You're right that Dell laptops are relatively easy to modify and upgrade - for a laptop. But still you can't expect to transplant a motherboard into any but the most closely related model. I upgraded my old M90 to an M6300 by replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory. For the M6400, I believe that the motherboard and case from the M6500 should be compatible (provided you change the CPU and CPU heatsink) but I cannot be entirely sure. The newer 17 inch Dell models have 1920x1080 screens instead of 1920x1200. You couldn't jam the older screen into them because it is physically a different size, even if the connector turns out to be the same.

I wonder whether installing Classic Shell would help users who are used to Windows XP and earlier versions.

As an English speaker learning Spanish I found it easiest to start with the word 'corrida'. Somehow the O vowel before helped to roll the RR. After that, 'corrida de burritos'. More difficult still, 'corrida de perritos'.

I think you're missing the point. It is not about hardware durability. The original hardware installed in 1974 has long since been replaced (probably several times over). It is the software that costs money over the long term - hiring programmers to maintain it. And it is the software that is the reason the system hasn't been replaced with something else.

http://xkcd.com/624/

Yes, for a few years Nvidia laptop video cards had solder that tended to melt with heat, and the cure there too is to bake them in the oven. I did this successfully with a Quadro 3600M card. Vibration can also be a problem, but I don't think it was the issue in this case.

FWIW, the Unicomp buckling spring keyboards are generally reckoned to count as Model M keyboards too. (as are Lexmark-produced Model Ms)

Fine, self-signed certs should not be "silently accepted" - but then totally unencrypted, plain-text-over-the-wire, any-idiot-with-a-network-card-can-sniff-it traffic shouldn't be silently accepted either! Nobody objects to a reasonable browser warning on self-signed certificates. What many gripe about is the fact that these same browsers then show unencrypted sites with no question at all. Often, if Firefox produces an SSL certificate warning I just change the URI from https: to http: to get the damn thing out of my way.

In fact this is not the 68000 but its crippled little brother the 68008, which uses an 8-bit external data bus (as the 8088 is to the 8086). That was also used in the Sinclair QL, which was Linus's first computer before he bought a 386 PC and got into Minix. Could Linux now be ported to run on the QL?

Don't SAP have their own RDBMS, called SAP DB or MaxDB? It was even released as free software a few years back (then they changed their mind and went back to proprietary). Do you mean that despite that, the only database backend that works well with large SAP installations is Oracle?

In terms of sheer numbers, I'd guess you are right: more Win32 applications have been written since 1995 or so than there are apps for iOS. Especially if you include in-house software.

In terms of applications to do something most people want to do, which is a subjective measure I admit, iOS may have the lead. Particularly so if you look for software that's optimized for tablet use: there are a lot of very capable Windows programs which are rather less usable on a tablet than with a physical keyboard and mouse, whereas iOS apps are all designed around touchscreen use.

For example, I've been looking for a map program (similar to Google Maps) that runs on a handheld Windows 7 PC with attached GPS. It's surprising how few choices there are that do the basic function of showing your GPS position on a map, and aren't some crusty thing last updated in 2004. True, if I included Windows 8 "Metro" apps there would be a wider choice, but still it is dwarfed by what you get on Android or iOS. (FTR - in the end I went with Anquet Maps for hiking maps and Mapfactor PC-Navigator for city use.)

It's analogous to testing itself. Testing cannot prove the absence of bugs, though it can find them. Similarly a coverage check cannot show that your test suite is adequate, but it can show it to be inadequate (or perhaps reveal dead code to prune). Nobody is claiming that coverage is the be all and end all of testing. That does not mean it is useless to measure it.

Yup, the PC-AT keyboard has the one true enter key in the large reverse L shape. After that things went downhill: the US layout for the Model M chopped off the top part and made Enter a thin horizontal line like Shift, and the international or ISO layout (which I normally use) chopped off the left hand part and left Enter as a rectangle: better than the US version, but still too small for one of the most frequently used keys on the board.

The biggest annoyance with the AT keyboard is the lack of F11 and F12 keys, if your applications use those (e.g. to step into statements in a debugger). The Esc key being on the numeric keypad is also odd but you get used to that.

There's also the 122-key Model F 'aircraft carrier', which has a much more modern layout, close to the international Model M layout.

But if you do prefer the US Model M layout (de gustibus non est disputandum, after all), then here's a way to modify the PC-AT keyboard: http://geekhack.org/index.php?...

Do you mean the 122-key Model F 'aircraft carrier' (I have a couple of those, but they require Soarer's Converter) or something else? I haven't heard of a 138-key version.