System Restore doesn’t work in Windows XP | Ask Jack
Arthur Whitemore says System Restore will create a restore point on his PC running Windows XP, but it will only keep the latest restore point. System Restore used to work OK, but now it only creates a restore point for the current day. A new one is created the next day, but the previous day's restore point is gone. My C drive has 12.3GB of free space and system restore is set at 12% of disk space. Arthur Whitemore System Restore mainly keeps track of changes made to your PC, including the Registry, so that you can go back to an earlier state if you run into a problem. You can see if there are earlier restore points because the calendar dates show up in bold. If you can't see any, try restarting your PC in Safe Mode. This loads a sort of "bare bones" Windows, which might not include the program that is stopping System Restore from working. This could be a virus or an anti-virus program. It's not too surprising if an anti-virus program tries to prevent changes to system files. If System Restore does work correctly in Safe Mode, then your next challenge will be to find out what's stopping it. Running MBAM ( Malwarebytes Anti-Malware ) would be a good start. If it's neither a virus nor an anti-virus program, you could try eliminating start-up programs. While you can use Windows' msconfig for this, AnVir Task Manager Free is worth a go. Of course, the most common reason for System Restore to stop working is that you have run out of disk space. There is a Microsoft Support page for this: System Restore "restore points" are missing or deleted . There's also a more useful document: Troubleshooting steps for issues when you try to use the System Restore tool in Windows XP . System Restore typically takes up 200MB to 400MB on home PCs, so you should have enough space (12% of 12.3GB is roughly 1.5GB). However, you can look to see how much space it is taking up. To do this, you must be able to see hidden files and folders.
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System Restore doesn't work in Windows XP | Ask Jack
India’s $35 tablet: a stalled revolution | Suhasini Sakhare
India's new $35 tablet computer needs manufacturing success and demand if it is to revolutionise IT literacy – it has neither Kapil Sibal, India's minister for human resource development, recently announced that Indian scientists had developed a tablet computer that could be manufactured for just $35 . The device has been developed primarily for students and is part of the government's ambitious plan to connect 2,5000 Indian colleges with broadband. The thrust is no doubt linked to MIT's 2005 offer to Asia to make available know-how for building $100 laptops . But it needs two critical support struts – manufacturing success and demand – to be successful. On the manufacturing side, the bill of materials currently going into the tablet has come up to $47. This does not include labour, supply chain costs or profit. Even if the government sticks to its current stance of subsidising the product by $15 it is unlikely to retail at $35, let alone the $20 the government eventually hopes to sell it at.
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India's $35 tablet: a stalled revolution | Suhasini Sakhare
Death to the mouse: Apple’s trackpad hits the shops
The first whiff of an Apple trackpad was as far back as 2008, with a fresh bout of enthusiasm when the patent application was unearthed earlier this summer . Now the rumour has become a reality with the first Magic Trackpads released for sale through the Apple Store. Why yet more fuss for yet another Apple product? Because it symbolises the end of an era - the end of the mouse. As ever, Apple's brilliance is in refining consumer electronics to a form factor usable by the mainstream; the trackpad indicates the much needed death of the RSI-inducing mouse, another piece of hardware that Apple didn't invent, but did popularise . Magic trackpads are £59, wireless, 80% bigger than the trackpads on a MacBook Pro and work from 10 metres away. Eventually, a touchpad could replace both keyboard and mouse through a touchscreen interface
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Death to the mouse: Apple's trackpad hits the shops
Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow
Bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty – but the real delight lies in making your own choices The launch of the iPad and the general success of mobile device app stores has created a buzzword frenzy for "curated" computing – computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure. In theory, this creates an aesthetically uniform, and above all safe and easy, computing environment, as the curators see to it that only the very prettiest, easiest-to-use and most virus-free apps show up in the store. I'm all for it. After all, I've spent the past 10 years co-curating Boing Boing , a place where my business-partners and I pick the websites that interest us the most and assemble them into a kind of deep, wide, searchable catalogue of things that you should know, do, and marvel at. We've recently launched a store, the Boing Boing Bazaar, consisting of the most interesting inventions, clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins that our readers have created, as picked by us. My Twitter account mostly consists of retweets from other twitterers – my collection of the best tweets I've seen today. I am a born curator, and have spent my life amassing collections and showing them off. But there's something important to note about all these curatorial roles I enjoy: none of them are coercive. No one forces you to read Boing Boing, and if you do, there's nothing that prevents you from reading another weblog (or a couple hundred other weblogs). Order as many gizmos as you'd like from the Boing Boing Bazaar, we'll never tell you that you can't fill your knick-knack shelves from anyone else's curated wunderkammer . Follow me on Twitter if it pleases you, and feel free to follow anyone else you find interesting. The beauty of noncoercive curation is that there are so many reasons we value things, it's really impossible to imagine that any one place will serve as a one-stop shop for our needs. Two categories in particular won't ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum's recovered from a carton in the basement. My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams.
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Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow
Chinese province bans adults looking at youngsters’ mobiles
Adults banned from searching children's computers or phones under a new law passed in Chongqing, southwest China It is a ruling that teenagers around the world will regard with a certain amount of envy. Parents in one Chinese city are to be prevented from snooping on their children's online activity and text messages. Adults, including family members, are banned from searching through children's computers or phones under a new regional law passed in Chongqing, southwest China, state media reported today. The regulation outlaws snooping into their emails, text messages, web chats, and browser history. The regulation is designed to protect the rights of children, but is surprising given widespread concern in China about excessive internet use among young people and their access to unsuitable material. Psychologists have sought to have internet addiction listed as a clinical disorder and treatment camps have sprung up across the country. The Chongqing Evening Post described the new regulation, adopted on Friday by officials in Chongqing, as the first of its kind in the country. Other Chinese media said it expanded an existing national rule. But both experts and children doubted whether it would have an impact in practice. Lu Yulin, a professor at the China Youth University of Political Science, told China Daily that children were unlikely to take their parents to court
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Chinese province bans adults looking at youngsters' mobiles
Crime software may help police predict violent offences
Minority Report-style technology being trialled by two British forces following success in the US Two British police forces have begun trials of a sophisticated computer software package which aims to boost their efficiency by predicting where and when future crimes will take place. The system, known as Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates patterns of past and present incidents, then combines the information with a range of data including crime reports, intelligence briefings, offender behaviour profiles and even weather forecasts. This is used to identify potential hot spots and flashpoints, so police forces can allocate resources to areas where particular crimes are most likely to occur
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Crime software may help police predict violent offences
Video: India unveils world’s cheapest ‘laptop’
The $35 device is aimed at university students – and the price could yet fall further
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Video: India unveils world's cheapest 'laptop'
India unveils ‘laptop’ costing $35
Touchscreen computing device aimed at students is expected to be rolled out to higher education institutions from 2011 India has come up with the world's cheapest "laptop", a touchscreen computing device that costs $35 (£23). India's human resource development minister Kapil Sibal this week unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production. "We have reached a (developmental) stage that today; the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything," he told a news conference in New Delhi. He said the touchscreen gadget was packed with web browers, PDF reader and video conferencing facilities, but its hardware was created with sufficient flexibility to incorporate new components according to user requirement. Sibal said the Linux-based device was expected to be introduced to higher education institutions from 2011 but the aim was to drop the price further to $20 and ultimately to $10. The device was developed by research teams at India's premier technological institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science. India spends about 3% of its annual budget on school education and has improved its literacy rates to over 64% of its population of 1.2 billion. However, studies have shown many students can barely read or write and most state-run schools have inadequate facilities. India Computing guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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India unveils 'laptop' costing $35
Web-crawling computers will soon be calling the shots in science
Within a decade, computers will be able to plough through scientific data looking for patterns and connections – then tell scientists what they should do next Move over scientists – computers will be asking the questions from now on. They will trawl the millions of scientific papers on the web and suggest new hypotheses for humans to test, according to an article in tomorrow's issue of Science . Scientists are drowning in data. Whether it's high-speed genome sequencing, simulating the early universe or testing complex mathematical proofs, there are often more numbers to crunch than there are people to crunch them. But help is on the way in the form of "automatic hypothesis generation", argue James Evans and Andrey Rzhetsky of the University of Chicago.
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Web-crawling computers will soon be calling the shots in science
Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Once we found fun things to do with computers sold as serious machines. Now gadgets are marketed as nothing but toys As a boy I managed, after much persistence, to persuade my parents to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ (the one with the black, concave keys). To do this I had to convince them it was not merely a machine on which to play games but an important tool that would teach me computer programming and aid my schoolwork.
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Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray