OBSOLESCENCE

If you’re like me, then you’ve been caught off guard in the last couple of years by something that you hadn’t realized was obsolete. Here are a few that still occasionally take people by surprise when they get a new computer. PS2 connections (the round ones) for...

HP BLOAT

It seems we’re constantly buying printers to replace the ones that break before their time. A quick word of advice if you buy an HP printer: don’t put that installation CD in the drive! The chances are good that you’ll wind up with hundreds of megabytes of bloated...

MICROSOFT ENDS 2008 WITH A CRASH

A heartwarming story for the end of 2008! On December 31 every owner of a 30Gb Microsoft Zune woke up to a crashed device that couldn’t be started. (The Zune is Microsoft’s competitor for the iPod. Only 14 people own them, so this isn’t all that...

PRINTER SOFTWARE & SLOWDOWNS

The headline tells the story of this Microsoft Knowledge Base article: Severe system performance problems occur on a Windows Vista or Windows XP-based computer after you install HP printer software, version 11 (Microsoft KB960673) To be honest, I don’t know if...

CRUCIAL MEMORY SCANNER

If you don’t have enough memory (“RAM”) in your computer, it will run very, very slowly. Once you have a reasonable amount of memory, performance won’t change very much if you add more. Memory has been so cheap for the last few years that most...

U3 LAUNCHPAD UNINSTALL

Some of you are running into unnecessary software included with many USB flash drives. The U3 Launchpad probably seemed like a good idea but I’m not aware of anyone who uses it, and I know a lot of people who find it irritating. The U3 software is included with...