I happen to own what I consider to be quite a decent Hewlett Packard Notebook. One of the features I love to flaunt about my computer is the onboard WWAN card; this allows me to easily connect to Safaricom or any mobile data network without having to stick a USB dongle into one of my few ports. I really wonder why this feature has not caught on in mainstream notebooks yet. Anyhow, other cool specifications of my computer include a really large hard disk, a fast processor, tones of memory and nice speakers. It could do with a better graphics card but I suppose one cannot have it all.

Now with such a good machine, one would be surprised to find out that it could not run a 64bit guest operating system because the virtualization features of the processor are disabled by default in the computer’s Basic Input Output System(BIOS). A simple solution to this problem would be to go to the BIOS and enable the processor’s virtualization features; I mean, it should be a simple toggle setting – either enabled or not. Well, lets just say that it is NOT that simple, and thus the point of this post.

Of late, for one reason or another, my burner is not writing discs properly. Now, while I chill to take the machine in because that is definitely a warranty issue, I needed to urgently fix my older laptop which I knew had hard disc issues and required to be ‘Spinrited’ – if you don’t mind the invention of the word. Anyhow, long and short of it is that if I required the services of DynaStat Data Recovery and I could not burn discs, then my flash drive would have to do. Not suprisingly, it is not the simplest thing to do, getting a flash disc to boot so here goes some tips on how to do so in Linux and Windows

I love neat and useful gadgets. On my wish list is the iRobot Roomba robot that can clean floors while I am away at work but who am I kidding. TIA (this is Africa) and the dust in my neighborhood will make the motors in that thing pack up in one week max. My uneven floor wont help much either. Anyhow, I do own dust averse clever gadgets though, and this one I love. It’s my Kindle!

It’s a second gen Kindle Keyboard (curses all you Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire owners) but it works like a charm and for as long as it keeps doing so (or somehow gets lost), Amazon can keep releasing newer ones – I will not be deterred to buy another one. Though the $79 ad supported Kindle is quite tempting.

It’s very rare that I use Telnet ever, so  when developing for Android  and I required to use telnet to interface with their emulator, it took a long time for me to notice that by default it was not enabled with Windows 7 though it was installed. I did some research and found out that this was also true for Windows Vista.

This tutorail is for installing Windows XP on a Compaq Mini 110 or other netbook using a USB Flash Drive or SD Card. You will need to have already prepared the bootable USB Flash Drive or SD Card. If you have not done this yet, please follow this tutorail on How to Make a Bootable USB Flash Drive or SD Card for Windows XP.

This tutorail is for making a Bootable USB Flash Drive or Memory Card that can be used to install Windows XP on Netbooks that do not have optical drives. To complete this tutorial you need a PC with a version of Windows XP / Vista / 7, and a USB Flash Drive or Memory Card that is at least 1GB in size or more.