For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Even for the most tech-savvy users, Windows 8 presents a bit of a learning curve. Just figuring out something as simple as shutting down your PC can be challenging.
The folks at TradePub have just the thing: the Microsoft Windows 8 Quick Reference Card. It's a colorful two-page guide to Windows 8's most commonly used areas. And if you don't mind sharing a bit of personal information, it's free.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
As I documented last week, I've been having intermittent problems with my Internet connection. Just when I thought I'd solved it, I woke up this morning to yet another massive slowdown.
Using the method I described previously—running SpeedTest on at least two devices—I verified that this wasn't a local hardware problem. Something was amiss with either my router, my modem, or my ISP (Comcast).
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
In a nutshell, the adapter allows you to connect an internal hard drive to your PC—externally. What would an internal drive be doing outside your desktop or laptop? Funny you should ask.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
My new slogan for Windows 8: "It's not all bad!" ($50K and it's yours, Microsoft.)
Misguided though the Metro interface may be, there are some nice under-the-hood improvements to be found in the OS. For example, there's the File History feature I wrote about a couple months ago.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
For the past week or so, I've been trying to pinpoint a problem with my Internet connection.
Usually I blame Comcast, my ISP, but a typical Comcast outage is exactly that: a total interruption of service. I can tell from looking at the System Tray network icon that there's no connection.
This time, however, the problem was intermittent. Sometimes my connection would slow to a crawl, other times it would disappear altogether for a few minutes. But the network icon didn't indicate a loss of service.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
Over the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to test-drive a couple Windows 8 laptops, and even though I've used the OS intermittently for months now, I still find it jarring every time the Metro interface (a.k.a. Start screen) appears.
Indeed, for anyone brand new to Windows 8, anyone who's already familiar with an earlier version of Windows, that tile-based interface can be startling, confusing, and ultimately very frustrating.
Can you learn it? Sure. Should you have to? No. With a few simple steps, you can make your new Windows 8 PC much more familiar, both in look and operation.
For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow. More by Rick Broida
StarRSS
After the events of the last few days, I thought everybody could use a smile. And this definitely brought one to my face.
Many users still rely on RSS feeds to see the latest posts on their favorite sites. Of course, now that Google is pulling the plug on Reader, the door is wide open for interesting alternatives.
