Wal*Mart has decided to shutdown all of its DRM servers, which means that if you downloaded music from Wal*Mart's music store, it is no longer playable. The good news is that if you are on of the millions that downloaded pirated music that is available from the music store, your music will still work. Read more at BoingBoing.
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One of the great things about Vista is that supports .pngs as icons. Unfortunately Microsoft decided to cover these great looking icons with unsightly shortcut arrows. Frameworkx has found an easy way to re-beautify your icons by shrinking or removing the shortcut arrow overlay.
Just download the Vista Shortcut Overlay Remover from the downloads section of their site, then install the program. Next run the program and pick the size of your arrow. It's that easy!
You can get the 32 or 64 bit version here.
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Microsoft has made the great decision of removing bundled apps that are current apart of Vista from Windows 7. This means windows 7 won't have under developed programs like Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Movie Maker and more. The bundled programs will be replaced with downloadable components from Windows Live. Hopfully this means that Windows 7 will be lighter and faster, and the Windows Live services should get updated and improved faster. You can read more at cnet.com
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MSI has released the MSI U90 which is an cheaper version of their popular MAI Wind (U10 0). The U90 costs about $150 less then the U100, but it is basicly the same computer. The only difference is it has an 80 GB hard drive rather than a 120 GB, and it has an 8.9 inch screen rather than a ten inch. Other than that everything is the same!
As you can see, all MSI did was put a smaller screen in to the case of the MSI U100. The U90's 8.9 inch screen has the same 1024X600 resolution as the U100's 10 inch screen, so if you want to save some money and don't mind a slightly smaller screen, then you may want to consider the U90.
Other articles you may be interested in:
Fix the netbook 1GB RAM limit
The new EEE Box B202 Desktop
6 cell Wind due this September!
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ArsTechnica has an interesting article saying that people have found pirated software and Asus internal files on Asus supplied recovery DVDs. Asus say's that they don't know how it happened. Some of the things found on the disks include pirated software in a 
folder labeled "Crack", confidential Microsoft documents, internal Asus documents, source code for Asus software and a PowerPoint presentation outlining major problems that Microsoft has found with it's operating system and programs. To make matters worse, PC Pro said that one of it's readers even found personal files of Asus employees- including resumes.
Asus told PC Pro that "We will be investigating this at quite a high level. Once the investigation is complete, we will ensure it doesn't happen again."
You can read more at Astechnica
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With the usability and functionality of netbooks casting a bad light on Vista, Microsoft decided to limit all netbooks running XP home to maximum of 1 GB ram. Luckily for us, this isn't a hardware of software limitation, just a OEM licence limitation. This means that your netbook may support 1.5 or even 2 GB of RAM! all you have to do is install it your self.
Here are some links that may help you upgrade the ram in your netbook.
EEE Pc:
Article: http://www.geek.com/eee-pc-chronicles-part-3-memory-upgrade/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_7ZZxb_q1g
Acer Aspire One:
Video: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/2008/08/29/how-to-add-ram-to-the-acer-aspire-one-netbook/
HP Onenote:
Article with Video: http://www.hp2133guide.com/how-to-upgrade-the-ram-in-the-hp-2133-mini-note/
Dell Inspiron Mini 9:
Picture: http://eeepc.net/dell-inspiron-mini-9-easy-to-upgrade/
There's no directions, but you just remove the bottom panel, take out the old ram and add the new ram.
MSI Wind:
Walkthrough: http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/msi-wind-ram.aspx
Have fun voiding your warranty !
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I was reading at article the other day that talked about how the hardest part of switching to a Mac is not being able to install any Windows software on it. Luckily this is not true.
Most Linux users know of the great program called Wine, and love how you can install 
alot of Windows programs in Linux with having to do having Windows installed. There is a Mac version of the same program called Darwine (a play off the Darwin Bootloader name)
All you you have to do is go to the Darwine site, click download on the left and select your version, then just drag n drop the Darwine file to your application folder and you're all set.
I don't have a Mac yet so I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet, but I have heard great things about it. If anyone has any experience with Darwine, please tell us about it in the comments.
I just updated the "Microsoft Office 2007 on Wine on Linux Ubuntu!" post. It has new links that give more in-depth directions. Now it is even easier to run Microsoft Office in any Linux distribution! Have fun being more productive in Linux!
One of the many things I love about Linux is the ability to move a window just by holding the Alt key and then clicking and dragging the window. The ability to do this is a real time save when you have multiple windows open or have a large monitor.
I have been trying to find an easy way to get this functionality in Windows and when Vista came out, I hoped that Microsoft had added it, but they didn't (surprise!). So after doing some research on I found an AutoHot Key script on HowToGeek.com.
Basicly, all you have to do is download the script from HowToGeek (direct Link). Then extract the .zip file and run 'AltWindowDrag.exe'. If you have AutoHot Key installed then you can run the AltWindowDrag.ahk file. Now if you need to move a window, you don't have to go all the way to the title bar to move it! just press and hold the Alt key while left clicking anywhere in the window and dragging! If you want to know more then you can read the orginal article at HowToGeek.com
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The Eee is one the hottest netbooks on the market and now has a new brother. Asus has launched the Eee Box B202 which is a downsized version of the Eee 1000.
It has Intel’s Atom N270 1.6GHz single-core processor, an 80GB hard drive (no solid state option), 1GB of RAM, 802.11n wireless plus a Gigabit LAN port. The Box also sports four USB ports (two at the front and two are the rear) plus a multi-format memory card reader, but an optical drive remains missing from the list.
The Eee B202 will have Windows XP or Linux and is small enough that you can stick on the back of your monitor, or if you put LinuxMCE on it, you caould just stick it to the back of your TV. Retail is expected to be from $270
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I planed on doing a big review on the new browser from Google called Chrome but it 
seems like everyone else beat me to it because I wanted to really give it a good testing and use it everyday before writing about it. Now, sadly, there is really no need because other web-sites have done that for me. So, here are some great Chrome related links:
Download Chrome from here.
Read Google's comic explaining all of the cool features here.
Lifehacker articles on Chrome.
ArsTechnia articles on Chrome.
And of course a Google search for Chrome.
ArsTechnica has the best articles on Chrome and Lifehacker has a lot of posts for customizing it. Most of the other articles I found were just reiterating what was on Lifehacker and Ars .
Sun Microsystems is working on a cool new 3d desktop called Project Looking Class. It is coded in Java so it is cross platform and should work fine on any operating system. The project hasn't been updated in about two years, so it doesn't look like this will ever compete with GNOME of KDE, but it still looks cool and is fun to play with.
Read more about Project Looking Glass at its Wikipedia article, or at its web site .
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I will no longer be adding tags to my postings because Blogger's great built-in search feature has made tagging obsolete. If you need to find an article on my site, then scroll to the top of the site, and type in a word or phrase into the black search box and hit enter.
The new posting schedule will be Mondays and Thursdays, with some posts in between days, but there will always be a new post on Mondays and Thursdays.
Last, incase you didn't notice already, you can click any image in a post to see the larger version on Flickr. The pictures that you see in the posts are low resolution to help CaseyTech load faster, so don't bother squinting to trying and read them, just click the image and see the larger version.
I spent Sunday afternoon installing and setting up Fedora! After installing I tried to connect to my wireless network but network manager applet keep saying that the connection had been disrupted. I knew I had a good signal and that my wireless card worked with Ubuntu so I should work with most distributions. But I also knew that Ubuntu was Debian based and Fedora was Red Hat based so it wouldn't surprise me if it did not work. after some quick Googleing I found out that all I had to do is tell the network manager the MAC address of my card. Here is how you do that:
1. Right click the Network Manager applet in the GNOME Panel and select 'Edit Connections'
2. Open a terminal window from Applications> System Tools>Terminal
3. In the terminal window type "/sbin/ifconfig" The outputted data is your networking card information. eth0 is Ethernet, wlan0 is your wireless card and HWaddr is you MAC address.
4. Back in the Network connections windows, select the Wired Tab, click add then copy the numbers after the word 'HWaddr' in to the 'MAC address'. Then Click OK.
5. For Wireless Internet, click the Wireless tab, then copy the 'HWaddr' from the wlan0 part of the terminal output, to the 'MAC address' and click OK.
You should now be connected to the Internet! If you are using wireless Internet and are not connected, then left-click the network manager applet and see if their are any networks to connect to. If there are then select it and now you should be connected!
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I recently helped someone setup their net laptop and they were upset because their 
camera drivers weren't working with Vista and nothing happened when they plugged in their camera. I told them that with modern operating (Linux, OSX, XP and Vista) systems you don't need to install drivers to use most things, and most cameras show up as USB mass storage or an external hard drive in the (My) Computer window.
If you have already installed drivers for your camera and it doesn't show up in the Computer window, then try uninstalling the drivers. To do that, plug your camera in to the computer, then click the start button (XP) or Windows Orb (Vista) and then right click on (My) Computer and select Manage. When the Computer Management window opens, click on Device Manager in the left panel. In the right panel you will see the device list. If you see an yellow warning triangles, ten you should right-click that device and select to uninstall that device. You may have to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
Another thing you should never do with a camera is install the 'helpful' companion software that comes with the camera. Most of this software is poorly made, not easy to use an, takes a large amount of hard drive space and adds extra programs that will run at start up and slow down your new computer. A example of this is the software that came with the HP camera that I use. The camera had a 7 Mb driver, a program to import the photos from the camera and put them in my Pictures folder, a program to edit the photos and a program to sort an tag the pictures. All of these programs took up a total of 1.37 gigabytes! I uninstalled all of it, then used Windows built in USB mass storage driver in place of the 7Mb driver, just drag-n-dropped the pictures to my Pictures folder instead of using the photo importer, I used GIMP to edit the photos instead of the bundled editor, and I don't tag my photos, but if I did then I would of used Picasa for the tagging and album making instead of the bundled tagger. I got all of the functionality of the bundles software for only about the 25Mb that the GIMP uses! And if I use Picasa then it would of only been about 45Mb! Plus I didn't get anything added to my start up list, so my computer still runs fast!
Read and learn more useful stuff at Caseytech!