OS/2

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: June 22, 2007 - 10:22 AM PST I am cleaning up the closets here on our office and it is simply unbelievable the things I am finding here. Yesterday I found this beauty on the picture below that around 1995 came for free inside cereal boxes. The system was outstanding, it ran Windows 3.1 better than Windows itself, as OS/2 protected each Windows 3.1 application on its own protected area in the RAM memory, so if the application froze only that session was closed and not the whole operation system like happened on Windows 3.1. OS/2 had two major flaws. First IBM sold it, and selling to end-users was never IBM’s strongest area. And second it wasn’t compatible with Windows 95, i.e. you could install Windows 3.1 programs but couldn’t install Windows 95 ones (some people must have created ways to allow this, but this wasn’t standard). Then… it dropped dead. This copy of mine, by the way, came for free bundled with a book called “How Internet Works”. Can you believe that I had once to buy a book with a title like that? Don’t laugh. In 1995 nobody knew what Internet really was or knew how to use it, everybody was talking about but only a few had seen it or really knew how to use it, also there were several features with weird names like Gopher and Veronica, used in Jurassic times before the web – which, like OS/2, died in 1996. click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Fake 2 GB USB Drive

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 18, 2007 - 9:12 AM PST A friend has just sent me the picture below by e-mail. This is a fake 2 GB pen drive someone bought at one of those little shacks that sell computer parts on an underdeveloped country. Ouch! Updated on 05/19/2007: The text of the e-mail I got was a fake, since the device below is clearly a fake USB wireless adapter (the picture, however, seems to be real, i.e. it is a fake USB wireless adapter). Also, this picture is circulating on the Internet at least since December 2005. At wireless.com.pt website besides this picture being posted on January 2006 there is another picture of an USB Bluetooth adapter with a fake antenna, which I posted below. Even though it has a fake external antenna, apparently this adapter works fine. Thank you for all readers that provided me this information. click to enlarge Figure 1: Fake Wi-Fi adapter. Figure 2: Bluetooth adapter with fake external antenna (the device seems to work fine). Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

USB Drives For Ready Boost

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: May 9, 2007 - 6:38 PM PST Last time we visited Super Talent they showed us some “special” USB drives for Ready Boost, Windows Vista caching mechanism that at least in theory improves the PC performance. So what is special about them as any USB drive or memory card can be used for Ready Boost? What is different about them is the fact that instead of using the standard 4-pin USB connector, they use the 10-pin motherboard header connector and thus are targeted to be installed inside the PC (and not outside), directly on the motherboard. click to enlarge Figure 1: USB Drives from Super Talent that are installed directly on the USB header on the motherboard – a.k.a. “Ready Boot USB Drives”. It is very likely that other manufacturers will copy this idea pretty soon. At least in theory this idea is really good, since if you are really interested in installing a USB drive for increasing the performance of your Vista-based PC the best way would be putting it inside the computer, for three reasons: One, you free one of your external USB ports; two, the motherboards nowadays usually have 10 or more USB ports and even if your case has frontal USB ports and you install all USB brackets that come with the motherboard at least one or two USB headers on the motherboard will be left over; and three, it will prevent breaking your USB drive by accident – for example, by hitting it with a chair, as has already happened to us. Whether Ready Boost really improves the system performance or not is a totally different story. We didn’t see any performance improvement here and other websites (and even manufacturers) that are posting results showing performance increase with Ready Boost are using 256 MB systems for the performance boost to be measurable. Honestly, who will have Windows Vista with less than 1 GB anyway? By the way, one of our users (thanks Utics!) sent us a very good link with several technical details about Ready Boost, written by Matt Ayers, one of the creators of this technology. A must-read if you want to study Ready Boost more in depth. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Does ReadyBoost Really Improve Performance?

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: April 6, 2007 - 5:18 AM PST This entry is based on preliminary testing we are done here at our lab. As soon as we get more conclusive data we will post a full review about ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost is a technology brought by Windows Vista that allows any piece of flash memory like pen drives and memory cards to be used as a disk cache improving, in theory, the system performance. However so far we were not able to see any performance improvement on our system. Let’s explore the subject. First we thought that ReadyBoost would be a conventional disk cache system, so disk performance gain would be noticeable right after installing a pen drive and configuring as a disk cache. Installing a Patriot 2 GB pen drive on our system and running hard disk drive benchmarking software like HDTach and Sandra, however, didn’t show us any disk performance improvement – on the contrary, performance dropped a little bit. So we had these considerations on our mind: Maybe ReadyBoost isn’t a disk cache technology. Maybe ReadyBoost does not work as planned. Probably we need to load the same data (e.g. the same files from the same location) from the hard disk drive for ReadyBoost to cache it and then we could see some performance improvement – hard disk drive benchmarking software doesn’t do that. So we decided to load some programs and files and measuring the time they took to be loaded, with and without ReadyBoost. With 2 GB installed on our system (Core 2 Extreme X6800, ASUS P5B, Samsung SP0411N HDD, MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB) we saw no performance improvement. We start reading about ReadyBoost on the net and some people are saying that ReadyBoost helps caching the Windows swap file. This file, also known as virtual memory, is used when the CPU needs more RAM memory. When there is no more free RAM, the CPU stores what is in the RAM in this file, freeing up RAM. Since the hard disk drive is slower than RAM, this transition is noticeable by the user. That is why when you install more RAM your system becomes faster: your computer will need to access the swap file less times, as there will be more RAM available. So we reduced the amount of RAM on our system to 512 MB in order to see what would happen. Loading Photoshop CS2 for the first time took us around 18 seconds without ReadyBoost and then took us 29 seconds with ReadyBoost. So performance decreased – probably because Windows was caching Photoshop files to our pen drive, we thought. Then from the second time we loaded Photoshop on our system took 5:30 seconds to load the program without ReadyBoost while this loading time decreased to 4:40 seconds with ReadyBoost. We gained 1 second, but we keep thinking if it was worth it, as our system delayed a lot more to load Photoshop for the first time. Keep in mind that the performance we gained from loading programs from the second time on – 18 seconds vs. 5:30 seconds – was due to SuperFetch technology, having nothing to do with ReadyBoost. We tried the same approach with Word 2007 and for our surprise ReadyBoost only warmed our performance. Loading Word 2007 for the first time without ReadyBoost took only 5 seconds, while with ReadyBoost it took around 26 seconds. Loading Word 2007 from the second time one took us only around 1 second without ReadyBoost, but the loading time increased (i.e. performance decreased) to at least 1:50 second when we enabled ReadyBoost. How ReadyBoost works and whether it can really improve performance is a total mystery to us. Here it made more bad than good. We will keep making some tests here and we will post a more conclusive review as soon as we have a better conclusion on this technology. Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (5) top

I Got My Own DVD-R Copy of Windows Vista... Shipped by Microsoft!

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 12, 2007 - 5:25 AM PST Last Saturday I got my copy of Windows Vista, generously sent by Microsoft. The thing that immediately caught my eye was the “type” of copy they sent: a plain DVD-R. What is the message Microsoft is trying to send by shipping a DVD-R instead of an original copy to the press? It could be an OEM copy, I really don’t mind. But a DVD-R copy is really bad for their reputation. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words. See the picture below and make your own conclusions. click to enlarge No further comments... Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (6) top

Five New Quizes @ Test Your Skills Section

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: February 1, 2007 - 4:03 PM PST In the past few days we added five new quizes to our Test Your Skills section: Basic Electronics - Diodes Basic Electronics - Transistors Networking Hardware - Part 1 OSI Model For Networking Protocols Switched Networks Go there and test whether your knowledge on these subjects is good enough or you need to study more! Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Fractured Cuboid

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: January 20, 2007 - 5:47 AM PST I always saw people that twisted their ankles and had to put a cast on as sissies. Until it happened to me: I twisted my ankle, header a "crack" noise and boom, I fractured my Cuboid bone. I had never felt so much pain in my entire life, I started to cry. This happened last monday. I am without a cast right now, but my foot looks like a football. Now I have to spend a lot of time on bed and putting ice on it, thus working "less", i.e. half the time I am used to. The prevision is that my foot will be healed in 45 days, but during this time I cannot put my foot on the floor. On the X-ray below I marked where my foot is broken. click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

Counterattacking Cold Calls

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: January 8, 2007 - 3:03 PM PST I hate cold calls, simply because if I needed something from any company, I would call them. Last Saturday morning I got a call from someone offering me a free checking account at a certain bank. You know what? I would never open an account on a bank that allows their salespeople to annoy me on a Saturday morning. The worst case that happened with me was a few months ago: a lady from the local phone company called me offering their ADSL service SEVEN times on the SAME day. She only stopped after my second phone call to their 800 number threatening to sue them. In fact, I blacklist companies that use telemarketing and never do business with these companies. If everybody did like this, they would stop using this annoying “technique”. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? But I have a really terrific (and funny) way to counterattack cold calls. Usually telemarketing operators don’t know my name, because my phone number is listed under my company name. So usually they call and ask “Who is talking?”. I reply “With whom do you wanna talk?”. They usually reply “With the person in charge”. I love that one… I reply back “Oh, the person in charge is Mr. Fox but this is not his office number, I will give his office number, do you want to write it down?” and give the person the phone number from the local Zoo… I have a friend that is really mean. When he has time, he pretends that he is a very lonely person almost committing suicide, “Oh, I am so glad that you called, I was feeling soooo alone”, etc, and annoys the operator for at least 30 minutes. This one is really funny as well, but you gotta have a lot of spare time. Seinfeld got a terrific one as well on his show: “please give your home phone number that I will contact you if I am interested”. How about you? Do you have better (and funnier) ideas on how to counterattack telemarketing operators? Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (2) top

Vacation Notice

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: December 22, 2006 - 1:39 PM PST Hi guys. This is just to let you know that I will travel for the next 10 days and won't be posting any new stuff until the first week of 2007. Meanwhile you can read our current contents and play with our on-line quizes ("Test Your Skills"). Have a happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year party! Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top

It Happens Even With Me...

Author: Gabriel Torres Date: December 22, 2006 - 1:33 PM PST This afternoon I started feeling the smell of something burning and it took me some minutes to find out what was burning. It was my motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP-A Ultra (yes, I had an old PC – I really didn’t need more to use Word and browse the net). See the pictures below. It seems that something was wrong on the +5 V line of my motherboard. On the solder side of the board, I could notice that the area right below the motherboard voltage regulator was darker than the rest of the board. Even though the power supply connector is brown and melted, my PSU is still working fine. Well, it was time to upgrade my system anyway... click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge click to enlarge Print Version | Send to Friend | Bookmark This Entry | Permalink | Comments (0) top