A8X chip inside, custom 8-cluster GPU

Windows XP support ends

Do not use Internet Explorer

It is not advisable to keep running Microsoft's Windows XP operating system now that support has ended.

Today (08^th April, 2014), Microsoft will release its last batch of security updates, patches, and fixes for Windows XP, and after this date, core vulnerabilities or security issues that could leave you open to cyberattack will not be investigated or fixed. You won't have a permenant blue wheel of death the moment support ends, but vulnerabilities stored up by cybercriminals for use after this date will not be fixed. 

Tip one? Stop using Internet Explorer.

The most common version of IE used on XP systems is version 8, and considering that Internet Explorer is now up to version 11, you can see how old and obsolete the browser is. Not only this, but Internet Explorer 7 and 8 will also not be updated further, leaving your system vulnerable to malware that exploits this old program.

Both Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome browsers will continue support for Windows XP after expiration, and so use one of these browsers instead of Internet Explorer if you are still running XP. This will at least give you a little more time, but be aware that Chrome on XP will only be supported for one more year, and it is not known how long Firefox will offer support.

In addition, don't forget to change your browser from the IE default.

The Windows 7 Benefits

The Windows 7 OS provides many new tools and features that on improved.  This new OS has been constructed to be more intuitive and less distracting.

Decreased boot time- the average windows 7 machine will boot will boot up in under 60 seconds. Compatibility- The flexibility of Windows 7 gives users the ability to run almost any software that is Windows compatible. 

Libraries- Windows 7 provides a new, more intuitive way of organizing and locating documents.  Instead of wasting time trying to remember where a previously created document is stored, a user can now search for their documents by type in different “libraries” such as communications, contacts, documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos.  

Windows Search- This enhanced search feature resembles the “auto-complete” function that is a familiar tool in Microsoft Word.  The moment a user starts to type a word in the search field, Windows 7 will list items that match the typed characters.  The list will decrease as characters are added.  At any point, a user can preview the search results—without having to open the document.

The Benefits

Faster, more responsive performance

• System boot time and application launch times have noticeably decreased.
• A reduction in the time required to place systems into and retrieve them out of hibernation mode makes “putting your system to sleep” more convenient.

Improved taskbar and full-screen previews

The taskbar at the bottom of your screen to switch between open programs. In Windows 7 you can set the order of the taskbar icons and they'll stay in that order. The icons are larger, too. If you point to an icon, you'll see a small, preview version of the page or program. If you point to this preview, you'll see a full-screen preview.

Jump Lists

With Jump Lists, you can quickly find files that you've worked with recently. Right-click a program icon on the taskbar to see a list of recently-opened files. You can also pin files that you use regularly to a Jump List. Some Jump Lists show commands for common tasks, like playing music or videos.

Enhanced searching capabilities

• New options allow you to look for keywords in documents, emails, attached storage devices, and can also extend the search to networked servers and designated web pages.

Location aware printing

• When you connect to a network, Windows 7 will automatically detect your location and select the proper printers for your print jobs.

Virtual hard disk support

• Windows 7 can be virtualized, allowing multiple operating systems to reside on a single host machine.
• Windows 7 is preconfigured to support Hyper-V virtual machines.

Expanded security

• BitLocker-to-Go brings the encryption powers of BitLocker to portable storage devices such as USB drives and external storage devices.
• Preinstalled drivers let your Windows 7 machine “read” most biometric devices.
• App-Blocker lets IT administrators easily control the applications individual users can access.
• Windows Access Center replaces Vista’s Security Center.  The Access Center provides security alerts and gives you the tools to take care of problems and system maintenance in one convenient location.
• Geo-tracking will broadcast the position of your computer to location-aware applications such as mapping programs.

Simple device management

• Device Stage is a plug-and-play app that will recognize portable devices when connected to a computer, and then provide you with only the relevant menus and options needed to manage the device.

New remote access methods

• BranchCache provides branch-office users quicker access to files stored on central file servers in the main office.

• Direct Access gives mobile users remote access to resources without requiring the use of a VPN.

Computer History (Time line)

The following is a timeline of some significant events in computer history. It is not meant to be complete, just a representation of some of the major landmarks in computer development: 1617 John Napier creates “Napier’s Bones,” wooden or ivory rods used for calculating.

1642 Blaise Pascal introduces the Pascaline digital adding machine.

1822 Charles Babbage conceives the Difference Engine and later the Analytical Engine, a true generalpurpose computing machine.

1906 Lee De Forest patents the vacuum tube triode, used as an electronic switch in the first electronic computers.

1937 John V. Atanasoff begins work on the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), which would later be officially credited as the first electronic computer.

1943 Alan Turing develops the Colossus, a secret British code-breaking computer designed to decode German secret messages.

1945 John von Neumann writes “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” in which he outlines the architecture of the modern stored-program computer.

1946 ENIAC is introduced, an electronic computing machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

1947 On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully test the point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution.

1949 Maurice Wilkes assembles the EDSAC, the first practical storedprogram computer, at Cambridge University.

1950 Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis builds the ERA 1101, one of the first commercially produced computers.

1952 The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau is the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention.

1953 IBM ships its first electronic computer, the 701.

1954 A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments, Inc., brings a tremendous reduction in costs.

1954 The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator establishes itself as the first massproduced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year.

1955 Bell Laboratories announces the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC.

1956 MIT researchers build the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors.

1956 The era of magnetic disk storage dawns with IBM’s shipment of a 305 RAMAC to Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco.

1958 Jack Kilby creates the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors can exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.

1959 IBM’s 7000 series mainframes are the company’s first transistorized computers.

1959 Robert Noyce’s practical integrated circuit, invented at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., allows printing of conducting channels directly on the silicon surface.

1960 Bell Labs designs its Dataphone, the first commercial modem, specifically for converting digital computer data to analog signals for transmission across its long-distance network.

1960 The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC’s PDP-1, sells for $120,000.

1961 According to Datamation magazine, IBM has an 81.2% share of the computer market in 1961, the year in which it introduces the 1400 Series.

1964 CDC’s 6600 supercomputer, designed by Seymour Cray, performs up to three million instructions per second—a processing speed three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM Stretch.

1964 IBM announces System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and 40 peripherals that can work together.

1964 Online transaction processing makes its debut in IBM’s SABRE reservation system, set up for American Airlines.

1965 Digital Equipment Corp. introduces the PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer.

1966 Hewlett-Packard enters the generalpurpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers.

1969 The root of what is to become the Internet begins when the Department of Defense establishes four nodes on the ARPAnet: two at

University of California campuses (one at Santa Barbara and one at Los Angeles) and one each at SRI International and the University of

Utah.

1971 A team at IBM’s San Jose Laboratories invents the 8'' floppy disk.

1971 The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appears in Electronic News.

1971 The Kenbak-1, one of the first personal computers, advertises for $750 in Scientific American.

1972 Hewlett-Packard announces the HP-35 as “a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule” with a solidstate memory similar to that of a computer.

1972 Intel’s 8008 microprocessor makes its debut.

1972 Steve Wozniak builds his “blue box,” a tone generator to make free phone calls.

1973 Robert Metcalfe devises the Ethernet method of network connection at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

1973 The Micral is the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

1973 The TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster, provides the first display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set.

1974 Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center design the Alto, the first workstation with a built-in mouse for

1974 Scelbi advertises its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel’s 8008.

1975 Telenet, the first commercial packetswitching network and civilian equivalent of ARPAnet, is born.

1975 The January edition of Popular Electronics features the Altair 8800, which is based on Intel’s 8080 microprocessor, on its cover.

1975 The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed by Lee Felsenstein, marks the first implementation of a memory-mapped

alphanumeric video display for personal computers.

1976 Steve Wozniak designs the Apple I, a single-board computer.

1976 The 5 1/4'' flexible disk drive and disk are introduced by Shugart Associates.

1976 The Cray I makes its name as the first commercially successful vector processor.

1977 Tandy Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80.

1977 Apple Computer introduces the Apple II.

1977 Commodore introduces the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor).

1978 The VAX 11/780 from Digital Equipment Corp. features the capability to address up to 4.3GB of virtual memory, providing hundreds of times the capacity of most minicomputers. 1979 Motorola introduces the 68000 microprocessor.

1980 John Shoch, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, invents the computer “worm,” a short program that searches a network for idle processors.

1980 Seagate Technology creates the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST-506.

1980 The first optical data storage disk has 60 times the capacity of a 5 1/4'' floppy disk.

1981 Xerox introduces the Star, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

1981 Adam Osborne completes the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighs 24lbs. and costs $1,795.

1981 IBM introduces its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer market. The IBM PC is the grandfather of all modern PCs.

1981 Sony introduces and ships the first 3 1/2'' floppy drives and disks.

1981 Philips and Sony introduce the CD-DA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) drive. Sony is the first with a CD player on the market.

1983 Apple introduces its Lisa, which incorporates a GUI that’s very similar to the one first introduced on the Xerox Star.

1983 Compaq Computer Corp. introduces its first PC clone that uses the same software as the IBM PC.

1984 Apple Computer launches the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a GUI, with a single $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl.

1984 IBM releases the PC-AT (PC Advanced Technology), three times faster than original PCs and based on the Intel 286 chip. The AT introduces the 16-bit ISA bus and is the computer all modern PCs are based on.

1985 Philips introduces the first CD-ROM drive.

1986 Compaq announces the Deskpro 386, the first computer on the market to use what was then Intel’s new 386 chip.

1987 IBM introduces its PS/2 machines, which make the 3 1/2'' floppy disk drive and VGA video standard for PCs. The PS/2 also introduces the MicroChannel Architecture (MCA) bus, the first plug-and-play bus for PCs.

1988 Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveils the NeXT.

1988 Compaq and other PC-clone makers develop Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), which unlike MicroChannel retains backward compatibility with the existing ISA bus.

1988 Robert Morris’s worm floods the ARPAnet. The 23-year-old Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the National Security

Agency, sends a nondestructive worm through the Internet, causing problems for about 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts linked to the network.

1989 Intel releases the 486 (P4) microprocessor, which contains more than one million transistors. Intel also introduces 486 motherboard

chipsets.

1990 The World Wide Web (WWW) is born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN—the high-energy  physics laboratory in Geneva— develops Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

1993 Intel releases the Pentium (P5) processor. Intel shifts from numbers to names for its chips after it learns it’s impossible to trademark a number. Intel also releases motherboard chipsets and, for the first time, complete motherboards as well.

1995 Intel releases the Pentium Pro processor, the first in the P6 processor family.

1995 Microsoft releases Windows 95, the first mainstream 32-bit operating system, in a huge rollout.

1997 Intel releases the Pentium II processor, essentially a Pentium Pro with MMX instructions added.

1997 AMD introduces the K6, which is compatible with the Intel P5 (Pentium).

1998 Microsoft releases Windows 98.

1998 Intel releases the Celeron, a low-cost version of the Pentium II processor. Initial versions have no cache, but within a few months Intel introduces versions with a smaller but faster L2 cache.

1999 Intel releases the Pentium III, essentially a Pentium II with SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) added.

1999 AMD introduces the Athlon.

2000 Microsoft releases Windows Me (Millennium Edition) and Windows 2000.

2000 Both Intel and AMD introduce processors running at 1GHz.

2000 AMD introduces the Duron, a lowcost Athlon with reduced L2 cache.

2000 Intel introduces the Pentium 4, the latest processor in the Intel Architecture 32-bit (IA-32) family.

2001 Intel releases the Itanium processor, its first 64-bit (IA-64) processor for PCs.

2001 The industry celebrates the 20^th anniversary of the release of the original IBM-PC.

2001 Intel introduces the first 2GHz processor, a version of the Pentium 4. It took the industry 28 1/2 years to go from 108KHz to 1GHz, but only 18 months to go from 1GHz to 2GHz.

2001 Microsoft releases Windows XP Home and Professional, for the first time merging the consumer (9x/Me) and business (NT/2000) operating system lines under the same code base (an extension of Windows 2000). 

CMOS

The system’s configuration options, to store the system’s setup parameters in a small, low-power RAM IC called the CMOS RAM. CMOS RAM is typically combined on the same IC with the real-time clock.
Computer starts, its system attributes—stored in the CMOS RAM—are read by the BIOS. BIOS then uses those attributes during normal system operation. It is vitally important that the correct settings be used when configuring a system.

BIOS and CMOS RAM are not the same thing, although the two are intimately related. BIOS refers to the firmware instructions located on the BIOS ROM, and CMOS refers to the low-power RAM that is holding the system’s setup parameters. BIOS reads the CMOS RAM into memory at start time, and provides the “setup” routine that allows you to change the contents of CMOS, but the CMOS RAM/RTC device is a totally different IC.
ENTERING CMOS SETUP
The configuring of CMOS setup is to launch the setup utility. BIOS manufacturers are rarely consistent when it comes to accessing the setup utility. we launch Setup in the first few moments after the system boots—a note on the display will usually indicate the correct key or key combination such as:
Press <F1> to enter Setup...
BIOS/SYSTEM                                KEY OR KEY SEQUENCE
AMI BIOS                                       <Del> key during the POST
Award BIOS                                    <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Esc>
DTK BIOS                                      <Esc> key during the POST
IBM PS/2 BIOS                              <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Ins> after <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Del>
Phoenix BIOS                                  <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Esc> or <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<S>
ALR PC                                          <F2> (for PCI systems)
                                                        or <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Esc> (for non-PCI systems)
Compaq PCs                                   <F10>
Gateway 2000 PC                           <F1>
Sony PC                                          <F3> while the PC is starting (you see the Sony logo), then hit <F1>


THE CMOS MAP
standard 128-byte ISAcompatible CMOS is divided into four fairly distinct sections: 16 bytes of real-time clock data (00h–0Fh), 32 bytes of ISA configuration data (10h–2Fh), 16 bytes of BIOS-specific configuration data (30h–3Fh), and 64 bytes of extended CMOS data (40h–7Fh). Additional CMOS
RAM is typically used as the ESCD.

BIOS ERROR MESSAGES

• BIOS ROM checksum error—system halted The checksum of the BIOS code in the BIOS chip is incorrect—this is a fatal problem, indicating the BIOS code might have become corrupt. They will need to replace the motherboard BIOS before the system will initialize.

• CMOS battery failed The CMOS battery is no longer functional. Need to replace the CMOS battery.

• DMA bus time-out A device has driven the bus signal for more than 7.8 microseconds. This might be a random fault, but chances are that a device in the PC has failed. Try removing expansion devices first. Otherwise, replace the motherboard.

• Cache memory bad, do not enable cache POST has determined that your cache memory is defective. Do not attempt to enable the cache in your system.

• DMA  error A serious fault has occurred in the DMA-controller system of your motherboard. In virtually all cases, the motherboard will have to be replaced.

• INTR #1 (or INTR #2) error A serious fault has occurred with your interrupt controller on the motherboard. In virtually all cases, the motherboard will have to be replaced entirely.

• Primary input device not found: The primary input device, such as the keyboard or mouse or other device if input is redirected, could not be found. Check the installation and configuration of all your input devices. Be sure that the input devices are also enabled in CMOS setup.

• PCI IRQ conflict: Two devices requested the same IRQ, resulting in a conflict. Try freeing the IRQs needed to allow both devices to be configured properly.

BIOS Features

PC is constantly advancing in CPU’s, chipsets, memory, video, drives, etc. The key features that are included in a BIOS.

• CPU support BIOS should support a rich range of CPUs, preferably from such CPU makers as Intel and, AMD.
• Chipset support The BIOS should support the latest chipset families. Chipset support is crucial because it allows motherboard designers to implement other features, such as USB and advanced memory.
• Memory support The BIOS should be able to auto-size and support the most modern forms of memory. Memory error checking (parity and ECC) should also be supported.
• Drive support The BIOS must support large SATA/EIDE/Ultra-ATA hard drives  with very fast data-transfer modes, such as PIO Modes and Ultra DMA.
• ACPI/APM support The BIOS should be fully compliant with the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification , and supports APM BIOS specifications through version 1.2. Power management is important for mobile systems, and is widely used in desktop/tower systems to reduce energy waste.
• Boot versatility support The BIOS should be able to boot from a number of different drives, and include the BIOS Boot Specification for Initial Program Load (IPL) devices. This currently supports booting from up to four IDE/EIDE/SATA drives (including CD-ROM drives), SCSI drives, USB and network cards.
• Plug-and-Play support The BIOS must detect and configure PnP devices during POST.