Category Archives: PCs/Laptops
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It’s Screen Time!
Is this what they mean by “too much screen time”? Continue reading
"This is Bloody Dangerous!"
More MacBook battery woes – this time it’s serious. The title is a quote from arguably the greatest of Hollywood Musicals, Paint Your Wagon. The words are uttered by Mad Jack Duncan, a gold miner engaged in digging a shallow … Continue reading
Death of an Alien
An Upgrade Too Far, OR: Don’t Count Your Aliens Before They Explode Out Of Your Thorax! Prior to 2009, I regularly upgraded our desktop PC / server, changing the entire hardware and/or rebuilding from scratch every year or two. There … Continue reading
Why I Like My MacBook, But I’m Beginning To Really Hate Apple
Battery Replacement on a 2015 MacBook I realised a couple of weeks ago, much to my horror and chagrin, that I had been walking around with a potential incendiary bomb. Not that I had done anything wrong – this is … Continue reading
Form vs Function – a Tail :) of Three Mice
Just in case you think some of my recent posts have been a bit anti-Microsoft, here’s one in which (spoiler alert!) they win! Call me old-fashioned, but I very much prefer using a mouse to a trackpad or its relatives, … Continue reading
The Colour Nazis
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a movement obsessed with removing colour, especially those whose skin colour or religious preference was different to their own. This went to great extremes, caused the greatest of all wars, … Continue reading
Microsoft : Busy Fixing What Ain’t Broke
There’s an interesting, but intensely annoying, behaviour by the big software companies, which as far as I’m aware has no parallel in other areas of production for consumer consumption. We’ve all been used, since the mid-20th century, to the concept … Continue reading
Backing Up
Coming up with a reliable backup policy is a challenge as data volumes grow. My approach is as follows. On a weekly basis I do a full backup of the system disk of the more "volatile" PCs in our collection, … Continue reading
Weinberg’s New Law, and the Upgrade Cascade
When I started the experiment of running Windows on a MacBook (continued here and here), I really expected it to just be a "travel" laptop, continuing with something like my Alienware R17X as primary machine. That changed rapidly when I … Continue reading
Standardising the Mac Keyboard
My MacBook Pro is, ironically, the best portable PC I’ve owned. The Big Old Alien is slightly faster and more powerful, but you’d never use the word "portable" about it without gritted teeth, and since the PC world went to … Continue reading
The Experiment Continues
The MacBook Pro has arrived, and for a nearly four year old PC it’s in very good nick. There’s one unfortunate scratch on the top lid, but otherwise it’s very clean and works well. The 8GB RAM I switched out … Continue reading
An Experiment
Readers of longer standing may remember the agonising when I had to replace my 2009 Toshiba laptop, as there had been yet another shift in screen aspect ratio standards, and in order to preserve a decent vertical screen size, I … Continue reading
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