Looking at children these days, it kind of feels like they were born with an iPhone in one hand. Why, if you give them a BlackBerry or another kind of phone with actual buttons and keys, they keep trying to swipe their fingers across them and expecting them to spring to life.

That’s how used they are to technology. Needless to say, kids’ laptops these days make for a great idea. Not just because they’re going to play video games all the time or anything, but because theywill actually them learn well as well.

A lot of the time, parents have never heard of kids’ laptops. When they first chance upon them at a local electronics store, there are a little wonderstruck – what is it about a laptop designed for a kid that makes it different from one designed for a grown-up?

Well, some of the differences are rather common sense. For instance, you can’t get your kid a regular laptop and then expect him to be careful with it. Without a doubt, kids, when you place them in charge of anything, are going to be a little playful and rough with it.

So a child’s laptop is usually kind of toughened up – with a rugged and colorful exterior and a screen protector for the time your child decides to actually clamber on top of the screen in his enthusiasm to get to the bathroom.

Actually, if this were the only concern, you could easily buy a regular laptop and buy a protective shell for it.

But that isn’t the only kind of protection kids’ laptops need. Even if you do insulate it against all kinds of knocks and falls, how about the fact that a regular laptop has a very delicate moving device inside – the hard drive?

Hard drives aren’t really built for any abuse. Neither is a DVD drive. Kids laptops are built with solid-state hard drives – expensive storage devices that are made entirely of flash chips.

These are quite expensive, but you’ll find that your kid gets to keep his new laptop a lot longer this way.

As much as you would like to build protection and security into a kid’s laptop, what do you do about the weight? Even netbooks will tend to weigh at least 3 pounds. What do you do about that when even adults have trouble logging their laptops around sometimes.

They try to kiddie size everything on a child’s laptop. The one thing that makes a laptop quite heavy is its battery. They cut down battery size, and, to still keep the laptop usable over extended periods of time, they cut all kinds of other things to keep power consumption down. Kids’ laptops rarely have more than 10 inches.

What do kids love to do on their laptops more than anything else? It’s plain gaming, of course. You can get a child’s laptop built to handle this kind of thing. In fact, if you don’t, your child’s going to lose interest in it very quickly.

What are Kids Laptops Anyway? 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

If you haven’t actually bought your college-going kit a laptop yet, he is probably pestering you for one right about now.

How do you pick the best laptop for students going to college, actually?

Does he really need a full-blown laptop that costs $1200?

Won’t a $400 netbook do just as well if they just want to take notes in class or something?

Well, your kid probably so badly wants an iPad at this point that he’ll try to convince you that it could be his main computer for college.

Don’t buy that line of argument though. Most of what your kid will do in college, will involve typing. And doing that on an iPad can be a pain – even with a Bluetooth keyboard.

So basically, the best laptop for students is a laptop (surprise!). How powerful a computer is your kid going to need?

Well, he is going to need something for his homework – which, unless he is studying animation or computer music composition, is going to be fairly routine.

An Intel Corei3 processor and a 15-inch screen could do.

If your kid is a slightly built girl though, that kind of computer might be all too heavy to lug around between classroom, dormitory, library and home. A 13-inch laptop should be completely serviceable and should be large enough too.

You can’t just buy a computer for what it does though. Even if it’s technically exactly what it needs to be. College is as much about the social experience of being with your friends and getting along as actually getting work done. Basically, you want to get a machine that’s good-looking, too.

If you really like the idea of an ultrabook – which would be something like the MacBook Air – that might be workable, except that it’s really expensive without really bringing anything to the table other than lightness of weight.

Which actually brings us to an important point. College kids are not known for how careful they are with their possessions.

There’s certainly going to be a fair amount of being dropped, and being slid across floors, and being sat on involved (for the laptop, and not the kid).

While the idea of getting a really lightweight computer might appeal, and ultrabook like the MacBook Air is not really going to be suitable.

Because these computers are by definition, really, really thin and light. They aren’t going to take that kind of abuse. This isn’t the best laptop for students.

You could go with a standard MacBook or MacBook Pro depending on your budget. That’ll cost you about $1200 or so.

On the Windows side of the aisle, ta Core2 Duo or Core i3 should be perfectly adequate. A Core i5 and a 1TB hard drive wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. A machine like this shouldn’t cost more than $600 or so.

Do see if you can get an educational discount. You can usually get $100 off when you’re buying a laptop for a student.

Buying the Best Laptop for Students is a post from: Computer Spot

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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.

Choosing a Laptop in a Market that’s Constantly Redefining Itself is a post from: Computer Spot

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Here’s an interesting concept – attend university for free – on a computer, through iTunes. If you’ve been hearing a little bit about something called iTunes U and have been meaning to look it up, this is what it is.

The answer to the question of what is iTunes U is simple – it’s a feature on iTunes that universities pipe their free courses to you through. But it isn’t just university courses that you get, of course. K-12 education is available on a separate channel, as well. There are 800 universities around the world that participate.

Now that you know what is iTunes U, you’re probably anxious to get started. And you probably have lots of questions. Let’s get right to it. Let’s see how it works.

If you have iTunes on your computer, you’re already halfway there. There is an iTunes U button on the toolbar on the front page.

It takes you straight to where you’re going. Right away, you get your full selection of subjects, schools, the top 10 and so on.

Click on it, and you get a full series of lectures or books or anything else. Once you have the course content on your computer, you can port it to your iDevice (which is an easy way to say iPhone, iPod or iPad), or you could read on your computer.

There’s no homework and there’s no one pushing you to go faster. It’s completely user-determined, how fast you go.

If you’re wondering about what is iTunes U good for if there’s no one pushing you, this is probably not the application for you.

You don’t get any university degrees or credits at all. This is just for those who pursue knowledge for the sake of it.

If you find that this is a great concept, to get great lectures and books and study material to take you step-by-step right from the basics to the most advanced levels, if you really want to have the benefit of the kind of education the ivyleaguers get, then this certainly is for you.

So is this a great idea or not? It depends on what you’re looking for. Of course, if you’re looking to your iPhone to substitute a college degree, you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.

But if what you’re looking for is education in something new for a practical purpose – you are in luck. And just think about all those people all around the world who just don’t have access to reasonable education.

Or else, think of all those young people in this country who would like to give a college course a dry run before they actually commit.

It’s a winner of a concept, and it’s the promise that the Internet came with, all along.

What is iTunes U and what does it Do? is a post from: Computer Spot

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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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How much is a computer science degree needed? This depends on the market needs. The dynamics of information technology have drastically changed and continue to do so.

Information technology is now part of any organization and acts like the nervous. In fact, regardless of what degree qualifications other members of staff hold, part of their job will usually involve an IT aspect.

With this intertwining comes the question of how much worth a computer science degree.

Granted technical skills will always be marketable from the simple fact that the world runs on code. However the large majority of this code is not written by humans but rather computer generated.

A computer science degree that is directed towards utility computing and social networks is currently the way to go.  In other words, anyone who pursues a computer science degree needs to become a technology generalist as well.

It is not enough to just know how to write code. You need to adopt, relate, mold and use the existing technology to meet the changing business dynamics where your computer science degree can be most beneficial.

Thus, a degree in computer science tells an employer that you have the basic skills. But to profitably apply it in a business setting will require wielding this sword in a changing landscape effectively using business and social knowledge.

Even companies like Google and Microsoft recognize the need to have a well-rounded knowledge of IT. A computer science major is undoubtedly a high market demand.

However, having experience and skill in other areas such as finance, law, management or other disciplines will make it easier for anyone with a computer science degree to appropriately apply their skill to improve a specific departmental section or resolve a related problem.

As the director of Talent and Outreach Programs in Google’s People Operations Department Yvonne Agyei said in an interview, “”In addition to software engineering roles, we have roles within business, within legal, within finance where having a facility for technology and a passion for technology are important.

It helps if they have familiarity with our products. Having that knowledge is really important regardless of what aspect of the business you go into.”

Sometimes a hiring decision is largely determined by the experience a computer science degree holder has. As one interviewer said “It’s not going to be a show-stopper for me if someone does not have a computer science degree.

Particularly, if I am looking for developers, I am looking at what skill sets they have, how many years of experience and their knowledge of the subject matter.”

Indeed, to get the most out of a computer science degree, balancing it with business, collaboration or communication skills will make for valuable employees.

How much is a Computer Science Degree worth Today? is a post from: Computer Spot

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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.

Fake Antivirus gets Sophisticated 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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