Archive for August, 2013

The back to College/School laptop 2013

Monday, August 26th, 2013

So your back in college and you need a computer. So what to buy well it’s always a tough choice, but you don’t need to go into the thousands for a PC these days. the lower end laptop will do the job for most things, and the way to go here is low end.

  • Keyboards: if your buying a laptop be sure to try it out and make sure you actualy type on it, and be sure to type a paragraph on it, cause if it’s a bad keyboard your stuck with it for 3-4 years.
  • Touchscreens, yes the are here, you have to search them out as they are not on many lower end specks. Windows 8 will work better with them rather than a normal screen so it is worth the investment.
  • Memory, go for as much memory as you can, Memory is not hard disk space, we’re looking here at on-board memory, it will be quoted like 4096MB which is More than enough if your running windows 8, also make sure you can expand it.
  • Hard drive space: Don’t worry about hard drive space 160GB will be enough for most people, if your into music and video, you can always get an external USB drive. USB if you can come across USB 3.0 on a system, then that’s a plus.
  • Screen size, rember the bigger the screen the more its going to cost to replace it if some one sits on it, of if it falls off the bed/desk or what ever!, a 17inch screen is going around €200 for a replacment, and its not an easy job, also if you can buy a standard screen size you will pay standard money to replace it.

The next thing is software:

  • Have a look at   www.studentsoftware.ie/   This is a site for purchasing student software at discount prices.
  • Office software, well Microsoft office is the standard, but you can use open office or libre office, once you have made sure that you save everything as Microsoft file format and it will work fine.
  • Photo-shop is a standard but GIMP gives you all the functionality that most people need, it’s also open source.
  • The Zotero plug-in for Mozilla FireFox, is great for citations.
  • LYX is great for producing papers and Theseus, and is much better at handling documentation than word.
  • If your a publisher look at scribus, its open source desktop publishing system, you could always pay for quark.

Happy shopping, and don’t spend too much!

Getting the Service Tag/ Serial Number through CMD

Thursday, August 8th, 2013

This is a reminder for myself really, but its handy for referance

To retrieve serial number of the computer run the following command from command line

To retrieve model name of the computer run the following command from command line

This code doesn’t return information for all computers but it seems to work on  windows 7

Are Mobile phone companys going to go bust?

Wednesday, August 7th, 2013

I ‘ve been thinking for a while about smart phones, and maybe that the smart phone may kill the mobile phone company, how could this be ?….. well if you look at the way “Whats up” the messaging platform has taken off (below) http://siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/33724-mobile-network-killer-or/

It seems that people are starting to see that  you can message, and talk to people with out a mobile signal, and just a wifi signal, by using skype and whats up and viper. So where is this going, well if people can message each other with out the need for a mobile network, then why does one need a mobile network? I wonder what will happen when mesh networks start to become more widly avaibale on handsets, This is already starting on the Android platform with projects such as below

The Serval Mesh

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.servalproject&hl=en

There could be interesting times in the mobile networks, as we have near 100% moible phone penetration in some markets.

Map of Ireland with broadband

Tuesday, August 6th, 2013

Ireland off line have come up with a map of ireland, in relation to boradband, Might be worth checking out, if your trying to get good broadband.
http://irelandoffline.org/map/index.html