A friend sent me a reference to Google Linux.
Yeah, I said, hard to know where to focus forward. Currently I’m resisting modernizing my home computers – the newer one, that my son and I built back in ’02, is losing its motherboard. Leaky capacitors – it’ll still boot if you try several times in succession; I guess the capacitors build up a charge and then acquiesce. I’m going to try replacing the old motherboard with one that came out in ’04 (couldn’t find my exact model) – still using IDE drives and DDR (184 pin) memory. Meanwhile my son is now a sophomore in college and on his second laptop in 3 years….
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Upgraded My Memory
Well, the memory in my computers, anyway. I noticed my newer deskside computer seemed a bit sluggish running big progams like Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 under Windows XP Pro when I thought to check on how much RAM it had. When my son and I built it in 2002 we installed one stick of 512 MB DDR (PC2100). That just wasn't enough for the load I was putting on it, Task Manager showed I was trying to use about 600 MB. Oops, the OS was having to swap memory in and out.
So I checked the specs on my Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP motherboard and ordered two Kingston KVR333 (PC2700) 512 MB DDR DIMMs from newegg.com. Slightly faster memory and twice as much of it, whoo-hoo! Also kudos to Giga-Byte's support website: when the motherboard didn't recognize half the memory on the first try, they answered my e-mail question within a couple hours, providing some helpful hints -- turned out I just hadn't fully seated one of the DIMMs).
But that's not all; I took the 512 MB PC2100 DIMM that came out of the home built machine and put it into my slightly older Micron computer (it also has a Giga-Byte motherboard, a GA-7DX Rev 2.2). It previously had 384 MB and also runs XP Pro, so it could sure use a boost. It only has two memory slots, previously a 256 MB PC1600 and a 128 MB 200MHz PC1600. So I moved the 256 over and put in the 512 and voila, 768 MB -- I assume this all ends up running at the PC1600 speed, but still, I doubled the amount of memory in both my home computers, and the memory speed in one of them, for about $46, including shipping. (The home built machine still has an empty memory slot, I probably should have gotten another 512 MB stick. Hmmm. Also, if somebody needs that 128 MB DIMM, I'd part with it for a couple dollars, plus shipping) Now if I can resurrect the screen on the HP laptop that my son just handed down to me, we'll really be in business!
So I checked the specs on my Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP motherboard and ordered two Kingston KVR333 (PC2700) 512 MB DDR DIMMs from newegg.com. Slightly faster memory and twice as much of it, whoo-hoo! Also kudos to Giga-Byte's support website: when the motherboard didn't recognize half the memory on the first try, they answered my e-mail question within a couple hours, providing some helpful hints -- turned out I just hadn't fully seated one of the DIMMs).
But that's not all; I took the 512 MB PC2100 DIMM that came out of the home built machine and put it into my slightly older Micron computer (it also has a Giga-Byte motherboard, a GA-7DX Rev 2.2). It previously had 384 MB and also runs XP Pro, so it could sure use a boost. It only has two memory slots, previously a 256 MB PC1600 and a 128 MB 200MHz PC1600. So I moved the 256 over and put in the 512 and voila, 768 MB -- I assume this all ends up running at the PC1600 speed, but still, I doubled the amount of memory in both my home computers, and the memory speed in one of them, for about $46, including shipping. (The home built machine still has an empty memory slot, I probably should have gotten another 512 MB stick. Hmmm. Also, if somebody needs that 128 MB DIMM, I'd part with it for a couple dollars, plus shipping) Now if I can resurrect the screen on the HP laptop that my son just handed down to me, we'll really be in business!
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Free OCR
(Warning: Geek post, little entertainment value) Once upon a time the Xerox Textbridge Classic computer program for doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) worked for me. Even more than that it had worked recently, but it was finicky and this week I couldn't get it to work at all. It kept complaining about my C: drive being full. It wasn't. I had defragmented my C: drive recently. Maybe that was the culprit. Windows Explorer was also having issues: if I right clicked on the C drive and hit properties (e.g. to check how full the disk was), Explorer said it experienced a problem and had to close; and when it did it restarted the Windows desktop in order to recover. Swell. I did solve that problem, but it didn't help Textbridge. (When Explorer had its problem it offered to let me debug it, so I tried and that told me that there had been an access violation in neroshx.dll. I uninstalled the Nero CD burning software and that solved that -- I hadn't used Ahead Software's Nero in a good while anyway).
Textbridge had never worked that well, anyway.(For those who don't know OCR software can process a picture of some text and turn it into editable text for use in a program like Microsoft Word or Notepad. It's very handy if you only have a printout or old typewriter copy of something (and a scanner).) Textbridge tended to interpret things as all different fonts and very odd characters even when the digital image text was in one non-proportional font like Courier. But the last time I'd searched, several months ago, I hadn't found any freeware alternatives. That changed this time. I found Softi Software's FreeOCR on the ZDNet download site. It's based on the Tesseract OCR engine which is apparently Open Source (I think I found that last time I searched, but wasn't about to write my own application around the engine.). FreeOCR looks to have been posted in the last couple months. And the really good news is that it just works. At least on my old typewriter copies of text (see "The Little Wanderer" on The Chipster Zone web site).
Textbridge had never worked that well, anyway.(For those who don't know OCR software can process a picture of some text and turn it into editable text for use in a program like Microsoft Word or Notepad. It's very handy if you only have a printout or old typewriter copy of something (and a scanner).) Textbridge tended to interpret things as all different fonts and very odd characters even when the digital image text was in one non-proportional font like Courier. But the last time I'd searched, several months ago, I hadn't found any freeware alternatives. That changed this time. I found Softi Software's FreeOCR on the ZDNet download site. It's based on the Tesseract OCR engine which is apparently Open Source (I think I found that last time I searched, but wasn't about to write my own application around the engine.). FreeOCR looks to have been posted in the last couple months. And the really good news is that it just works. At least on my old typewriter copies of text (see "The Little Wanderer" on The Chipster Zone web site).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)