Computer Spot

If only cars were as simple to maintain as computers were. If all you had to do to change the oil or to check tire pressure was to press a couple of buttons sitting in the comfort of your seat, no one would ever let any maintenance get out from under them.

Oddly enough though, they do let quite a lot get out from under them when it comes to computers. The thing is, computers don’t need any mechanical maintenance. You don’t need to oil your hard drive or put your i7 processor in the mineral oil bath to clean up the joints.

Whatever maintenance you need to do is all in the software. People don’t take software very seriously. This little computer maintenance checklist should help you identify what spots need a spot of care from time to time.

Have you ever noticed how when you first buy a computer or when you do a fresh install of the OS, that it runs in an inexplicably clean and smooth way? The moment you install your first program though, things become less than smooth in some hard-to-define way.

Computers do slow down when there is a virus there gumming the works up. They also slow down when there are programs of any kind installed. Of course, you can’t use your computer without installing programs.

But a lot of us just keep useless programs on long after you stop using them. Cleaning your computer up in this way can really help step your user experience up.

You must remember to put this on your computer maintenance checklist – look for any kind of program that you don’t use ever and just get rid of them. Do a proper uninstall, and see how it improves your experience.

Antivirus software by itself really can slow your computer down. The best kinds do manage to carry a light footprint. But they still do bog a computer down at least a little bit.

If you know what not to do on your computer to open yourself up to the risk of malware, you just could consider going without antivirus. It really would help with how snappy and nimble your computer felt.

This still doesn’t mean that you don’t have to have antivirus software. You can get something to install once a month, scan your computer to check for any problems and then you could uninstall it.

If you find that there are viruses found from time to time, that means you really do need the product. Keep scanning to find out if there’s anything there that tells you you need protection.

No computer maintenance checklist is ever going to tell you to try the politically incorrect move of uninstalling your antivirus. But you really should try it.

If you want that new computer feel, you really could back your data up and completely reinstall your operating system once every six months or so. Nearly nothing else you do can make your computer feel as new as this move can.

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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.

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It used to be that your real computer was always your desktop. Your notebook was always the standby – what you tried to use when you were outside.

You came home and tried to sync your laptop to your real computer so that you could get some real work done. But that’s all changed now.

There is only one real computer in our lives, and it isn’t a desktop. Choosing a laptop these days though isn’t just about choosing a laptop. Laptops have just gone and morphed themselves into a half-dozen different subcategories.

There are the full-featured laptops of course that everyone knows and pays $1500 for. But there are lots of other contenders for the throne – chrome books, net books and ultra-books being important among them. How do you know what to buy?

Let’s start with the newest in this category – the ultra-book. As far as mobile electronics manufacturers are concerned, thin and light are the mantras to live by.

It’s actually a pretty great one as mantras go, and it’s driving quite a bit of innovation in the mobile PC market right now.

You could say that Apple invented the ultra-book category with its MacBook Air. These are notebooks that have a full-sized keyboard and screen and full-sized power – except that the notebooks are thin enough to dangerously bend when you try to do that.

The MacBook Air was quite expensive at first; and rare. But many manufacturers have hopped on the bandwagon now and they all offer something at about $1000.

These laptops are quite powerful full-sized devices; the only place they ask you to sacrifice anything is in the connectivity options they give you and in the presence of an optical drive.

Asus invented the netbook category. It was so successful that Intel really went to town with a whole new kind of stripped-down processor for the category – the Atom.

While ultra-books look incredibly sleek and attractive, net books don’t try to be small in that way. They’re actually just small – with screens under 10 inches.

Their keyboards are small and cramped, and they clearly look like budget offerings. But they’ve been runaway hits with physically very small.

You can get netbooks the size of paperback novels for $250, and they fill a real need – anyone can throw one of these into a handbag or even a coat pocket. And for most purposes, these do work like actual full-sized laptops.

Google came into the market at some point and wondered if it could do something with the popularity of the netbook and hijack the market to its own ends. They’ve come out with something they call the chromebook. While netbooks and ultra-books run proper Windows or OS X operating systems and are real computers in every sense of the term, chromebooks run a special Crome OS. It’s an all new operating system that you can’t really install programs on. There’s just one thing you can do with it – you can run the Chrome web browser. Whatever you want to do, you’re supposed to do on the cloud through this web browser.

Ultra-books really are the perfect compromise. While they are full-size, they’re very light. And you don’t sacrifice any on performance. The ultra-book can usually give you almost everything you are looking for in a computer. They’re the new benchmark.

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If you are on the market for a laptop for the student in your family, there are basically four things that you need to keep in mind as you shop around.

Laptops for students need to be light because they do need to carry them around a lot, and they need to be small enough to slip into a satchel or something.

They need to have the kind of power your child’s course of study requires, and they need to be the right operating system for the kind of software your child will be using in the course of her studies.

What that means is, if you have a student who is studying video editing or animation, you don’t want one of those mass-market $300 laptops. Those will almost certainly be underpowered for this kind of thing.

On the other hand, a powerful and bulky desktop replacement type with powerful graphics processing ability will be overkill somewhat for the student who just wants to take down notes in law school. Let’s look into it a little bit deeper.

As much as you would want to buy the most powerful machine out there that you can afford, you do need to remember that with bag and power supply all put together, a powerful computer can end up weighing 10 pounds.

It’s really too much to expect students to carry around all the time. You don’t want something that’ll tire her out before she even gets into class. So when it comes to buying laptops for students, you have to really accept that portability trumps power.

And it’s not just about how light the machine is, either. While you might find yourself loving a large 16 inch screen on a laptop when you’re working at home, try using that same laptop at the coffee shop or something where there are lots of other people and you don’t find yourself free to spread out.

That’s the kind of environment your child will be using her laptop in – in class or in the dorm. There really isn’t much room at a classroom desk for a large laptop. Go for something that’s 11 inches or 13 inches in screen size, and your child will thank you for it.

Actually, the small size of the thing should work out really well. The smaller the screen on the laptop is, the smaller the battery has to be. All put together, it has to make for one lightweight laptop. Not to mention, a smaller screen is likely to use less power. That’s more battery life for you.

Try your best to look for a laptop that has the longest lasting battery. Try to get something with seven hours of battery life at least. It shouldn’t be that hard these days.

And finally, you really don’t need to buy a really powerful computer unless your child really needs it in the course of her studies.

You do need to remember that a young person can be really tempted to stray into gaming in her spare time if she has a really capable computer. Get as little computing power as your child can actually manage with.

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Fake antivirus designers can get their work done in some ingenious ways. Around the time the British royal wedding spectacle was going on, one particular malware designer thought of a pretty clever way of exploiting the Royal wedding craze to his advantage.

He put up very a popular portrait of Princess Diana on a website (because he knew people would be searching for Princess Diana).

When people clicked on the website, they got redirected time and again until they suddenly found themselves on a website that came up with a very Microsoft-ey-looking dialog box – that said that their computer was infected, and they needed to pay $60 then and there to get rid of it.

This was fake antivirus, of course. And if nothing else, people can always tell a fake antivirus pitch by how they demand money right away. Reputable companies always offer you a free one month trial.

Anyway, reputable companies never pop up a warning like that. Fake antivirus isn’t some kind of fringe business. The FBI believes that they make will that’s the one billion-dollar industry every year.

They steal money, they take control of computers, they steal information, and they turn your computer into a kind of remote-controlled robot to make it send out lots of spam to everyone else.

The problem with fake antivirus is so bad, the normally immune Macintosh operating system has just had its first fake antivirus announced. [Score for Macintosh: 01, and Microsoft 10,000].

Fake antivirus makers use every trick in the book to get through. Sometimes, they use simple spam and online advertising.

At other times, they do it through actually calling you at home and asking you to visit their website for something or the other. Once you get there, you’ll find familiar fake antivirus running putting up.

Most of these attacks come from countries in Eastern Europe and China. There are set on stealing from the West. When fake software detects that your computer uses Chinese or Russian something, it just won’t try to steal from you.

Some of these businesses make such a great living from what they do. They try pushing fake software with convincing-sounding names like Win Drive Cleaner or XP Internet Security Organization and just get past a lot of people’s defenses.

And since they actually ask you for permission and get you to pay, your antivirus software is often a little unsure whether it needs to stop this thing that you paid money for.

Some of these organizations actually have 1000 employees and proper offices in Eastern Europe. Just imagine – some of these companies make $200 million a year. That’s more money than Twitter makes.

When these fake antivirus companies are so big, they can afford to constantly rewrite their malware code so that your antivirus software has a very hard time indeed detecting anything. As usual, personal vigilance is all that will protect you.

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It’s like there’s always something on the horizon trying to wipe established laptops and computers out. At first, when Asus came out with its EeePC mini laptop four years ago, people couldn’t stop wondering if a small portable laptop that did most things well was all you needed and how a full-fledged laptop was overkill.

These days, iPad-like tablets have all but left netbooks in the dust and there’s talk of how the big computer manufacturers are scared of how the tablet is going to put everything out of the running.

If you’re looking to jump on the handheld computer bandwagon, should you go with the iPad or should you go with one of the alternatives? Which is the best tablet PC on the market for your money?

The thing is, choosing among the different tablets doesn’t work the way it does when you’re trying to choose from among different kinds of laptop. There are different kinds of things you need to compare – not just power and screen size.

For instance, when you buy a laptop, you get just one of two different operating systems to choose from – Windows or MacOS.

Go over to tablets, and you have iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS and Windows 7. Since all of these have comparable feature sets, and you can’t really go by those to make a distinction.

And of course, there is HP’s sad WebOS – an option you could choose if you wanted a tablet just for the fun of it. HP’s WebOS-powered TouchPad came out to much fanfare just a few months ago, and then sold so poorly that the company just abandoned tablet computers altogether.

If you’re not worried about buying a dead-end product, you can get one at Best Buy on firesale for $99.

If you’re looking for the best tablet PC out there, there are two kinds of ways you can judge a product for its OS. You can either look at how beautiful, elegant and easy-to-use it is, or you can look at how many downloadable apps there are available for it that will help you do all kinds of things with your purchase.

When it comes to OS elegance, Apple’s iOS is certainly the winner. But HP’s a WebOS is widely recognized to be extremely beautiful too. But HP’s product, when you buy it, is a dead end. There are no programs or applications for it.

You only have more or less what this product comes with. Apple’s App Store on the other hand is insanely well-stocked – with hundreds of thousands of apps.

Android is certainly not as slickly designed or is visually pleasing as Apple’s iOS. But it does have a very complete App Market.

So basically, picking the best tablet PC on the market comes down in one measure, to the kind of applications that are available for its OS.

You can also pick a tablet for the kind of specifications you look for in a laptop. Apples iPad happens to be about the lightest for the kind of performance you get. If you want something even lighter than the iPad, you could look at 7 inch tablets such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab or even smaller ones by Dell.

In the beginning, about 20 years ago, people would say that if you wanted to pick the best computer for your needs, you’d first pick the kind of software you planned to use on it, and then just look at the kind of computer you needed to get to run it properly.

The same would apply today to tablet PCs. Pick the apps that are the most attractive, and then pick the tablet that would run that app.

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For about 10 years now, Apple has been trying to go with a theme when naming its products. For all its mobile devices and some of its computers, it uses the iDevice naming convention.

As for its computer operating systems, it likes to name them after jungle cats (as opposed to house cats). In its operating system world, the names are all about Cheetahs, Jaguars, Panthers and Leopards.

For its latest operating system though, the company brings in a new kind of cat – the lion. This what they call the latest avatar of the Mac – the Mac OSX Lion.

Microsoft is known for charging outrageous sums of money for its operating systems. Apple on the other hand charges an extremely reasonable $30 (okay, $29.99). Of course, you’ll get it preinstalled on any new Mac that you buy. If you wish to run it on an earlier Mac, is this an upgrade that’s worth the price?

The simple answer to that question would be – yes, it is. But you knew that already. Let’s get into why it is worth your time and money.

To begin with, Apple calls the Mac OSX Lion an operating system that’s completely set to change the computer paradigm for you. Read the rest of this entry →

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What kind of effect does it have on a person to be constantly fed politically correct statements? For instance, you know that Apple’s Mac OS is supposed to be far ahead of any OS made by Microsoft.

When you open any tech magazine and you see the words Windows and Mac together in an article, everything in your life up to that point that you’ve been exposed to forces you to believe that it’s an article about how there is a new way in which Mac wiped the floor yet again with that poor joke of an OS by Microsoft.

Well, that’s not how this is going to go. With version 7, Microsoft really has made a truly mature and well-designed operating system that even the Mac OS X, that has always been the last word in operating systems, could learn a trick or two from.

Let’s look at a few features that 7 has that the Macintosh should kill for, but doesn’t have to  (because there are ready-made apps that port those kinds of features right over).

Windows does cut-and-paste just about anywhere. In Windows Explorer, you can cut, copy and paste files to your heart’s content. Somehow, OS X doesn’t allow any cutting. Read the rest of this entry →

The Samsung would be close to the marketing of a netbook based on the new Google operating system at home, or the Chrome OS. Although there was no official announcement yet, Samsung’s forthcoming netbook, which should be called Alex, already circulating in the first information that allow us to draw a fairly detailed technical information.

Driven by the dual core Atom N550 processor with an operating frequency of 1.5 GHz, the Samsung Alex adopt a DDR3 memory and a 2 GB SanDisk SSD signed, while the 12-inch LCD display (10.1 inches according to some sources) has a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, also has a webcam so that the inevitable keyboard and touchpad.

With a nearly complete connectivity through Qualcomm’s Gobi chip, the Samsung Alex avails itself of the modules 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, there are also USB ports, VGA output, the slot to insert the memory card and then the 3.5 mm jacks for headphones and microphone.

Alex is probably the Samsung officially unveiled on 10 May, during a press conference scheduled by Google to announce the final version of its Chrome OS. At this point we have to put on hold to find out all the official details of what should be the first netbook on the market based on the new operating system in Mountain View.

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The monitor does not do the trick for you? Or maybe you need to give a presentation as well as people who peered of your shoulder in the 12-inch laptop screen you just will not cut it. Whatever your reason for wanting a second monitor attached to your laptop, this is an easy task for complete. These steps would guide you through how to add a second monitor to your laptop.

Both ports would be classified as DVI, VGA, HDMI or DisplayPort Mini. Image shown above is one VGA port (left) next to the HDMI port. Connect the second monitor and turn on the laptop monitor.

Click the “Identify” or “detection” (depending on the operating system you would use) for the computer for register the second monitor. Often the register immediately without having to perform this step. Click “Apply.” Select the “Extend It Displays” in Several Displays. Completing this step if you want your second monitor for act as an extension of your desktop. Select “Duplicate This Displays” under Multiple Display. Click “Apply.” Complete this step if you want your second monitor for act as a mirror of your laptop screen. You can also have your desktop display on the monitor only the first or second monitor just to suit your needs.

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