Category: Storage

There Was a Problem Installing Mac OS X (Lion)

I had a couple of MacBook Pro laptops grace my desk and I have been upgrading them to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The first one (maybe eighteen months old) went through without a hitch but the second one (which is a few years old) had all manner of problems including reading my original DVD-RW …

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Classic Windows Gaming: WinTrek

Just a quick one for tonight (and a bit of nostalgia for me too). Back in school I remember the time when we moved away from our fleet of Apple IIe computers (and a sole Macintosh which the school had won in a Coles shopping docket collection competition) and upgraded to IBM compatible machines (can’t …

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Apple MacBook Air Unboxing

My wife had been hanging out for a MacBook Air and I had encouraged her to wait until the refreshed model became available with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Well, that happened last week and the order was placed shortly thereafter. As always, I had to do an unboxing video. I cover some of the …

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The Apple Double Format, Network Shares and uTorrent

This might be a bit of an edge case for most people but for those of us with heterogeneous networks with a mixture of Windows and Mac OS X computers you may come across hidden files starting with “._” (so something like “._humptydumpty.doc”) and may or may not correspond with a filename of the same …

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MacOS X and NTFS – Will it Blend?

In the Windows world the best file system to be using is NTFS (New Technology File System), hands down. Compared to legacy FAT file systems (including FAT32) the robustness, reliability and scalability of NTFS is undisputed. However, since NTFS is proprietary to Microsoft it is often incompatible with non-Microsoft platforms such as MacOS X. Of …

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Windows Home Server Upgrade – Progress Report

Just wanted to share with you my “upgrade” experience going from the original Windows Home Server to Windows Home Server 2011. This morning I made some hardware upgrades, specifically: adding another 4GB RAM, replacing the existing four hard drives totaling 3TB of varying sizes with three 2TB hard drives. This part didn’t take so long …

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Format Beyond 32GB with FAT32

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. Sometimes, you need to format a hard drive to FAT32 so it will be read on devices that can’t read the superior NTFS format such as the PS3. However, under Windows XP and later, you can’t format a drive beyond 32GB with FAT32 due to artificial limitation put in …

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Bolster Your DOS USB Boot Disk – Part 1

File Conflict Warning

Yesterday, I walked through how to make your own DOS USB boot disk with the final result being a bootable USB stick that won’t do much more than let you browse the USB stick itself and other internal FAT and FAT32 drives. Today, we’ll make that USB stick a bit more useful. The first and …

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Front and Rear USB Ports – Use Them Wisely

Just a quick one for tonight. One thing that gets my gripe is how people use USB ports on their computer, particularly front and rear USB ports on desktop computers. When USB ports first hit the scene they were relegated to the rear of the computer along with all of the other faithful ports including …

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Why You Need Headphones Connected to Listen to FM Radio on Mobile Phones

These days, smartphones have so much packed into them its a wonder that their innards don’t burst open. Some of the more common components crammed into smartphones are: Bluetooth chipset and antenna, Cameras (front and rear), Capacitive touchscreen, Cellular antennae (one for each frequency), CPU, Flash memory, GPS receiver, GPU, SIM card holder, Wi-Fi chipset …

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