Green Tech Girl

Just a quick note to express my frustration that computers seem to have a clock that kills them just a little bit after the one-year warranty is up. Maybe that means more money for the computer makers, but it’s just soooo much electronic waste. I have an old Pentium II that was custom built 10 years ago and the darn thing still works. It’s been there as a backup of my backup computer, in case nothing works and I need email. I guess they don’t make them like they used to.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to become a brand angel for the new CherryPal green computer, which will be released within a few weeks. It needs only 2 watts of power, and runs on a flash drive without any moving parts. Linux is the operating system, and many of the apps will be available via free “cloud” computing online.

I will be getting my CherryPal to review soon, at which point I am going to run the computer through the motions to see how well it does. (The nice thing about being a brand angel is that they aren’t censoring honest opinion, though there is a financial incentive to write positive things, since we get a small referral bonus for the use of our promo codes. Rest assured, if I hated it, I would not promote it regardless.)

The CherryPal will be for sale on their website soon - use my promo code CPP235 to receive a discount on your purchase.

Back in the day, I used to go to CompUSA with my live-in boyfriend as the quick alternative to Fry’s. Somewhere along the line, CompUSA degenerated into a shell of itself, a dirty, disheveled store with absent customer service.

I went to CompUSA about two years ago to purchase a new computer, with a $600 budget. Having found a model I wanted, I waited around for a sales rep to get the actual computer for me. (The boxes were in the back.) Twenty minutes later, after asking for help, I still had no response in a quiet, dead store. I walked out, telling the cashier that they had just lost a $600 sale. I was not surprised when the store closed down as part of a massive “gutting” of the corporation. (more…)

I have an old Sony Vaio laptop, a Pentium III. I had installed the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on it back in December. It was working OK but the computer was starting to freeze at odd moments. The breakdown would inevitably occur after a very ominous KACHUNG KACHUNG sound from the hard drive.

I wasn’t sure if it was the Linux distribution causing the problems. I had heard from a friend that PCLinuxOS was a very good Linux distribution that happened to run very fast, particularly on older computers. So I downloaded it (Linux is, after all, free) and installed it. No go. The computer was now worse off. (more…)

CNN is reporting about the pain at the pump; will gas prices ever come back down or are we finally seeing the rampant cost of fuel run up as predicted by the peak oil people?

One commenter really struck me:

I waste gas every day. Because even though i could just as easily do my job from home, I am required by my employer to drive into the office every day. My 17 mile commute takes 40 minutes in stop-and-go traffic. I would LOVE to not have to drive in every day. Can someone (eg Congress) please start penalizing businesses that don’t allow people to telecommute where possible??

And I have to say, I am seeing a decided lack of leadership on this issue. Why aren’t we calling for more telecommuting? Why aren’t we encouraging more use of public transit? Why is our government so silent on this issue? Are we just going to sit around and whine or do something about all this?

Telecommuting is cheap and easy to do, and the only reason it is not done more is that bosses are too prone to want to micromanage and control people. With a webcam, the boss could conceivably be looking at you all day at any rate…shades of Big Brother, for sure, but it would solve some of those management fears that instead of working at home, the employees are out partying.

We need to start making some serious changes, NOW. The worst case scenario: If these prices continue to rise so dramatically, it will be too much too soon and our economy could collapse. So let’s start being more proactive, please!

*end of rant*

Another good quiz from the Sierra Club:

How Green is My PC?

I just bought my first printer in nine years. Yes, that’s right, nine years. When I say I am anti-consumerism, I really mean that. If something works, I don’t just throw it out to get something new. I have a perfectly good 1994 HP LaserJet that still does the bulk of my printing. In 1999, I bought an Epson color inkjet. That was the last printer I purchased. I wasn’t using it that much, but it, along with an old printer/scanner combo a friend gave me, finally bit the dust.

So I went to Costco and got a new Canon all-in-one printer for around $100 with tax. This thing is amazing. It prints, it scans, it copies, and it faxes. And excuse me for sounding like an old fart here, but back in the day I used to own a printer, a copier, a fax machine and a scanner. Trying to find homes for these items in my then one-bedroom apartment was a challenge. My home copier was actually situated on the top of my fridge. (more…)

In case you had not heard, there’s been a huge brouhaha in the past week over a massive billing error at one of the top webhosting companies, Dreamhost. I found out about it when my friend (who I had referred) asked me why she was being billed in January for a September due date. We discovered that Dreamhost accidentally billed a year in advance (inputting 2009 instead of 2008 or something like that). She got an email back from Dreamhost, felt happy that she had a refund coming, and that was that. (My account was fortunately not charged, since my credit card had expired.)

Well, that wasn’t exactly that. That might have been that for her, but for many others, the charge put them in the red and the refunds were slow in coming. The blogosphere has been aflame with the issue, and the drama has been a whole soap opera of its own. What has amazed me is seeing how many people are living so close to the edge. Dreamhost users were on the official blog, complaining that they had no money for food or baby formula. Baby formula? You’ve got kids, and you spend money for webhosting when you have no savings set aside for emergencies? Yikes. (more…)

Linux may be the greener choice when choosing an operating system. Why? Because the latest version of Microsoft Windows is such a resource-hog, you’ll need double or triple the computer power to perform basic tasks with the same speed you might with Linux.

Program that used to require a few hundred megs of RAM on Windows XP now require 2 gigs or more on Windows Vista. Check out this chart on the Audacity download page. To use Audacity on Windows Vista Home Premium, you will need 4 gigs of RAM versus the 512 MB you needed on XP. A whopping 4 GIGS!! Talk about creating unnecessary e-waste! Why force people to buy more electronic chips when the old operating system did everything just as fast if not faster on less hardware? (more…)