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Have you ever bought a hard drive that didn't seem as large as was advertised? Why is my 80 gigabyte hard drive showing less than 75 actual gigabytes?

The reason is that companies like Seagate define their gigabytes by a standard that no one but hard drive manufacturers use which is this:

The first, while semantically correct, has no bearing on computing terms at all and is highly misleading. Though the term "giga" technically means 1 billion, in computing terms 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes which translates to the second number you see there. For a hard drive manufacturer to play with numbers like that, I say they deserve some retribution.

In this case, they've settled on a class action lawsuit (without admitting any fault of course). Customers of Seagate will be able to get a 5% refund on Hard drives they've purchased… assuming they find out about the settlement of course.

That said, to see the settlement information, go to this site.

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A guy in Italy managed to get a refund from HP for Windows XP and Works 8 which were preinstalled on his system. Apparently, the license agreement states that if the customer doesn't accept the agreement, the vendor will refund the money.

This could be the start of a disturbing trend as far as computer retailers are concerned.

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Microsoft slipped another bomb into their "critical updates" in the form of a Windows Desktop Search. The reports say that besides being an unwanted feature, it has been slowing machines down considerably.

The worst part is that somehow Microsoft thinks they can change the way our machines work without our consent. But this wouldn't be the first time.

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Vista apparently runs out of memory when copying over 13,000 files in one go without any warning. While that is a lot of files, this seems to be a fairly large bone-head mistake. First of all, why can't Microsoft figure out that file transfers should be pausable and resumable (same as when downloading from the Internet). Of course, even that was something they had to steal from Mozilla rather than figure out on their own.

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Even if a hacker put some code into a music file (for example), the music file player should just try to send the code to the speakers along with the rest of the data, not actually perform any commands (like taking over your computer). For this to be possible, the makers of the player software practically have to write custom code to look for and execute hacker code.

In other words, for a virus to be embedded in a video, music, or text file, there has to be deliberately placed code in the player that watches for commands and acts on them.

It's stupid to think you could ever get a virus from a text document, a music file or video file, but, thanks to sloppy programming practices like this, it happens. Remember not to get distracted by the spin doctors and "damage control" people. If there's a virus in video, music, or text, it's the fault of the player/reader, not because of clever hacking.

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Vista has been a rough release for Windows. I would say that it's probably the first time since Windows 95 that a new system wasn't better than the previous (other than ME, but that didn't last long). Some people think Microsoft's mistakes with Vista are such that they should just abandon it and move on.

Much talk has been given to Service Pack 1 and how this update should address many of the issues users have with Vista, but I simply don't agree. Will SP1 eliminate the ridiculous Microsoft licensing schemes? Will SP1 drop the price on the higher-end versions? Will SP1 eliminate the need for users to buy a new computer just to use the faulty OS?

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People who would normally be forced to have Vista because of buying a new computer are now being given the option to "downgrade" to XP.

The article also says that the unpopular Vista operating system cost 6 Billion dollars to create. Ouch.

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In some slightly overblown reporting online, Microsoft has been caught downloading updates to its software without user knowledge or consent. In this case, they were just updating the Windows Updater, but the key complaint here is that the users didn't get to choose.

In the past many people delay updating (or avoid it altogether) because the updates can sometimes cause less security or add features that we don't want.

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Rather than try to prevent people from copying or sharing music with drm, Microsoft has patented a watermarking procedure that will allow them to tag music with IDs that are very hard to remove.

First take: this is bad, bad news. While Ars Technica believes that this could help to get rid of the much hated DRM, I believe the replacement is far worse. Now instead of merely being annoying in preventing you from copying a CD, the RIAA will be able to track music by ID to see where (and who) it came from. If your son shares a song online that's from your CD collection, you will be much easier to find and prosecute.

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How many years has it been since America's Funniest Home Videos came around? How many videos do you still see of some dad somewhere teaching his kid to swing a bat, but he stands behind him and gets nailed in the crotch? You think they'd learn.

Well the same can be true of these laptops. How many times does a company/government branch have to lose a laptop before they learn? The simplest solution is to stop putting people's data on laptops! Sheesh.