5 May 2012 | Computers |
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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23 April 2012 | Computers |
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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2 March 2012 | Computers, Do-It-Yourself |
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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8 January 2012 | Computers, Energy, Spare Me! |
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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7 October 2011 | Computers, Spare Me! |
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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29 June 2011 | Computers |
Until recently, I got a lot of use out of Google Translate. It worked great, it was fast, and its web page translations were good enough.
But then, something changed.
Now when I use Google Translate in Firefox to translate a certain URI, it seems to get stuck in some kind of loop and then craps out.
So I found a lovely alternative: Bing Translate!
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19 May 2011 | Computers |
With the advent of Thunderbird 3, searching messages became a bit more sassy in the old bird.
There is one little problem: it is not readily apparent how one actually searches for text inside an open e-mail.
It used to be that you could just type Ctrl-F and the little “Find” bar opened at the bottom of your message pane/window. Type in some text, and all instances of that text would be highlighted in the open message.
In the latest Tbird, that doesn’t work in certain cases. In fact, searching in an open message has become downright annoying, and nobody seems to know how to make it work. Several people even filed bug reports about it.
This situation was obviously intolerable, so I finally managed to solve it!
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4 May 2011 | Computers |
If you’re using Ubuntu Server 10.10 and you get the upgrade notice for 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, you might want to hold off a bit before taking the plunge and typing “do-release-upgrade”.
It seems there is a rather severe problem with GRUB 2. If you have a RAID setup – and even if you don’t – GRUB may not load at all upon reboot, leaving you with a bricked server.
There doesn’t seem to be a fix for it. In fact, I do believe the name of the release should be changed to “Nasty Narwhal”.
Here’s the scoop.
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12 April 2011 | Computers, Energy, Spare Me! |
These days, the fad is GREEN. Everything is “eco-this” or “green that”. Of course, we’re supposed to be terribly concerned about saving Mother Earth. Well, I’ve got news for you: Mother Earth is plenty capable of taking care of herself… Whether or not humankind survives her care is another question entirely. Frankly, if I were Big Mama, I’d be pretty pissed off that my occupants were continually dumping toxic crap on me and irradiating me. I don’t think I would care if they were using a certain type of hard drive or not.
But, I digress…
If you’re in the market for a new hard drive, you may have noticed that there are now tons of “green” hard drives out there. There are several reasons why you do NOT want one of these things. Perhaps the most important reason is that when you get right down to it, they do almost nothing to truly save energy – which kind of defeats the purpose of having a green drive, now doesn’t it?
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26 March 2011 | Computers |
Most likely, you have at least the Java runtime environment installed on your puter. And, if you’re using Firefox, you may have some strange add-ons installed that just won’t go away.
With every Java update you install, yet another “Java Console” add-on may be installed. The problem is, all you can do is disable them. There is no way to actually uninstall older versions of this add-on. Worse yet, you don’t even really need the add-on in the first place!
So, if you have multiple Java Console add-ons sitting in your Firefox, how do you get rid of the darn things?
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