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Toshiba Portege R100 - Installing Windows The Portege R100 was a high-end Ultrabook produced by Toshiba. Released in 2004, it was a thin, lightweight notebook, part of a series of machines carrying the Portege model name. The specs were an Intel Centrino Pentium M 1Ghz processor, Trident XP4 Graphics at 32Mb, Intel 855PM Chipset, up to 1.25Gb of DDR memory, 1024 x 768 XGA 12.1" Screen, and Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) coming in at less than 4lbs (1.81Kg) On release the price was over £2000, but this quickly dropped to £1500 to increase sales within business and office circles.  These notebooks have been quite sought after in the past few years, but are getting thin on the ground due to a few issues. One of those issues has been that they were thin and light-weight, meaning that they broke easily in the fat sweaty hands of over-weight business men, and parts were expensive, so lots of machines were broken down for parts.  The main problem in later years was that
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Retro PC Gaming   I can remember walking into a Game Shop as a kid and walking around, looking at the games on offer for the various computers of the day. There had been computers around for decades, but they were starting to be available to have in the home. The Spectrum, the Dragon, the Commodore 64, the Vic 20 and the BBC Micro. Not to forget the mighty Amiga and Atari ST. There were games galore, some on cassette, some on disk, and most were rather expensive, especially the big name companies.  Sometime later, the Personal Computer (PC) came into the price range of the mainstream user, IBM did a deal with Microsoft and Windows became the standard Operating System for the PC. Games started to get better as the equipment got better, processors got faster, memory got better and faster, graphics cards designed with gaming in mind were appearing in shops, with their own dedicated memory on board. I remember the first PC I bough
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Packard Bell TJ68 - Upgrade and Overheating   Allow me to introduce the Packard Bell TJ68 laptop This is one that I originally salvaged for myself, and my wife inevitably stole it from me. The TJ68 was never a powerhouse, built for general use, but designed to be upgradeable. If we flip the unit over we can see that the Hard drive bay is central, there are two pci-e, one with the wifi card and the CPU is also removeable So, this unit came into the store that I was working in around, maybe five years ago, and I really liked the look of it. It needed a screen, keyboard and a really good clean. This laptop had not been looked after in any way, shape or form. After estimating the potetial cost to the customer of the repairs, the customer decided, with indifference, to buy another machine and we bought this one for parts.  I decided to buy it and basically stripped it down, which turned out to be quite easy once I figured out how. Remove all screws, including back of t
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Which Ubuntu?   It has been released that Canonical will no longer be funding the Unity desktop for Ubuntu, and this has raised a lot of chatter within the various online communities, and also with new users. New users seem to be a little confused over Ubuntu and Ubuntu based operating systems, so I am going to try and compile a list of sorts here today.  As I have explained before, with some distributions you can choose different desktop distributions with linux operating systems. For instance, I am currently test driving KDE Neon, which uses the plasma desktop, Linux Mint is available with Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE and Mate desktops. The Unity desktop has been the main feature for Ubuntu for some years now, but will be using the Gnome desktop as a standard replacement. But people don't realise that you can already get Ubuntu Gnome, and various other desktop versions, so if you fancy trying them out, you can download them for free. I'll supply links but you can always googl
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Which Linux Operating System to choose????

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When you have a Windows computer, you have the various visual desktops, but each desktop is defined by the operating system running the machine. So even if skinned or themed, an XP desktop is found with XP, a Vista desktop with Vista, W7 with W7, etc. etc. This isn't always the case with Linux Operating Systems. As you may know, I have been a user of Linux, trying and tinkering since the early 2000's and over the last year and a half, maybe two years, I have been teaching myself to use Linux as an alternate Operating System to Windows. These days, Linux Operating Systems have come on in leaps and bounds, beautifully displayed, and are generally, out-of-the-box ready, with proprietary and free open source software built in, and in most cases can be run fully when installed. They are self updating and can be customised a great deal to suit your personal taste or configuration. There are different types of desktop, and most are available in various O.S.'
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