Before you throw your dial up modem away do remember it's what you use to send a fax, and even now we find occasionally we still have to (the police still use faxes for some things, why?)  If your pc came without a dial up modem the fax software will need to be installed from Printers and Faxes.

we 21 oc 09

We often encounter laptop users who either don't know you can tap the touchpad for a click or have turned it off because they can't control it.  The Apple Magic Mouse isn't going to help them but it does seem controlling a computer is moving on ... finally

This is the netbook Lady KRJ bought herself, it's much smaller than a laptop and stunningly light implying the battery doesn't have a lot of clout, no cd/dvd drive so installing apps would need external stuff, it cost just over £300 and despite the seemingly tiny 10" screen you can do real stuff on it.  Nice one Lady K.

At £200 the new Blackberry Curve 8520 is affordable apparently; well it's half the price of the Palm Pre (not available in the UK yet) which we were hanging out for but got a poor review on the Gadget Show and perhaps the 8520 would hold the data we need and the £120 iPaq we bought wouldn't.

su 12 jl 09

When you've had your laptop a while and it starts to slow down it's because the hard disc needs cleaning up.  We do ours on the Delicates cycle, it's much safer to use a non-bio powder and of course never put it in the tumble dryer but dry naturally.

mo 22 jn 09

When you come to throw a computer away it's the hard disc that contains information you may not want fraudsters, blackmailers or your wife to know.  If your soon to be discarded pc is a desktop (not a laptop) then the hard disc will look like one of these.  Open the pc box (usually by removing phillips screws but sometimes by just pressing the right bit) and there'll most probably be a grey ribbon hanging out of the hard disc to help identify it.  There'll probably be more phillips screws going into the side of the disc drive which when removed allow the drive to slide out.  Now you need to seriously damage the green printed circuit board that controls the disc, break bits off with a screwdriver or pliers or beat it with a large object till they fall off.  The info is still on the disc inside the case but you'd have to be pretty devoted to repair the pcb to get at it.

Our first PDA was a Sharp something or other and we were very fond of it, it had a rounded case which was nice to hold and a four line text only monochrome display with no back light.  It DOA'd after falling from a great height ... twice.  Fondness became the real thing when the Sharp was replaced by an early Palm Pilot.  The Palm was such a clever, useful and successful product that inevitably the accountants took over and the creative people left to start Handspring.  Handspring always seemed to be driven by financial imperative rather than creativity and though we now use an elderly Handspring Treo it's design is an unhappy compromise.  Time passed and Palm bought Handspring ... more time passed ... but now the Palm Pre is tipped to rival the iPhone and it runs Linux not Windows!

It's always been an attractive idea to use the power wiring in your house as a network because it's already there, indeed we had an intercom system that did just that and worked some of the time.  There's a new standard promising 200Mbits/second on the power lines, if it delivers could be very interesting.

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