Remember how freeing it felt getting a 128 MB flash thumb drive about 10 years ago? Even up until a couple of years ago, getting a portable external hard drive that could hold 160 GB seemed like a great little personal luxury – you could carry your movies and your music and your data anywhere.

These days, even as these devices become extremely affordable, people do think twice before buying. They know that there’s cloud storage to be had for next to nothing at all.

If they buy their own personal hard drive, they figure, they could drop it or lose it or something. Cloud storage is forever. Why bother with a portable external hard drive, they feel.

The thing is, cloud storage isn’t as great as you might think. If you get a virus on your computer or if you any need to wipe your hard drive, it’s a lot easier to restore everything from a hard drive you have in your drawer than it is to download hundreds of gigabytes.

And anyway, who has the time or the patience to repeatedly stream a movie every time they want watch? In short, a portable external hard drive still makes sense.

Buying a drive, the choice today is between the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. It would make a lot of sense to buy 3.0, because it doesn’t cost any more.

Of course, most computers don’t have a USB 3.0 port. But no matter, new computers that come out these days mostly have them.

Practically every computer should have 3.0 support withing a year or two. Until then, your superfast hard drive still can work with an old 2.0 port.

Stay away from FireWire though – that’s a standard that is nearly gone now. If you want something that’s even faster than USB 3.0, you should consider Intel’s Thunderbolt – something that’s only shown up on Apple computers so far.

Thunderbolt is pretty expensive. A mere cable for Thunderbolt costs $50. If you can find it. The upside though is that it can transfer data at twice the speed of USB 3.0.

Since Thunderbolt really hasn’t shown up anywhere yet, might not make much sense looking for a Thunderbolt hard drive. You might be able to use it with your newest Apple computers. You probably wouldn’t be able to use it on anyone else’s computer.

eSATA is a great option too, though that’s exclusively designed for hardware connections. Most new laptops feature eSATA these days. They’ll usually double up as a USB port too. If you get one of these hard drives, you’re in luck. They are as fast as USB 3.0.

Do consider springing for a network attached storage drive or a Wi-Fi drive. This is something that you don’t have to actually physically connect to your computer.

Basically, portable drives are dirt cheap. And they are super compact too. There’s quite nothing like owning a capacious 1TB hard drive that’s the size of the palm of your hand.

Buying a Portable External Hard Drive is a post from: Computer Spot

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Is there any reason anyone should go to the trouble of building their own computer from the ground up – buy a motherboard and all those components, snap all the parts together, install the operating system and so on?

Well, you could do that if you are really particular about performance and getting a good deal. The kind of motherboard you get has a great deal to say about what kind of performance you get. And who’s to tell what kind of motherboard Dell and HP and Lenovo use?

Not to mention, there are so many little things you could control if you built your own PC – you could get the latest kind of USB port (SuperSpeed 3.0), you could get exactly the right kind of graphics card that you wanted – no more, no less, and you could buy exactly the kind of monitor you wanted.

You just won’t be locked some impractical configuration that the geniuses of the computer company put together. And of course, you’ll save some money this way.

Okay, now that you’re clear that building your own computer makes a lot of sense, let’s talk a little about how exactly you buy the most important component of your own hand assembled computer – the motherboard.

Most people don’t seem to realize this, but if there’s one part of the computer that you could point to and say – “That’s the soul, the main part of my computer”, it would have to be the motherboard. It’s not the processor or anything else.

For this reason, if you’re building your computer, you need to buy a motherboard first of all. Everything else that you buy, you buy to suit the motherboard you bought.

Picking a motherboard, of course, you do want to think about what kind of stuff you would like to plug into it.

Most parts that you stick into the motherboard – the hard disk, the graphics card, the sound card, the memory – happen to work to standard requirements no matter what motherboard you buy.

If there’s one kind of part, the most important, that requires that the motherboard be specifically built for it, it’s the processor.

The processor and motherboard need to be built for each other. Basically, you have a choice in two different standards when you’re talking about the motherboard-processor match.

There’s the standard adopted by Intel, and there is the standard adopted by its rival AMD. Both are mutually incompatible even if you could get very good performance with either. The first thing you need to do is to choose which standard you want to go with.

Intel is widely considered to be somewhat better when it comes to performance. AMD on other hand, while it does offer nearly the same kind of performance, is often far cheaper.

Once you make a choice of standard here, your next step is to choose how powerful a processor you need. If you’re going with Intel, you want to know how powerful the processor you’re planning on buying will be – the i3, the i5 or the i7.

Once you do that, you’re pretty much set for what kind of motherboard you want to buy.

How to buy a Motherboard is a post from: Computer Spot

How many times have you needed to hit Print on your computer and you’ve realized that you’re just not connected to a printer?

Physically connecting your computer to the printer of course will mean picking your computer up, making your way to wherever the printer is, or wherever a computer is that is connected to the printer through Ethernet cable.

Why on earth should anyone have to put up with this, when it’s cheap buying and setting up a wireless printer?

Printers are just getting smarter everyday. A wireless printer – one that is able to connect to computers through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi – can be had for as little as $50.

You can park the printer wherever it’s convenient, plug it into the power, and you’re good to go. It’ll just show up on everybody’s computer as a network destination, and anyone can just send print jobs.

If you’re good with setting up a wireless printer, there is no reason to have to wire things up anymore.

Now, unless you have a very old printer, you never have to connect a printer directly to the computer it needs to print from.

Nearly every printer out there has a regular Ethernet port. You just need to connect the printer to a Wi-Fi router that wirelessly connects to every computer in the building, and you’d have yourself a wireless printer just like that.

But that isn’t really as convenient as a real wireless printer.

In some buildings and installations, the router is located somewhere really inconvenient, sometimes in the basement or on another floor.

To have to put the printer next to the router can make little sense in many places. Setting up a wireless printer is the only thing that would work.

Once you have it, you could get your printer and every computer in the building to connect wirelessly to one another.

In some installations, wirelessness in a printer can make even more sense. Consider a small office where there is more than one printer – perhaps one that’s an inexpensive color laser model, one that’s a monochrome laser model, a couple of inkjet models for different levels of quality and so on.

Everyone in the office would want to connect to every one of these printers at different times. A print server would be an excellent idea in this case.

Actually, make that a wireless print server. To think of the kind of wiring you would need to do in such a situation if it weren’t a wireless set up, fairly boggles the mind.

Setting up a Wireless Printer is a post from: Computer Spot

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If you’re a gamer, it’s safe to say that next to the processor in your computer, the graphics card is the most heavily-pounded component in your system.

The way each new generation of videogame title uses up computer graphics power these days, you can never have enough.

The graphics card, a separate processor much like your main processor Intel or AMD processor, is the part of your computer that draws and renders all the complex imagery that your game involves.

If you want truly realistic imagery in your videogame, you’d better be prepared to equip you computer accordingly.

Sometimes, even if you buy the most powerful graphics card on the market, it still won’t be enough. You need something more. Something like dual video cards of the same kind of the same computer.

There are basically two kinds of standards for those who wish to use dual video cards their system. You can either go with the Nvidia standard that they call SLI or you could go with the AMD standard that they call AMD CrossFireX.

Typically, the AMD standard is the one that’s the most flexible. Go with the SLI standard, and you absolutely have to buy two identical expensive cards.

With the AMD standard though, if you have two compatible cards, one powerful and the other less so, you could still have them add up.

If you’re kind of on a budget and you’d just like to be able to use a less powerful card as well, you really should choose AMD.

AMD offers another advantage, as well. You can actually get the onboard graphics, as modest as it might be, to pitch in. Before you can go with dual video cards, whichever company you want to side with, you need to make sure that your motherboard is capable of a setup like this.

Go with AMD, and you will be able to get CrossfireX performance out of practically any motherboard that has two PCI Express slots.

With SLI though, you’ll need a motherboard that has SLI certification. You can expect such certification on any motherboard with Nvidia chipsets and motherboards based on Intel’s X58 or P55 chipsets.

However, if you’re going to be taking the plunge with dual video cards, you do want to make sure that the specific games that you have been mind to play on a setup like this, do benefit from dual video cards. Not every game is programmed in such a way that it can take advantage of this much power.

If One Powerful Video Card won’t do for your Game, try Dual Video Cards is a post from: Computer Spot

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You couldn’t buy a computer today that didn’t have sound built in. Every computer out there, whether it’s something you buy from a name brand or a machine that you build from the ground up with parts, you can be sure that there is going to be a Realtek high definition sound chip in there that’s good to go right out of the box.

So computer retailers really have their job cut out for them when they try to sell you a new computer sound card.

The first question you ask is, “Why on earth would I want that when I have a perfectly good soundcard built right into my computer?”.

If you have a PCI slot on your computer, you certainly have room for the discrete sound card. You’re supposed to buy and install a card in there the way you buy and install a separate graphics card for gaming purposes.

Now it’s extraordinarily difficult to convince computer buyers to upgrade with the discrete computer soundcard.

You certainly have it pointed out to you often enough in the ads that just because you have a CD player in a boombox, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t appreciate the sound of a proper discrete CD player.

The difference is in the sound quality, of course. But in the matter of a sound card, there are differences that would come down entirely to function.

It’s like half of America is in a band – or at least, they like to experiment with playing and recording music by themselves right at home.

Music equipment is certainly cheap these days, and music software can turn any old computer into a fully-fledged multitrack recording studio. You just need to add a $100 USB music keyboard, and you would have nothing stopping you. Except your computer soundcard.

The thing is, that inbuilt sound cards or even cheap discrete sound cards, are only capable of playing recorded music well. They aren’t capable of producing music well. How so, you ask?

If you were using onboard sound or if you had a cheap Sound Blaster installed, if you tried to play a software instrument on your computer with it, every key you pressed, you’d hear a sound for it about a half second later.

In other words, you need a sound card that’s intended for music production. Look for something that is capable of ASIO software drivers.

And look for something that has as many pairs of inputs and outputs as you would wish to have separate software instruments playing at the same time.

Let’s say for second you have no interest in producing music. What if you’re just a gamer or someone who likes a little bit of entertainment?

Well, you’ll certainly notice how much richer and deeper and crisper the sound is when you plug your home theater system into discrete soundcard.

Do try that once. And since video games these days have sound design built into them that would put a big budget Hollywood blockbuster to shame, your gaming well benefit from a new computer sound card too.

It doesn’t even have to cost much. A professional $85 soundcard from a brand like M-Audio would do.

Do you really need a New Computer Sound Card is a post from: Computer Spot

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When Microsoft released a Media Center Edition to Windows XP all those years ago, they were only acknowledging the obvious – that to most people, at least part of the time, their computer stands in for a videogame machine or an entertainment center.

Certainly, everyone knows right away that you need a nice, bright and impressive screen for their home entertainment system or their videogame machine. You need something that gives you an immersive visual experience.

What they don’t think of often is that you need immersive sound to go with it too. The best computer speakers that most systems ship with are tinny, tiny, and annoying.

Have you seen the kind of speakers they put into laptops? It’s as if they’re actually trying to not be audible. The thing is, people usually put all their speaker money into speakers for the home theater – out in the living room where there is a big-screen TV. They don’t seem like investing much in buying the best computer speakers as well.

Well, if you ever spent time looking around the computer speaker section at your local Best Buy, you will have noticed that once they call them computer speakers, they don’t really go beyond a certain size.

You really don’t need to spend a fortune. A reasonable pair is all one asks for. And since your computer is the most important entertainment unit in your house, it really does deserve better than what it ships with. You’ll have a far better time playing your games and watching movies.

So what do you need to look for if you’re out there at the aforementioned Best Buy computer speakers department and you’re not really sure how to judge all the speakers other than to look at the price tag?

Well, for the kind of attention to sound quality that today’s movie and game creators put in, you really owe it yourself to get a surround sound system – 5.1 or 7.1 – you know how it goes.

Every new DVD out there and every game as well, goes out of its way to blow your mind with spectacular surround effects. Everything is recorded to overwhelm you with crazy sound effects and immersive sound.

These don’t even have to be expensive. Your typical 5.1 system (which means five little speakers to surround yourself with and one subwoofer) by Logitech, retails for $65.

There is something that should occur to you when you talk about surround systems – how are you going to wire all those speakers all around your room without tripping over them all the time? Well, that’s what wireless speaker systems are for.

At least, that’s what they say they are for. You’ll pay hundreds of dollars for wireless surround computer speakers. If you think that buying wireless actually means wireless, think again.

The “wirelessness” only refers to how you don’t have to wire each speaker for audio. Each wireless speaker does need its own power source. So you just end up having to wire everything anyway.

And finally, make sure that you check to see that the speakers you buy have ready-built connections for all the different sound sources you might have – RCA, headphone jack and so on.

What to Look for when you want the Best Computer Speakers is a post from: Computer Spot

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For most people, the large amount of storage space they get on today’s computers is enough for whatever they can pile onto it.

However, there are some people that need more space. Instead of buying yet another computer, you can buy external hard drives that can store what you need without adding too much to what you have in your home.

These can be downright small, and can even be portable when you do not want to lug your computer when going somewhere. If you need more space, this is the way to go.

Those that store a lot of music on their computers find that they soon run out of space. If you write your own music, you are going to need tons of extra space.

You can buy almost as must memory as you already have on your computer for around a hundred dollars, give or take.

This means that you can have double the space for far less than you would if you were to buy a more powerful computer or if you had to buy a second one just for your music needs. Music tracks take up a lot of space so give yourself a break and get what you need.

If you take a lot of photographs or have a photography business, external hard drives are going to be great for you too. You can put any projects you have finished on this and keep them there.

Once it is full you can store it safely and then get a new one to start filling it again. Most photographers keep large versions of their pictures and they have a lot of them. The extra space you find on the hard drive that hooks up to your computer externally is going to be a great way to file things away without overwhelming your desktop or your laptop.

Gamers also benefit from having external hard drives. You can keep a few games on your computer at a time, but you may find it hard to keep things moving. Your computer is going to slow down and your game play is going to be ruined as a result.

Instead of storing all of these games on your main hard drive, you can put your games on your external drive and then you can keep your computer fast. You can store many more games this way and you won’t have to delete something you love to make room for something new.

To find out more about external hard drives, have a look around online or go to your local computer and technology store to see what is out there. Some are connected to the computer simply and some are not so easy to use.

Some are more portable than others, and there are obviously differences in the amounts of memory each is going to offer.

You can easily find something that will fit your needs and that won’t cost you an arm and a leg to buy.

You already spent that must on your computer, now it is time to save a little cash.

External Hard Drives is a post from: Computer Spot

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Today’s computers are sleeker, smaller, and more portable than ever before. Some people use a smart phone for all of their computing needs, but those people don’t have a lot of use for many programs.

Everyone else either uses a hand held table, a laptop, a notepad, or a full sized PC or Mac at home. Whatever the case, each of these things has some type of hard drive, which is where all of your important information will be stored.

If you are smart,you will get something with a removable hard drive or you could end up losing more than just a machine.

If you have ever had a computer crash on you, you can start to understand why a removable hard drive might be a good idea.

Some of them are not, which means a fried computer will take your important files down with it, and unless you have backed that information up, you have lost it forever.

Everyone has the best of intentions when it comes to backing up computer files, but even the most ardent savers forget once in a while.

That is, of course, when the inevitable melt down is about to occur. If you can get the hard drive out of there, you can avoid this headache.

Short of throwing your computer off of a cliff and having the hard drive break into hundreds unidentifiable pieces, most hard drives can survive when a computer goes nuts.

A removable hard drive won’t help you much if you have a virus on your computer that cleaned it off, but it can help when a malfunction in the computer renders it useless.

A professional can always try to get your information off of your hard drive, but it can be very expensive and they may not be able to save anything.

On the other hand, if you have a removable hard drive, you can either put it into a new machine, or you can get an adapter that you put around the hard drive and it then allows you to plug it into another computer so that you can retrieve the files that you need to save. If something has corrupted the files, like the virus mentioned above, it won’t help much, but on the other hand, things have been saved with removable hard drives that were considered permanently lost in the past.

Remember that if you have a removable hard drive, you have to take care of it when it is not in your computer or device.

If you get a hard drive too close to a magnetic field of any type, you will probably find out that all of your information has been wiped clean.

You must do all that you can to keep it dry, clean, and safe from damage. Try to keep in in a safe spot, like your computer, if you can, and also see if you can find a case that may help you protect it from the every day accidents that can wipe out the files that you probably can not afford to lose.

Removable Hard Drive is a post from: Computer Spot

As one continues saving data in his or her computer, the processing speed of the machine tends to be slower. In the same light, when one wants to download big files from the internet, the download speeds of the machine one uses can be slower than is desirable.

It is in such cases that a computer memory upgrade becomes necessary. Before deciding to upgrade the computer memory however, one needs to understand a few basic things.

First, a low-rated random access memory (RAM) is just one of the reasons why the computer could be slow. Other reasons include the presence of unnecessary toolbars, or start-up items.

Secondly, one must rid the computer of malware, spyware, or adware. Usually, they lag the operating speeds of the computer.

Depending on the amount of work that one handles using a computer, one can easily tell when he or she is running short of RAM. In the past, RAM chips used to be low as 128 MB.

Nowadays, and considering the speed requirements necessitated by computer networking and connectivity, most computer manufacturers only release machines that have 512 RAM or more.

Usually, the manufacturers leave enough spaces on the computer’s motherboard to allow for computer memory upgrade.

As such, one can purchase RAM chips compatible with the slots on the motherboard, fix them, and consequently enjoy higher operating speeds on the computer.

Computer users should not however be duped into believing that computer memory upgrade will automatically resolve the speed issues in their machines always. As observed above, there are several other reasons why computer speeds slow down.

When the computer has software related errors for example, no amount of RAM upgrade will enhance its operating speeds. As such, it is advisable that the computer user resolves the software errors first before upgrading the RAM.

People using computer bought five or more years ago, no doubt find the machines much slower compared to new computers released by manufacturers today. With computer memory upgrade however, owners of such machines can increase the speeds to comfortable working levels.

To attain good operating speeds however, computer owners should always avoid opening too many processes or programs at the same time. Additionally, they must use reliable anti-virus software and conduct spyware sweeps, in order to rid the computer of malicious programs.

Since errors in the hard drive can also slow down the computer speeds, one should resolve any outstanding disk fragmentation issues.

But how does computer memory upgrade work? Well, as computer technicians would readily tell, the more RAM a person has in his or her computer, the better.

While 512 megabytes is sufficient for computers operating on the Windows XP platform, people handling larger amounts of work at the same time, or those connecting and downloading files from the internet may require 1 gigabyte RAM or more. Since it is fairly cheap and easy to install RAM chips, there is no reason why one should be tied down to a slow computer, when a RAM upgrade can solve the issue.

Tips on Computer Memory Upgrade is a post from: Computer Spot

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To many people, the term “ergonomic” used to describean object, usually ends up calling in your thoughts the image of something which is actually unconventional in its design – and quite futuristic-looking.

By that measure, the Swiftpoint ergonomic computer mouse is clearly a device that completely needs to be called “ergonomic”. To begin with, you wouldn’t even know it was the mouse unless you were shown what it did.

The Swiftpoint (it helps you point swiftly, gettit?) is nothing if not unusual. To begin with, it’s very small; then, you don’t hold it the way you hold a mouse. If there is any type of analog you’re looking for, you could say you hold like you do a pen (not that it looks like a pen).

Is this an ergonomic computer mouse? It depends on how small your hands are, and how long you plan to use your computer every day. For those who have large hands and that are at their computers hours every day, this may really not be that ergonomic at all.

For individuals who don’t use their computers that long and who have small hands (and who are actually right-handed too, by the way), it’ll be a fantastic device to have around for around $60. The one thing itself is just about 2 inches long and a little more than an inch wide.

It features a place where you can rest your right thumb in a cushioned rubberized bed, and the left and rightmouse buttons are placed along the center of the thing. Your index finger rests on a different area of the device and operates the scroll wheel.

Whatever you do marvel at, holding this ergonomic personal computer mouse, is how intuitively the thumb grip was made. The device connects wirelessly to your computer via a really small USB receiver. And it will attach through magnets to the bottom of your mouse to help charge the internal battery.

You only need to ensure that while you’re doing this, you don’t end up losing that tiny USB dongle. If your laptop’s USB ports are all set close together, the mouse is just going to block everything while it charges.

What makes the Swiftpoint particularly ergonomic is the fact that it has an amazing scroll method. It works spectacularly, and it’s very easy to manipulate. The mouse itself isn’t programmable at all though, which may be a problem to some users who can’t do without customization options.

Generally, this is certainly a device you want to check out. It’s not that expensive; and for individuals who like to make heads turn while they casually go about using their computers, this really is a must-buy.

An Ergonomic Personal Computer Mouse that appears the Part – the Swiftpoint is a post from: Computer Spot

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