Computer Spot

There are some parents that worry non-stop about how much time their children spend watching television and playing things like video and computer games. This is a relevant concern, because too much can be bad for children.

Some suggest that children under two have no screen time and then that it be limited from then on. However, you also have to think about the world in which they are going to live when they get older.

Computers are in almost every home and are common in most workplaces. Allowing your children some time to play computer games can actually be a wise investment in their future.

Many children today go into kindergarten knowing the basics of using a mouse and starting and using simple programs on a computer. In fact, they may start doing some work at that age on a computer while they are at school.

Teachers will help children that do not know what to do, but if your children have some limited interactions with computer games on your home PC, they will already know what do and they will already know that learning computer games at school are going to be just as fun as what they would do at home.

What you want to so is to find computer games for kids that have learning potential. Today, there are many of them on the market.

Most of them are made just to help children learn things like the alphabet, counting, colors, basic logic skills, and computer dexterity. Some are just for fun, but they end up having a learning element to them as well.

Some are generic and some are made with characters that your children may know from TV like the Wiggles, Sesame Street, or whatever it is that they love.

Parents should limit the time children are playing computer games, and if at all possible, play along with them. This can be hard when both parents work and time is limited, but if you play with them, you are on top of what they are learning in computer games and you also know when they are ready for something more advanced.

It is also easy to get lost in doing a chore while your child plays and they end up being on the computer longer than you intended. Some play is good, but they should have limits on time playing games and when watching TV.

Remember that as children get older they are going to want to find computer games online. There are plenty of good ones, but it is also easy for them to wander away to sites that you may not like.

See what you can do to put parental controls on your computer and also on popular sites like YouTube and Facebook. You want to know what they see and you want to know that they cannot find things that are well beyond their years.

If they cannot follow rules you set up while playing games, limit or cut out time as punishment. They’ll soon learn to follow your computer games and online activity rules.

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Computers are among the most fascinating pieces of technology and the main reason for this is that they can do so many things at once and this has really helped very many people.

Just the way people are fascinated with the different things that a computer can do there are some who are equally fascinated about what goes into their making and maintenance and it is this group that needs to know all about computer engineering.

Basically, computer engineering is a study that entails computerized solutions to every problem that is associated with computer processing like manufacturing troubles, research problems and system control.

It helps to save the above problems by merging the knowledge of computer science and electronic engineering.

Included in the average computer engineering course are courses such as instrumentation, the theory of control system, analog and digital electronics and robotics.

For one to learn all they need to about computer engineering, they will have to make a very informed decision about the university or college that they want to join. This will in the long run help them get quality education that will make them greatly advance in their careers.

The first of great tips when looking for the right college to attend is to choose a major then look for a college that offers the major.

When one chooses the college according to the majors they want they will have several options to choose from and here they can further narrow down the numbers by using several specifications among them quality of education offered, costs and the reputation of the college.

This will leave the aspiring engineer with several institutions to choose from and the best route to take here will be to get as much information as they can get about the institutions.

Among the other basic things a person should know about computer engineering is that their job is crucial in all industries where computers are needed for business to operate.

In such businesses a computer engineer will be required to come up with new systems that can meet the ever evolving requirements in a business as well as improve and maintain the set-ups.

Compared to the other specializations in the field of engineering, computer engineering is among the ones with the highest remuneration in terms of salary.

Most of the modern conveniences we have today were made through computer engineering and they include alarm systems, x-ray machines and mobile phones.

When it comes to software and hardware, it is not a must that computer engineers make a choice as they enough to will be skilled enough to handle both.

There are also many specializations for computer engineers and they can make a choice in areas such as artificial intelligence, computer architecture, computer systems, integrated circuits and computer networks. With all the above options there is almost no reason why anyone would not make it in the field.

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When Apple first announced the iPad, Steve Jobs said in the keynote address that the great thing about it was that it ran on OS X. Microsoft is doing something similar with Windows 8.

They said at the last Microsoft Build conference that the new operating system was intended to be just the one OS for both tablets that ran Windows and PCs.

Which is quite a step away from how Microsoft usually does things. They usually like at least 10 different versions of the same thing. Well, if you routinely tune out when hearing about the new Windows operating system, perhaps you should listen now.

There’s a lot to like in Windows 8. It does things that the iPad and the MacBook should, but can’t. Suffice it to say that when it comes out sometime next year, you’ll be a frantic to upgrade Windows 8.

Every successful computing device out there gets that way because it has a unique feature that people need that no one else has. The MacBook air has its anemic profile, of course.

But apart from that, since it’s a machine that runs on a solid-state drive, it has (almost) instant-on. You press the button and a couple seconds later, it’s completely ready for anything you want to throw at it.

There are lots of people who want to upgrade to a MacBook Air just for that one thing. You’ll want to upgrade to Windows 8 just for this one thing too. Running on a regular laptop with a regular hard drive, Windows 8 starts up in under 10 seconds.

Certainly, no one really thinks to compare iPhone’s iOS with Windows Phone 7. However, there is one thing everyone loves about Windows Phone – the interface that’s tile-based.

It’s strange thing for a full-blown PC operating systems to mimic a phone operating system, but there it is – Windows 8 borrows the successful tile interface from Windows 7.

If you’re using this on a tablet, it’s far more usable than simple icons. Multitasking becomes very easy too. If you’re for instance looking at your Facebook newsfeed, you can just dock it to one side of the screen and switch to something else like a music video on YouTube.

At the Microsoft conference, they showed a cool way to set a password without a password. You just have to set parts of the screen that you have to touch in the right sequence to unlock your computer.

Heard more about how the cloud is going to take over our computing lives than you’ve actually seen happen?

Well, upgrade to Windows 8 and you’ll actually see it happen.

Every Windows user gets to tap into Microsoft SkyDrive. Come to think of it, this should be a great way to control piracy.

The best sign that an upgrade to Windows 8 is a great idea? Remember how journalists always simply hate Microsoft?

Vista was barely a twinkle in Microsoft’s eye (eww!) when the entire journalistic community joined hands to dismiss it altogether. Well, every story that’s been done about Windows 8 so far has been a very gushy one.

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Without a doubt, smartphones are such useful everyday tools. Yes of course, people know how to use a smartphone to catapult frowning birds at badly behaved pigs; but apart from that, they will help you get an astounding variety of things done everyday.

When Americans were polled about recently about how useful their smartphones were to them, about one out of two said that their phone was very useful in an emergency; and one out of four said that they’d been in situations where they didn’t have their smartphone with them and got into trouble because of that.

And yet, most smartphone users aren’t aware of a vast variety of things they can achieve with them. Yes, they use their phone to look at maps and use them sometimes to access their bank accounts, but that’s about it.

When it comes to apps for smartphones, it’s an embarrassment of riches. That’s just a bit problematic though when you need to pick something useful out for your needs.

Since many of these apps answer needs you have that you didn’t even know about, how do you find these? Well, sometimes, lists like this particular one out. If you want to learn how to use a smartphone and ever more useful ways every day, here are a few ideas.

Back when Baywatch was running about 12 years ago, you’d always get these little stories in the news all the time about how some kid somewhere managed to save a drowning brother or someone because he learned rescue techniques and CPR watching Baywatch.

Well, there lots of people today too who really fancy the idea of learning CPR and first aid. What does that have to do with your phone, you ask?

Well, you can learn how to use a smartphone for this – with the American Heart Association’s Pocket First Aid and CPR app for Android and iPhone phones.

Anytime you have someone on your hands in some kind of medical emergency, the app shows you ways easy animated instructions for what you have to do to save them.

It’s somewhat hard to learn how to use a smartphone to print documents. What do you do though when you are away on the road and you come across a document on the Internet that you would like to print out?

Well, they have a free app for both major smartphone platforms called CloudPrint that will let you do that. If you have a wireless printer at home or at the office something, you just have to set it up to receive print orders from your phone.

You can send the order from anywhere, and when you get home, you’ll find your printed copy waiting for you.

Lots of people are beginning to learn how to use their smartphone to save every time they shop. An app called RedLaser tries to let you be your own red laser-wielding checkout clerk.

You just aim your phone camera at any barcode on any product at the store, and RedLaser will quickly find out what your GPS location is and tell you what all the prices in your immediate neighborhood are.

You can save a great deal on gas with Gas Buddy as well. You just need to ask the app every time you need to fill up, and it’ll tell you what all the gas prices are in a 10 mile radius.

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So let’s start with the basic question here — what is a refurbished laptop? Is that like a really old laptop that’s been used for three years and sold by someone and cleaned up for sale again? Not really.

A refurbished laptop is, in the lingo, also called B-stock. It’s either a laptop that’s been on the computer store’s display for while and been poked and prodded by everyone passing, or it’s a laptop that was sold to someone but was returned for one reason or another.

Sometimes, these are review units handed out to different magazine reviewers for a few months; and sometimes, these were returned after a business lease expired. In any case, the laptop is given a proper once-over by the manufacturer, and is certified to be as good as new.

Refurbished laptops are not secondhand or used in any way. These are the latest models. If you are willing to have something that’s not factory-sealed in a box, cheap refurbished laptops could be spectacular deals.

Choosing to go the refurbished way, you can either buy directly from the manufacturer or you can buy from some vendor that you trust. If you haven’t done this before, going with the manufacturer would be best.

Whatever source you buy from, cheap refurbished laptops should still come with at least a three month warranties. Sometimes, it’s six. Compare this with used or pre-owned laptops, and you’ll find that it’s a poor deal in every way. These are usually obsolete models and they don’t come with warranties either.

Whatever vendor you buy your cheap refurbished laptops from, you want to make sure that you read all the fine print. You never know about the warranty they offer you until you read all the exclusions there.

This should be especially required reading when you go with a previously untested vendor. The warrantee aside, every purchase should come with a return policy in case the unit doesn’t perform to your satisfaction.

As soon as you receive your laptop, make sure that you do a few tests — try the optical drive in a few ways; use all the ports a few times; try switching the resolution of the screen; and charge the battery to see how well it holds up.

When you find a good unit advertised anywhere and it’s priced just the way you want it, you shouldn’t hesitate too much. Laptop prices and inventories go up and down really quickly. You wouldn’t want to lose just the right model to hesitation.

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So there your kid is on the couch, being nice and quiet puttering about on the Internet on the laptop. He is a right before your eyes and not getting into any kind of trouble. Is he? Children under 15 do need your help learning stay safe.

They really haven’t understood enough about life to stay clear of on Internet. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children finds that while most parents do establish ground rules for how to be safe on the computer and have had talks about it all, they almost never look in regularly to see that their children really understand what they’ve said.

And one out of two children in America report that they don’t need any parental permission at all to get on the Internet and their parents never ask them to limit the time they spend online. These Internet safety tips for kids that follow should help. But they’ll only help if you check in on a regular basis.

Most children who get into trouble on the Internet have things go wrong the moment they give out personal information on Internet – their phone number or even the name of your school.

It’s not just that you need to tell your children to never give information out to anyone who asks. Often these days, they just disguise their intentions by putting out fake contests, sweepstakes or games on Facebook.

Anyone who wants to enter these needs to give out all kinds of information. Your children are fooled by the official-looking forms that go with these fun-sounding ventures. Most Internet safety tips for kids tell you to tell your children not to give out personal information. They never tell you the ways in which these requests come in.

The “Don’t give out personal information” rule can be surprisingly difficult to keep. For instance, what do you do if your child wants to learn to develop his own website? Most parents would look at this and completely approve.

What’s not to approve – it’s creative, and it requires a bit of hard work. However, do you realize that every domain name registration requires that you submit your address, e-mail ID and phone number, to be published to the whole wide world?

Of course, most kinds of domain names offer you a privacy option – for some money. Your child needs to learn why it is necessary to pay for this. And besides, there are some kinds of domain name TLDs that don’t even allow for privacy.

For instance, a .us domain name has no privacy option. A child needs to learn how to use these choices for his website.

Sometimes, Internet safety tips for kids can be surprisingly simple and still be very effective. For instance, a child needs to be sure to not use something that points to whether the child is a boy or girl. The name shouldn’t even point how old the child is.

With a few commonsense Internet safety tips for kids like these, safety isn’t really a challenge anymore.

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If your professional life depends on having your computer behave properly (and that would kind of described the work one out of two people do), you really need to keep a bagful of tricks handy for every time your computer acts up – system files that get corrupted, important data that somehow gets deleted, user accounts that don’t somehow log you on.

You’re telling yourself that this is why those computer magazines keep exhorting you to keep backing up all the time. And certainly, that wouldn’t be a bad idea – scurrying for a backup drive backup disk whenever something goes wrong.

The thing is, reloading everything from a backup really is overkill. And pressing System Restore doesn’t turn back the clock on user files. What you need is to learn how to fix computer problems like these without turning your computer inside-out.

Let’s start with a simple problem that just seems to occur to computers for no reason – system files that just get corrupted.

When this happens, your computer won’t even start up. All you get is a blank screen with an unfriendly-looking line about how some .dll is corrupted and do you have a Windows disc.

How do you just do a bit of precision repair work, and fix just the problem you have and get on with your life? What you need for this is to keep a Windows installation disc handy.

When Windows claims that a system file has become corrupted, the first thing you need to do is to try to see if your PC will boot into Safe Mode.

You get into safe mode by pressing the power button on your computer and then pressing F8 when it’s booting up. If this does work, you just find your way to System Properties and access System Restore.

If your PC is far too corrupted for even Safe Mode to work, it’s back to the old Windows install disc for you. Pop the disc in, restart your computer, boot to the CD and then use the System Restore utility that you’re offered. It’ll tell you how to fix computer problems to do with corrupted system files.

How about when the problem is not with a Windows system file but with one of your own personal files?

What if one of those gets deleted by accident?

You could certainly run to your backup hard drive for this; but what if the backup isn’t up to speed with a file that you really need?

In cases like these, you could seek the help of a rescue program like Recuva or Recover my Files. These programs look through your hard drive for anything that’s been recently deleted and restore them in pristine condition. These are neat programs that show you how to fix computer problems to do with file disappearances.

And finally, what do you do if you’ve been locked out of your own Windows user account – through your own doing or someone who’s been careless?

Well, there’s pretty much nothing you can do unless you have acted preemptively and created a password reset disc. If you haven’t done this already, you really should – you just go to User Accounts and Family Safety in the Control Panel and get it done.

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Maybe the British Navy has the right idea about buying into the latest computer technology. On their vertical takeoff Harrier jets, when they need to program the onboard computers with something, they still use cassette tape — you know, like they used to about 25 years ago. NASA still uses ancient Pentium powered computers on some of its satellites.

And these are people with a real use for technology. So when Apple goes and tries to dazzle you with how its latest line of laptops is faster, bigger, brighter and sharper, should you really buy into all of that?

Technology marketers offer you the latest computer technology all the time to get you to give them even more money than you already have.

Does your two-year-old digital camera seem sharp enough? Of course it doesn’t – not now that they can offer you a model that has twice as many megapixels as the embarrassment of a camera that sits in your pocket.

Does your Internet service seem to take a bit of time streaming your movie? For a mere $15 more, you could bump up the download speed and make everything more instant.

And NASA has to wait a week to finish downloading its satellite pictures because they have a slow link and the onboard computer on the satellite was apparently made right about the time the Big Bang occurred.

Manufacturers of whizbang electronics want you to replace every electronic doodad in your house every three years. That’s the cycle they are looking for that will help keep them in business. And people certainly are responding.

The average smartphone that a person has in his pocket these days is only a year and half old. People used to carry their phones around for far longer.

Of course, for a country full of jobless people and little hope for the future, this addiction to technology isn’t a good thing.

Shouldn’t a family that is more or less established today take care of the future and reject the notion of buying an iPad?

An iPad actually costs about $100 more than an entry-level laptop while promising to do far less for you. If you aren’t sure about whether to invest in the latest computer technology, here’s a little primer.

Let’s start with computers – an area that sucks up with a lot more money out of our budgets than it should. Certainly, if you like to look at the Internet with 50 browser tabs open at the same time, buying a $1200 desktop or laptop would make a lot of sense.

But do you really want that luxury when you could apply that money somewhere where it would make a lot more sense — like an investment?

Basically, even the most basic entry level computer today comes with 2GB RAM, a 250GB hard disk and a dual core processor.

Even if you have thousands of MP3s, thousands of digital photos and e-books, you’d find it hard to use more than a handful of gigabytes of hard disk space.

You don’t want to buy a computer unless you find that you’re frequently peaking your computer’s processor and running out of RAM. On Windows, you can check all of this on Task Manager.

The TV manufacturers really want you to buy Full HD. The problem is, Full HD content is only available on expensive Blu-Ray discs and Hi-def television programming.  If you are someone who takes advantage of all of this, then buying a Full HD television wouldn’t be a bad idea. But you don’t want to buy it just because the salesman seems excited about it.

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Technology continues to grow by the day and there is more need for computer engineers and apart from this there are also those people who have always wanted to be computer engineers.

The latter group of people it is therefore quite necessary they found out the necessary computer engineering requirements that might have them attain their dream.

Truth be told, there is no way a person can make it in the computer engineering field if they do not have a passion for information technology and computers.

This is because computer engineers are normally tasked with maintaining and developing software programs that entail coded instructions that are spoken using computer language. If one therefore does not have a passion for it they will have a really bad time.

Computer engineers should also be skilled in science, analysis and mathematics as after graduation they can get positions in schools, government offices, the engineering industry and the manufacturing industry.

There are a number of computer engineering requirements one must fulfill education wise if they are to join the computer engineering field. The requirements include university or college education that majored in software engineering and/ or computer science.

While it is not a must that one gets a degree to be employed, it is preferable that one has a degree as they will be able to attract more potential employers. Computer engineering is divided into two categories: software application and software systems engineering.

It should be noted that each category has its own programming languages and knowledge and despite the fact a student will be required to cover both topics, they will also need to make a decision on which of the two appeals to them more.

Due to competition in the field, another of the computer engineering requirements is that one get as many feathers under their cap as possible once they are out of school.

They can do this by having hands on experience at various companies or organizations. Having previous experience will a go a long way into making the computer engineer marketable for employment.

Some patience will be needed as well because the big salary might not comes  as immediately as the engineer expected but with time they will rise up the ranks and get to the big positions and big salaries.

Computer engineering is also essentially a marriage between computer science and electrical engineering and it is therefore important that the person taking the course be very up to task as the two professions can be quite demanding.

Different institutions have their own charges as regarding the fee requirements and so it is important that one enquires earlier on in order to make an informed decision on the school with the most affordable fees. Once all the above requirements are met one will be well on their way to becoming a computer engineer.

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While most people swear by their computers, it is ironic that while they profess to love their computers so much they never take their time to clean the screen.

Having a clean computer screen is not that difficult and what better way to be comfortable when working with it?

For those who do not know how to go about cleaning their computer screen they should know that the best liquid to use is distilled water.

This works very well for monitors that are not very dirty as opposed to using liquids with ammonia or alcohol which are known to pose danger to the screen.

Having established that water is the best liquid; one should sprinkle it on the screen and wipe it using cloth or smooth paper. The movement should be done in a consistent way from the bottom up or vice versa.

The action should be repeated as well using another piece of cloth to ensure that the water is completely dried off from the computer. Read the rest of this entry →