Practical Technology

So you’ve never gotten into the habit of making regular backups? Fortunately, nowadays copies of your e-mails probably rest safely with the likes of Yahoo, your photos with Flickr, your word-processor documents with Google, your music with iTunes, and so on. Whew! These applications reside on massive server farms, surely making your data as secure [...]

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I’ve been working with Windows 7 for some months now, and while 7′s not for netbooks, I vastly prefer Windows 7 to Vista. So, when it came time to try out the release candidate, I didn’t expect to have any trouble. I was wrong. For the Windows 7 RC (release candidate), I used my main [...]

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I recently got a note out of the blue from another technology journalist. He wrote, “I know I’m often critical of Linux, but I’m SOOOOO GLAD I installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I installed some patches to Vista and now Vista won’t boot, not even in Safe mode. Uggh!” He continued, “So now I’ve booted [...]

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What can I say? For me, XP SP3 was the cat’s meow, the best Windows client operating system ever. But, for other people ‘upgrading’ to XP SP 3 is like being fed to a roaring lion. They’re seeing endless, and I mean endless-reboots. Many can’t even escape to the relative safety of Windows’ Safe mode [...]

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Sometimes, no matter how much you try to protect your computer, you need to get down and dirty with the hardware. Sometimes it’s the obvious. I never cease to be amazed at how many PC problems turn out to be loose cables or-the shame of it all!-an unplugged electrical cord. But, others times, it will [...]

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