Chromebook sales are up, PC sales down

Look at that, just after I go out and purchase a Chromebook of my own, sales numbers for 2013 and first quarter 2014 are hitting the web. The results are straightforward, PC sales continue to decline and Chromebook sales are on track to possibly double over last year.

Mixed into the numbers are some dramatic numbers out of the Microsoft camp, where the Surface division is reported to have accrued losses upwards of $2 billion in the last couple years.

As for the Chromebooks, they clocked in for a little over 2 million unit sales last year, not bad, but they rang up over 1 million sales in the first quarter of this year alone, on track to 4 million then?

There is no doubt that mobile and Chromebooks are taking over the majority of sales these days, these numbers only prove it.

Start Windows Task Manager at login

Do you like to have your task manager up and running all the time? I usually do! It provides that handy little graph in the task tray showing my CPU usage.

Because I could not find a built in method of having it start when the machine turns on, I turned to VB.NET coding and created a module that starts it for me at login.

Most of you won't have, or even want to have, the tools to create a VB.NET app to do this job, so let me describe a simple way of doing it with notepad.

Create a new .txt document, remember what you have named it (ex. MyTaskManagerStarter.txt)

Inside, type the next two lines:

taskmgr.exe

exit

Now, save and close it.

What we have to do now is change the file extension; this is done by right clicking the file, select rename and change the .txt to .bat (may need to turn off 'hide known file extensions' in folder options to be able to see the extension)

Note: .bat files can harm your machine, do not play around with them unless you know what your doing. (on that note, our example will be safe)

Now all you have to do is drag and drop this file into Startup in the Start Menu.

Alternatively, you could create a task using the task schedular that runs it for you at login. This would also allow you to 'run as administrator'. (post a comment asking for directions if interested.)

Happy Manipulating