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Coming to grips with measuring the speed of an Internet connection is not just for the curious; it's a real-life indicator of the efficiency of your setup, be it Dial-up or Broadband. Time spent surfing is your time, after all, so it needs to be as fast as possible. Waiting time is wasted time.
One of the better web sites offering to quantify your connectivity is Numion.com's YourSpeed, currently in version 3.7.
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The Microsoft provision for file and disk defragmentation in Windows Vista is not only laughably slow but also quite uninformative. It's also a resource hog by dragging on your disk drive(s) as they are being processed. Few things slow down your system quite like live disk defragmentation running in the background.
Yet leaving your files fragmented is one of the surest ways to degraded performance. Over time, as files are used and expanded, fragments are scattered all over the drive, the consequence being, of course, that the disk heads have a lot of work to do locating the parts of the fragmented files in order to read them. This is a sure way to finger-tapping boredom, not to mention insecurity because fragmented files are the easiest to corrupt and the most difficult to recover in the event of accidental deletion.
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When a rechargeable battery is first bought, it will usually come with a certain amount of charge in it. Don’t use this charge, except perhaps to check for a short time that any equipment you bought with it actually starts and runs.
The main thing you should do with the battery is test your patience by spending the time necessary to charge the battery to full capacity, as recommended by the manufacturer, having due attention to the type of charger you use and the length of time the cell should be on charge.
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While most computer users know there are certain things they should attend to in order to keep their computer running well, there are some settings on the machine that are rarely touched by the average punter. Yet, potentially, some of these offer the biggest gains. We’ll look at one or two of these in a minute. But first, the basics.
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As more and more individuals are trying their hand at trading stocks, futures and forex, the production of trading software itself had become big business. And OmniTrader is one of the Big Boys, having been around since 1994. Its latest incarnation in 2008 boasts many new features.
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Vista has gained a reputation for being somewhat RAM hungry. Whilst many systems are sold with 'just' 1GB, Vista really likes at least 2GB to work with any real speed on most systems, especially laptops where the slower hard drives impact overall performance. Our Vista test machine normally sports 2GB. We decided to see what difference it made upping this to 4GB.
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With ever more sophisticated utility programs available for detecting and removing malicious software from a PC, it makes sense to keep up to date with such tools. Some of the best are freeware, which may add to their appeal for many. Spyware code is not a virus; it's a bit of programming that's been added in some way (usually by surreptitious download) to your computer. It monitors and transmits all of your online activities, and is consequently a potentially serious violation of your privacy. Thus, adding well-chosen anti-spyware to your armoury can only be a good thing to do.
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A typical Windows computer, with all it’s installed hardware, will include very many drivers. These are the little bits of code that tell your items of hardware how to interact with the computer. They’re vital components of any computer, but they can and do get broken, as with any type of programming. System glitches, crashes, and computer maloperations in general can disengage drivers, corrupt them, or interfere with badly written program code. It’s vital, therefore, that you should be in a position to locate and reload the correct, uncorrupted drivers when a system failure of this nature occurs.
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If you only have a single PC, an external USB hard drive is all you need for back up or data storage. Things get more complex when you have a small network and the ability to have storage space available to all the PCs without having to keep a dedicated PC up and running is useful.
The Lindy USB 2.0 NAS Personal Server for SATA & IDE Drives pretty much does what it says on the tin. You need to provide your own hard drive of either IDE or SATA flavour then connect it to your network.
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Whilst there are hundreds of HTML books out there, only a small proportion fall in to the reference category. We were thus immediately attracted by the title of this new book from Sitepoint
The Author Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com and is well known in the web development community so we expected great things of this title
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As many homes now have two or more computers and an increasing number of us are storing music, photos and videos on them, it makes sense to safeguard them by backing up. You can backup to a second hard drive, an external hard drive or a Nas Drive.
However, knowing and doing are two entirely different things. If we could just press a button and have all our data backed up automatically, we would. But PC life is rarely that straightforward.
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Programming is one of the most creative and fulfilling activities you can do with your computer. It's part science, part art, and it can seem rather arcane.
This book aims to take the mystique out of Visual C# programming and contains instructions and code for writing a weather tracking application. Along the way you get to create your own web browser, and dabble with DLLs, .NET and databases.
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While the ubiquitous computer mouse has advanced in design by leaps and bounds over recent years, Microsoft clearly thought it was about time that some modern developments in electronics and ergonomics, as well as software design, should be allowed to enhance the performance of this most useful of PC add-ons.
Current operating systems such as Windows Vista bring all manner of tricks to the screen; Flip-3D in Windows Vista, image magnification, horizontal as well as vertical scrolling and so on. These can, with a little ingenuity, be incorporated into mouse design, and this 2.4GHz Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 brings it all literally to the right hand (though unfortunately not the left).
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We recently looked at the updated Version 2 of the Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe and were rather under whelmed by its dated interface, installation problems on Vista and lack of sufficiently updated content. However, in this instance, we felt rather warmer towards the DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3 because somewhat more care seems to have been taken on updating the content and as we browsed the information, we found many examples of clearly updated text and dates in the articles.
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The next step is to see if it runs!
The small speaker we fitted will produce various beeps to tell us if the system is ok or not although you could plug a speaker into the audio output.
If the system boots or POSTs (Power On Self Test) okay then you can install your OS (Operating System). You will be able to boot the OS CD from the DVD/CD drive. You may have to enter the BIOS to ensure that the CD drive is selected as a bootable device.
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When the CD-ROM first came out, people got really excited. Companies waxed lyrical about the interactive titles they would be producing with sound, videos (amazing back then) and high quality images. The first few titles trickled out and were under whelming in the extreme. Then Dorling Kindersley, famed for their high quality books and production values decided to release flurry of titles. Suddenly, everyone else's efforts looked silly.
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The next tasks are to fit the motherboard inside the case and then hook up the cables and connectors. It may often be easier to fit some plugs and connections to the motherboard before you fit the motherboard inside the case. With our system, for example, it would have been easier to plug the SATA cables into the board.
However, it would be rare to be in a situation where you couldn’t fit all the connectors after fitting the motherboard but it may be fiddly. Look at your set-up and make an executive decision.
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There's no definitive way to put the pieces together but we like to take the path of least resistance so our method makes it fairly easy.
First, check that you have all the parts you need. In addition to the PC bits, you'll need a cross-head screwdriver. You may also need a flat-edged screwdriver although most screws in a PC are cross-head types. We'd advise against using a power screwdriver as it's difficult to tell how much force is being applied and most screws in a PC only need to be tightened to hand tightness.
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If you've ever thought about building a PC, two questions probably popped into your mind - is it easy and can I save money?
Is it easy? Well, it ain't difficult! If you've fitted RAM, an expansion card, an optical drive or a hard disk, you should have no trouble. Essentially you simply connect the parts together like a construction set. No soldering, cutting or sawing is required.
Is it cheaper to build your own PC? The short answer is- possibly, especially if you're looking at a high-end machine. But probably not if you take your time into consideration.
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Here we have the second of a pair of drives that you could consider suitable for any application. The Buffalo DriveStation Combo that we reviewed recently was aimed primarily at the Desktop PC user who needs capacity. Now this second offering is a drive that can easily be popped into a jacket pocket and transported across the world to attach to another computer perhaps, or simply moved between machines in the office or home.
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Herbert Schildt is a prolific if not always well received author. Earlier version of this C Reference Guide were considered somewhat lacking in both the accuracy and content departments. Have things improved with this latest (and final?) version?
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Measure Your Connection Speed with YourSpeed
Faster Disk Defragmentation With Auslogics
Prolonging The Life of Rechargeable Batteries
OmniTrader 2008
Increasing Vista Performance with extra RAM
Spybot - Search and Destroy 1.6
DriverMax v4.3
Lindy USB 2.0 NAS Personal Server for SATA and IDE Drives
SyncBackSE
Microsoft Rechargeable Wireless Laser Mouse 7000
DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Science Version 3
Build a Modern PC 2008 - Part 4
DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe Version 2
Build a Modern PC 2008 - Part 3
Build a Modern PC 2008 - Part 2 
Build a Modern PC 2008 - Part 1
Iomega eGo Portable 250GB Hard Drive
