Windows

It’s pretty much the hottest new “device” on the block today and yes, there’s a damn good chance that it could replace or at least significantly supplement a laptop. And a tablet. And possibly a desktop PC too. Scrolling back just for a sec, a couple of months back I sent Red Gate Software some tips on optimising ASP.NET web apps which then made their way into their free eBook titled 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues (go and download it, I’ll wait). Turns out this was actually a competition for the best tip, also turns out the prize was a Microsoft Surface and also turns...

A few weeks back I wrote about The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 and boy did I hear some opinions! “Why should I be forced to upgrade?! I’m happy with my 11 year old OS dammit!” “I’m sick of Microsoft always changing things!” “Get off my lawn ya damn kids!” But most interestingly: “Why should I be forced to upgrade my hardware to run this new OS?!” Really? I mean I know there’s this unwritten law that newer software requires more resources but my experience with Windows 8 has always been that’s it’s way faster certainly than Windows...

As sure as night turns into day, sooner or later your PC will descend into an unrecoverable abyss where it no longer boots, stays booted or can’t even get booted to begin with. I’ve had memory go bad, motherboards die, CPUs fried, many mechanical disks develop bad sectors and now for the second time, an SSD gradually turn itself into nothing more than a paperweight. I now have a very robust backup strategy which I’ll come back to (courtesy of previously losing data and deciding that was never going to happen again!), but having a disk fail is about more than just restoring from backup, it’s about rebuilding the whole damn thing....

Do you remember what you were doing in October, 2001? You weren’t watching videos on YouTube, updating your Facebook status or even using the term “social media”. It was still the days of web 1.0 and REST was something you did when you were tired. If you had a puppy, it’s probably no longer with us. This was a cutting edge device: Websites were “Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5” and looked like this: That 800x600 image was the typical resolution too, it was the most your common 15” CRT screen (in 4:3 aspect, of course) could display. Advanced users might see 1024x768 on a 17” screen, but...