Almost as Important as Sex

I chanced upon an article at Gizmodo that featured Intel's attempt to find out how important the Internet was to people. Well, you guessed it. Results of the survey showed that the Internet is almost as important as sex. Read more about sex and the Internet here.

ARP Cache Entry: How to Clear, Delete and Refresh

Here's something for me to remember. I found this at the My Digital Life site, and I thought I'd like to share this with anyone who might be interested.

OK, so here's how to clear, delete and refresh your ARP cache entry in Windows XP, 2003 and Vista. Simply open a command prompt window and type in:

netsh interface ip delete arpcache

Read more about it.

Inheriting a Compaq Armada M700

I couldn’t believe my stroke of luck when I found out that I was going to own a notebook computer. I had always wanted one, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself that it was worth spending for. Depreciation has always been my main concern, and that has prevented me from buying myself a notebook.

I only started wanting to own one when it occurred to me that a notebook’s power consumption is about half that of a desktop PC. You see, I pay the electric bills, and because my country’s government has not done anything to ease up that burden, I had to think of a way to increase my personal savings. A notebook was one solution.

My German brother-in-law had actually given the notebook to my brother, who in turn passed it on to me, most likely because he wanted to help me with my situation. I knew that my bro had two notebooks at the time, so I tried my luck and asked for the older of the two. To my surprise, he gave me the newer one. It sure felt like I won the lottery or something.

I couldn’t explain how I felt when I pulled out the notebook from the box. The word “COMPAQ” clearly printed on the box simply elated me. I didn’t care if it was an old model; the thrill of owning a notebook made me forget that.

What made me even luckier was the fact that my brother-in-law, an electronics tech guy who used to work at a Benz factory, took very good care of it. He put in 512Mb of memory, a 20Gb hard drive, and a CD/DVD combo. My M700 came with a docking station and monitor base, an extra LCD monitor, a USB card, a floppy drive, a spare power supply, an extra touchpad, a second 6Gb hard drive (which I plan to house in an enclosure with a USB port), and a backup battery. Even the operating system is an authentic Windows XP Pro. My sister also gave me a wireless mouse, which I really prefer to use instead of the touchpad.

My M700’s processor is a relatively sluggish Pentium III 500, but I turned off all the unnecessary services and used the classic Windows theme. I also removed the desktop wallpaper. In fact, for simple tasks such as doing wordprocessing, using spreadsheets, and watching YouTube videos, this puppy works very well. I sometimes forget what kind of processor it has. Anyway, if I could buy a 1Gb Pentium III board/processor and an English keyboard, everything would be perfect. Yes, everything is in mint condition. It feels like I bought everything brand new a few years ago. Good thing my bro took good care of the M700 too.

Anyway, I love my M700 a lot. I can’t type hard on the keyboard because I don’t want the letters to come off. Yes, even the keyboard is mint; it really looks and feels brand new to me. Looking back at the surplus notebooks and laptops being sold at stores around the city, I can’t imagine how badly treated those tech wonders once were. Seeing all those deep scratches and barely readable letters on the keys of those surplus laptops and notebooks being sold in stores makes me love my notebook even more. I am compelled to take good care of M700 the way its previous owners did.

One added advantage of owning a hand-me-down computer -- or any electronic gadget for that matter -- is the fact that I'm less scared to open it up compared to if it was brand new. In fact, I just got to take off the keyboard and memory modules, and it sure was a great learning experience. I would never take this computer to a technician.

So, if you own an M700, you don't like the idea of paying a technician who could potentially ruin your notebook or steal some parts from it, you're in the mood for some DIY fun, and you promise to be extremely careful, go check out this site that tells you how to disassemble a Compaq Armada.

Online at Last!

It was a nightmarish experience not being able to go online for three days, which is the longest I've ever waited. First, you still have to pay for the full month, and three days of complete inaccessibility to the Internet results in your being shortchanged. Second, if you're waiting for important e-mails that you want to reply to as soon as possible, going to an Internet cafe makes it really impractical unless you're willing to pay for long hours of possible futile waiting. Third, if you make money online, you not only lose money from being deprived of the Internet but also lose money from the potential amount of money you could have raked in.

There could be a slew of other reasons depending on your situation, but in short, Internet access is really vital for certain people, and Internet service providers should always keep that reality in mind. I don't know why my service provider doesn't have some kind of backup or contingency plan to keep subscribers online 24/7.

Still, I have to credit my Internet service provider for bringing service back to normal. For under 1,000 pesos -- 999 to be exact -- I guess MyDestiny is still the best there is here in the metropolis. Great job, people.

The Trouble with Manually Merging Bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox

My laptop computer sits on the table beside the cable modem and router, while my desktop PC is in my room. Sometimes I surf with the laptop and accumulate bookmarks in the process. I do the same with my desktop. Naturally, I end up having bookmarks in my laptop that are not in my desktop and vice versa.

After I've realized that there was a huge disparity between bookmarks in both computers, I decided to export my laptop's bookmarks to an HTML file generated by Firefox, which I then imported using my desktop, which also has the Mozilla browser. OK, so, when I clicked on the Bookmarks drop-down menu, what did I get? Chaos.

What would I like to happen? Automatic merging of bookmarks so there won't be any doubling up and so the bookmarks are listed in an orderly fashion. I didn't know about Foxmarks when I tried to merge the two HTML bookmarks files.

I can simply send that HTML file containing my bookmarks via e-mail or move a copy of the file using a USB drive or through our LAN to another computer. Now it would be very, very practical to simply import the HTML bookmarks file, and then the browser does the merging for you. I don't recall such a problem with Internet Explorer. I may be wrong though.

Can someone from Mozilla solve this inability to neatly merge HTML bookmark files and make life easier for all of us? Or perhaps a plugin or add-on that I haven't heard of already exists out there?

Thanks in advance!