Mad Scientist Technologies

Today, April 11, 2017 marks the end of support for Windows Vista.

What does this mean? If you are still using Windows Vista, your computer will receive its last group of Windows Updates and will not see any future updates from Microsoft. Your Vista based computer will continue to work but you will not get any security patches.

Microsoft Windows Vista was released in early 2007 to the general public. Upon its release many reviewers and tech professionals panned Windows Vista, because of its higher system requirements and buggy drivers. However, Windows Vista built the base for Windows 7, which was hailed as a better Operating System.

Even though many may have hated Windows Vista, I found it a refreshing vision of Windows. I personally used Windows Vista for my primary operating system until Windows 8 arrived.

So, today I honor Windows Vista, for the improvements that it brought to the computing landscape. Which made many people’s computing experiences better for it, even if they didn’t know that at the time.

The results are mostly, in – for our current poll question.

How Often Do You Replace Your Computer?

We posed this question to our readers and passersby for over an year and we have decided to wrap this poll up. The results are as follows.

Based on the results, most people will replace there computer when the machine finally fails. I don’t know if this means that the computer just stops working or when it just become so slow and unusable that it might as well have stopped working (As in cases of heavy spyware infections on Windows Based Machines). But that is a failure on my part in creating the poll.

A new poll will be up in a week or so. Until then, share your thoughts on this poll below in the comments!

Today is March 31, 2014 and it is World Backup Day!

What does that mean? Lets start with what is a backup. The World Backup Day organizers say it the best way:

A backup is a second copy of all your important files — for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails.

Instead of storing it all in one place (like your computer), you keep another copy of everything somewhere safe.

— World Backup Day

So today, March 31, is the day of the year to bring awareness of the importance of making backups of your digital life.

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If you heard about it or not, the end of Windows XP is now upon us – April 8, 2014. Yes, everyone’s (mostly) favorite operating system is just a few short weeks away from being put out to pasture. Thus ending one of the oddest events in Microsoft’s empire.

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Thirty Years ago today, a product was released that would changed the computer industry forever. That product was Apple’s Macintosh 128k. This relative simple computer by today’s standards was anything but in its day, the first commercially available computer with a graphical user interface, used a mouse, and used a standard 3.5″ Floppy Disk. These features that we take for advantage today were not commonly available back in 1984. The PC user would not see the graphical user interface, in more common usage, until the release of Windows 95. With these new features Apple would go on to lead the industry in many future trends. Read More »

New Poll!

How Often Do You Replace Your Computer?

This is a pretty simple poll, but here is our quick and simple view on the question. Depending upon your usage and what you use your computer for, we suggest adopting a 4 – 5 year replacement cycle.

The reasons being that most machines will start to fail in their Read More »

There is a new screencast out, learn how to list an item on eBay. We will cover the the following steps: how to sign up for eBay/PayPal, listing a item, and discuss post sale process.

Watch The Screencast Now

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Public Service Announcement for Social Media Users (Facebook & Twitter)

I find it interesting how easy it would be to mine people’s personal identifying information using a Facebook app. Not that I would do that. — Mad9Scientist via Twitter

With the increased popularity of Social Media Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ – a rogue party could steal your personally identifying information – PII – without even trying. Most of the major social media networks allow third parties to connect to your account and perform actions on your behalf, some of these actions are for useful services where others are not so.

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This is just a quick reminder that this coming Sunday – January 15, 2012 – Verisign the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name domains – will be raising the price to register or renew domain names.

Verisign Announced in July of 2011, that the following price changes will go into effect on January 15, 2012:

• .COM Domain Names will change from $7.34 to $7.85
• .NET Domain Names will change from $4.65 to $5.11

So if you have domains that need to be renewed this year, or just plan on getting a domain name – your best bet is get it done now – so you can save some cash.

You can read more about the price change on Verisign’s Press Release.

After reviewing the usage of the Mad Scientist Technologies’ Discussion Forums by the community, we have decided to discontinue the the forums until such time that the forums would be fully utilized by the community.

The forums will be shut down as of January 7, 2012, all associated data for the forum will be removed and deleted.

In the future, if the community requests a discussion forum, we may re-implement the forums. Until such time, the forums will be no more.