Category: Mobile

Posted on

Windows RT Preview

The Verge has a preview of the final version of Windows RT which will run on the ARM-based tablets that will be priced to compete with the iPad.

Microsoft is betting big on this, but you can still see the rough edges.  Small touch targets and traditional mouse-optimized apps on a touch tablet are terrible when everyone is familiar with the easy-to-use iPad.  Microsoft is trying to have it both ways, leveraging existing apps while building new apps at the same time.  But if users need to spend any time in desktop mode, they’ll be disappointed. And it’s not powerful enough to please traditional desktop users. Hopefully this is just a short-term transition phase which will be remedied soon by lots of native touch-optimized apps.

Posted on

Turn Off WPS

Most current routers have a feature enabled called WPS, which stands for WiFi Protected Setup. The purpose of WPS is to make it easy to associate devices with your WiFi network. It has two main methods, the push-button method and the PIN method.

Unfortunately, the PIN method is easily cracked, for example with a tool such as Reaver, part of Backtrack 5 as we described.

Therefore you should turn off the WPS Pin in your router. This is usually under “Advanced Router Settings” in your router configuration. This will protect you from a WPS attack allowing someone to get onto your network.

You would check off the box above for “Disable Router’s PIN”.

Posted on

Seagate Momentus Hybrid Hard Drive

I recently upgraded the client’s old laptop hard drive laptop to a hybrid drive from Seagate:
Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB

Hybrid

What’s special about it? It’s got 8GB of solid state drive. That makes its speed somewhere between a standard hard drive an SSD. The drive intelligently moves commonly used files to the solid state portion. The hard drive handles all that on its own, appearing to the computer as just one drive.

With the original hard drive in this 5 year old Mac, it booted up in 55 seconds. With the new drive it booted up in 43 seconds. But after three boots, it had moved the boot files to the SSD and was booting up in 24 seconds. It felt much faster for common tasks and commonly used programs.

If you need a large fast drive, this Seagate is a great compromise. SSDs at 750GB are prohibitively expensive. And standard hard drives are much slower.