Archive for July, 2006

I’m a little late in posting this, but it appears that quite a few Dell laptops have been bursting into flame. Thankfully no one has been injured.

The chances of your Dell laptop bursting into flames are very low. I would imagine that these few laptops that are bursting into flame are doing so because too much heat.

You may want to: avoid blocking vents; keep air vents clear of dust; look at the battery and look for signs of damage; and keep an eye on your laptop and make sure it doesn’t get too warm.

The update that Symantec released for Norton AntiVirus 2006 over the weekend is causing problems for users. At startup users are seeing a message saying “Norton AntiVirus 2006 does not support the repair feature. Please uninstall and reinstall.”

If you are seeing that message, you will need to work through this work around.

Symantec should release a patch, but that hasn’t been announced yet.

Two questions that I’ve been asked more than once are: “What is PCI Express?” and “Is it just a faster version of PCI?”.

PCI Express is quite different from PCI and is potentially much faster. It is available in many different formats, most commonly: x1, x4, x8, and x16. The number after the x is the number of lanes the bus has, and a higher number of lanes means increased performance.

PCI Express is intended to replace both AGP and PCI, many graphics cards are now available in PCI Express, and performance gains are common.

DELL Computer has a great whitepaper (a rather technical article) on PCI Express if you’re interested. It’s easy to read and not too jargon-ladened.

So the rumors circulating the net were true though a bit early, because in the end AMD did buy ATI.

What does this mean for us consumers? And for those who love the nForce chipsets, what will happen now? For the first question, it likely means that new chipsets for AMD processors will be superoptimized to work very well with ATI graphics cards, giving those who seek it, better performance than ever. AMD also keeps prices low with high quality, qualities that will likely improve in the AMD’s new ATI division.

As for the second question, many people who custom build AMD based PCs swear by the nForce chipset developed by nVidia and AMD, what will happen on that front remains to be seen.

In anycase, I’m an AMD fan and I like the performance of ATI graphics cards so this looks great to me. It gives AMD another leg upon which they can compete with the largest processor and graphics supplier in the world, Intel. Competition always gives us lower prices and high quality products, and that is nothing but a good thing.

Zune is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s seeming monopoly on all things audio. Like the iTunes and iPod combo, Microsoft’s Zune will offer audio playing hardware (iPod) and audio playing software (iTunes). One of the announcements that has generated a lot of buzz is that Microsoft will buy all of the songs for you that you have on iTunes.

The name Zune sounds a tad cheesy, but I’m sure I will get used to it just like I did for the XBOX 360 and Vista.

TechCrunch.com has a good question which Microsoft should ask itself: Will Microsoft take a position of true innovation or will it still be playing catchup - at the risk of feature overload.

Feature overload and unnecessary complexity should be avoided at all costs, the joy of Apple products is their simplicity. If they start using the direction they are moving towards with the latest Windows Media Player BETA, it will be great. Simplicity and power is the combination that Microsoft should strive for with Zune and with future endeavors.

Microsoft has just released more details about how upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows XP or Windows 2000 will be handeled. There will be two ways to upgrade and which one you can choose will be based on your current setup.

The two possible paths are: In-place install (upgrade) in which you keep all your settings, apps, and data in place; and clean install in which you will have to backup all your data as Vista will take over the hard drive and wipe it out.

It seems that if you have one of the special versions of XP, or Windows 2000, you will have to go through a clean install, but it actually gets a little more complicated than that. You can learn about what you will have to do, if you choose install Windows Vista, by visiting the Windows Vista: Upgrade Planning website.

Windows XP often becomes bloated and full of loose ends and wacky settings; sometimes the darn thing won’t even boot up and it seems that you’re up a creek. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to reinstall Windows without reformatting and losing all of your data? It’s actually rather easy to do just that.

InformationWeek’s Fred Langa has a great article entitled “XP’s No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option” that can tell you how to do just that. You will need a Windows CD to do this and make sure that you print out the instructions. I would advise that you backup your system before you attempt to rebuild Windows.

TechCrunch.com is reporting that Yahoo! will be releasing a heavily updated version of its site today. It has not happened yet at 1:06 EST, but since Yahoo! is based on the west coast, that is understandable.

You can try the new design and features out at http://www.yahoo.com/preview or just wait until the new site is up and running. I think the new update is certainly an improvement of the tired Yahoo!. This move should help Yahoo! stay competitive with Microsoft’s new Live.com and Google’s personal homepage.

Intel is planning on releasing the Core 2 Duo processor family next week. This new series of processor should bring about a big increase in performance based on improved architecture rather than increased clock speed. AMD processors at lower clock speeds (Mhz) have recently been faster than Intel processors, because AMD had superior architecture, but it looks like that may no longer be the case.

There are two versions of the processor: Core 2 Duo, and Core 2 Duo Extreme. Intel markets Core 2 Duo for most consumers, and Core 2 Duo Extreme for the most demanding gamers.

If you’re a more regular reader, you can see that this blog has undergone some big renovations. I plan to have the entire site updated to this theme, and of course I will be adding more useful features to the site.

Speaking of features, new features on this blog include: tags, easy access to feeds, a sidebar (woah!), and related posts. There are probably some other features that I have forgotten, but you will need to go and look for them.

Thanks for stopping by.