Category Archives: Personal Computing
LIMITED OPPORTUNITY!-BUY NOW!!!
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I recently found this advertisement from around 1978 while sorting through the contents of my filing cabinet. It may have been the first PC related scam. This flyer was sent to every PC retailer in the country. Not one diskette drive was ever shipped. If you could find one, a single sided TRS-80 drive was more than double this price, required the purchase of the expansion interface, and was somewhat unreliable. The data capacity of a double sided 5.25 in diskette was 256,000 characters.
“Never trust a company with the word ‘World’ in it’s name” is one of the Rules For Life I developed from that long ago episode in my past.
I have no idea how I managed to hold on to this scrap of paper for so long!
An Argument for Status Quo
An Argument for Status Quo
By: George B Mathison III, President
Dothan Computer & Technology Users Group
Dothan, AL
In this day of numerous technologies, software updates, upgrades, and the now present Windows 10 platform I began to think of all the things that will need to be done in order to maintain the overall efficiency of my current computer. Continue reading
It’s Time To Kill Freeware
Allow me to walk you down the garden path to the briar patch called Freeware; a segment of the software industry that just needs to go away. Now I am not referring to such organizations like Open Source Foundation, Open Office, Open Libre, The Apache Foundation, or the authors of Squirrel, Firefox, MySQL, Notepad++, Filezilla and many others. Continue reading
The Canon MG3520 A Next Gen Inkjet Printer
I am always on the lookout for new tech items with low user ratings. No doubt- the device is quickly discounted to get it out of the retail stream while the manufacturer corrects the issue. These devices will also show up in the re-manufactured market at a significant discount owing to the many user returns. Often, the bad reviews have nothing to do with quality, capability, fit or finish. Continue reading
The Real Answer To Why Microsoft Leapfrogged The Windows 9 Release Name
If you follow the PC industry as I, you have no doubt heard many reasons why Microsoft named their latest OS release as Windows 10 instead of 9. One explanation noted that the number 9 in Japanese has bad karma. In actuality most all of the single digits have some form of evil superstitious connotation in the Orient. Ya, I know. I also like the name Redskins. The explanations from Microsoft itself sounded phony and appeared to be overt spins from their marketing department. The real reason is actually quite simple and cogent. For more than 20 years, Continue reading
Connect Your Media Devices With Netgear WNCE3001
You are probably hooked up to the Internet like me. You have cable or twisted pair coming into your house. A MODEM separates the digital service from others, providing the input to a WI-Fi router for your laptop, smartphone, e readers or other mobile devices. You might have a desktop PC plugged into the router with an Ethernet cable. Most big flat screens, DVD players, or Apple TV are designed to be connected to the Internet through an RJ-45 connector, i.e. an Ethernet cable. Chances are your router is not located at your TV center. Netgear offers a solution to the problem with their Universal Dual Band Wireless Adapter – WNCE3001. Continue reading
-Partitions, Volumes & Drives–
My Encounter with storage structures while investigating Linux
You will most likely encounter an ISO file for installing Linux on your old XP machine. After I downloaded this file, I dragged and dropped the file on my DVD drive icon in Windows Explorer and then burned the contents to a DVD. I wasn’t all that surprised when I found the ISO file nicely burned on what is now a festive window ornament. Continue reading
My Old XP Boxes
The theme of our next DCTUG meeting will be “What to do with your old XP machine”. As one of the presenters, I will demonstrate the conversion of older Wintel boxes to Linux. As I gaze at my accumulation of digital relics, I can’t help but reminisce about how I, and the PC industry got to this point.
Organize Your documents with OneNote
From the inception of the personal computer revolution, there has been game changer applications that spurred the growth of the PC industry; Electric Pencil, Visicalc, Lotus 123, Peachtree Accounting, and dBaseII – the CP/M program from Ashton Tate not the mainframe program from IBM. Though Microsoft’s OneNote cannot possibly stand with these legends, it does fill a need missing with available personal productivity software: a simple way to organize documents and files in one place.