Smart Tech Tips

You’re wondering what does this have to do with a computer site? Funny thing though, it has everything to do with a computer. I was sitting at my desk working away when my wife calls me into the living room. Behind our fish tank she points with an excited look in her eyes. I went to investigate our little intruder. I blocked off the kitchen to where I figured his escape route was and waited. Our little friend darted the other way and went straight into the entrance way closet. Quickly we built a barricade around the door to the closet and was ready to open it up. When we finally opened up the door, our mouse ran straight into a black antec three hundred steel atx mid tower computer case. It had went into an open 5 1/4 bay that use to house a CDROM. This case was one of the pieces of my barricade. I took the case into the bathtub (thinking the slick sides would make it virtually impossible for our friend to escape) and extracted him into a clear plastic container. Right now he’s eating some crackers and peanut butter while sitting in some shredded phone book paper looking up at 6 holes in a lid of a blue tuple-ware.

As for the computer case, it now has another use added to its’ already impressive features. If you ever build a computer on your own, or something happens to your case and you can salvage the inside of an already working one, I highly recommend this case.

It has plenty of fans to cool the components inside and the design is top notch. Unlike most computer cases, this one has the power supply sitting below everything so that the heat it dissipates rises to the top. Most cases has a power supply relatively close to the top back where already hot air is rising to meet it. This can significantly reduce the life of the power supply unit. Finally, this case has plenty of room for as many as 6 internal hard drive including three 5 1/4 bays available. It comes with two fans and no powers supply.

Our little mouse is probably thinking ‘I hope he doesn’t take me on his desk and drag me around a small gray mat while looking at a computer screen all day’

Twitter has been pretty popular lately. It has gotten lots of media attention and is in the target sights of many bigger fishes. A rumor has it that Google was shot down trying to acquire it. The latest buzz is Apple is looking into purchasing this service. Just like anything that shoots quickly to the top, the race to the bottom begins. This time literally bottoms. In comes twishitter. I’ll let the name and the link speak for itself.

The Amazon Kindle is a great device for anyone from avid readers to tech early adopters. As with many things in this industry, the first model isn’t the best representation of what the vendor is trying to sell. The kindle 1 was oddly shaped and had many shortcomings. What it did right was provide an easy way for consumers to find what they want to read and read it in the shortest amount of time. It also provided Amazon with the easiest and fastest way into a consumer’s wallet.

The Kindle 2 was more of an evolutionary product. It kept features like subscription less 3g network, one click book purchases, and small form factor.

What I am excited about is the upcoming DX model. This one has a much bigger screen and addresses a few gripes about the kindle 2.

Here is what will set it apart from the rest.

You may be seeing me at the beach with one of these in my hands….many feet alway from the salt water shore…with kindle in a plastic bag just in case…away from gadget killing sand…near a good spot for 3g coverage…never mind, I’ll just leave it in the hotel room near the beach and take a two buck newspaper.

A trend that I’ve observed which seems harmless on the surface is really becoming a problem on laptops. Screens that get crushed due to accidental closure with something in the way. May it be a pencil or a stack of sticky notes, a few mini-seconds and you’ve got a broken screen and a costly repair. This seem to occur more and more lately due to laptop design that is ‘hip’ instead of practical. In the old days, YOU control when and how much the screen closes. There was also a latch to keep it closed when it’s shut. These days on most laptops if you close it 2/3 of the way, a spring or magnet helps you the rest of the way. This mechanism won’t know if a pencil or any other object is on your keyboard that could potentially harm your screen. In addition, since the laptops doesn’t have latches anymore, objects can get embedded in between screen and keyboard during transit, just waiting for a little force to turn your bright new screen into a ink blot with pieces of glass when you open it. One jolt on a bumpy road can send your laptop screen to go flying a few inches from the base and slam back down with dire consequences.

Luckily my favorite brand of laptop still does it right, the IBM Thinkpad X series.

For those of you unfortunate to have a latch-less venus flytrap clamshell notebook, all I can recommend is be extra vigilant when you close it and make sure you put it in something that keep both screen side and keyboard side firmly shut during transit.

I had a really hard time finding this gem for a client who recently had their motherboard’s ethernet port fry on them. This created quite a quandary for me. I could have installed a new ethernet card, reroute the modem to USB, or tell them to buy a new machine. I chose the USB route. They had Vista and the disk that came with the modem was very old. I searched up and down only to find sites that wanted me to install some sort of driver helper to detect my driver. This is just another spyware ploy and should be avoided.

Here is the link you’ll need.

http://www.softwaredriverdownload.com/download_ambit_usb_cable_modem_driver.html

I can’t actually point you to the exact download link because it changes from time to time to keep people like me from doing this. Therefore just read down the page and find ‘download ambit USB cable modem driver’. Click there and you should be greeted with a dialog box asking where to put usbdriver2.1.zip. Of course trying this on the machine that can’t get on the internet due to the problem in the first place posed a problem… ;/