The traditional PC is changing according to Bill Gates.

According to Bill Gates the traditional personal computer is dying and the mobile revolution is signalling a change to tablets and Metro applications instead of the traditional applications that all computer users are enjoying at the present time. But I believe that the standard computer form factor with a tower case, large screen and keyboard/mouse … Read more

Get Prolific USB-serial adapter working with Windows 8.

Getting the Prolific USB serial adapter working with Windows 8 can be difficult. Especially if you are studying for CCNA and you need to access a 2960G switch on Windows with Putty. As strange as it may look, you need an outdated driver to make it work. The only working version I have found is … Read more

New Windows 8 GTK theme available for Linux. This comes with a Metacity theme as well.

Nice Windows 8 theme for Linux http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Windows8+%28GTK+theme+2.x+%26+GTK+3.x%29?content=158560. This is a theme for GTK 3.0 that allows you to theme Unity or MATE to look like Windows 8. Sure the Windows 8 and Server 2012 interfaces are ugly; but it is kind of cool to theme Unity and MATE to resemble Windows 8. This theme also … Read more

Windows 8 Metro UI theme for Metacity available. Make your Linux Mint MATE desktop look like Windows 8.

This is a Metacity theme that will work with MATE. This is the Metro UI theme for Gnome 2.32.2 or MATE: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/?content=157024. This is for those of you that want the Metro UI look for the Linux Mint 14 MATE desktop. There is also a Windows 8 iconset that is available for download in png … Read more

How to get to safe mode in Windows 8 Pro final release.

This is not really applicable to Linux, but I am running Windows 8 Pro dual booted with Linux Mint 14 and I encountered a bug that stopped Windows 8 from fully starting up. I found out that if you press the F5 key just after booting Windows 8 you will see the test “Please Wait” … Read more

Windows 8 machines burdened with crapware and Ubuntu a good alternative.

The Windows 8 launch is past and there are stories floating around that the computers running this operating system are polluted with crapware that slows down the machines and provides no real benefit. When I bought my ASUS eePC netbook; it was running Windows XP Professional with the extra ASUS crapware installed that is supposed … Read more

Thoughts on the Ubuntu 12.10 Linux distribution and Surface tablet on NCIS LA.

The Ubuntu 12.10 Linux distribution has been on my computer for a short while and I have tried out the KDE 4.9.2 desktop and Gnome Shell. The KDE desktop works pretty well in this distribution; but I prefer Gnome Shell right now. Just type sudo apt-get install gnome-shell to install the Gnome desktop. I have … Read more

The Windows 8 operating system forces you to re-boot to install updates.

The Windows 8 operating system forces you to re-boot to install updates. This is 2012; why can the operating system not install updates whilst the operating system is up and running and there is a user logged into the system doing their work? Apparently after 2 days it forces you to re-boot to install your … Read more

BASH Shell is better than Powershell and discussion of the Linux desktop versus Windows.

The Powershell for Windows has many useful features for controlling your Windows computer; with many cmdlets and scripting ability; but the BASH shell for Linux is already an established shell that is far more powerful and useful. The downside to the Powershell is that it does not seem to have an implementation of grep. Without … Read more

The Graphical User Interface has come a long way since Windows ’95.

The Windows '95 desktop. Look at those icons...

The graphical user interfaces that we all enjoy have come a long way since the existence of the Windows ’95 operating system pictured on this page. Computing in those days was an exercise in frustration trying to get the various drivers installed and configured and adjusting the darned IRQs to Getting hardware to cooperate. Nowadays … Read more

Cloud based user accounts backup in Windows 8 Enterprise; how Linux could benefit from this sort of infrastructure.

I have just installed the Windows 8 Enterprise 90 day trial and first impressions are quite positive. After logging into Windows the first time using your Windows Live account your desktop is setup and then you are presented with a Metro interface. But when you format and re-install the operating system you only need to … Read more

A look at the Windows 8 desktop, the Windows 8 interface is still present in this operating system.

This is a look at the Windows 8 RTM desktop. The Windows 8 Interface is still here, they would not remove that would they? But this is just a tablet interface on a desktop machine, at least with Gnome Shell and Unity the interface makes some sense, but the Windows 8 tablets require a Windows … Read more

Desktop interfaces in the olden days versus today. have we moved in the right direction?

The olden days of computing were dominated by the massive Microsoft corporation, they bought their DOS operating system from IBM, and copied the mouse and icons interface from the Xerox Star operating system from 1981. Nowadays the Ubuntu distribution is copying the Macintosh OSX interface to create the Unity interface. But that is not very … Read more

Windows 8 reviews are becoming more and and more unfavourable. Linux Mint 13 is the alternative.

The Windows 8 reviews are becoming more and and more unfavorable. The interface is being dumbed down and it will end up becoming a joke in the computing world. The Linux Mint 13 distribution has been released and the 64bit MATE release of this distribution is looking very good indeed. As the image to the … Read more

New Windows 8 interface and getting the start menu back.

This is what the new copy dialog looks like on Windows 8. The actual process of copying this amount of data over a USB 3.0 connection was actually very fast, the previous versions of Windows were slower at copying data, but now it is getting faster. And I was copying from a 8 GiB USB … Read more

Enlightenment E16 and Lord of the Rings symbolism.

The Enlightenment E16 desktop I have setup on my computer is a very good example of a simple computer interface, the layout of the desktop with the iconbox and virtual desktop pager at the bottom of the screen, the clicking on the desktop to access the root menu and the overall eye candy aspect is … Read more