Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Comcast's bad year, streaming live TV at home only, Google's notch limit, LG's troubles, T-Mobile's partnership with Nokia, and more.

Don in LaBelle, Florida asked: "I have an older laptop, about 5 or 6 years old and I'm afraid it might give up the ghost sometime in the near future. I'm wondering if I should go and get a Chromebook instead of another laptop. I've noticed lots of problems with the recent updating of the Windows 10 products. And what would be a good price range to look at in a Chromebook or another laptop? I mostly do web browsing and emails."

 

Don, if your use is mostly web browsing and email, a Chromebook may be an ideal device for you.

Chromebooks can be used offline and they have some basic online functions, but really they’re meant to be used to browse the web, check email, and use web applications in general.

They will remove a lot of the hassle of updating, they’ll basically alert you that there’s an update, and whenever you restart or shut down the update will get applied so fast you won’t notice it happened.

As far as pricing goes, you don’t need a particularly powerful machine to browse the web and check email, so you don’t need to go for a very expensive laptop or Chromebook unless you want one.

You probably know that cheap Windows computers tend to last less, and they tend to be noticeably slower.

Chromebooks do have a few problems you should take into consideration. The cheap ones probably won’t have a touchscreen, the screen itself may be a little dim and the colors may be dull, and the hard drive space and RAM will probably be fairly minimal.

That may not matter to you if you’re looking at spending $200 for a new computer, but keep in mind that with different prices come different specs.

For your needs, just about anything will do, but try to avoid the bottom of the barrel pricewise, if you can spend $400-500 you’ll probably be better off, especially if you go for a Windows machine.

Ming in Tyler, Texas listens on KTBB 97.5 FM and asked: "I have a Samsung and it's made or put out by GreatCall. The problem I have with it is when I eliminate messages that come in, the next message that comes in, all the old messages come back up. I can't tell which message belongs to the new person that's messaging me or an old one. I try to get rid of them - in fact I do get rid of them but they keep coming back. So I end up with a screen full of messages and I can't tell which one is which. It's frustrating and I'm getting to a point where I absolutely hate these smartphones."

 

Ming, your problem is not really with smartphones, your problem is that you need a normal, working  one.

Whatever possessed your phone to do that is not normal, and it’s not a common problem that smartphones suffer from. That is completely bizarre behavior that would cripple anyone’s ability to use the phone.

At this point your options are really to either restore it to factory settings and hope the issue goes away, or get a new phone that behaves normally.

Just switch to a new Samsung and be annoyed by normal things like the phone suddenly catching on fire after sending your naked selfies to random people for no apparent reason.

Recent problems aside, Samsung is normally a serious brand, and even their low end phones should be able to handle text messaging, something is abnormally wrong with that phone.

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