advice for computer dummies, beginers
If you just go buy a computer and use it without “making it work your way”, you definitely fall into this category. So here are some advice for you. But you’re already reading my blog, so you’ll soon be fine using your computer.
1. Learn or ask the engineer to partition your hard drive for you. (Exploit the service now that he’s already there to help you. Don’t wait till later to learn the truth the hard way.) This simply works when your computer has a problem that you have to re-install the system or something. If you have more than one partitions, you can save your data on the non-system partition and you won’t lose all your data.
2. Don’t upgrade your system. I know sometimes you need some new functionalities and stuff. But don’t easily upgrade your system. Your hardware capacity is consistent with your pre-installed system. Upgrading could be disastrous speed, usage experience. If you really need something new on your older systems, there should always be replacement softwares that are also free. Try to look for those. One thing good about IT world is that CS students have to have some homeowork problems and some people just enjoy the process of problem solving, so there are a lot of wonderful free softwares out there. If you can’t find them, just let me see what you need in a comment.
3. When the system is very slow, try to find some one/way to re-install your system instead of doing defragment. Disk defragment helps in some way, but when your system is barely responding, it doesn’t get you very far. And systems eventually become corrupted. So it comes back to the 1st advice, try to use partitions and it won’t be a problem if you need to re-install.
4. If something different happens, it doesn’t necessarily mean something went wrong. Don’t freak out. (Just a general moral.)
Creative technology vs. Ipod
Why do people use Ipod? I don’t know. It probably proves democracy doesn’t work when one of your classmates gives a wrong answer to a tricky question and everyone else follows.
I have been looking at some creative products for replacement of my washed Sony MiniDisc player recently. Some of the mp3 players have removable batteries which allows you to bring an extra battery to extend battery life and keeps the cost low when the battery eventually run out. Their storage is as good as Ipods’ and I heard a friend say that they actually uses laptop harddrives which makes it better because you can easily upgrade. Creative specializes in sound card so I would expect their audio quality to be decent.
Plus, for people who want to save, look here:
Opera: the best browser
Why do I say so?
1. Tabbed browsing : and supports easy switching between the tabs. Great for real surfers.
2. End of unwanted advertisement, adware etc.
3. Speed dial. I don’t know about most people, I only seem to go on a few websites most of the time. And opening a new tab with those in front of you really helps.
4. Light weight and fast. IE 6 is light weight too from my experience. But IE7 and firefox… You know, some people browser the internet with Lynx OK.
5. Free with no complexities. If you install IE7, it does 1 million things to your computer. We don’t want that to happen, so use Firefox or Opera. Portable applications are good right? Even when you re-install your system, you still have everything, bookmarks, speed-dials so on and so forth. (Some other amazing portable softwares can be found at http://portableapps.com/ )
6. I like the search function where you type g to search google, you can set it to type w and search wikipedia, maybe e to search ebay. You owe 1/10 of your life to opera if you search a lot.
7. Restore lost session. Actually, 4 possible startup choices… And everything the other browsers have.
It’s just a combination of maximal functionality.
Note: Compatibility is can be a tiny issue for the pedantics. But you know what, if everyone starts using the real browser, then everyone will test their sites with opera and problem solved!
Suggestion: However, I do propose something like conkeror for firefox. I know that’s probably for the geeks but we like it so much better that way. And conkeror for firefox is unsatisfactory because you can’t see the tabs, it doesn’t restore lost sessions etc. All I want is the best for opera!
The lastest stable version is 9.24 and 9.50 alpha is out I think. go to www.opera.com and try it out.
To give a as comprehensive opinion as my other post, I actually did try out the other things.
The IE world is just plagued with malicious wares, popup windows, and even MSN space would carry IE ad scripts etc. I’ve used firefox both on windows and on linux. I use it from time to time for compatibility. But opera just offers everything firefox offers except for maybe a few extensions. I rarely use them so … Opera starts faster on a speculative level (I could google a few links up but there was a page that I saw where a quite rigorous series of experiments were done but I can’t find it at hand.) and offers easier shortcuts like 1,2 , x,z to switch between tabs and go back or forward. Key bindings are actually kind of troublesome here. (And I am a big fan of emacs…) Speaking of Emacs, conkeror actually enables you to use all the key bindings you use with emacs but then you lose the ability to restore your sessions and it goes wrong often. So it isn’t really something reliable.
To Partita: I have seen IE7Pro which is like an add-on right? I’m still quite confused what are the new features of IE7 are. For me, I can see tabbed browsing, they claim they have something new that enables you to zoom in and out, but opera offers a perfect one. IE7 offers some new security features which is kind of ironic that if you really want security, I suppose opera or even firefox would be the choice for daily users. (I hate those Java depended security systems that are slow and only run on IE. I HAVE TO figure out something smarter. Seriously.) Safari had problems with UTF-8 character encoding for an earlier version. And as all other softwares (songbird maybe?), the first editions to Windows always have problems (software develops really don’t use Windows it seems).
Feeds
Paul's Digital World- get your feet wet with Linux/Fedora easily: installation tutorial
- A little poll on Snap Preview
- Fedora 8 is here! Download !
- Portable Applications : the future of software industry
- Blog management tools
- Hotspot @ home: restrictions and possibilities
- Fedora 9 features list unveiled
- Fedora to be released in 3 days
- What an operating system ought to be like
- Smallville: New Season
