Killing the Crapware

If you’ve bought a new Windows-based computer in the last 2 or 3 years you know that it came with a ton of applications and applets that you just don’t need.  This slows down your computer and start-up seems to take forever.

George Ou over at Tech Republic posted this handy guide to killing crapware on your computer.  It’s great and I recommend that everyone does this.  Proceed with caution.  Some computers (Thinkpads come to mind) need some proprietary services running in order to work correctly.  Here’s an excerpt:

One of the things that bother me the most about the PC industry is the inclusion of all that crapware (or crapplets) PC makers put into their computers. The same thing extends to the software industry as a whole. Every time you download some software, you’re prompted (often the default setting) to install some kind of add-on for your Web Browser. By the time it’s all said and done, we’re looking at a computer that spends three to five minutes booting up and a Web Browser that’s so jacked up that half the screen real estate is taken up by utilities that people never use. Of course, this isn’t entirely unique to the PC industry, and I’ve seen Macs loaded with lots of junk during the startup process as well, but at least you don’t get all that crap in a brand new Mac.

General Protection Fault

In this episode I interview Jeff Darlington the creator of General Protection Fault.

Feel free to leave comments or send feedback to geek{at}jesusgeek{dot}info. You can call and leave voicemail at 518-290-0228. This podcast is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Jesus Geek is a member of the My Life Ministries Network: a community of ministries that views the everyday Christian life as a ministry and seeks to encourage Christians in their daily walk with Christ.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

• General Protection Fault
• Neural Core Dump (Jeff’s Blog)

Download mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:39 — 13.6MB)

21 Biggest Technology Flops (so far)

Microsoft Bob topped the charts as the biggest tech flop according to Computerworld’s readers.

For Computerworld readers, no other product or technology comes close to Microsoft Bob for sheer floppiness. The second place pick, dot-bombs, received 1,000 fewer votes than Bob.

The top-5 looked like this:

• 1st place: Microsoft Bob, with 4,924 votes (16% of the total)
• 2nd place: Dot-bombs, 3,870 votes (12%)
• 3rd place: The paperless office, 2,828 votes (9%)
• 4th place: DIVX {the player, not the codec — ed.}, 2,704 votes (8%)
• 5th place: Iridium, 2,615 votes (8%)

If you’d like a trip down memory lane or a harbinger of the future (because history tends to repeat itself), check out this article.

Toyota #1 auto manufacturer for Q1 2007

It was bound to happen, via Bloomberg.com:

Toyota’s global sales rose 9.2 percent to a record 2.35 million vehicles, the company said today. Sales at GM, the world’s largest carmaker for 76 years, gained 3 percent to 2.26 million vehicles, also a record, GM said on its Web site.

Note to GM: gas prices are going up so drop the Hummer and go for a hybrid.

Between the Walls on TBN tonight at 11PM PST

Just a quick reminder to watch Between the Walls tonight on TBN at 11PM PST/ 2 AM EST.

If you would like to see Between the Walls aired and a more reasonable hour, contact TBN via their website or you can write:

Trinity Broadcasting Network
P. O. Box A
Santa Ana, CA 92711

Thanks for watching and listening.

Feel free to leave comments or send feedback to geek{at}jesusgeek{dot}info. You can call and leave voicemail at 518-290-0228. This podcast is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Jesus Geek is a member of the My Life Ministries Network: a community of ministries that views the everyday Christian life as a ministry and seeks to encourage Christians in their daily walk with Christ.

Download mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.6MB)

Samsung releases new laptop with hybrid HDD

Samsung appears to be the first laptop maker out of the gate with the new hybrid HDD:

Samsung has announced it’s first laptops with new Hybrid HDD built in. The first to get this Hybrid HDD upgrade is 15.4″ Samsung R55 multimedia notebook.

So what is a hybrid hdd?

Hybrid HDD is a technology that ads a flash RAM chip to the standard HDD. This way most frequently used data can be stored and read from flash memory, reducing the usage (spin) of HDD itself.

So what does that mean to me?

According to Samsung, when used for small chunks (up to 10Mb) of data in R55, Hybrid Hard Drive had 26% improvement on data reading and 71% improvement of datawriting speed, 32% lower power consumption and increased HDD longevity by 10%.

No, really, what does it mean to me?  OK.  You can access all of those old episodes of The Transformers faster that you downloaded from a bit torrent site.

RIM plans to expand to Windows Mobile devices

Think the recent Blackberry outage will slow RIM’s progress? Think again…

Research In Motion is set to roll out new software that will let users turn smart phones running on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform into virtual BlackBerrys.

Wow. Now instead of the battery on a WM device last 2 hours you’ll only get about 45 minutes of use out of it. That puts it on par with the iPhone, if you can believe the rumors.

The software will appear as an icon on the screen of a smart phone and will have the same interface as a BlackBerry. Users will be able to toggle between the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry interfaces, the company said.

Hmmm…does that mean we’ll see smart phones will scroll wheels and/or trackballs? While I think this is a great idea on RIM’s part, my experience with smart phones has been that the battery life is dreadful and smart phones aren’t designed to preserve battery life like a Blackberry.