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My First Laptop Computer: The Dell Inspiron 8000 - Part 2

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  Windows 2000 SP4 Unofficial Service Pack 5.1 Unofficial Rollup 2 Daylight Savings Fix dotNet 2 7z 9.20 Winzip 14 WinRAR Acrobat Pro 8 iTunes 7.2 mRemote 1.50 Microsoft Office 2003 MS Office SP3 FileConverters (Office 2003 .docx support) PaintShop Pro X1 (11.2) K-Meleon 74 Goanna WinAmp 5.63 FileZilla Nero 

My First Laptop Computer: The Dell Inspiron 8000 - Part 1

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    Retro computing, or to be more specific retro gaming, is something of a trend at the moment. Some people are happy using DosBox to emulate old hardware on their modern PC, but some get a kick out of using real retro hardware. Old desktops can be bulky so if you're not fortunate enough to have the space for one the next best choice is a period correct laptop. A scan through YouTube shows a lot of people hunting down old IBM ThinkPads and their prices on the used market have risen accordingly. The thing is... while you do get very nice build quality (at least in terms of the casing, many models in the early 2000's had problems with failing components on their motherboards ), contrary to what you may be led to believe by recent displays of ThinkPad fetishizing, they were never lusted after by the younger demographic when they were new, primarily because their specifications were business not gaming focused, not to mention they were what I would generously describ

The Cost of Website Obesity

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I've been creating websites since the mid 90's, and in that time the web has changed a lot, mostly for the better in terms of style, but certain problems have persisted and I'm going to focus on just one for now: size. As internet connections got faster, with early cable modems offering ten times the speed of 1990's modems, and many city dwellers today enjoying speeds 1,000 times faster than that, efficiency and the underlying size of a page became less of a priority, and beautiful magazine style layouts with big detailed images and interactive galleries powered by javascript became the norm. A new breed of designers entered the industry who hadn't even been born when the web was invented and they built sites using "frameworks" which are pre-built libraries of code that you can just add to your web page to get all sorts of cool, interactive features with the most minimum of effort. Perhaps you wanted your photo gallery to fade pictures in and