TweakHound

Computer stuff...

Eric (a.k.a. TweakHound)

Tuesday Random Stuff

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space12345Random Tuesday morning news from around the web.

Ed Bott is at it again: The Metro hater’s guide to the Windows 8.1 Preview

Tom’s Hardware has tested 31 USB 3.0 Thumb Drives. Their “winner” is the SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Model SDCZ80-064G-A75. A comment to the article led me to check out the Newegg reviews in which 45% gave this drive one star (as of this writing). Faster isn’t always better.

Wanna know what wi-fi would look like?

Do not mess with Kevin Rose’s dog!

New pics from NASA of the Earth from 898.414 million miles (1.445858 billion kilometers) away.

Acronis True Image 2014 Beta Invite

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ti2013_logo2Acronis True Image 2014 Beta Invite

What’s New?
– Disk backup to Acronis Cloud Back up your system or other partitions directly to the Cloud saving all data and partition structure.
– Bare metal system recovery from the Cloud When your system becomes unbootable or you change your hard drive, you can recover your system from Acronis Cloud using Bootable media.
– Incremental recovery from the Cloud When you recover a partition from the Cloud, data is recovered incrementally. It makes the operation very fast.

Random Saturday Stuff

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www_newsI got busy and didn’t get around to posting yesterday. To me, it was a pretty boring week news wise. I really couldn’t give a rip about the Microsoft re-org which seemed to be the major headline this week.

Not new and certainly not concise but the Makeuseof Best Of Apps is the best I’ve seen.

The How-To Geek has a handy article up: How to Easily Transfer Files Between Nearby Smartphones

Not news. This week several sites mentioned an article where the author discovered that if Firefox is running slow it may help to disable hardware acceleration. This “new discovery” has been known by Geeks for some time thanks to the Mozilla support page and 2 year old articles like this one. :rolleyes:

System Ninja 2.4.3 is out. It is another good system cleaner brought to you by the same folks who do CCEnhancer.

One change to Android Apps I Use. I had to switch from AdFree Android to AdAway as it was causing too many issues navigating sites.

PC Sales Drop 5 Straight Quarters

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oldpcPC sales see ‘longest decline’ in history
Unlike many Geeks and tech pundits, I do not think Windows 8 is a major reason for most people not buying computers. I’m not saying it isn’t a factor, just not a major one.
My take on why PC sales are down:
1 – Money is tight. Most folks don’t have the extra cash to spend on a new computer.
2 – Little or no performance benefit. Truth is many folks only use a fraction of their computers potential. Unless you are a gamer, that 3 year old computer probably does everything you want it to do with room to spare.
3 – Smart phones and tablets (obviously). Within the aforementioned group is a group of people who have no need for a computer at all. Email, social networking, and surfing the web can all be done with their gadgets. Gadgets have replaced the need for multiple computers in many homes.

The PC market is never going to be what it was. Today it is all about mobility and convenience. Having earlier stated that I did not believe Windows 8 was a major factor in people not buying PC’s I also do not believe Windows 8.1 will be a factor in helping sales. The retirement of XP may help though. The biggest factor that I believe will help PC sales is an economic rebound.