After three years, I have added another feature to my Weather Station reporting templates - National Weather Service Forecasts.
Ladies and Gentlemen! In this corner we have the venerable Dell Studio 1536 running Windows 10. In the opposing corner, we have the youngster Lenovo N22-20 running ChromeOS. Let's get ready to rumble!
While I have been using computers in general for a long time, and have been using Android phones and tablets, there I am still having to learn things with my Chromebook.
I just acquired my first Chromebook. Having been wrapped up in the Microsoft world since MS-DOS 3.1, and only really deviating for mobile devices (cell phone and tablet), it’s interesting going to a Chromebook.
As with several hobbies, my father got me interested in running a Personal Weather Station (or PWS). At first, I used second-hand hardware for this, but ran into issues. Most of the issues I had were communications between the base station and the sensors. So I swapped out with another second-hand system. This one was relatively stable with the communications, but developed an issue with the humidity sensor. After a couple months, it too developed communication issues. Fresh batteries in the sensors and base station did not resolve the issue, so I began looking for a new weather station. This time, I decided to purchase a brand new weather station.
Here's a new trick I recently learned, and it comes in handy for System Builders, as well as system restorers.
I was installing a non-branded copy of Windows 7 Professional on my Dell Studio 1536 laptop. While installing all the drivers from Dell, I included a registry patch that inserted the model number as well. Going into the System Properties screen, I saw it now showing the model, but it did not have the manufacturer information.
My testing of the Mediasonic HF7-SU3S3 enclosure was successful. One negative that I learned was that the small Western Digital Black 500GB drive that I tried in one bay was bad. The other 3 drives I tested it with worked without issue.
Mediasonic HF7-SU3S3 ProBox 4 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure
Written by Marc TilleyI received daily emails from various online tech stores about various sales or daily deals that they are having. On December 4th, the Shell Shocker email from Newegg.com had a device that interested me. It was an external hard drive enclosure that could host 4 drives, up to 8TB each. This device had a mail in rebate that brought the final price to $49.99. Having several Western Digital MyBook external drives, this interested me. With the thought of if it worked, I could (void the warranty) move the MyBook drives into the single enclosure, and go from 4 external power supplies down to just 1. That would make it a lot easier on my UPS.
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On July 29, 2015, Microsoft started a free upgrade to Windows 10 for consumer level versions of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1. This was started by using the Windows Update feature, but required you to make a reservation to get the download. Once your reservation time was reached, you would get a popup saying that Windows 10 was ready to install, and as I mentioned in my August post, this went fairly simply on my primary system. I also mentioned that Microsoft made available a Media Creation Tool as well for creating a USB Flash Drive or DVD which can be used to update other computers without waiting for the reservation time, or for reinstallation.
Here, I will go through the process of creating a USB Flash Drive.
When I wrote my last article, I promised the next would be installing Windows 10 on my laptop. Unfortunately, a few things have hindered me from writing that. First was that the rough draft, with screenshots, apparently wasn't saved as I thought it was, so I lost it and would have to start over. Second, and more important, I began having issues on my main computer. Six times in a two week period, I received the Windows 10 version of a BSOD error. I have to admit the new screen (which I think was actually implemented with Windows 8) doesn't look as confusing as we have grown used to over the years, but still frustrating and annoying. Especially when it happens to a "computer geek".
Well, as many know on July 29th, Microsoft started rolling out FREE upgrades for Windows 7/8 users to the new Windows 10 through the Windows Update service. Anticipating massive bandwidth issues, Microsoft made it where you had to reserve your upgrade, and then the upgrades would be staggered, so not everyone was able to get the upgrade on July 29.
