Every now and then, you’ll probably come across some program on Windows that you simply cannot uninstall from the “Uninstall a Program” page in Control Panel.
Normally, it will give you some kind of error that makes no sense whatsoever.
I recently ran across this very issue when I accidentally installed the wrong WiFi driver package. It was an Intel Pro WiFi driver/software set. Only problem was, the puter didn’t have an Intel WiFi card – oops!
Worse yet, I couldn’t uninstall the software because the uninstaller first looked for the hardware. When it couldn’t find the hardware, it bombed with an error saying (you’ll love this): “Please install hardware first.”
I wish I was kidding.
Then I discovered a really handy tool to make everything all better.
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Scottie Computers program, uninstall, windows
If you have a dual-boot setup on your computer involving some flavor of linux, at some point you will most likely encounter a problem with GRUB, the linux bootloader.
For example, maybe you used a tool like Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite to resize your OS partitions. Then you tried to reboot, and you got a GRUB error message followed by the GRUB rescue prompt.
There are several ways to reinitialize GRUB, and most of them involve live CDs and mounting partitions and all kinds of other tricks that will probably make you crazy unless you’re a command-line commando in linux.
Well, I don’t mind the command line, but I also have better things to do.
Fortunately, there is a MUCH easier way to save the day: Boot-Repair!
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Scottie Computers GRUB, linux, repair, ubuntu
Lucky you! This happened to a friend of mine recently. She was minding her own business, surfing the web. A little box popped up, and it looked just like a Windows dialog box that said something about Microsoft Security Something-or-Other.
So, of course, she clicked the button. After all, it looked genuine enough!
Not long after that, a program that looks like the following image came up:
It began to give her all kinds of warning messages. Her GPU was overheating, her processor was overheating, she was out of RAM, and her hard drive was corrupted! Then it made 25 “Error Reading File” windows pop up.
If you are seeing this problem, there is a very simple process to follow to rid yourself of the malware without reinstalling Windows and starting from scratch!
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Scottie Computers, Do-It-Yourself fakeHDD, malware, Rogue.FakeHDD, trojan, unhide, virus
If you’re like me, you still have some Rails 2.3.x apps hanging around. Yeah, Rails 3 is awesome in some respects, but that “2x performance increase” never quite materialized.
In fact, for the most part, Rails 3 is still slower than Rails 2.3. SIGH!
Nevertheless, Ruby itself is progressing nicely. Ruby 1.9.3-p0 was released a few months ago. With faster garbage collection, startup, and file load times, Ruby 1.9.3 is where it’s at.
The only question is: What do you do to make Rails 2.3 play nicely with Ruby 1.9.3?
It’s actually not that hard!
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Scottie Programming rails, ruby, yaml
I hate to say, “I told you so!”, but: I told you so!
Actually, I don’t hate saying it. I’m relishing every second of this glorious moment, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Okay, I was ashamed for the few seconds it took me type the first sentence, but I got over it.
What the heck am I yammering about? Green hard drives, of course! You may recall a previous post I wrote:
Recently, Seagate came out and openly called “BS!” on their own green hard drive BS.
I suppose we should praise them for this, but it would have been better if they hadn’t let their marketing bozos direct their engineering department in the first place!
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Scottie Computers, Spare Me! green, hard drive, hdd, seagate
You’ve probably heard of ARM processors a lot lately. They are used in all kinds of devices like smartphones, tablets, routers, and so on. I’m sure you’ve also heard why they are so great: They’re powerful, and they’re extremely energy efficient!
Well, so is my Intel processor in my desktop computer, frankly. On average, it uses about 9W of power (I measured), and it’s a quad-core chip!
Well, 9W is a lot for smartphones, which have very small batteries. But still, what is the deal with these mystical ARM processors? What exactly are they, and what makes them so great?
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Scottie Gizmos, How Does it Work? ARM, CISC, processor, RISC
This article originally appeared in Issue #14 of The Dot Connector Magazine.
Cell phones: they’re everywhere. From the “Battlephones” of the olden days, technology has progressed inexorably to today’s Smartphone. Crikey, some people even sleep with their cell phones!
Much has been written about the health effects of the gigahertz electromagnetic radiation that emanates from your trusty phone. Whether it’s brain cancer, or interfering with sleep, or mental fog, everyone has heard of some study or another that cell phones are dangerous.
Well, let’s get real: When you hold a microwave-frequency transmitter up against your head, what do you think is going to happen?! Of course, your average cell phone emits signals at power levels that are thousands of times weaker than a microwave oven – and at a different frequency. But still, cell phone emissions are nonetheless microwave radiation, and that can’t be good for you.
To make matters worse, your super-intelligent, handheld-computer “smart phone” just loves to gobble up the juice from its battery. But what if you could minimize your exposure to cell phone radiation and increase your battery life?
If you must use the darn things, you may as well do it correctly, yes?
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Scottie Gizmos, How Does it Work? cell phone, health, radiation
Well, heck, everyone else is talking about it incessantly, so why not me, too?
Of course, there are much more important topics to be worried about, like the fact that the global economic and political situation seems to be destabilizing in numerous ways. But this is a techie blog, so we’ll forget about all that for now.
Since Jobs died, I have read far too many tributes about all the wonderful contributions he made to the tech world. Well, to be fair, he was more or less responsible for many shifts in the tech industry. Whether or not those shifts have actually benefited humanity as a whole, well… that’s a whole other ball of wax.
He was also, according to many reports, quite an ass at times. And let’s not forget about the infamous Reality Distortion Field (henceforth referred to as the RDF)…
Apple’s new lack of a its Reality Distortion Field is the primary reason why I believe that Jobs’ death is in fact the beginning of the end for Apple.
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Scottie Computers, Spare Me! apple, rdf, steve jobs
Hope he reads this post!
Everybody loves superglue. It bonds darn near anything to darn near anything else, darn near instantly.
There’s only one problem: it also bonds skin.
Another problem: it’s hard to remove from skin once it dries – or even before it dries.
Most people will tell you to use nail polish remover. Others will spend way too much money on official “Superglue Remover” products.
But there’s a very simple way to remove superglue that works in seconds…
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Scottie Do-It-Yourself acetone, superglue
I have to say that I simply can’t stand it any more.
I’m talking about Apple and their damned lawsuits. They are suing anyone and everyone who makes any product that even remotely resembles an iThing (gosh, I hope they don’t sue me for putting that lowercase “i” in front of the word “Thing”!).
Seriously, all computers look alike. Mostly that’s because they all use the same exact components, and they all serve the same basic function. The same is true of tablet devices and cell phones.
So how is it that Apple gets away with actually forbidding other companies from even selling their products now?
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Scottie Spare Me! apple, lawsuit, patent
