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| The White MacBook and Asus’s MSI Wind (below) |
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q+a I want to buy a laptop for my business as well as personal needs. I want value for my money, with all the regular features, decent memory, good speed, USB ports and Win XP as the operating system (OS). Can you suggest laptops within Rs 35,000? How is the Asus MSI Wind?
Shiladitya De
The Asus MSI Wind is a small notebook good only for very basic tasks. It will not serve your personal or business needs. I suggest you buy the White MacBook that runs on the latest operating system called OS X Leopard. If you buy a Mac from any Apple authorised reseller between June 8 and December 26, 2009, you will be eligible for the Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrade package. The disadvantages of MSI Wind are many. It runs on a 1.6GHz atom processor which has very poor performance. Secondly, it does not have a good integrated graphics card. This means you will not be able to see your pictures or movies without the computer hanging. Worse, it runs on Windows XP, which means you will need to buy an Internet Security Suite, Microsoft Office and whatever else you might need. And with the launch of Windows 7, Windows XP is not going to be around much longer.
On the other hand, the MacBook comes with a 2.13 Intel Core2Duo processor, 160GB of hard drive, and the powerful 9400M graphics that let you play games that are very demanding on the computer hardware. You do not need any Internet Security Suite because viruses do not attack Macs. The best part of all is, you get a package, called iLife 09 and iWork 09, that lets you watch movies, store pictures, write documents, and make websites, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations through its program called Keynote. And, amazingly, all the files that you create on a Mac will open on Windows seamlessly. The MacBook costs a little more than Rs 50,000 but it is a worthwhile investment. So wait and save another Rs 20,000 and then buy the laptop.
Default download location
q+a I have been surfing the Internet with Internet Explorer 8 for a few days. When I download anything (pictures, songs, etc.) the download automatically starts without seeking my permission. The download location is automatically set to C:\documents&settings\ administrator\downloads. How can I enable IE8 to ask me where to save the file?
Kaustav Lahiri
Whenever you download a file it will ask you to save the file to some location. For example, if you choose Desktop once, all your subsequent downloads will be saved to the desktop. That becomes your default save location.
Error message
q+a While opening files from the net, I am constantly getting the error message “Could not interpret the parameters 1. The error which occurred is java.lang.NullPointerException”. How do I solve this problem?
M.K. Mitra
In most cases, when the end user gets one of these errors, it simply means that the code is broken. If it is a web site, they probably have a server down or have moved a resource file or graphic to the wrong place. The site is just broken and there’s nothing you, the user, can do about it! However, try changing your browser to Safari or Firefox or even Chrome. It may help.
File system option
q+a Which is a better file system, FAT 32 or NTFS given any day?
Ravi Kumar Rajak
Obviously, NTFS. NTFS is more secure. It supports disk quotas, allowing you to control the amount of disk usage on a per user basis. It supports file compression. FAT32 does not. Don’t be convinced into loading your operating system on the FAT 32. It is just that data retrieval is easier from a FAT 32 system. But the vendor has to do a little more work to restore data from an NTFS system.
Send in your computer- related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon.
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