Windows Tips and Tricks

I have commented before that consumers should hope for AMD to continue as a going concern so that Intel will have some competition. Unfortunately, AMD’s future is looking gloomier. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes:

So that leaves me worried about AMD’s future, and the effect that will have to the entire chip industry. Not because I have any affiliation with the company, and not because I buy AMD processors (I do like ATi graphics cards though, partly because I like the drivers, but to be honest I see 2008 being the year that I go back to nVIDIA) but because we need AMD to keep the pressure on Intel and to keep innovation going. I fear that without competition, the processor sector will start to stagnate and we’ll be plunged back to the dark days of the 486 when innovation crept forward at a snail’s pace.

PC Magazine has an article surveying a number of the things you can put on a USB thumb or key drive. The article is called The Ultimate USB Key and begins:

The USB key is used mainly as a kind of digital briefcase—a place to store various files while you carry them from one location to another. And that’s fine; it’s what a USB key was made for. The thing is, there are also plenty of applications that you can load onto a USB drive, and they could make your life much easier. With some advance planning and setup, your USB drive can be more than a briefcase; it can be a powerful tool that keeps you fully connected and functional when you’re on the road without your laptop.

The article also suggests that an iPod can serve as a medium for portable applications.

Search Engine Land reports a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and comments:

Cellphones are now more important to US adults than the internet, television, landline phones and email. In addition, an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for things other than voice communications, including accessing mobile internet content.

Unless I am attracting a different audience than I think, no one who reads this blog is going to buy one of these but you can get a look at the height (or is it nadir) of customized computers at the PC World article, 11 Pimped-Out PCs. Actually, none of these match the platinum, diamond-studded PC that I mentioned before.

Two incompatible formats for high definition DVDs have been fighting it out in the marketplace but it looks like the “Blu-ray” format has won over the “HD” version. Toshiba, the backer of HD, has given up. Buyers of the special players for HD, which won’t play Blu-ray, are unlikely to see many future releases. Ordinary DVD players can’t play either high-definition format.

Touch screens have been around in specialized applications for some time but interfacing by touch has not been mainstream except for laptop touchpads. That may be changing and Walt Mossberg devoted his Thursday consumer electronics column to the subject of touch as an interfacing method. He begins:

We are now witnessing the emergence of a new user interface for digital devices, including laptop computers, advanced cellphones, wireless portable data gadgets and other types of computing products.

This interface is generally called “multitouch,” and it involves using one or more fingers on a screen or touchpad to perform special gestures that manipulate lists or objects on a screen — without moving a mouse, pressing buttons, turning scroll wheels or striking keys.

Got some spare cash lying around and you want to perk up your desk a little? I have just the thing for you- a nice diamond-studded PC.

PC World gives the details:

Jupiter from Japanese manufacturer Zeus, features a solid platinum case studded with diamonds which, the company claims, replicate astrological constellations. The PC runs on an Intel 3GHz E6850 Core 2 Duo CPU and features 2GB of DDR 2 memory and a 1TB hard drive. The only downside is its price tag - a cool £375,000 (US$746,000).

Well, maybe that’s just a little over the top. How about a more modest selection:

Zeus has also launched a cheaper, gold alternative. It still has diamonds in its case and the same tech spec, but will only set you back a mere £280,000.

Somewhat to my surprise and definitely to my delight is the progress that Linux-based machines are making in the computer market. Big manufacturers Dell and Lenovo are offering Linux machines and ZDNet reports:

Linux is not just for computer whizzes.
In fact, buying Linux and learning how to use it are easier than ever, thanks to the open-source operating system’s expanding presence in affordable computers and mainstream retail outlets.

In quick succession, the number of mass-market, sub-$200 desktops has tripled–from one to three–in less than three months. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, small form-factor PC maker Shuttle debuted its $199 KPC. The catch? It’s not preloaded with Windows, but an operating system based on Linux. Then last week, Mirus and Linspire collaborated on the Mirus Linux PC, which is now for sale at Sears.com. It’s $299 (although an included $100 rebate brings it to $199), and is preloaded with Freespire 2.0, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution.

But the beginning of the low-cost computer trend actually started last fall. The Everex gPC showed up on the shelves of Wal-Mart for $198, a low price even for a desktop PC. It’s bundled with speakers, a mouse, and a keyboard, and it comes with 24-hour tech support. The operating system is called gOS, a version of Ubuntu 7.10. Sure, that may be almost unpronounceable for most average consumers, but despite that, Wal-Mart is having trouble keeping the gPC in stock.

Today’s desktop computers may come with 500 GB or even terabyte hard drives but something around 100 GB is still a common size for drives in laptops. Nowadays laptops are often the choice for home PC buyers but don’t plan to store a lot of videos and music files on your laptop. If multimedia is your interest, you are likely to need an external drive to store the files. If you have a laptop with Vista, half your hard drive may be used up before you install a single file of your own.

Here’s some actual numbers from my own HP laptop with Vista and a 100 GB hard drive. Actually, as explained in a previous post, the 100 GB drive is 93 GB when measured the usual way. Also, 8 GB are used up by the “recovery” or “restore” partition. So the usable space is only 85 GB.

Next, there is the Windows folder, which is over 13 GB. But the Windows folder isn’t all that the operating system involves. There are several big hidden files that you won’t see unless you configure your computer to show system files. There is the page file (once called the swap file) that provides temporary memory. On my system it is about 2 GB. Then there is the file that is necessary for the system to hibernate. It is also about 2 GB, which is the size of my RAM. Then there is the space for the System Restore files. System Restore (aka System Protection) can take up to 15% of your hard drive. On my system that would be about 13 GB. So altogether I could lose as much as 17 GB or so to these system files.

Let’s count up how much space is left. That would be 85 – 13 – 17 = 55 GB. And I haven’t counted a single file of my own. Actually, there is even less space. Vista also takes up room in the Program Files folder with stuff for any number of Microsoft applications that come with Vista, like Windows Defender, Windows Mail, Windows Sidebar, Windows Games, Media Player, and more. It’s almost impossible to make an exact count of how much space is involved but it might be a GB or two. In any event, it is clear that, before I installed even one file or application of my own, I had only about half of the hard drive capacity to work with.

One way to recover some space is to limit the allocation for System Restore but that requires a somewhat arcane command line entry and deletes possibly useful previous backups. Also, you can twiddle with the page file size and never hibernate but who wants to have to do this?

It comes up over and over. Someone looks at their hard drive size in My Computer (Computer in Vista) and sees less capacity than they thought they had. They start asking, “Where has my space gone?” Nothing has happened to their space. It’s the way hard drive manufacturers advertise disk size. The industry uses the measurement of 1 KB = 1000 bytes 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes and so on. Exactly right, you say. Isn’t that what “kilo” and “mega” mean? Actually, not in most of computer-land. In most cases 1 KB means 1024 bytes, a binary 2^10. 1 MB means 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes and 1 GB is 2^30 or 1.074 X 10^9 bytes. An advertised 200 GB hard drive is going to read about 8% less in My Computer. The apparent size discrepancy wasn’t so noticeable when hard drives were 20 or 40 GB but becomes bigger and bigger as the hard drive size goes up.

Another source of “lost” space is the hidden “restore” partition that so many computer manufacturers use instead of giving you a Windows installation disk. It is likely that the drive that comes with a new computer will have a sizable chunk of space used up that way. On my HP Vista laptop, the hidden partition is nearly 8 GB.