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If you're not concerned about privacy and security you jolly well should be! It's not just about running a firewall, anti-virus software and scanning for spyware – it's about not allowing your data to fall into the wrong hands – whether it be a thief, a hacker, the government, or even your boss or co-worker. It's about keeping your data private.
There's a range of data you need to consider – files on your hard disk, email correspondence, contacts, photos and pictures, passwords, and making sure deleted files can't be resurrected.
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We recently looked at The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby which has now morphed into volume 1 with this new book joining it as volume 2.
Whereas volume 1 was fairly general in its advice, this volume is more targeted with content covering flash, studio work,weddings, portraits, travel, macro and landscapes. The final chapter is more general though with a grab bag of general tips for better photos.
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There are lots of big shiny books out there that tell you all about digital photography and while many of these are great books, they can be a little intimidating too.
Scott Kelby, author of many of the better photography boooks out there has now come up with the antidote. The Digital Photography Book is a mere 200 odd pages and is just slightly bigger than A5 in size yet contains a whole lot of useful information that will almost certainly improve anyone's photography.
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Anyone who has to travel to any extent whether it's by train, plane or bus will know how noisy the background can get and how high you have to have the volume to allow you to make out what you're listening to, especially with spoken word material like podcasts. Over time, these volume levels are both bad for your ears as well as being anti-social to other passengers.
There are plenty of headphones that claim to be noise-reducing or noise-cancelling but in practice, most are just designed to fill your ear canals more snugly. Some do have an element of proper noise cancelling via electronics but for some time now the benchmark has been the excellent Bose range although with prices of £250 or more, these are out of most people's price range.
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An integral part of the process of accessing the Internet is the use of a service that translates the URL that you can type into your Browser into an exact IP address of the desired web page so that it can make the required connections. This translator is the so-called Domain Name Service, and a default will be provided for you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
If that DNS Server has problems at any time you will not be able to access the Internet, and that's a more common problem than many are aware of, for the DNS Server supplied by your ISP may or may not be reliable. DNS servers are not all the same, indeed some are created "more equal" than others, as Orwell would have said. That's to say, although they all do nominally the same job, some may be more likely to be online when you need them, and that provided by your ISP for your initial installation may not be such a good one, or fast, or even safe.
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I recently had a motherboard failure on my existing Dell Inspiron laptop and given its age, repair looked a bad move as one could buy a new laptop for less. However, once I decided to see what was available and given my two main criteria - a higher than usual resolution screen and three year warranty, I suddenly found the price spiraling upwards. What to do?
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Make your life with Vista easier by taking control of the UAC, preventing your Hibernation settings being wiped, recovering disk space from System Restore and more...
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When most people think of Zip files, they think of WinZip or perhaps Windows' rather meager built in Zip file handling. However, there are lots of alternatives and one such one is JZip which not only offers much of the same facilities as its rivals, it does it for free.
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In the last few years the word mashup seems to have been applied to everything from dance remixes to videos and now we have web mashups. In each case, the idea is basically the same, get a bunch of good stuff from different sources and pull it together to make something new and interesting.
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If your Epson Stylus printer plagues you with messages like these - 'cannot recognise the cartridge, please replace it' - this free utility could offer the solution you need.
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We've all done it at some time or another - set up a password then forgetting it. Sometimes it's just an inconvenience but if its your Vista logon password, things can become a little challanging. Luckily, with a little forward planning, you can easily recover from such a situation.
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For anyone who makes a lot of calls Skype is a wonderful things assuming the person they are calling is also on Skype. Even calls to people with normal telephones can be done cheaply and easily, especially when used in conjunction with Skype's ability to embed links in web pages within your browser allowing you to call a number on a web site just by clicking on it.
Of course, such activities do require some sort of speaker and microphone arrangement on your PC and in most cases, it's far easier to make use of one of the huge range of headphone and microphone combinations out there.
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Unlike previous versions of Windows, Vista really goes out of its way to stop you accessing the administrator account. In many cases this is no real problem and you can still run programs with admin privileges by right clicking on them and selecting 'Run as Administrator'. There are however good reasons for Vista keeping you out of this all powerful account. It's all too easy to use it for everything leaving you open to attack by the usual suspects such as trojans and malicious web sites.
However, sometimes it really is useful for power users to have full access to the system so despite the user interface offering no obvious way to use it, it is still there.
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Wireless peripherals connectivity is not restricted to WiFi Internet and the usual modes of connection through wireless modem/routers. We've had InfraRed for a long time, and recently the Bluetooth standard has steadily gained favour, not only for it's ostensible ease of setup but also, increasingly, for it's versatility, and more recently its useful wireless range.
We looked at the Belkin Bluetooth device, built on the usual USB 2.0 model, as one example of the range of adapters on offer from sundry manufacturers, and we pressed an unbranded and even more inexpensive alternative into service as a second Bluetooth dongle to see how it compared. Installation of the former on a host Vista Home Premium computer, while ostensibly easy, took a surprising length of time to complete, with some convolutions we did not anticipate.
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Whatever your feelings may be about the ubiquitous mechanically driven mouse, there are alternatives you should perhaps consider. We recently took on board for testing a couple of optically driven mice, one still cabled to a USB port, though with a novel arrangement of the cable, and a second which not only sensed movements optically but was wirelessly driven.
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Radmin (short for Remote Administrator) is remote control software. It enables you to control another computer on the same network or even over the internet from your own computer using your own keyboard and mouse.
If you understand why this might be useful, you've probably already decided to buy it! If not, here are a couple of common scenarios...
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You know the problem – your PC seems sluggish and simply not as fast as it used to be. After much use, your computer's registry will fill with unused settings and fragments. Over time it can get bogged down, become sluggish and conflicts can occur. It's good practise to clean it out regularly but that's not easily done manually, even by an expert.
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If you can’t locate the Microsoft registration key for your copy of Windows, or any supported version of Microsoft Office, and you don’t fancy rummaging around in the Registry to find it, a neat little download from Magical Jelly Bean will quickly do the job of reading it for you.
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To my enormous relief, one of the top spam blockers is now available for my mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as already supporting Outlook and Outlook Express.
I've tried a number of spam blockers over the years, and they all have their pros and cons. Some work well, others don't even make it past the starting line. Mailwasher has been successfully used here for several years and it would take something very elegant to tempt me away.
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While, these days, WiFi is all the rage for connecting to the Internet with your home computers, we should not forget that there are alternative ways of doing the job. Using the network of wires that's already built into your home or office, in the form of the ring main carrying the electricity, would appear to be a sensible thing to do.
The ring main can already be used for adding telephone extensions, indeed such technology was in service during these trials. So to keep the mains voltage at bay, and to suppress the spikes and other nasties which are associated with mains electricity was a technology that had been fundamentally conquered long ago. The remaining technological advance was to permit higher connection speeds. So now, with these units, we see up to 200Mbps capability, and that can more than compete with your typical wireless connection.
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There's nothing more infuriating that being out on the road when your favourite gadget suddenly gives up the ghost because its battery has run out. With more and more devices having something other than the usual AA or AAA batteries and instead relying on some internal custom battery charged via the USB port, you would ordinarily be stuck.
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We recently looked at the twin-tuner digital USB version of Hauppauge's Nova-TD and thought it a commendable effort, though it showed several deficiencies. Among these were rather slow channel changing, protracted initialisation during preparation for recording, and some lock-ups during manipulation of the device's software.
Several of these problems have been attended to in version 6 of the otherwise essentially identical software, and the hardware format has been changed in that, rather than presenting a USB interface, a 54mm ExpressCard has been pressed into service. The actual business end of the device is 34mm, but such is the mass of electronics and attachments that a full 54mm slot is required for the device.
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The PCMCIA system expansion port has been around for many years, in recent times enhanced by the more advanced CardBus specification, and now followed by the ExpressCard standard. Currently it’s a toss-up, when you buy a notebook computer, whether you’ll have CardBus fitted or the latest ExpressCard slot. The latter is winning the race because of it’s superior performance, and it can shortly be expected to replace CardBus as the expansion device of choice. Some notebooks have both fitted, in deference to the fact that so many will have accumulated a range of CardBus expansion cards over the years.
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Steganos Privacy Suite 2008
Panasonic RP-HC500 Headphones
Faster, Safer, and more Reliable Internet Access with OpenDNS
Dell XPS M1530 Laptop 
JZip
SSC Service Utility - Help with Epson Cartidge Problems
Jabra GN5035 multimedia USB headphones
Vista - Enabling the Administrator Account
Bluetooth Connectivity
Belkin Optical Mice 
Radmin
RegistryBooster 2
KeyFinder
Cloudmark Desktop Spam Blocker
Power Extras USB In-Car Charger
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1400 ExpressCard Digital TV Tuner
What is the ExpressCard Standard?
