You have a disk that you want to use with Windows. You need to format it: What file-system do you use? A file-system specifies exactly how files are laid out on a hard disk. In other words it defines, in conjunction with the registry, where the computer would go to find files and folders stored on the disk and how the computer locates the data on the hard disk...

Sony is developing a new fold-up display that could herald the production of fold-away computers. According to The New Journal of Physics, researchers from Sony and the Max Planck Institute are exploring the possibility of creating, and are working on the development of, bendable optically assessed organic light emitting displays. When fully developed, this...

When your Windows operating system reads a file off a hard-disk, it’s reading a file stored in lots of little bits -usually 512-bit chunks in NTFS. Your operating system doesn’t always, in fact rarely does it, write to the disk putting all of the separate 512-bit chunks next to each other. Sometimes different chunks get put far away from one another,...

Following on from my article about backing up your data, I’ve learned some important new lessons: Hard-drives can fail in many ways and each failure has varying symptoms. Sometimes the thing just fails to work at all. This can be accompanied, perhaps, by some noise from the drive itself. These symptoms are commonly caused by mechanical failure such as a...

Do you use a variety of social networking sites; but find it a pain to continually have to switch between your browser and your social networking client software such as Twhirl or Tweet Deck? Do you use FireFox 2 or 3? If you answer “yes” to both of these questions then the answer is Yoono.“In a single browser sidebar, Yoono users can...

If you knew me personally, you’d be fed up with hearing me say this like a broken record: “Backup, backup, backup. If your system crashes and is unrecoverable then if you have no backup you’re screwed.”And people still don’t bother. When their system does crash, perhaps due to a hard-disk failure, I see them running to me whining,...

According to Bill Tancer, the General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, the porn industry has been overtaken by social networking for the most searches on the net lately. In his published book “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters“, he says that over the past decade the interest in adult-oriented sites has...

What you see here’s not a test; I’m a’warning you – beware! If you reply to spam and don’t give a damn; you’ll get stung, and they don’t care. They sent out spam; damn, to the people on the Internet; jammin’ up the servers; To the spam spam boogie say up jump the boogie, to the rhythmic unsolicited beat. I said...

The dawn of the age of cloud-computing presses ever onward with Microsoft announcing that they won’t be including Apps such as Windows Movie Maker, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery… In Windows 7. They want to make their new OS what they describe as “cleaner”. The Apps that they chopped will still be available for optional download...

One of the good things about XP is that you can create a shortcut to virtually any file and place that shortcut in virtually any file that you choose. There are three particular file shortcuts which I find useful to keep on my desktop: Firstly a Shortcut to Program Files: I’m mainly a Firefox 3 user. (I use IE at times; as well as K-Meleon occasionally...

Microsoft seem to produce versions of Windows so quickly these days that before you can manage to get used to the one that they seemingly only just produced; they’re beta testing another. (If you look back to the turn of the century you’ll notice that the situation was rather similar: 2000 followed ME, (Or was it the other way round? It all happened...

Chances are if you’re using any Microsoft messaging service at all it’ll be Windows Live Messenger rather than the default Windows Messenger that comes with Windows XP. Perhaps you don’t use any Microsoft messaging service at all, and therefore you have no use for the default Windows Messenger – So when it appears in your system tray and...

MS-DOS Editor is a DOS-based text editor that comes with 32-bit Windows XP Home and Professional (As well as virtually all other versions of Windows before it.)Since Notepad can only handle small files; Editor is sometimes used as a substitute for Notepad. It is a Text User Interface; the color scheme of which is adjustable. Editor can edit files that are up...

When waiting for a user to log on to Windows, Windows XP will display the Logon dialog box or the Welcome screen for 10 minutes before  the Windows XP logo floating on a black background appears; which is the default logon screensaver. (You can do this both in Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.) If you wish, you can reduce the amount of time Windows...