Month: October 2010

As a recent post noted, Offline Files is still a temperamental technology that I have decided is not worth the effort on Windows 7. So what other systems can you use? Take note of the following: By default, Windows 7 will create a restore point on the laptop’s hard drive every day. This can be…

One of the most distasteful features of using Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers in a domain environment is their tendency to freeze during the Group Policy application phase of user logon. Although it is known that there were some instances of this occurring with Windows XP as well, we never saw these happen in…

Well, Windows Live Essentials has been updated to the 2011 edition and they have, at last, gone back to proper toolbars with icons, replacing text labelled buttons in the last few editions. In fact, the WLE applications (I’m using Writer to post this) are now using the Ribbon like Office does, this is the first…

Offline Files is a technology that was introduced in Windows XP. We used it for a time then but found it troublesome. I have often wondered why Microsoft needed to use a special folder in the local computer instead of doing something like a straightforward automated sync between a visible local copy of the data…

Still can’t get over how quiet this thing is. From the next room you can’t hear it at all. Although the old one turned out to have quite a bit of dust blocking things up. I got a serial backplane connector from an Asus motherboard and am pleased to report it worked the first time…

Well, such a big project and now it’s over. Very pleased with the new box, just a few niggles of things maybe I should have checked over before I started. Mainly that this board has only got provision for 8 USB sockets, one of those is taken by the card reader and I wanted more…

As we saw in the last post, I started it on the old PC and finished it on the new one. About halfway through writing, I saved the draft on the old PC and shut it down. I then booted from a Windows PE CD and started up ImageX to capture the boot disk to…

Now that we have the board completed, the next task is to install it into the chassis. Your existing chassis should already have spacers installed, the board sits on these spacers to hold it up clear of the chassis. Check that the spacers are in the same number and positions as the board needs, if…

After the power supply, the next thing to do is to assemble and install the main system board. The board comes with an I/O shield which fits into a space on the back of the chassis and this has the cutouts in it for the onboard connectors. Which in this case are PS/2 mouse and…

Well, of course, we all know that PCs don’t last forever, and I am not interested in the extremist brigade that say you should try to get 8-10 years of life out of a PC. The way I see it is, a PC is obsolete after about five years and while it will still do…