The tiny wonder..........

Have you ever thought how ironical it would be to possess a personal computer with all the essential peripherals right from an LCD screen to a webcam to a bluray rw drive, "except a mouse"??? Sounds wierd eh? Now, please dont think of all the modern stuff like lightpen, touch screen etc.. etc... My sole purpose of asking a question like that was just to shift your attention to that tiny device which you have been using daily for working on computers. Well, speaking about the first computers ( which may seem to be my habit these days, but... never mind) they dint have a mouse and everything had to be done by inputs through keyboards.
It was the idea of Douglas Engelbart, yes of course, the same person who gave a new definition to modern computers with his brilliant and valuable contributions computer video, teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, email and the internet and the more. He recieved a patent for the wooden shell with two metal wheels which was nicknamed 'mouse' because of the wire coming out from one end. It was described at first as an " x-y position indicator for a display system.
Douglas Engelbart is, presently the director of his company, Bootstrap Institute in Fremont, California, which promotes the concept of Collective IQ. The best part of it is that Bootstrap is housed rent free courtesy of the Logitech Corp., a famous manufacturer of computer mice.

Pioneers in laptops

The first portable computers were not like the book sized notebooks or flat laptops that we are familiar today.Grid compass, designed in 1979 by William Moggridge, for Grid Systems Corporation, is claimed to be the first light weight computers which comprised of a 340 byte bubble memory with die-cast magnesium case and folding electroluminescent graphics display screen. But the pioneer in laptop was Adam Osborne who found Osborne 1. It weighed 24 pounds and costed $1795, had a 5"screen, modem port, two 5 1/2" floppy disk drives, a battery pack and many software programs.But the product did not last for long in the market.

The brains behind the manufacturing of laptops with LCD screens were Microsoft corp.'s Kazuhiko Nishi and Bill Gates who showed their prototype to Radio Shack, and the latter manufactured TRS-80 Model 100, and a much smaller TRS Model 200 in 1986.

It was in 1988 that Compaq computers introduced their first laptops with VGA graphics.

In March 1991, Microsoft released the Microsoft BallPoint Mouse that used both mouse and trackball technology in a pointing device designed for laptop computers.

Intel and Microsoft released APM or the Advanced Power Management specification for laptop computers in 1992.

The first PDAs or Personal Digital Assistants were released in 1993. PDAs are pen-based hand-held computers.

And thus goes on the history of laptops. Nowadays, laptops contain very sophisicated facilities like face identification, fingerprint password protection, in built speakers in LCD , etc, all built in a lightweighted body. Isnt that great?

The costly laptop

On March 23, 2007 Luvagilo, a US based luxury goods creator made the first million dollar laptop. Te laptop features a 17" LCD screen with anti glare coating for clear and better image, a 128 GB hard disk and a slot for loading bluray drive Moreover, there is an integrated screen cleaning device and a rare coloured detachable diamond that will act both as a power button and a security key when placed on teh laptop. The first laptop may cost about one million dollars.

Evolution of QWERTY keyboard

Most of us today uses the qwerty keyboard for our pcs. Have you ever wondered why the keys are placed so? Well, the qwerty format is the direct adoption of the way letters were arranged in the typewriter by its inventor C. L. Sholes in the 1860's. In fact, many loathed his typewriter at first, even saying that the keys were misplaced purposefully by him to slow down fast typists. But there was a scientific reason behind it.

Sholes found out that arranging keys alphabetically lead to jamming and clash of the typewriter at times when they were used at a fair speed. The early typewriters had the letters on rods called typerods connected to the keys. The typebars hung in a circle and the roller onto which the paper was mounted sat over this circle. When a key was pressed, the typebar would swing and hit the paper from beneath. If two typebars used successively were near each other, then they would clash.

Sholes found out that rearranging letters, like T and H for example, in such a way that the corresponding typebars are kept at sufficient distances from each other would help solving the problem and thus came the QWERTY typewriter.

The first typewriter could type only capital letters. The problem was solved in the Remington no 2. typewriter, in which a shift key was introduced. The shift key mechanically shifted the carriages in such a way that only one letter( small letter or capital letter) would be
chosen to print from the impressions of the two made on the particular typerod. The modern keyboards do not make use of mechanical shifting, but still, shift keys are incorporated in them.

Automatic reboot in XP

Sometimes, due to some reasons, your system will suddenly crash down. This often happens due to great amount of CPU usage by some programs. The following registry edit will cause your system to reboot itself automatically upon crashing. This can be useful if you have a reason for keeping your system on 24/7:
Open REGEDIT
Navigate to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl'
Edit the 'AutoReboot' value to '1'

XP tricks

Renaming The Recycle Bin icon:To change the name of the Recycle Bin desktop icon, click Start then goto Run, write Regedit and press Enter. It opens Registry Editor. Now in Registry Editor go to:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID/{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}and change the name "Recycle Bin" to whatever you want (don't type any quotes).