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Showing posts from August, 2007

Tips for care with computers

Here's a couple that have just sprung to mind: Never send a cranky/sarcastic email without having walked away from it for at least an hour first. You never know how much trouble you'll get yourself into. Of course, as a general rule - never lose your temper until it's detrimental not to lose it. Always check the send to address - autocomplete can do the strangest things if you're not paying attention (oops!) Write short, but meaningful emails. Remember that sometimes a very terse email can convey dissatisfaction or dislike. Write to your audience. There are a lot of guides out there suggesting you should write very short emails - that's OK if it's a high volume environment. Not OK if it's a low volume environment. Water/Coffee/Coke/Beer + computer = bad. So many combinations that are so nasty in so many ways. Also, try to avoid smoking while computing - it really fouls up your keyboard. And that's all from the brain for this very moment.

Linux on the Desktop

I read a fair few reviews about running Linux on the desktop. One of the things that always springs to my attention is people moaning about hardware support. All things considered, I have an opinion about this. My XP Installation at home does not work without significant time spent downloading (after I've installed a driver for the network card) drivers for sound/video/mainboard stuff. I have an ASUS mainboard, nothing fancy or special. It does not work natively with the drivers supplied with XP. It does, however, work just fine with Linux, specifically Ubuntu, but also SuSE. I run Ubuntu on a series of machines, including two Dell GX260's, a GX270, a Dell Server (the name of which escapes me) and various put together machines. I find fewer issues with drivers than I have had with XP. Don't even get me started on Vista. It's hardware support might be better, but you've got to have a *lot* more of everything to get it to work properly. Drivers for my printer - a HP