crusty ol laptops vs Droid

My Apple iBook G4 is dead tech. It has almost always functioned perfectly and continues to do so. However, I ask less and less of it as time goes on. It has a PowerPC processor which cuts it off from being able to play a lot of streaming media (such as Netflix) and OS X is no longer being updated for it. It's a dead platform. It's no longer being supported and its weak graphical capabilities are beginning to flag under the weight of today's graphics-rich computing experience. It's done its job admirably for around 6 years and I'm thankful for that. But there's part of me that desires to smash it to pieces on the ground. I'm done with it. I wants a sweet new computer.

Speaking of dead tech, I'm typing this on my trusty old Toshiba Satellite. This tank is even older than my iBook. It has better stickers on it, though. Plus, it's able to stream Netflix. It also has Office, which the iBook lacks. The more time I spend in my electronics classes the more I feel that I'm much better off with a Microsoft-based computer. I also took a Cisco class and its online curriculum was much better suited and tailored for Windows.

The iBook is my music center. Almost all of our music is on there and I often use it for Last.fm, MySpace music, and Pandora. The Toshiba is where I get things done.

Battling the laptops for computer time is my Droid. I use it more than I use the laptops. It does everything they do and almost always does it just as well. Sometimes the system lags a little and sometimes there's network lag but such occurrences are not often and the Droid is ridiculously convenient. It does everything I need a computer to do except that I wouldn't use it to compose anything longer than a text message or short email, but even that's changing. I recently downloaded Swype and it's been great.

To sum up: iBook is a jukebox, Toshiba is for typing and Electronics Workbench, and Droid is for everything else.

Happy New Year

Lazy Man's XP Optimization

I recently did a Live search for the terms "optimizing xp in older machines". The first link Live gave me was Optimizing Windows XP on an older machine. The link led to a useful page. That's all I ask for from a search engine.

From there I chose Eric's first link, A faster Windows XP? Here's how. I followed the instructions to disable indexing services. Cool. I just learned a little about how Windows XP works, and I sped up my computer a little.

Afterword
The more I learn about how computers and operating systems work, the more I realize that they use a significant amount of resources doing things that most people don't care about or need. I'm also surprised by how much is required of a computer's processor(s) to just deal with the increasingly graphics/video-centric Web. I wonder how many computer crashes are caused each day simply by going to MySpace.

Chrome Your Windows

Yesterday I downloaded Google's new web browser, Chrome.  I went so far as to bring my old Windows laptop out of its bag in the closet, slog through the Service Pack 3 install, and a slew of other updates in order to test drive Chrome.  I've gone back and forth from Chrome to Internet Explorer (7) to Safari.  Chrome seems to be faster than IE.  The Safari comparison isn't fair because it's on my iBook G4 which has 4x as much RAM as my Windows computer, a Toshiba Satellite which I've had for like 6-7 years.  Also, I'm not familiar with Windows shortcut keys so I can't switch through different windows as quickly as I can on my Mac.  I like to work with multiple browser windows as opposed to multiple tabs.  I like the expose feature (or whatever it's called) on OS X which lets me view all my open windows at once.  Yeah, with XP, I can just look down at the taskbar and see what's open but it gets crowded quickly and isn't as easy for me to find what I'm looking for.

Anyhoo, this is supposed to be about Chrome.  Like I said, it appears to be faster than IE and so far every page I've looked at has come up looking good and proper.  I LOVE how Chrome allows you to pull tabs out into separate windows and put them back into one window by simply dragging and dropping.  That's cool.  I also like how it allows you to easily convert something like Blogger to a sort of standalone widget.  In Google's words:

Many websites, such as email services, operate like actual programs, similar to those on your computer desktop. Google Chrome supports these web applications by providing a special window designed specifically for web applications.

Microsoft might be annoyed by the emergence of a Google web browser but there's an upside: Chrome encouraged me to step away from my Apple for a bit and get reacquainted with my Windows-based machine.