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I have been working on a computer for the last few days that is a few years old but would be used for playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X and it has been a bit of a battle.

First of all when I looked at the requirements it looks like it does not take much to run Microsoft Flight Simulator but in reality it takes a great computer and the best video card that you can get to run Microsoft Flight Simulator with the highest settings.

I started thinking that I could use a year old HP desktop but in the end that desktop had not slot for a new video card and as unacceptable as that seems I think it is a fact that many home users would never get a new video card for their computer so I guess I can ccept that. I found another machine, a Dell Optiplex GX 260 with a half gig of ram, a 2 gig P4 processor and an AGP slot. This better or worse is what I have sued for the Microsoft Flight Simulator install. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I downloaded the release candidate for Windows XP Service Pack 3 and installed it on both a VM and a secondary XP Pro machine and it seems to have passed the boot up test. I will be testing more today but so far the only differences between the SP3 RC and my old Windows XP SP2 is the computer performance, which is much faster then it was before and the loss of my address bar in the Windows Taskbar.

I  have been looking at the documentation that Microsoft has on the technet site and there is very little about what will bse included in the Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. It looks like we get a rollup of all the service packs, patches and security updates but there is no auto update to Internet Explorer 7. The Release Candidate for XP SP3 includes the updates to Internet Explorer 6 as well as anything for Internet Explorer 7.

Microsoft is very clear that there are almost no new enhancements in SP3. After the raft of changes a few years ago with Service Pack 2 this is a bit of a disappointment but I am sure that Microsoft would much rather have us all move to Vista then to continue with Windows XP

I have been looking aqt these Asus mini laptops for a while. They seem really useful and a great piece of technology to be travelling around with.

Just to let you know what they are made for, the Asus eee is a laptop without a hard drive, it uses flash memory for the OS and to save your files and comes as a really small form factor unit with a mini keyboard and a mini screen. I have seen that htey have Wifi and a simple Linux operating system but Asus says that they plan to ship it with Windows (I suspect the mini version of XP) by Christmas, still haven’t heard of it being out yet.

If you are wondering what the Asus eee is really supposed to be for, I have kind of wondered too. This unit would be great for traveling around town with internet sometimes, calendar always and the option to take any notes or type for a while on.

I think that this is the obvious next step form a PDA as much as people think that smartphones are the future. With a smartphone you get anything that does not require a keyboard really but I could not imagine any cellphone, even my blackberry, as being a replacement for a computer.

I have seen these Asus eee mini laptops in a local computer store but today Asus announced that they had shipped 350,000 so the popularity is definitly there and they will be in Best Buy and other stores in the new year, at that time sales will really pick up and we may see some limnitations as more people use them. So far I love what I see though even if I don’t have one in the palm of my hand yet.

Today I woke up to my Blackberry 8703 sitting with a white screen saying JVM 523 error reset. This was not a good start to the day. I fought with this error across my laptop and the internet for hours today and hope to save you hours trying to fix this.

One of the big problems with the newer Blackberry units is that there is no reset button. Everytime I tried to reset the damn thing I would watch as it would boot up and just as I was about to put in the password - flash - the JVM 523 error would come back.

So now that I have fixed it I will tell you how to get your blackberry up and running again. first of all know that you will lose all the data on the blackberry so if you have no backup, sorry, you will now have a clean slate to work with. Fortunatly I am on a BES server so this is not a big deal to me. OK, now that you know that your data is gone….letting it sink in there….you will be able to rescue your connectivity to the world in two steps with two pieces of data. OK here goes… Read the rest of this entry »