A friend of mine recently asked what the purpose of the old “Turbo button” was on old computers. Many today won’t remember a time when PCs were a fairly new concept and there used to be a button on some systems that changed the speed of the system.

Now, the question arose for obvious reasons: why would you ever want your computer to not be turbo? Isn’t the big push always for more speed in computers?

The answer requires us to go back to the beginning. The original compatible PCs had such speeds as 25 MHz (my first Windows 3.1 PC). Video game programmers used to make shortcuts in their programming, relying on the limitations of the CPU to set speed boundaries. In games such as Wolfenstein, one would hit the “walk forward” button, and the animations and movement speed were limited by the CPU processing power.

The problem came when processors started speeding up. It was not long before 100 or 133 MHz CPUs became available, and suddenly hitting the forward button would turn the game into an approximation of “the Flash” and you would launch at impossible speeds into death because the game was scaling faster with the processor. 4x faster CPU translated into things happening 4x faster (or more) in the game.

The Turbo button was a solution that allowed computers to scale back their speed to enable compatibility for these older games.

It may seem counterintuitive to have a button labeled “Turbo” whose purpose is to hobble a processor’s ability, but when you consider that when the button is pressed, the system is at full speed and when inactive the CPU is in the limitation mode, it makes more sense.

Today, systems have software solutions to such problems to virtualize ancient software environments to play such games. One such example is DOSBOX. Lucasarts’ SCUMMVM is another example of legacy gaming software virtualization.

As a mobile computer technician and network administrator, I’ve come across a wide variety of consumer and business grade laptops. From the boxy IBM line around the time they changed their name to Lenovo (for some reason) to the garish Acer Ferrari line and everything in between.

My first tech job involved getting certified to maintain an array of HP servers, desktops and notebooks, so I could take them apart and re-assemble them almost with my eyes shut (the exception being the laptops whose disassembly steps haunt me in my sleep to this day). There are a number of quirks about laptops I’ve learned in my travels, the first being that repairs are usually difficult, and always expensive. The magic number for out-of-warranty replacement parts is $600, and when you include labour, it’s more than enough to justify the purchase of a new laptop. Then there’s the “crapware” most vendors still seem to load the system down with. I can’t stand my computer coming out of the box with a dozen trial versions of software I don’t want or like. Some vendors like Dell have promised to tone down this kind of thing, but some other companies have not yet learned their lesson.

My mom bought an HP Pavilion dv2310 laptop, and a few months back the wireless device disappeared from the device manager. I tried new drivers and updated the BIOS but to little effect. Being an experienced laptop technician, I was comfortable checking the connections of the wireless card on the motherboard, and confirmed they were installed properly. I was to the point of considering purchasing a new card when the monitor stopped activating when I opened the lid. I figured the writing was on the wall and the laptop was a lemon. Which wasn’t far from the truth, but I came to find I had more options than I thought. Originally when I looked into the problem, HP hadn’t acknowledged these as issues, and the laptop was months out of warranty. But a few months later – today in fact, inspired by the beginning of this article, I did a quick Google search that yielded a warranty extension for specific models which I found included my mom’s lemon. A half-hour phone call later and a box is on its way here to place the laptop in and send it away for a free extended warranty repair.

Anyway, what I was originally getting at was that I am quite impressed with the style, performance, support and practises of Dell. When I first pulled it out of the box and booted it up, the extra software installed was minimal. The driver updates have always been available when I’ve encountered a problem. Sometimes it seems that companies ignore drivers for hardware that’s already sold, but I’ve never found that with Dell, from the Bios to the fingerprint reader, it’s all updated where necessary. As a bonus, a couple weeks back my 9-cell battery started charging only to 80%, then the next day only to 50%. I discerned right away there was a problem. There was still a Warranty for a couple more weeks, so Dell support agreed to send me a new replacement (although I admit it was my suggestion – Dell support initially told me I had to buy a new battery until I reminded them my warranty had not yet expired, which does make me wonder what would have happened if I didn’t know).

I am absolutely in love with my Dell laptop. The only way I might be equally satisfied is if I could afford a MacBook Pro.

Update: FYI when I purchased the laptop, I opted out of the so-called “upgrade” from Vista to XP. And it is wonderful. I could never go back to XP.

I’ve always had trouble with run-of-the-mill networking devices. Over the years I’ve gone through dozens of routers, switches and hubs. The worst offender is always the wireless router.

I’m a network admin by nature and by former trade, so I know how to manage my home network from anywhere. Sadly, this management aptitude is completely useless when the network drops several times a day. Usually when there were torrents involved. My Linksys or D-Link routers just weren’t up to the task of handling so many connections.

So I did what any highly-motivated and intelligent network admin would do for his home network. I bought a Cisco Router. One of the best purchases I ever made. The Cisco 871W Integrated Services Router. This baby does it all: firewall, NAT, DHCP, DDNS, VPN, and more features that I will likely never use. It presents a formidable learning curve: it had to be programmed manually using a proprietary Cisco IOS CLI (command line interface). And between you and me, I’d never done this before, nor did I know the first thing about the syntax or the IOS. So I consulted master Google, who provided some brief but effective training that after a week or so, was able to apply to programming the router properly.

Two years later, it’s only gone down once (but that was entirely my fault and I had to reprogram everything manually once again).