Have you ever heard of a Chumby? No? Me too. Until today that is.

A Chumby is a small little Linux computer built into a cushion. Yes, that’s what it looks like. Chumby is made to provide its users with Internet and LAN access via a Wi-Fi connection. It is actually a small touch screen inside a bean bag. If it’s not for the screen, it might even look like a bean ball. It also functions as an alarm clock to wake you up in the morning. And it does look like an alarm clock.

The Chumby Alarm Clock

Chumby has a 3.5 inch touch screen. Even though it is small, the screen is bright enough for easy reading. And then at the back of the Chumby, you can find the USB ports, the power jack, earphone jack and the on/off button.

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I hear so many people complain about Windows Vista lately. I do have a few complaints about Vista myself, but overall I think it’s still a pretty good Operating System, including its bundled Disk Defragmenter which is located in System Tools, under Accessories.

Let’s start the Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter and have a look. Looks like it’s scheduled to run once every week, by default.

You can force the defragmentation to start immediately by clicking on the “Defragment now” button of course. But compare to Windows XP, there is no progress bar now. This is because the defragmentation process in Vista is non-linear unlike Windows XP’s, so there is no way to estimate accurately how much time a defrag would possibly take. Instead of trying to show estimates of how much time the defragmentation will take, the defrag team came up with a better solution: reducing the impact of defragmentation on your computer by making it use low-priority I/O and low priority CPU, so you can still use it and do what ever it is you do while the defrag is on. That’s why the whole process is scheduled to run in the background! So smart can die…

Now, many do not know you can also invoke the defrag tool from the command prompt. Check out a screen shot below.

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I bet that picture caught your interest. Who doesn’t want to get a free Windows yeah?

Now, before you go and search Microsoft’s website for a free edition of their their ‘over the top expensive and fairly new’ Operating System, you might just want to finish reading this article first. You just might change your mind about switching to Vista.

Have you ever wondered why every initial release of a Windows is never the best in quality and is always full of bugs? Now you can see what Windows Vista is clearly made of.

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With the torch relay event just graced us last Monday, the Beijing Olympic Games 2008 is seems to be what people are talking nowadays. It is a hot topic in the kopitiam, on the television news, in the newspapers and of course, the ever reliable Internet. But the games is hardly what’s on everyone’s mind. It is the Pro-Tibet / Pro-China protests that are all over the news, sharing the limelight with the biggest sports event this year.

If you have yet to hear about these protests, or the Beijing 2008, I have to ask you this, which cave have you been hiding in? In a nutshell, Pro-Tibet groups have used this year’s Olympic Games opportunity to create awareness and to give pressure to the Chinese Government to free Tibet from its choking hold.

This article will not describe more about these protests but instead will concentrate on the latest news on Internet Security. Since hackers and Internet criminals always rely on the Internet trends of the moment to execute their illegal scheme, they have now chosen the China / Tibet controversy to target their victims and wreck havoc on the Internet.

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If you have followed my tip to make Windows Vista run faster, you will receive the following annoying Windows warning message in the notification area at the far right end of the taskbar: Windows has blocked some startup programs.

This problem occurs because a program or service that you have earlier restricted to start using the User Account Control (UAC) restrictions tries to start during the Windows Vista startup process. Although your Windows Vista now may run slightly faster, but the annoying message keeps popping up every now and then. Luckily it is pretty easy to stop this message from appearing again. Let me show you the easiest way to do it.

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