Consumed Consumer . org

I was hit - for the nth time - with the now familiar face of MSN Messenger in my tray at a system start-up. I've decided to document my uninstall efforts this time, to reduce the chances of the nightmare reoccurring.

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

I recently noticed this question asked and started to wonder myself. Having had to make subtitles for one of my foreign language movies, I was surprised to learn that there is a vibrant community of people making subtitles out of scratch for movies they trade online.

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.

I recently had to play a bit with a new installation of Ubuntu and again, old unnerving ghosts came back to haunt me. Since these ghosts have a habit of tormenting indiscriminately, I am sharing my solutions with you.

When working on the CLI (command line interface) or, as it is widely known, "the prompt", most people prefer to set certain shortcuts as typing the same thing over and over is not something anyone enjoys. In Linux, such shortcuts are called aliases. This is a continuation from choosing and then setting up your first VPS .

I recently got another used laptop off eBay. It came without an OS so I was going to install Linux, but seeing that Windows 10 has just become available for download, I decided to give it a try and install Linux alongside, in dual boot. First, let us look at downloading the ISO, comparing the 3 possibilities: NetSession, Direct and BitTorrent. This article represents my pre-install research – the install experience and tips coming up soon.

I have recently unearthed a computer I haven't touched in a while and together with it the problems that frustrated me initially. Not only that the problems did not go away, but now the computer seems to suffer abandonment issues. This is a multiboot machine and it seems that the CD-ROM / DVD burner is identified by all OSs but it is unusable in only one of them. I'm showing you how to fix this problem.

After unsuccessfully trying to install VMware Server 2 in prior versions of Ubuntu I finally managed to get it to work. I still can't believe it was this easy! Finally, I can run WLW and play with all the other OSs I've been dying to try!

Blogger has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Quite a few improvements have been introduced –first in draft- since Google took over, but the pressure to innovate has been diluted partially through the rising profile of the Wordpress self-hosted platform, where most serious bloggers reside. Yet lately, Blogger has been giving signs that some improvements may be coming. We are looking at the latest and best tips we could find for this platform:

One of my favourite winter things to do is cooking good food. After all, you’re stuck inside for longer than usual, you get those carb cravings, and what better way to fight that then with good, wholesome, homemade food?

Not long ago I dropped my old trusty tablet hybrid on the floor and the monitor went blank. I had to quickly purchase a new laptop, which itself was fixed only days ago. I will discuss here how I got a new one and what others can do when their laptop is almost dead to retrieve their data.

I was a happy camper this afternoon, on a lazy sunny Sunday, trying to decide between a bicycle ride and wasting time on the 'net.

Each operating system has different special characters to mark the end of line (EOL) or end of file (EOF) in simple text files. If transferring by FTP, the file conversion may be done automatically by your client based on the file extension or you could force it using the ascii command before the transfer; if not, you may have to employ the methods we discuss below.

We recently needed an older computer and discovered we had forgotten a login password. Our development server for designing and testing a website will most likely reside on an older laptop running in dual boot with Windows XP SP 3 and Backtrack Linux 5.

We recently learned that Canada's Competition Bureau (7) took the unusual step of warning the public about several hoaxes perpetrated on the Internet and not only (9). This is a good opportunity for this article, since after getting for the nth time a chain email from a friend, I had already decided it's about time I write this little ditty, in the hope that if I am to receive more junk / chain mail from friends, they will at least be more interesting / innovative.

One of the most annoying "features" in Windows is the "Compressed Folders" feature, where Zip files are displayed as folders. While this may be nice for some, most users accumulate a large number of zip files in a folder, making it unviewable in Windows Explorer. We look at how to get rid of it.

After having a look at the more specific driver issues related to installing the latest version of Ubuntu linux on my Toshiba Tablets , it’s time to have a more general – and, hopefully, useful to more readers – look at what’s new and what needs to be changed in this new install. Obviously, I’m building upon my previous install notes ( 10.10 ).

Unlike softphones , discussed in the first instalment of our beginner’s guide to VOIP , hardware solutions enable you to use the regular phone(s) you are presumably accustomed to use. There are three major solutions that could enable your home phone line to be routed over the Internet.

Recently, my Linksys VoIP adapter malfunctioned. Here's my adventure in customer support.