What must be one of THE most annoying features of Windows is that, post Windows Update, the constant reminders to reboot your PC. What is worse is that if you don’t do it then Windows will do it for you after five minutes. So if you have, say, popped off to make a cup of tea when you come back you will find your machine rebooted and that whatever you are in the middle of, such as burning a DVD, aborted.

This can all be incredibly frustrating as I found this morning. Fortunately there is a solution in the form … Read the rest

Having a clear out of some old books recently turned up the above bookmark given away with 80’s computer magazine Your Computer. The cover of the first edition, which I still have, is shown below featuring the then state of the art Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, BBC Micro and something I can’t identify right now. What’s interesting is what was considered jargon then. So, for example, we have “interface” that includes “A centronics or RS-232 interface [that] allows you to plug in most printers or disc drives”.

My particular favourite though is the advice on “an ordinary cassette recorder” … Read the rest

Oops! This is the message that is currently being displayed on all of the websites related to Peter Gabriel. AS you can see it seems that someone has stolen the servers his sites ran on from his ISP – not very secure it would seem. The Register is also reporting that the ISP is ultimately owned by the Carphone Warehouse so yet more bad publicity for them.… Read the rest

Here’s a great idea and a real life saver too – access to your BT home voicemail (1571 service) from any browser. As you can see from the image your messages are listed along with the number that made the call. You then have the opportunity to listen to the message or save it to your machine for archiving – something that could be useful.

One thing that the service doesn’t do is tell you when there is a message waiting. Clearly when I get home and I pick up the phone the interrupted tone lets me know that I … Read the rest