Everything Express
Hardware
Review: Motorola Moto G 3rd Gen Smart-phone
Three months with Motorola’s SIM-free smart-phone – £129 as at Dec 2015 – and one thing’s for sure: there’s no going back to contract phones filled with telecoms carriers’ bloat-ware crap. With a fine, full HD screen, good performance, a pure, unsullied Android experience with automatic updates, it’s a reminder of Motorola’s place as a … Continue reading
How-to: Computer Networking Primer Part I
The perils of being the ‘knowledgeable friend.’ At this time of year, this means family and friends acquire all sorts of shiny new tech kit, then ask someone with half a brain to help set up their home network. This often means me. Down the phone line. From a different country. So here we go; … Continue reading
How-to: Understand GSM and CDMA (phones) II
Last time, we started looking at the various phone standards, trying to avoide ending up in acronym hell. We got as far as GSM, CDMA, Edo, HSPA+ and roaming. This time we move on to 4G, LTE and into the future. While GSM and CDMA work using radio waves in a ‘traditional’ fashion; 4G works … Continue reading
How-to: Understand GSM and CDMA (phones) II
Last time, we started looking at the various phone standards, trying to avoide ending up in acronym hell. We got as far as GSM, CDMA, Edo, HSPA+ and roaming. This time we move on to 4G, LTE and into the future. While GSM and CDMA work using radio waves in a ‘traditional’ fashion; 4G works … Continue reading
How-to: Understand GSM and CDMA (phones)
You would think, by now, we’d have one global standard for mobile telecoms. But no. Depending on your country of residence, you may have a bewildering choice of cellphone standards. You want to buy a piece of technology to make your life better and easier: instead you end up in acronym hell. In the UAE, … Continue reading
How-to: Prevent Drive Failures with Gsmart [Guest Post]
Article originally appeared as SMART Tools: Preventing Drive Failures (Linux Lab by Charles McColm, Full Circle Magazine issue 82, Feb 2014) At our local computer refurbishing project, the top sources of hardware failure that we see are power supplies, CMOS batteries, RAM, and hard drives. The first three failures can cause systems not to POST … Continue reading
How-to: Choose FAT, exFAT or NTFS file systems
No, it’s not the latest diet fad. The story goes like this; I started to migrate a Windows Vista machine to Windows 7 (not for myself, I should add). When I plugged in an external drive for ‘Easy Transfer’ (this is Vista, so ‘easy’ is a relative term), the program decided it couldn’t cope with … Continue reading
How-to: Diagnose an SD Card that’s stopped working
It never ceases to amaze me how resilient is the humble SD card. They take heat, cold, damp, weight, an infeasible amount of weight, bending and mistreatment. And, unlike most of your other electronic gadgets, magnets and magnetism don’t affect SD cards; the amount of electro-magnetism it takes to corrupt the bits on EPROM flash … Continue reading
Review: Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Tablet
Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 $380 A thin, light tablet that looks like a stretched out Galaxy S4 with a 1280×800, 8.0-inch screen that is good for a TFT, but not even close to a Nexus 7. Which makes $380 a hefty price tag for a device that’s so very 1998: calling all stylus-lovers, you too … Continue reading
Review: Sony Xperia Z
Sony Xperia Z Tablet $500 If you want a 10-inch tablet that’s light, waterproof (up to a point) and performs almost as well as an iPad, Sony’s Xperia Z may be it. The 1920×1200 display may not be as good as the iPad’s Retina but it knocks spots off the competition. With a Qualcomm Snapdragon … Continue reading
Review: Microsoft Surface RT
Microsoft Surface RT $350 Remember the first Surface RT a few months back: ads full of clicky covers and no description of what the heck it was? For $500? Now with a prices cut of $150 down to $350, this may be worth another look – but take note – this is NOT the Surface … Continue reading
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