clearly any other distribution, the fact that it was remapped by default. To me just seems like a good idea. Now before installing the initial updates that came with Ubuntu.

After installing it, I found unity to be a much more pleasing experience with the exception of one or two features that to me just drove me bonkers, a prime example: pre-update Firefox still had its menu contained within the Firefox window, post update the menus were then moved out of the Firefox window and opened the black taskbar across the top of the screen. Now to most people this might seem like a good change, however somebody who spends the majority of their time in Windows for whatever reason might find this extremely annoying, I know I did. I haven’t yet looked for a solution to convert this back to the way it was, although I’m sure one exists or will shortly. I was trying to keep Ubuntu as close to the default installation is possible so that this review would apply to as many people as possible, if I had gone and customized a bunch of the features my experience might be different than somebody who just installed Ubuntu.

There were some intuitive things that thing could have been worked into unity they would have made it a little more user-friendly, some of these include frequently used programs showing up in the launch bar by default. As it stands under a currently default install of Ubuntu, if you wanted to make a specific program launcher permanently show up in the launcher bar, You would have to right-click it, While the program is open and click pin to launcher or something to that effect. I know it seems like I am just nitpicking but this is something that could drive a new user to Linux, especially one that’s never even touched it before nuts.

Ubuntu claims to be an operating system that’s extremely friendly and even somebody who’s never used Linux before, even specifically targeting somebody switching from Windows to Linux, as using Ubuntu is a good starting point. My beef with this claim is that if they take such simple, intuitive features and make them five or six more steps than they need to be you will only confuse new users. I mean yes of course most of the hardware 95% of time is going to work out-of-the-box, this is something that Ubuntu is extremely popular for.

Unity to me seems like it was geared towards people who wanted a simple experience, and one that was formatted specifically for touch devices such as a tablet PC. This is great for Tablet PCs, this however in my opinion sucks for desktop use, I don’t consider myself to be an advanced Linux user but, I do know enough about settings that I’d like a little more control, and while unity does not constrict any of the functionality of Ubuntu, it makes it feel like you’re restricted to me anyway. Yes, there is a way to disable unity and run in what they call classic mode, however you have to figure how to do this yourself because no documentation I have been able to find comes with Ubuntu explaining how to do it. Yes I could figure it out when it comes time for me to do that.

Now I know a lot of you who are pro-Ubuntu are probably go to say I’m being biased because I’m a Fedora person, I’ll be fair and say that what little bit I’ve seen of gnome shell doesn’t impress me either. I’m not a fan of over simplifying the user experience, simplifying is okay in my opinion but over simplifying just makes me feel stupid. It’s almost as if these distributions are trying to say the average Linux user now has no common sense, So let’s make things as easy as possible, in reality, they often end up making things so much more complicated for somebody who is used to using it the old way.

So I know this post is supposed to be a review about unity and I haven’t talked about many of the features, this is mainly due to the fact that there really aren’t any features that you can’t see when you look at screenshots of unity. I will touch on a few below, just for the sake of a decent review, myself, as well as some of the other people I’ve talked to however seem to think they unity is going to be dragging Ubuntu in the wrong direction. I am not against Ubuntu making a spin specifically geared towards the tablet PC, for such a spin unity would be perfect. When I use a desktop computer, I want to use a desktop computer not a super powerful tablet experience, this is why IOS is not made into a desktop platform, it would make any sense. Just like why was somebody install Android as their primary operating system on their PC.

One thing it did particularly like about unity was the fact that by default it seems to try to organize open windows in a fashion where there no overlapping, however you can still overlap windows if you want, they just don’t open that way. Also, thank God, If you try to maximize a window, it makes that bar that unity bar on the left go away, this is extremely useful, particularly for people with smaller computer monitors. I myself have a 27 inch monitors so screen real estate is almost at an abundance, but somebody with a 15 inch screen or smaller would not have the same amount of screen real estate. Therefore, if that bar didn’t hide when some was full-screen practically all of their screen would be filled with that bar.

Some of the key combinations that people are used to in Windows work with unity as well, such as Alt + Tab which can be used to cycle through open programs. As simplistic as unity is, some shortcuts that advanced users grieving users that have grown accustomed to keyboard shortcuts, might miss is Alt +F2 this key combination. It used open dialogue we could enter a command in the GUI, this would allow for quick launching programs without having to open a terminal window. As far as I can tell there’s no way to enable this in Ubuntu 11.04, I’m sure you could make a custom keyboard shortcut that would do the same thing, but that’s a little out of the scope of being easy to use out-of-the-box. I mean seriously, how much memory could that little feature of possibly taken up that they needed to strip it out of the distribution in a default ship?

Bottom line here if you’re looking with going with Ubuntu as your Linux distribution of choice, and you want a experience is very close To the Way, Windows was set up, then you’re probably either going to want to run 11.04 in classic mode, or run the latest long-term service release. Canonical has made a great product with Ubuntu. Building on free and open source software, so don’t get me wrong by the negativity in this blog post. I’m not being negative about Ubuntu itself.

Ubuntu is a great operating system and know tons of people who use it every day as their primary operating system, unity, however, is an entirely different matter. I was one of those people who was outraged when it was announced that 11.04 was going to have unity and by default, but what really did it in for me was when I found out unity cannot be removed, it just simply cannot be removed. It’s like cancer. Thinking back I know one other piece of software in a popular operating system that cannot be removed and starts with the letter I and ends with the letter R, and uses the abbreviation IE.

If you want to include unity fine, at least give people the chance to remove unity if they don’t like it, and install something else in its place. My honest advic, If you’re going to go with Ubuntu 11.04, think about Kubuntu 11.04 KDE seems to be a lot closer to the kind of experience that I would come to have expected from a desktop operating system.

Oh in case you’re curious the blog post I mentioned at the beginning the one where I compared early versions of February 15 to early versions of Ubuntu 11.04, I can be found by clicking here

as always, please feel welcome to leave comments below, I don’t expect to make a lot of friends with some of the statements of listed above but I’m not about to lie about what I feel. Canonical if you’re reading this which I seriously doubt, great job on Ubuntu 11.04 just ditch unity already in your operating system will be gold in my opinion.

Android, Fedora, Linux, Reviews, Ubuntu

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Portal 2 Review – Single Player

May 4, 2011 0 Comments

Recently I bought in finished the single player version of Portal 2, which bared, a striking resemblance to the first version of the game. While the general style of the game and fundamentals were the same, it was a lot more voice acting in this game and I would say also more humor. While this game also offered a cooperative play version, I have yet to attend this version of the game mainly due to the fact that coordinating with my friends to play for a few hours it is rather difficult.

So you might be asking what makes Portal 2 different than the original? While generally speaking, the idea of the game was the same, the underlying plot was different driven by a humorous protagonist and often clueless robot “Wheatley”(voiced by Stephen Merchant).the majority of the old-style puzzles were still present, new types of puzzles and solutions were also included, such as three types of goo because various different effects which you can use to your advantage to solve different types of puzzles.

The robots to everybody sees on the box covers including the one in this post, are the two cooperative play robots which are used in cooperative play. Sadly, single player play through’s do not have the advantages of a companion to help solve puzzles. Instead, you get the occasional scene with the halfway named Wheatley which proves to be incredibly humorous and often times following his advice can get you into a bigger pickle.

While many of the reviews I have read claim this game doesn’t have much re-playability, I feel this can be incredibly enjoyable to play more than one time.I’m not sure if this was just my own personal experience or if other reviewers simply had a different idea of what constitutes re-playability.

Generally speaking, however there is usually only one way to solve a puzzle and I could see where this might hinder playing the game multiple times. GLaDOS of course makes a return in this game giving the main character chell a great deal of a hard time, without spoiling the game. I’m not going to go into specifics about exactly how GLaDOS played into this game other than to say if you played the first one. You know that she was deactivated, I will tell you that she accidentally gets reactivated but that’s as much as I’m going to reveal, however that much should be known already , if you watch the commercials.

generally speaking, the game is fairly safe for teenagers to play not having any realistic form of violence, in effect, nobody actually dies in the game. What you can expect however it is the occasional bit of crude humor, coupled with the sadistic personality of a few artificially intelligent robots. You do find out a little bit more about GLaDOS and her origins in this game but they leave just enough of a mystery that a possible third game could be brought up. They don’t however explain much about the main character, aside from what anyone who played the first game would already know.

Bottom line, I feel this game was very enjoyable and if you intend to replay the game at some point in the future, most likely starting with the original and then playing the second one in succession. The gameplay experience may be different on the consoles. I haven’t tried any of these so I can’t exactly speak for, whether it’s easier or more difficult, but given the sheer amount of positive reviews, this game is received I will be willing to say that the console versions aren’t too difficult in terms of controlling. I will say I tried this on the normal difficulty level haven’t tried any of the harder difficulty levels, from what I understand these greatly change how to solve the puzzles, making things more difficult. Hence the hard difficulty level, might give these a try little bit later, however I usually don’t do so well with a game set on a hard difficulty level.

Games, General Stuff

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My Life at a Glance–New CPU, Gaming, Windows troubles, Linux Troubles, android tablets and more!

April 20, 2011 0 Comments

Well it has been a while since I posted anything to my blog, and I thought I would rectify that by making one huge post updating everyone on most aspects of my life currently.

New Computer Hardware

Recently I upgraded my old AMD Athlon II x4 620 to a new AMD Phenom II x6 1090T Black Edition.

The upgrade was relatively painless (typical CPU upgrade) and I did not notice a huge improvement at first in performance, however once the computer ran for a while I noticed some changes in both speed and the Heat the CPU generated.

With my older Quad Core CPU idle CPU temps were somewhere around 38c which is relatively hot I have been told for an idle temp. With the newer six-core the idle temps dropped to around 28c that is a 10 degree difference!

While I primarily upgraded to solve an issue Windows was having with the CPU (mine in particular not necessarily the same for others with it ) where it would frequently spike the CPU usage up and then not fully release capacity as processes slowed. I had tried numerous times to re-install windows in numerous different storage configurations (RAID 0, Use a separate drive for all Data and one specifically for OS and Important programs, Installing a tweaked version where certain features were turned off mainly indexing and what not), while most of these worked one in particular kept causing me to scratch my head as tried to get Windows running on it (RAID 0). With out boring you by going into detail on what I tried I will just say it did not work and ended up causing a new fresh install of Windows 7 using the default installation (which ironically ended up having better throughput). The CPU proved to be a good trade off as it increased windows boot time as well as offered a 6mb L3 Cache where the Quad had no such L3 Cache.

I ran the windows performance scoring tool (just for the hell of it not a big believer in what it says other then to pinpoint what hardware is the current bottleneck) finding that now all areas rated 7.5 where the HDD was the remaining bottleneck coming in at a miserable 5.9. Now I know Windows may not be the best OS when it comes to efficient write commands, but that was a good indicator it was time for a faster drive or to make the plunge into a reasonable SSD.

The issue here is that even though I could move about 95% of all my data to a external HDD and use the SSD as the boot drive, programs would continue to load slowly unless they were installed on the SSD. All that and not to mention the sheer amount that SSD cost per GB, it just was not worth the price at present.

Gaming

This all lead me into my next issue which was stuttering (video wise not audio) in the game Dragon Age 2, I examined this further and found that DA2 seems to see the processor correctly but only sees one core as being available. I then spent about 2 hours talking to EA support via chat to try and correct this, even tried reducing the available Cores it had access to in the affinity setting for the game.

Long story short we were unable to pinpoint the exact issue, but narrowed it down to something to do with the CPU upgrade (seeing as it worked fine on the Quad). The tech was so down that he could not solve my issue that he proceeded to go into the back end for my EA account and enable a whole swarm of free content (not DLC, promotional items mostly) for Dragon Age: Origins and one or two for DA2!. I literally now have so much stuff that when I log into the Bioware User Entitlements area to see what I have access to I have to scroll 3 times, and that is on a 27” monitor at 1920×1080 resolution with the browser full screen!

Did I also mention that earlier this month I had an issue with the DLC authorizing for Dragon Age: Origins? Well EA gave me a $20 voucher for the EA store and so I used that on Dead space 2 which was already on sale for $31 (Digital download version) so I ended up after tax getting a $50 game for $12 dollars!

Linux

Now all of you reading this from the Fedora Planet are by now wondering “what does this have to do with Linux?”

The answer is that had nothing to do with it but the headache did make me want to leave windows and try to install Fedora again on one of my free HDD’s

This brings me to where I had the issue with Fedora, to be fair here I was using the latest build of Fedora 15 alpha so the issues are not at all the fault of Fedora just my own lapse in judgment.

Here is what happened, I tried at first to do a custom install (like I always do when installing multiple OS) but that just caused me a headache because apparently my boot order for my HDD was set differently in the Bios then the physical location they are in (where they are connected on the mother board). That being said I managed to axe the small system partition Windows 7 makes for some reason. I panicked and though If I could install Fedora I could at least boot from Grub into Windows right? Wrong!

Second time installing is where I made the big mistake of choosing use all space when I meant to hit remove all Linux partitions, well as you can imagine this went bad as it wiped now my entire windows drive. While I chalk this up to my own lack of focus, my friend claims it was a sign from the Fedora Gods that Linux did not want Windows anywhere on the system.

I ended up just wiping that re-installing windows (to many good games that do not work in Wine plus school work that requires Windows programs) and just throw Fedora in a VM. So far this has worked well though I miss my dual boot setup and being able to run Fedora natively. I might try it again but making sure to backup my windows install prior to doing so.

Android 3.0

While I myself have not had any hands on experience with Android, I want an Android 3 tablet badly!

I began looking into the options out there and found out that not only do a handful exist but they are all super expensive!!!

I did find one that would have a 399 model but the specs on it were less then acceptable to me. While I generally am not a power user when it comes to mobile devices I found that a 512mb 8gb nand ram drive device to be a little underwhelming! How much could you fit on 8gb now days even if on Android!?

The next model the one I am seriously considering is 499 and has 1gb of ram and a 16gb nand ram drive. This to me seems sufficient and would work nicely, provided I decide to get it. ASUS the manufacture of this tablet apparently has released everything but the device itself in the US as of the time I am writing this. Will  I have the funds to spare when they do release it is yet to be seen but lets hope it gets released soon.

Well that about covers it, that should get most people who care caught up with what has been going on with me (not a lot of people care I get it but a few readers I know who read this do Winking smile ).

Feel free to leave comments below

Android, BioWare, Components, Computers, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins, Fedora, Games, General Stuff, Hardware Trials, Linux, Non-Specific, Software Trials, Windows Trials

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Computers – Ram Compatibility, Motherboard, Graphics

September 16, 2010 0 Comments

Motherboard

I finally got confirmation that my replacement Motherboard has in-fact been shipped from ASUS. The fact that they sent a replacement instead of the repaired board shows me one of two things, Ethier they were not able to fix the board due to the issue being to great, or they broke the board trying to fix it and just decided to pawn it off as unfixable.

Ether way I would have been happy, some people get leery when they hear a refurbished part is being sent in place of what was a brand new part being fixed. I on the other hand feel if the factory is the one doing the Refurb which in this case it is then the board is as good as new. If not it would be free to get replaced.

Ram Compatibility

I got to thinking the other day how alot of companies seem to be terminating support for previous generations of products. I tend to agree with something like XP which has had a predecessor previous to Windows 7. However RAM it seems is never backwards compatible, why is this? I know they use different voltages and what not right?

Well I think that reason is crap, If we can make a freaking car that runs on 4 different types of Gas and Electricity should gas not be present, then why in the name of all that is can we not make a RAM slot that will detect and adjust voltages for the appropriate RAM.

Here is a case scenario where this would be beneficial:

You currently have a Motherboard with 16gb of DDR2 RAM, you want to upgrade the Motherboard to support newer technologies such as SATA 6gb/s, and USB 3.0 support. It however does not support DDR2 RAM that means you would need to purchase all new ram leaving your old RAM useless.

If you were able to use the DDR2 until you acquired enough cash to upgrade to the over priced DDR3 then you would have a much smoother computer upgrade.

Graphics Card

The graphics cards that I got to use with the computer at the time seemed very good but I am finding it to be less then adequate for the current demand by programs.

Sadly the cheapest upgrade I saw was $84 and that is a lower but more acceptable model. This is out of my price range but I am watching it and will most likely get it one day in the far off future

Components, Computers

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Motherboard issues – Leads me to use Fedora 13 on the Laptop

September 4, 2010 0 Comments

Well I had an issue with my motherboard Recently which caused me to have to get it repaired/replaced.

ASUS M4A78 PLUS Motherboard

The computer was experiencing some odd behavior with the board so I began to try and trouble shoot it using just about every possible way I could think of to narrow down and eliminate the errors. This proved to not have any change on the state of things, Several things still continued to go wrong and so I was forced to send the Motherboard in and use my laptop.

Well my laptop had Windows vista on in which proved to be a lot more trouble then it was worth, not having an extra windows 7 license (I use my laptop rarely and most of the time when I do I need to access windows specific features such as a domain) I was ether forced to re-install Vista or get rid of it all together.

I chose to get rid of it and put Fedora 13 in its place, this proved to speed things up a great deal as I figured it would. I did run into some issues with the computer getting bogged down at times, however this was more a result of my laptop not having a whole lot of ram Even with this slow down at times the computer still ran faster at full load when compared directly to Windows Vista Business.

Aside from this good news with the laptop running more smoothly, my over all mood is rather annoyed, I did after all have to send in the motherboard for my desktop to be repaired or possible replaced depending on what ASUS decides it wants to do.

Just when I thought it could not get worse, My 2 yr  old Daughter found out where I had the CPU (thought it out of her reach I was wrong) and had thrown it down pretty hard on the kitchen floor. Now it being AMD it has lots of pin on the bottom and as far as I can tell no pins are damaged and it appears no physical damage exists. The real test will be when I try to use it in my desktop one the motherboard returns

Gaming

As well as the laptop runs on Fedora it still can not run my games, I am a rather active gamer at times on StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft however neither of this seem to work well on Fedora. I can get WoW working on the desktop under Linux just fine but even though WINE claims SC2 will work I have yet to get it to work.

Fedora, Games, Linux, Starcraft & Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft

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Droid X and Possible New Job Prospect

July 4, 2010 4 Comments

Job Prospect

Those of you that know me personally or even on a chatting basis, know that I have had one heck of a year with all that has been going on. One among many other things in my life that are less then fortunate, is that I am currently unemployed.

Enter Monster.com, I updated my resume on Monster and did the normal daily grind of late which is find 4-8 jobs and apply for them. Out of the blue one day I get a call from a company looking for someone to represent Sharp Electronics for their Marketing company basically helping educate customers on Sharp HD technology, I passed the initial pre-screen and anxiously awaited the interview.

The following Monday I got a call from who would become my manager should I get the job, The interview seemed to go really well and I am confident that the Interviewer got a similar feel for my experience. Now I should mention I have had experience in this type of job before, I sold Cell Phones for the 3 major carriers (not going to list them here you know who they are) wit a company called Mosaic Sales Solutions, This job i interviewed for was very similar to the cell phone one minus cell phones add HD tvs.

At any rate the interview was last Monday and I followed up on Thursday with a phone call re-emphasising how interested I was in the job and what it entailed. Now comes the waiting game, I should know by the end of this week (hopefully) if i got the job or not.

This job should I land it will require me to get rid of my pre-paid phone and get a regular posting plan phone which will be needed to keep in touch with my boss since I am completely solo on this job should i get it.

This brings me to the Droid X part of the post.

Droid X

Given that I would need a regular Phone and not a pre-paid phone, I began to look into which phone I would get and the more I looked the more it occured to me that if I had a smartphone I could be far more productive in several areas with relation to this job. For one customer questions I could not answer could be easily answered using the phone to do a quick internet search and pull up the information. Second I could use this phone to track my sales and log required information for the daily report at the end of the night.

So knowing I would need a Smartphone I began to narrow down which phone I wanted, would work for what I wanted. I tending to prefer anything other then Windows mobile was left with Palm WebOS phones or Android Powered phones. Having done a little research i found Palm was recently acquired by HP and while i have no beefs with Hewlett Packard, I felt with the buyout things might be a little late to be updated/fixed. Android was my choice of OS, then I began narrowing down Verizon Android powered phones as a means to get the phone I really wanted. Talking to several people and researching bit I found that the upcoming Droid X to be my phone of choice. It was not till after I chose this that I realized just how cool this would be, I could download apps from the Android Market to allow me to use this phone for non-work stuff as well.

True with the above things I researched which apps I would install off the bat as soon as I had network access, Some that came to mind were Seesmic, Bank of America for Android, WordPress, shopsavvy and Blizzards Authenticator app. I am sure I will install many more but for starters these are apps i would consider must haves.

Also Android is obviously powered by Linux which to me is one the best things out there. I use Windows for some things i can not get to work under WINE but for the most part Linux is my OS of choice so a phone powered by Linux just seems to be a logical choice.

All that being said, I will most likely not get a phone should I not get this job (at least not at first) since another monthly bill with no job is not the smartest of moves.

If you know a good (useful, or fun) app for android post it in a comment.

Android, Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Ubuntu

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