Normally I don’t write about hardware on this blog (or pretty much anywhere), but I’m making an exception in this case to shout out a thank you to Theje for a YouTube video showing how to fix a weird keyboard problem on my IdeaPad Y560p. Certain keys quite suddenly started doing strange things: The H key would act like an up arrow, so while you were typing, your words would suddenly start appearing in the middle of the last line. Continue Reading »

Never satisfied with something that is already working (Firefox), a few months ago I decided to check out Chromium, the open source version of Google’s Chrome web browser. My impression is that it is very snappy at page loads. In looking into which browser would be better on an old, hardware-challenged computer (a Sony VAIO with a 1.2 GHz Pentium M and 512 MB RAM), I found that Tom’s Hardware reports that while Chrome has a heavier memory footprint, it also has faster page loads. On low-end systems that makes it kind of a toss-up—will the increased memory demands translate into a faster feel in your browsing?—but on my 6 GB RAM Dell desktop and my 8 GB RAM Lenovo laptop, the OS can easily afford to throw a couple of GB to Chromium in exchange for a faster browsing experience. Continue Reading »

The New York Times just ran 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology. Two of the ideas were “Back up Your Data” and “Set up a Free File-Sharing Service”. Slightly puzzling to me was why these were two items instead of one, since it seems most of the back-up services (they suggest SOS Online Backup, Windows only) also work as file-sharing services (they suggest Dropbox, cross-platform) and vice versa. I’ve listed several of these services below, in roughly what I consider the order of their attractiveness, all things considered. And yes, SpiderOak is listed first because that’s the one I’m using. Continue Reading »

About 2½ years ago I made the switch to Linux. I figured getting a new home computer was as good a time as any. While I was already going off the beaten path with Linux, I decided to not go too far off by choosing Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. I kept Windows Vista (pre-installed) on its own partition, just in case I changed my mind.

While I was able (and more than willing) to tinker in order to get things to do what I wanted, my wife, who like me would be using the computer for both personal and professional purposes, needed things to “just work”. Any technical problems she had were going to get kicked to me. I asked her to give it a couple of weeks, but her verdict after one day was “This isn’t any different from Windows.”

I think most end-users would, like my wife, find no real difference for email, web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheets. Continue Reading »