I’ve heard estimates that up to 80% of the daily email traffic is SPAM of some sort. SPAM stands for Self Promotional Advertising Method. Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, started this nightmare with a pitch to help immigrants to apply for a current government program called the Green Card Lottery in a Usenet newsgroup around April of 1994.

Even then this caused an absolute outcry for the two to be lynched. But, alas, that never happened and here we are today dealing with an avalanche of unwanted email every day.

I really don’t mind some legitimate company sending me something that I might have an interest in buying. I am on many email lists for companies I do buy from whom send me new offers and information I want. But receiving 100’s of unsolicited offers for crap is not a good thing.

But there are some good options that you have to help slow this unending surge of absolute worthless stream of emails. We have three software packages that can help you deal with SPAM (SpamBayes, SpamPal, and MailWasher). They are listed in the Internet Category.

Microsoft Windows 7 was released in the 4th quarter of 2009.  The launch in general was much lower key than past version launches, probably for a couple of reasons. The biggest being that Windows 7 was the solution to the Vista version of 2 years ago. That was a debacle on every level.

Of course Microsoft has stated that the revenue generated was greater than any other Windows version release. Considering that the Windows 7 prices were higher than any other version, I'm not so sure that's a good measurement of the success. 

Then you have a fairly large group of users who saw the Vista problems and decided to wait. And this most likely is the group that made the difference on the sales figures. A lot of people were sticking with Windows XP since it worked. So there was a pent up demand for a viable new windows operating system. 

Plus there was, and still is, a lot of confusion over whether you need to by the upgrade or full package.

As most laptops are essentially commodity products comprised of the same stock list of components and parts, one might assume that all laptop brands are the same, at least as far as the general reliability of the hardware itself.

Warranty firm SquareTrade has just released a research paper analyzing the failure rate for 30,000 laptops comparing brands and hardware categories--and the results might surprise you.

The headline news is that over three years, one out of three laptops will fail, and that Asus and Toshiba laptops have the lowest failure rates, while Acer, Gateway, and HP have higher than average failure rates. Additionally, two-thirds of those problems are hardware malfunctions, while the final third are classified as accidental damage.

Netbooks, in particular, didn't fare as well--as one might expect from low-cost machines. They failed at a rate 20 percent higher than mainstream laptops. But keep in mind, since Netbooks are a relatively new category, this is based on only one year of data.

The full report can be found at the SquareTrade Web site, and we've excerpted some of the most interesting charts and graphs below (and note that some of the numbers presented below are projections based on previous data).

The key takeaway is that laptops in general fail much more often than many other types of consumer electronics--in part because they're among the most complex devices one can buy, and perhaps because pricing pressure has led to lapses in quality control in the design and manufacture of many of these systems.