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Tech News & Commentary
Jamie in Tampa, Florida listens to the Podcast and asked: “I have a basic cell phone. Samsung flip phone. It dies as fast as I charge it up. Is it a problem with the battery? What do you think it is?”
It does sound like it’s a problem with the battery. How old is this phone? If it’s a few years old, then it’s likely that the battery just aged and can’t hold a charge anymore. Batteries don’t last that long.
If you want to keep the phone, you can look for a replacement battery. They tend to be fairly inexpensive. You can probably find one for $15 or $20, but you could also look into replacing the phone altogether.
You can obviously get a smartphone. They’re the dominant phones on the market these days. But, if you haven’t so far because you haven’t wanted to, phone companies will still sell you a flip phone and for very little money too, so you can just look into replacing the phone for very little or no money.
If you want to go really, really cheap, you can get an Acer Aspire with a dual core processor, 320GB of hard drive space and 4GB of RAM for as little as $350 on Newegg.com. That’s 70% of the price of an iPad.
For about $400, you can get a laptop with similar specs from Lenovo, and models from ASUS are available for around the same price, too. If you’re willing to spend more money you can get a much better computer, but if you’re a first time time owner that won’t be doing anything too complex those should work for you without costing you too much.
Now as for the cost to own … there’s really not a huge cost to own a computer. You’ll spend money powering it, but it’ll cost you less than powering your TV. It may even cost you less than powering a single light bulb.
Most modern laptops run on around 60 watts of power per hour, some on a little more, some on a little less, but it’s hardly a huge expense. You could consider adding extra RAM or an external or larger internal hard drive as part of the cost of ownership, but most normal users don’t ever really do either of those… really, the bulk of your cost will be the purchase and the use, not the maintenance, and with options starting at as little as $350, you might be better off getting a replacement in a few years rather than investing on this one anyway.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
“It seems like crowdfunding is all the rage, especially in the video game world. Julie Uhrman has come up with a plan to make a hackable game console based on the Android OS, using some fairly off the shelf tablet parts combined with a twin-stick controller design. The console would use the Tegra 3 quad core processor and is planned for a $99 price point. Julie calls it Ouya and sought to raise $950,000 for its development on Kickstarter. How’d she do? In just over 12 hours, she raised more than $1 million. Pretty sweet, eh?
BioWare has announced some changes in Star Wars: The Old Republic. After insisting that they would “NEVER HAVE A FREE TRIAL” they have added…of course, a free trial. The game is now free to play with no time limits, up to a level cap of 15. There are other restrictions, of course, but it does go to show that SWTOR isn’t retaining subscriptions as they’d like. They’re patching the game to version 1.3 this week and offering 7 days free play to former subscribers to get them to try it out. The 1.3 patch expands the legacy system, adds a group finder tool, implements a wardrobe (sort of) for custom appearances, and a few other miscellaneous niceties.
Bethesday shipped Dawnguard this week, the first DLC expansion for their epic RPG Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Players choose a faction alignment, either with the Dawnguard or with the Vampire Lord Harkon (that’s right…vampires, but not those sparkly ones with feelings, these are real blood suckers). BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 will get a FREE DLC with a revised ending next week, in response to player outrage. But I’ve got news for you people, Shepherd STILL HAS TO DIE. In case you missed it, he’s a Christ figure in the game. He’s been on a path to sacrifice himself to save everyone else, and BioWare’s not going to let you cheat that.
There are more video game inspired movies in the works, with Deus Ex and Assassin’s Creed both being tapped for some big money, big studio productions. Someone please tie up Uwe Boll and keep him away from these projects. PLEASE?
And my favorite MMO, Rift, delivered another content patch. Version 1.9 of the game adds barbershops, a mentoring system where high level players can temporarily reduce their levels to play with in previous content that they’ve otherwise out-leveled, and Conquest – a new three-faction Player Vs. Player system that has generated a TREMENDOUS amount of noise, and not all of it good. Trion Worlds is tweaking Conquest right now, trying to get it balanced, but this appears to be the first serious struggle the developers have had with a new feature in Rift. It was a bold move to revamp PvP play – we’ll see whether it pays off.”
John in Detroit, Michigan listening on WCAR 1090 asked: “I have two hard drives in my computer – a ‘C’ and a ‘D’ drive. My C drive is very full and I have already deleted any files that I don’t need. I have a lot of available space on my other hard drive. Is there any way to move some of my programs that are installed on my C drive, to my D drive?”
Programs? No. But if you are running Windows 7, you can easily relocate your libraries. That’s where Windows stores all your documents, videos, photos, and music. So moving them to the D drive will free up a lot of space.
Here’s what you do. Click the Start button, then click your name at the top of the right column. That will open up your User folder. Look for My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos. You’ll see each one of these folders in your User folder. Right click on each of them and choose Properties. Click the Location tab at the top. Edit the location to be a folder on the D drive. When Windows 7 offers to move the existing files, say yes.
Windows will move the files from C to D drive, and then it will automatically update that folder in each of your libraries. Now, if you have created additional folders outside of those four standard ones, you will need to move those folders manually and edit the library location manually as well. Just remove the old folder and add it back in its new location.
But programs install themselves into a folder when you first load them and that’s the folder they need to remain in. If you plan ahead, you could make a Program Files folder on your D drive and load new programs there, but once you’ve installed them on the C drive you should leave them alone. It is technically possible to edit all the necessary registry settings to move a program installation, but it’s a lot of work and you still run the risk of things not pointing to the correct locations.
By the way, this is one area where Apple has it all over Windows. In Mac OS X, you can move a program between drives simply by dragging its folder from one drive to another. None of this wonky registry editing to do. Hope that helps! Let us know how it goes.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
In 1939, the United States became the third country, after Germany and Great Britain, to begin regular television broadcasts. President Roosevelt himself started the broadcast during the World Exhibition in New York. As television had become a reality, the Big German Radio Show which had started in 1924 to make radio reception and the necessary machinery popular, was renamed in 1939 and became “The Big German Radio and Television Exhibition”, making it the first television show in the world and the show that would later become the Internationale FunkAusstellung. Today IFA is still the number one show.
| HOUR 3 GUESTS | ||
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| Steve Koenig, Director, Industry & Analysis – CEA | Chinese reception | Angus Bryan – BrandsMart USA |
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| The TV Tower | AOC’s booth at SINOCES | Driving in 3D |
| Touring Shanghai | ||
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Dragon landscaping |
Dave and Rob in front of the Oriental Pearl Tower |
The foggy skyline |
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| Karaoke night | A motorized rickshaw | The Shangai Apple Store |
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| Chinese crowds | Touring the city | Chinese flags decorating the streets |
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Boingo: Several 60-day Certificates — With Boingo you can connect online at free and paid Wi-Fi hotspots.
Kingston: 16GB SD memory cards and a MobileLite G3 (USB 3.0 Card Reader)
Idea Incubator: Several txtRng — “the stylus with style”. This is a unique stylus Rob recently featured it on our Product Spotlight.
Radio Shack: Auvio Element Earbuds with Microphone