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my computer
contents hardware software network broadband my computer > hardware » At work I've gone through more boring corporate computers than I care to remember. After the PRIME mini at NIESR they've all tended to be bland work horses. My current work machine is an IBM x40 Thinkpad. It's not that bad: lightweight and reasonably robust (Monday to Friday I carry it all over the place) but the network police are frustrating as hell. » At home I've gone through fewer computers and with one exception they have been bought second hand or put together by cheap back street shops. My favourite was a second hand Gateway that was brought over from the US when the original owner moved to Scotland. The Gateway had one of the original Pentium chips that could not add up. The Gateway had two hard disks which meant that it was easy to run two operating systems - originally MS-DOS and OS/2 when I bought the computer. I ended up running Windows 95 and Red Hat Linux before passing the computer on to someone else. » I then went through two computers with AMD processors, the second of which was built by Zora Computers in Glasgow. This lasted well over 5 years. My current desktop is a basic Acer tower. An old Philips 150S1C/00Z LCD monitor completes the package - a neat feature on the monitor is the "auto" button that automatically adjusts the monitor's settings. Push this if the display looks really flaky. my computer > software » The Acer runs Windows Vista Professional which I would dump if it wasn't for Bill Gates' unfortunate grip on my employer and family. Web Authoring involves a text editor TextPad and a FTP client SmartFTP. Finally, web browsing by Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. my computer > a linux based laptop » We leased a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop from BT under the old home computer tax break back in November 2005 which Sue used daily for over two years before its Windows XP OS fell over. Fortunately Sue managed to recover her photos before the end. In April 2009 I installed Ubantu 8.10 which has given the Dell a new lease of life. This is the first laptop I've played with at home and the first Linux installation that has really worked for me. » The Dell has a 1.86GHz Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor, 512MB RAM and 60GB hard disk. Generate a detailed hardware profile by command line sudo lshw -html > hardwareprofile.html. my computer > wireless network » A Belkin ASDL modem / router runs our 802.11g network. At home you can access the router. my computer > broadband » Orange rent us the ASDL connection that they rent from BT. It works - although how much that has to do with Orange I could not say. I've just found out that Orange block port 25. Time to change. » It's possible to run a crude test of the speed your internet connection's is really running at by timing how long it takes to download a file of known size. Robin Walker, McAfee speedometer and bandwith place do the maths. |
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maintained by john ireland | last updated 19.04.09 |