Cleaning a keyboard

I’d been having some trouble with the left Alt and Windows key on my keyboard sticking the last few weeks.  That’s trouble in programs like Pro Tools where those keys can be very useful.  I got some compressed air and tried blowing out whatever dirt was in there, but it didn’t help.  So I decided to pop off the keys to see if I could clean out the keyboard a bit and fix the problem. …

Continue reading

Windows 7 – What happens after August 1?

So, this Windows 7 beta expires August 1, 2009.  I, like many, was curious what would happen then, so I changed the date to Sunday, August 2, 2009 on my Win7 virtual machine. The first time I tried it, I got some error screen alerting me that my license had expired (or something to that effect) shortly after resetting the date to 8/2/09.  There was a red “X” to close the window, and a “cancel”…

Continue reading

More (problems) on Windows 7

So, my first experiences with Win7 beta were really good.  Someone at Microsoft even replied to my blog about that, which is sort of geekily gratifying at some level.  But today I tried installing it on an older PC with my brother, on his HP 715n (1.8ghz P4 with 1.25gb of ram and a Radeon All-In-Wonder 64mb video card), and had less success. It seemed to install and run mostly ok, but I could not…

Continue reading