Computer Tricks

Google doodles a chocolate cake and candles for its 14th birthday  On September 27, 2012 Google turns 14 and the search giant celebrates the occasion with a doodle on its home page. The animated doodle shows a chocolate cake with 14 candles on it and the Google logo etched on the cake. The cake then gets covered in Google colours and the 14 candles rearrange themselves as tally marks to denote the number 14. Interestingly, the selection of September 27 as Google's birthday seems to be a one of convenience than the actual date when the company was founded. Google celebrated September 7 (the day when the company was incorporated) as its birthday till 2005. In 2005 Google changed the date to September 27 to make it coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing. It's has been 14 years since 1998 when two Stanford university students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, got together to form a company that would change the ...

Helium-Filled Hard Drives Lift Performance Due to its lower density, helium has long been considered an ideal medium for the innards of a hard drive. It stays cooler and allows the platters to be closer together because of reduced turbulence. Low density, however, is a double-edged sword because helium leaks easily. Drive maker HGST claims to have eliminated that problem. Storage manufacturer  HGST , a division of Western Digital on Thursday demonstrated a helium-filled hard drive enclosure. This platform will let HGST design seven-platter drives in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. The company currently has five-platter drives in that form factor. With the added capacity two more platters offer, a helium-filled enclosure will improve the total cost  of ownership of such a device in various areas, HGST said. "It is extremely difficult technically for an air-based drive to achieve the same capacity points that we can achieve with helium," Brendan...

What is goog-malware-shavar? If you happen to look in firewall logs or perhaps browse with  Fiddler  running [Fiddler is a transparent proxy that automatically adds itself to the WININET chain which logs requests and responses to allow you to see what is working and what isn't working.] or some other program that logs HTTP information, then you may very well see some things that sound nasty. One of those that seems to appear often on many systems is "goog-malware-shavar." In particular, the "malware" part of the entry may give one pause. But, this is one case where bad-sounding is not the same as bad. goog-malware-shavar is Google's anti-phishing API. Google uses it to identify malware, specifically phishing. Google provides data for the anti-phishing feature implemented in Firefox and Google Desktop. These clients get their blacklist and whitelist data using an "update protocol". The protocol supports many different blacklists or wh...

Why Can't I Copy a Large File Despite Having Larger Free  Space? In these days of extra large hard disks many try to copy large files from a DVD but find that can't even though there is plenty of free space on the hard disk. Why not? The most likely cause for this is not some sort of copy protection but that the file being copied is too large for the file system to handle. Windows XP allows you to format a hard disk in two different file system formats: FAT32 and NTFS. These file systems differ in the size of file they can handle. FAT32, for example, can only handle files up to 4GB in size. When it was developed, that size file was almost unheard of but now, a DVD can have files that large or larger routinely. So, if you are trying to copy a movie from a DVD onto your FAT32-formatted hard drive it likely won't copy as most full-length movies are files larger than 4GB. FAT32 The original File Allocation Table (FAT) file system was introduced in 1977 and gene...

What is a Scan Code? Written By:  DaBoss ... 2009-11-22 In the keyboard are little switches. When you press a key one of the switches is activated and when you release that key the switch is activated again. The keyboard makes note of these happenings and stores them in a small buffer (memory area) in the keyboard while it notifies the computer that something has happened at the keyboard (an interrupt). The computer, once notified of keyboard activity reads the buffer and takes the necessary action. Each key on the keyboard has its own code that it sends when pressed and when released; this is called its scan code. When listing scan codes here we'll list the "press" scan code. The "release" scan code is that number plus 128 (80 hex). While the original scan code specification allowed for a single number, newer keyboards with the movement keys repeated in the center of the keyboard forced a change and those keys carry a two-number scan code with the...

How to troubleshoot the "error 999" code Description This article provides troubleshooting steps for resolving the "Unable to process request at this time -- error 999" error when using Yahoo!. Resolution The 999 error is caused by unusually high activity from either your computer or your IP address to a specific page or pages within Yahoo!. While this type of error is usually temporary, there are troubleshooting steps you can take if you continue to experience this issue: Try accessing Yahoo! from a different computer or a different Internet connection to see if the issue continues or if it goes away. Scan your computer for spyware and viruses. Spyware programs can change your system settings, serve pop-ups, record your surfing habits, or display advertisements over web sites you visit. Other spyware programs and certain computer viruses will run separate programs on your computer for a variety of purposes, sometimes slowing your computer down in th...