Hijinks Inc.

Category: Jared Burham

  • Multi-Touch + ThinkPad = Drool

    X Tablet

    You see something like the new ThinkPad X Tablet and you just want to touch it, right? I know I do. Apparently though, that’s exactly what Lenovo is expecting you to do.

    In addition to being a pen tablet, the screen also sports a MultiView/MultiTouch interface, allowing you to “use your finger or the pen to interact with the notebook, open applications, etc.”

    Check out the full specs and features here.

    No word on how sensitive or precise the touch interface is, but I’ll be looking into this further… stay in touch.

  • Eggs make electronics shopping memorable

    Newegg.com review

    I’ve been using NewEgg for the past several years as my main source for computer hardware and almost refuse to buy anywhere else. Between personal and business I’ve purchased close to $15,000 worth from them and still counting.

    Their prices are hard to beat and their shipping is some of the fastest I’ve ever seen. They have an egg-cellent search engine for drilling down exactly what you’re looking for and the user interface is simple and no-nonsense.

    They specialize in electronics and computer hardware and software but sell a variety of other products including household appliances that range from refrigerators and microwaves to washers and dryers. Imagine Best Buy being crushed by a giant egg falling from the sky and you get a good idea. Oh, and for all you Mac fans out there, they’ve got those too.

    *Disclaimer*

    NewEgg.com is not in any way associated with this, though maybe they should license it as their theme song

  • Hard drive problems

    wdfdesktop_se_aajs.jpg

    Greetings, and thanks for reading my first post as a Hijinks Inc. author! My name is Jared, and I hope to be posting fairly regularly, but I have a busy schedule, so we’ll see.

    My rant today is about my computer, which apparently lacks the capacity to be scanned by Ad Aware or AVG without hanging. I have a 160GB SATA drive partitioned for my operating system and programs, and an additional 500GB SATA drive for storage. I figured since it always hangs while scanning the C: partition on the 160GB drive, that there was something wrong with the 160GB drive. I tested my theory by loading a fresh copy of XP Pro on an 80GB ATA drive, thus running on a completely separate hard drive on a completely separate controller, and it still hanged while scanning the C: drive. I then proceeded to un-plug the 500GB storage drive and then it scanned fine.

    What’s confusing me now is why it hangs when scanning the C: drive when it seems that the 500 storage drive is the problem. Or course, then I thought I’d figured it out, so I plugged the 160 back in, kept the 500 un-plugged and assumed it would work, but this time it hung. So now there’s either a problem with both drives, or it’s having a problem with the fact that both drives are over the magical ‘137GB’ mark.

    What’s really weird is that it’s successfully scanned with the newest 8.x version of AVG when I scan manually, but when it runs the scheduled scan, it hangs for like 20 hours.

    I’m stumped, irritated and tired, so we’ll tackle this one another day. Was that too negative? Probably, but it’s truth, and I think the truth is what we need a lot more of in this world. 🙂