This fellow describes how he got a refund for Windows Vista - a whopping $200 - with the purchase of his new computer.  All he had to do was decline the Windows Vista EULA agreement when starting his computer for the first time.

Brilliant!  Now a person can go out and buy those low-end Acers you can find for $500, get $200 back and brag to all your friends that you have a fully loaded laptop for the price they paid for their ASUS EeePC or other sub-notebook!

I currently use Amazon's S3 service to backup my important files for both my Linux and Windows machines.  Jungledisk is the "frontend" I use to gain access to the S3 service.  While this setup works very well for me, it would quite expensive to use it to store all of my important files, which is at 85 GB and growing.  For storing alone, Amazon S3 would cost me $12 per month. 

So over the next couple of months I'll be looking at other alternatives to backup solutions.  It may be that some files I store at home on an external hard drive or DVD's while critical files are stored off-site on Amazon servers. 

I did a fair amount of research on various backup solutions before choosing Amazon S3, so I'll be going back to these to see which could fit my needs better.  There are many backup solutions but these are the ones that seem to be most popular:

• Symantec Swapdrive
  
• Carbonite
• Mozy
• AllMyData
• DropBox (with review on TechCrunch)
• SharpCast (with review on TechCrunch)
• Sugarsync
• Syncplicity
• BeInSync
• BackBlaze
• HP upline
• Box.net
• Xdrive
• Multiply (with review on TechCrunch)

One service I was particularly interested in was Rsync.net.  I can't find where I read it, but this service has been around for a long time and they seem to have their act together.

Dreamhost, a web hosting company I deal with, also has a service called FilesForever that may be of interest to someone looking for off-site data storage. 

If you are in the market for either data backup, storage or syncronization services or solutions, one of the above options should fit your needs well.

One look at these pictures of the next generation of OLPC's will have you dying for one.  Amazing. 

Free Geek is an oganization based in Portand, Oregon that takes donated older computers and refurbished them for re-use.  They have an amazing program where they teach you how to build computers.  Once you complete their program, you get to keep a computer.

Older computers are often perfectly good computers.  They may be "slow" but personally I think it's because they run bloated Windows operating systems.  If you throw on some Linux systems, they will be much faster. 

I love their slogan of "Helping the needy get nerdy".  All of their documentation for their programs and processes are available for free.  I wish I lived in the area or an area that had such a program.  It's worth checking out.

Here are 2 videos that will show and tell the Free Geek philosophy and programs. 

If you read my previous post, I mentioned a fellow on my Local Linux User Group, Michael Ward.  As I was writing the post, all sorts of memories came flooding back to me.  Michael was the first to help me install Linux on my computer.  I drove over to his place and he installed RedHat for me.  This would have been about 10 years ago so it must have been RedHat version 5 give or take.  He was also the one who taught me how to build computers. 

The first "computer" my family had was a Commodore 64.  I loved that thing - it had the best games.  Our next computer was a 386 and was built with scrap pieces by NAIT students and it had Win3.1.  Somehow my Mom had a connection with someone there and we got it for cheap.  Back then cheap was in the $2000 range if memory serves me correctly. 

The dot matrix printer that we had for that machine was awesome.  It had the paper with the holes on the sides.  What a beast.  I swear that thing worked better than many of today's printers.  

A few years later my Mom purchased a computer from a local shop, Centauri computers in Edmonton.  And a couple years after that is when myself and a friend took the "Build your own computer" course from Michael Ward in the upstairs of that same shop.   I've been building my own computers since then.

Michael has a great website where you can read about the basics of computers and computer related things such as "How to buy a computer", "Multi-booting a computer" and more.

I'm fairly certain there are scores of other computer geeks who can relate to this story.