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LOL I rather hoped that someone would steer the thread away from computer talk! It's in the article about The Game of Thrones guy. He doesn't like spelling correctors, and still uses Wordstar on an old disk operating system (sic) machine, apparently. I'd have imagined someone would have ported it to 'doze, or there are emulators which can run the old Wordstar codebase at many times the speed. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502 Anyway, has anyone seen my flares? This retro thing could easily catch on.

...you read an explanation like this in a BBC news item: Not MSDOS computers please note. Maybe I will be around long enough to read this: Just kidding! Has anyone seen anything in print which made them seem old?

Yeah, there are lots of live CDs that are just as good or better at diagnostics, but the Puppy distros seem to be USB stick (UFD) centric and super-small. Don't know about you, but the last of my machines to have a CD drive hit the cupboard several years back, and I positively hate getting an external CD/DVD drive out. The disro I'm using is only a few hundred megs, but you wouldn't know that it when it pops up. On the downside the file system is a bit wierd; it loads a pseudo-disk file into RAM, and a quick attempt to install GCC has thrown up all sorts of probs. Searching on the error messages I'm surely not alone here. Just going to install the latest Java SDK and see if it is a viable development platform. But for an average end-user there's more than enough functionality and it's delightfully free of set-up nonsense. Some of this may be due to an obvious attempt to kill all "localization" but our mother tongue! Even the package manager offers to remove any language bloat from its downloads. That sure gets my vote! You're root all the time, except for an option to run the internet stuff as user: spot (spot the dog - gerrit?). This undoubtedly raises eyebrows, but simplifies many things.

I knew about it but I'd never actualy tried it until earlier this week. I'm talking about Puppy Linux. It's a Linux that you don't need to install. One that is very small (but perfectly formed), and which boots very quickly. Actually there are numerous Puppies because there is a tool called Woof that makes it very easy for the computer savvy to generate yet another one. I've now got a USB stick in my "man-bag" that can fire it up on just about any machine, and optionally install it permanently. Why would you want to do this? Well.. when you turn on that old lappy or desktop and it tells you that M$ got sick of waiting for you to buy the same old Windoze code yet again (a pop-up on the XP screen I'm told by a third party), then think Puppy Linux. You can have the old clunker working better than it ever did under Microsoft in no time at all, and you needn't pay a penny to M$ - ever! Also great if a machine refuses to boot as you can likely get at all your files, and test that it's not a hardware problem, both at the same time. This post is being written on an old Asus EeePC that was gathering dust for years. All it turned out to need was a new keyboard; £14 from Amazon. The battery is seems pretty good, so's I removed XP completely and installed Puppy. It's now better than new! Just about all the hardware was immediately recognised - no Windows driver hell!!! I will write full instructions to put Puppy on a USB stick, and make it bootable, if anyone asks here. The information is out there is you search, but there are a bewildering number of ways to do it. It only took me a few minutes and a £3 8GB stick is more than adequate. In fact a 4GB would do almost as well. Puppy saves your work back to the stick by default, so you can resume your session on other hardware. Even with slow USB 2 this is still faster than the usual Windows XP boot sequence, and it tells you what is going on at every stage. Magic! That's the new keyboard tested then! Posting beats the quick brown fox, any day!

Is that a yabba-dabba-doo then? Last year's is surely a page right out of history. Legal Notice: Any similarity to dinosaurs - political or otherwise - is purely coincidental.

...so you'll need to check that whatever you buy has a HDMI socket to connect it to your telly. People tend to either love or hate Chromebooks. So, buy your first one from somewhere that will give you a week or two to take/send it back for credit. According to Forbes the new batch (of about 20 models) is a month or two away from the shops. This could also throw up even better prices on the existing few models. So... it will probably pay to take your time. We'll also see 14nm chips in Windoze machines too. They are quoting eleven hour battery lives (from quite small batteries) for the new crop, which is highly impressive, even if this is a bit exaggerated for real-world use. http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/05/06/google-aims-new-intel-powered-chromebooks-at-mainstream-buyers/

I'm currently buying a little USB 3.0 Flash Drive to run another operating system from on my lappy, and for this the read/write speeds matter a whole lot more than gigabytes per buck. Suppliers are VERY poor at supplying this essential information, and you can waste a fortune buying them to test them yourself. But, here's a site that supplies objective comparisons so's you can make the best decision. Certainly one to bookmark on your smartphone or tab to spot bargains while you are out shopping. http://usb.userbenchmark.com/ What's particularly useful is the effective speed assessment - raw read and write speeds are not the full story! (S)He has also computed a value for money figure, and you can sort your list on any of the criteria by clicking on the column title. Remember that unless your computer has USB 3.0 sockets you aren't likely to see anything like the quoted performance on the faster products. USB 3.0 sockets generally have a tab in them that's colour-coded purple against the usually black USB 2 type.

I will go with Keith's scranchings, or maybe without the g. Aren't they illegal under EU law by now? Think I'm joking see http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22579896. You can pretty much guarantee that the med countries will ignore this, but it will be enforced by the gestapo in the northern parts of the Fourth Reich! But - could set up schranching speakeasies! The roaring twenties will be around again quite soon.

Whoops... spot the deliberate mistake? It's actually a dual-core! Full 64 bit, so it would be interesting to see if it is being used in 64 bit mode in this machine. Comes in at about 60% to 70% of an i3 - depending on i3 stepping - so that's pretty good.

Well the Celeron 2955U seems to come in at about a PassMark of 1550 which isn't at all bad on the scale of things. Find out what your existing gear has inside to get a performance comparison. The little SSD is almost certainly going to be faster than you existing hard drives, so it's worth a try, particularly if you are buying it from somewhere you can take it back to if you don't like it. Here's how it compares to a (likely much more power-hungry) i3: http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Celeron-2955U It's a 22nm device so not quite bleeding edge, but will have an impressive battery performance. It's single core dual threads by the looks of it, so that's doubly impressive. Someone you know has a little tablet with a 22nm dual core chip in it, and I'm amazed by the performance. AFAIK the 14nm stuff hasn't actually surfaced yet. Also impressive that a budget machine has Bluetooth 4 as standard, and a USB 3. The real irritation that I've found with current Intel based tablets is that they have no separate power jack. This means that you need to charge them through the microUSB port, and as they generally only have one, you are stuffed if you want to power them, and use an external drive or keyboard/mouse at the same time. This is truly daft! Make sure that anything you buy for serious use doesn't solely depend on microUSB power, or at least has more than one microUSB.

That's the first thing you should use it for! Download the free edition of Macrium Reflect and image your hard disk partitions right away. If you have a recovery partition on the machine then Reflect will show it and allow you to copy it. You only need copy the recovery partition once, and can store its image anywhere - on a USB stick for instance. When your drive fails or corrupts simply buy a new one and write the image(s) to it. Weekly backups of the working partitions are recommended. Macs are expensive to buy and have a high cost of ownership - especially in the UK where they are a rip-off. The best thing to buy depends very much on your existing software investment, how you intend to use the machine, and how good your on-line connection is. The trend is to cloud computing where you do need a decent Internet connection. If you are replacing a legacy XP machine, like many are at the present time, it may pay you to look at Google Chromebooks. They are amazingly good value, and there's a more powerful collection coming out from various manufacturers (using the latest 14nm Intel CPUs) over the coming months. All software is provided to you for free, without all this staged nonsense (to extract more money for more features), and the machine is kept updated quite automatically. In addition there's an ever-growing market in third party "apps" developing - just like Android. Most people just look at the ticket price when buying a machine, and don't consider the cost of ownership. I know that many educational establishments are moving their legacy XP stuff to Google Chrome as they do look at the total ownership cost. Over the next decade Chrome could easily eclipse Windows as the number one operating system - unless Microsoft wake up very quickly, and cut their fees to manufacturers and end users. Chromebooks generally have a smallish SSD and no hard drive which makes them quite compact, but you can buy them with hard drives too. You are right to consider an SSD anyway, as prices are currently crashing and they do deliver a lot more performance. They are pretty easy to retrofit, and knowing how to use disk imaging software will make this easy for you.

Back up to an external drive regularly. There's no excuse when you can get first class disk imaging software for free. Google on "Macrium Reflect". Once a week minimums if you are an active user! Also pick up a free DropBox or Amazon Cloud account to copy your current work to in the background. If you are a really serious user buy a cheap NFS with RAID. Most people have older hard drives lying around that can profitably be recycled in a multi-bay NFS. Also, buy a three quid 8GB USB stick and create a bootable pen drive for emergencies. If you don't use it you'll make a friend rescuing someone else with it. The time to do all these things is NOW; it's human nature to put off until it is too late! A failure will happen, it's simply a matter of when.

Yes, we're now up to 29! This has a completely redesigned interface which looks pretty good on my lappy and uses the limited screen depth more sensibly. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/ If you are still using MS Internet Explorer you really need to ask yourself why? Even the US Government warns against the risks you are running. There are other browsers of course, so, if you have a particular favourite, then please tell us all here what you like about it.

Now here you are being totally unreasonable! Without the extra tax revenue, how on earth are we going to pay the £8BN annual membership to the EU? That's not to mention the countless billions in foreign aid to fund, space programs, nuclear weapons, missile development, and all those other essentials that "underdeveloped" countries need to sustain life! And, there's not just fuel, there's the excess cost on most items we put on our tables.

Leaving aside the other farces which surround Eurovision, here's something else our betters have slipped under our radar:- The British public voted overwhelmingly for last night's Polish entry, rating it the number one. You wouldn't think that from the voting though - the official UK vote offered up zilch points to Poland! Yes, no votes whatsoever! The bearded Austrian "lady" - who couldn't actually sing, and delivered a song that immediately had you trying to remember which of the poorer Bond films it must have accompanied the title sequence in - rated the full twelve UK points! That "she" broke down in tears during "her" highly politicised speech about the world now being a better place for now caring about "her" sexuality came too late for the voting, but it left a warm feeling that the right thing had been done. Better songs, better presentations, were consigned to Eur-oblivion; other hopes from real singers and songwriters were dashed. But none of this mattered, because militant gays were now (temporarily) happy - they'd score yet another victory in their unstoppable cause. Wrongs had been righted, conventional wisdom had been overturned - consequential social damage has no place in the modern world! The "lady" looks like a man, talks like a man, "her" see-through sequinned top vividly illustrates that she is a man - in the chest area. Then there's the more subtle touch of that highly coiffured beard. Her real name is Tom, so clearly her parents thought they'd brought a male into the world. To the PC BBC none of this physicality matters one iota. She feels to be a woman, so must exclusively be described as "she" even if the audience is as confused as hell. Even dear old Graham Norton was confused as to whether the tears were genuine - but helpfully said he thought they were. ..but I digress from the main point here. How on earth did the UK public's choice of the politically incorrect busty Polish beauties receive zero points from the BBC? Simples! Our betters at the Beeb decided that we really shouldn't be seen to be so sexist, so politically incorrect, to the rest of Europe and beyond. In EU democracy fashion people who knew better than us swung the vote the politically correct way - on all our behalves. The Beeb's appointees, and guardians of our correctness, get 50% of the votes. They can thus divide and conquer in the well tried, well tested, European way. I'm immensity grateful for having any politically incorrect thoughts so carefully moulded. It's for the best, I'm sure of it. And, think of all those at-risk jobs which depend on the EU, people! And here, my fellow Europeans, are the figures to prove that we are just as PC as all the other PC fixes that comprise our wonderfully PC European "democracy". http://www.eurovision.tv/page/results?event=1893&voter=GB My humble vote: UKIP douze point!

Didn't say there were any links with Guallists.. said I think he would like to. So AfD and Bepe Grillo's movement is "far right" too is it? They have a lot of support, are diametrically opposed to EU waste and corruption, and want their countries out! Looks like rather a lot of left leaning folk in Cinque Stelle from where I'm sitting - and I'm sitting quite close as I write! To portray UKIP as far right is a tactic of the establishment. The truth is that in a focus-group-driven bid for votes Labour moved sharply right and Cameron has now moved his party into the realms of the loony left. We all know that they are near indistinguishable and simply out for themselves; so why do we still buy into their divisive ploys? Supporting your country is not the exclusive province of the far-right, and being anti-establishment the exclusive province of the far-left. There's a revolution headed our way! That the dinosaur political classes are blind to it - and will try all the usual ploys to hang on to power - is a given.

No bloomin' way!!! It's true that Marine Le Pen has made noises, but she has been thoroughly rebuffed. I think Dupont-Aignan would very much like an alliance - I'm fairly sure it was him on TV the other day proposing something to that effect - but so far he has minuscule support compared to the Le Pen bandwagon. Take a look at these pictures and tell me that these people would support anything which was even mildly racist. http://www.ukip.org/ukip_fights_back_against_smears_from_the_extreme_left_and_the_establishment Yeah, OK, the event was managed to get African, Asian and Jewish faces up there on stage, but considering the massed ranks of the establishment spin-doctors trying every bit of innuendo in the book to indirectly imply that UKIP is racist - whilst of course denying any such thing - the party has no option but to demonstrate its breadth of support. It's actually very logical for immigrants to support UKIP. They have even more to lose than native Brits from continued uncontrolled immigration.

Hi willy j! I think we are seeing a revolution in our country, but the political classes haven't woken up to this yet. They've lost control of the media and they are about to lose control of quite a few other things too! The modern working classes, the people who produce the wealth, are about to consign the chattering classes to history. We've had quite enough of Old Etonians and Champaign Socialists telling us what to do and how we should think. Instead of rolling back their influence over our lives they've plotted to add yet another undemocratic layer of it - the EU! Nowhere is the waste and futility of big government more evident than it is in Brussels. As per usual this was sold to ordinary people on a lie. We were told it was a Common Market that would increase wealth, and the LD's still peddle this lie. When he thought no one much was listening Ted Heath even admitted to the dishonesty. The modern strategy to bury this lie is to pretend that the thinking masses don't actually care much about the EU - it's very low priority, we must see to other more important things first. Well, it's behind all of our problems people, and the lie needs sorting once and for all! Cameron lied about his "cast iron guarantee" of a referendum, and his current strategy (ably aided and abetted by Labour and the LD's) is to promise one at a future date. A date when he suspects that he won't need to deliver. His chums in the other parties will help him along on the cynically calculated 2017 date. If, by chance, he is in a position to deliver, he'll try to repeat the Harold Wilson trick of pretending that we now have a much better deal, so all is OK again. It will be a deal that civil servants have pre-negotiated so's he can return from the Reich in triumph, waving his worthless bit of paper! Brussels will moan about the UK getting special treatment, but the eurocrats will be secretly laughing all the way to the European Central Bank! Like everyone else I was duped by the political classes into believing in "the European project" and foolishly voted for it. It's up to our generation to flag up to our children and their children, the fact that they are being exploited. They must not repeat our mistakes! Only by voting against the political classes can the latest rounds of political musical chairs at our expense be stopped! But we mustn't stop with Brussels - that Westminster gentleman's club needs a very thorough sorting too! A vote for Labour, LD or Tory is to be duped once again. And... if you foolishly think that they are not all in it together then ask yourself what a Labourite ex-minister is doing chairing an all-party committee formed to try to discredit UKIP! If UKIP is simply taking votes from the Shire Tories then why is Labour helping them to combat this?!

Nope, Manuel stops at the white cliffs of Dover! A torrent of ex-pats returning from Spain who thought the EU meant easy jobs in the sun. Record unemployment there, especially youth unemployment. Only fools put other nations before their own! Things... can only get tougher... can only get tougher! You know the tune - or d-ream on with the LDs?

Ah - they are all at it! At what, you ask? At bleating on about squeezed resources. There's Millipede bleating on about the squeezed middle, our friends up North West in your article, and a member of my family who can't make a choice between embellishments that aren't actually needed! There's even an article in the Telegraph bleating on about people on £120K p/a not being able to afford to dine out! We'll... message to you Mr Morpeth CoT Treasurer; Mr Potential Economy-Wrecker II; Ms Judith Woods of The Telegraph, and lastly my family member: Life is about making the right choices! Not the things it would be nice to have, but the things that ensure a better future. A choice between enjoying it now, or ensuring that come a rainy day you - and the people around you - have, what will by then, be regarded as the essentials. The globalisation - much beloved by Gordo - means that things can only get tougher as there's more competition for available resources. Things rating high on my current non-essentials list are: eating out, Sky TV subscriptions, and fancy gates! 'I make £120,000 but I can't recall the last time we went out for dinner' P.S. If there are any local people still of the opinion that New Labour is for the workers, then think on that squeezed middle sound-bite. They may well be for the workers, but their idea of work isn't remotely yours! It's distinctly non-manual work, and the North East no longer features in their plans - always assuming, since Blair, it ever did! If you really want to join in (21st century) class war then vote UKIP, they are for manual workers, and our country!

My memory may be out by yards, but it's sure not over five miles out! And... I probably only walked/rode/drove past their sign less than 10,000 times, so how am I supposed to remember foot high letters?! http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Smails-6 Interestingly, it's not just me that was confused by the appended "s" - seems like the family itself was!

I guess you mean: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.128386,-1.588501,3a,75y,43.6h,91.81t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1ssDWwl61C2xJJM_1GmrOQpw!2e0 The name Smail or Smails rings a bell here, or have I got the wrong shop? Excellent quality building but the stonework is a bit neglected where the water has been splashing off the pavement. Hope it has been re-pointed since 2009 to prevent further damage.

Those who the gods wish to destroy... Sensitive material - in a mutual?!