Despite the importance of information within any business, the vast majority of small businesses do not have adequate backup and data recovery systems in place. Even when a solution is in place it is often fraught with problems; some of which are only discovered when it’s too late.
Home users are no different; often storing treasured photos of occasions never to be repeated in one place with no copy!
So why don’t we protect the information on our computers?
At The PC Support Group we have looked into this and it would appear that a combination of factors contribute to this potentially dangerous situation.
The first issue is simply that most businesses, particularly smaller ones, don’t fully appreciate the value of the information they have stored on their computers and believe that manually retrieving it (presumably by making a few phone calls and checking old paperwork) is a relatively trivial process.
This belief seems to stem from the fact that most businesses develop from the knowledge and skills of one or two people. Those people are often the major decision makers in all areas for some time and, due to day to day activity and pressures, they don’t realise the quantity or quality of information that is building up to help the business operate. As a result they don’t put protecting that information very high on the agenda.
Those that have recognised the need to protect their data are then faced with the challenge of knowing what the threats are and how to protect against them.
Data can be lost through hardware failure, software problems, malicious software such as viruses, theft of equipment, human error or major physical disasters such as fire and flood. Considering all these issues can be a major challenge in its own right.
The next issue is that backup solutions are notoriously difficult to run and manage reliably - no one wants to take day-to-day responsibility for them and all too often they are left failing for prolonged periods.
Finally we have the old favourites: time and money. With all the other pressures placed on small businesses it is natural to put data backup on the “to do” list. Spending money on marketing and sales is seen as more important, so protecting the data will just have to wait… after all, it’s not likely to fail, is it?
So let’s look at a few statistics:
• Half of all companies that lose their data go out of business overnight (Source: Baroudi Bloor International - research firm)
• 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster (Source: National Archives & Records Administration)
• 34% of companies fail to test their backups, and of those that do, 77% have found backup failures (Source: Home Office Computing Magazine)
Pretty scary stuff! Clearly taking care of your information is paramount to any business and is sensible from a home user’s perspective too.
So what is data backup and what are the options these days?
Data backup is the act of ensuring your important information (which could be customer contact details for a business or cherished photos for a home user) isn’t only stored in a single place, which leaves it vulnerable to being lost through damage or theft. Since a backup system contains at least one copy of all important data, the risk of total data loss is minimised. And any data loss does not result in a total standstill of the business or heartache for the home user. Using the backup data, the system can be restored and normal service resumed.
Finding the right data backup solution can be confusing. It depends on what to backup, how to backup and what type of computer or network is being used. It might sometimes seem difficult to choose the right backup solution. Not because they are difficult to find, but because there are so many of them.
For small quantities of data you can consider simply copying it to a CD or a memory stick; both are cheap and easy to use. The main problems with these are that they are limited in what you can store and more importantly you have to physically remember to make the copy and then file it appropriately.
For larger quantities it is recommended that a local backup is made to another system such as a Server or an external hard drive. This protects you from the most common data loss issue - hardware failure. Your entire system is stored on an hourly, daily or weekly basis to a permanently connected independent disk, ready to be restored at any time. Depending on how sophisticated the solution is, you may be able to quickly search for and retrieve individual files that have been accidentally deleted… Data Backup isn’t just for total system failures!
To guard against major disasters such as flood or fire, where your entire office or computer room is destroyed, off-site storage is required. There are two ways in which you can do this. You can sign up to a service that automatically creates a backup of your critical files over the internet to a secure off-site location. Alternatively, or in addition, you can take a manual backup which stores a password protected image of your entire system onto portable disk drives that are taken off site on a rotational basis. The main advantage of this is that a complete system can be more rapidly restored than from a backup of only files and folders.
Choosing a backup system, setting it up and then managing it can be a complicated undertaking. Luckily there are companies, including The PC Support Group, who offer data backup and recovery services to both businesses and home computer users to take all these headaches away. If you decide to use on of these then you need not worry about the technicalities, process or intricacies of the data backup procedure.
One thing is certain, if you don’t arrange to have a data backup, it is not a case of if you lose your data but when, and the consequences will be at least upsetting or in the case of a business, could be catastrophic. Don’t delay, act now!
Resource Box: For further information on data backup and recovery solutions, or for any other computer support related matter, contact The PC Support Group via our web site www.pcsupportgroup.com or call us on 0845 2233116.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Canon Pixma IP 2600 – Review
There are various models and brands of printers that are available in the market but Canon Pixma IP 2600 is a new innovation in itself. If you compare Canon Pixma with older models of printer you will find the difference.
This latest model of printer has slim and stylish body with sleek exterior of 5.6×17.4×10 inches. It is more convenient and finished than ever. It does not take more space and can be mixed with IPod and desktop accessories. If you are looking for budget printer then Canon PIxma is the best choice for you. The control panel of the printer is just limited to power button an power button. The power input and USB port are located on the back side of printer. You can also print your pics through digital camera.
The printer cartridge is available in three colors and with standard black cartridge PG37. These cartridges are low consumption cartridges. The black cartridge consists of 11 ml of ink and color cartridge contains 9 ml consisting of 3ml of each color including cyan, magenta and yellow however you can buy cartridges of high consumptions that are little expensive than these cartridges. You can print large quantity of papers and your daily cost of print decreases.
In speed test, the Canon Pixma has outperformed and it just prints like flash and gives outstanding results. It approximately print 6 pages per minute with black print that is equitant with expensive printers like HP Deskjet D4260 and Lexmark Z845. It has successfully passed all quality tests and never created blur even in the low amount of ink in it.
The photos printed in the format of 4×6 are impressive and reviewers have admired this printing. This budget printer is just launched in the market and received good comments from consumers. You can buy this printer in the price of £50.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
This latest model of printer has slim and stylish body with sleek exterior of 5.6×17.4×10 inches. It is more convenient and finished than ever. It does not take more space and can be mixed with IPod and desktop accessories. If you are looking for budget printer then Canon PIxma is the best choice for you. The control panel of the printer is just limited to power button an power button. The power input and USB port are located on the back side of printer. You can also print your pics through digital camera.
The printer cartridge is available in three colors and with standard black cartridge PG37. These cartridges are low consumption cartridges. The black cartridge consists of 11 ml of ink and color cartridge contains 9 ml consisting of 3ml of each color including cyan, magenta and yellow however you can buy cartridges of high consumptions that are little expensive than these cartridges. You can print large quantity of papers and your daily cost of print decreases.
In speed test, the Canon Pixma has outperformed and it just prints like flash and gives outstanding results. It approximately print 6 pages per minute with black print that is equitant with expensive printers like HP Deskjet D4260 and Lexmark Z845. It has successfully passed all quality tests and never created blur even in the low amount of ink in it.
The photos printed in the format of 4×6 are impressive and reviewers have admired this printing. This budget printer is just launched in the market and received good comments from consumers. You can buy this printer in the price of £50.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
Windows Has Detected Spyware? Get Rid of Spyware Now
Sometimes when you looking for spyware removal software and anti-virus program, you suddenly face a pop up windows that ask to click for instant scan your pc so never do it because it can infect your system instead of removal an existing one.
Spyware can cause serious problems to your system and you can damage all of your data at once if you don’t get this spyware fixed. It not only endangers your pc performance but can be harmful for the theft of your personal identity. Your personal information can be misused and you can suffer with huge loss.
If you detect any spyware in your pc then you have to find a way to get rid of this before it incurs more damage to your system. You have to first find out ways that have infected your system so that you can block those doors that can make you safe in future.
Process Killer software:
Whenever you detect any of the virus or spyware in your system then first of all you should use a process killer that can disinfect your system and point out those areas that are highly infected and need immediate action. Once you indentify those areas, you can simply remove those spyware with the help of spyware removal or anti-virus.
The process killer do the major responsibility and de-stabiles or de-activate spyware then you can remove it easily.
Kasper Sky:
You can use this software that is highly effective in removal of spyware and virus through your computer. You can simply remove all viruses by using this software and it can also protect your computer in future. This is the way you can get rid of spyware and viruses.
The process killer is freely available online to various websites and you can simply download it to scan your system root and partitions.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
Spyware can cause serious problems to your system and you can damage all of your data at once if you don’t get this spyware fixed. It not only endangers your pc performance but can be harmful for the theft of your personal identity. Your personal information can be misused and you can suffer with huge loss.
If you detect any spyware in your pc then you have to find a way to get rid of this before it incurs more damage to your system. You have to first find out ways that have infected your system so that you can block those doors that can make you safe in future.
Process Killer software:
Whenever you detect any of the virus or spyware in your system then first of all you should use a process killer that can disinfect your system and point out those areas that are highly infected and need immediate action. Once you indentify those areas, you can simply remove those spyware with the help of spyware removal or anti-virus.
The process killer do the major responsibility and de-stabiles or de-activate spyware then you can remove it easily.
Kasper Sky:
You can use this software that is highly effective in removal of spyware and virus through your computer. You can simply remove all viruses by using this software and it can also protect your computer in future. This is the way you can get rid of spyware and viruses.
The process killer is freely available online to various websites and you can simply download it to scan your system root and partitions.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive to Boot Your System
A bootable flash drive is a memory device that anyone can make that facilitates users to boot their windows on any computer by just plugging your flash disk into the computer USB port.
The bootable device is primarily used for two purposes:
• To boot up your computer or windows in case of any troubleshooting.
• Sharing applications and windows programs on different physical locations like from office to your home.
First of all you need to make changes in your system BIOS so that it allows you to configure your flash device to run as boot device. When you enter your flash drive into computer port then it pops up into BIOS items on the setup screen. Then you can select your USB as first boot device in the option of boot sequence. While in some cases, you need to press F10 button to select your flash memory device for boot setup.
However you will also need software that will allow you to make changes into Windows to run on flash memory device. There are many software but I have used PE Builder that is easy to install and configurable. You can download this software from any website and install it on the same directory where you have installed your windows. You have to make a folder on the root directory such as C: PEBUILDER3110a that is called as SRSP1 to download windows Server 2003 from this software.
You will only need two files Setupldr.bin and ramdisk.sys. Don’t disturb any other file because it may corrupt your existing windows.
When you get these two files on your system then you can run PR Builder software and press shift button so that it don’t get auto-start on launching of CD. Start PE Builder manually. When the Source field on the main PE Builder screen, enter the letter of the drive in which you put the CD. Check to see that the Output box contains BartPE and that the “None” option is selected in the Media Output panel. Once you have this entire squared away, click Build. You can watch the progress of the compression.
When it’s complete you’re prepared to format and copy the Windows XP Professional bootable image to the UFD with the BartPE USB Installer. Open a Command Prompt window and use the CD command to switch to the pebuilder3110a folder. Next, insert the UFD into a USB port; note the drive letter to which it is assigned, as you’ll need to enter it into your next command prompt that you type.
Suppose that that you have assigned the drive H: you need to type this command pe2usb –f h:
When the process is complete then you can exit the program and can use flash drive as bootable drive.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
The bootable device is primarily used for two purposes:
• To boot up your computer or windows in case of any troubleshooting.
• Sharing applications and windows programs on different physical locations like from office to your home.
First of all you need to make changes in your system BIOS so that it allows you to configure your flash device to run as boot device. When you enter your flash drive into computer port then it pops up into BIOS items on the setup screen. Then you can select your USB as first boot device in the option of boot sequence. While in some cases, you need to press F10 button to select your flash memory device for boot setup.
However you will also need software that will allow you to make changes into Windows to run on flash memory device. There are many software but I have used PE Builder that is easy to install and configurable. You can download this software from any website and install it on the same directory where you have installed your windows. You have to make a folder on the root directory such as C: PEBUILDER3110a that is called as SRSP1 to download windows Server 2003 from this software.
You will only need two files Setupldr.bin and ramdisk.sys. Don’t disturb any other file because it may corrupt your existing windows.
When you get these two files on your system then you can run PR Builder software and press shift button so that it don’t get auto-start on launching of CD. Start PE Builder manually. When the Source field on the main PE Builder screen, enter the letter of the drive in which you put the CD. Check to see that the Output box contains BartPE and that the “None” option is selected in the Media Output panel. Once you have this entire squared away, click Build. You can watch the progress of the compression.
When it’s complete you’re prepared to format and copy the Windows XP Professional bootable image to the UFD with the BartPE USB Installer. Open a Command Prompt window and use the CD command to switch to the pebuilder3110a folder. Next, insert the UFD into a USB port; note the drive letter to which it is assigned, as you’ll need to enter it into your next command prompt that you type.
Suppose that that you have assigned the drive H: you need to type this command pe2usb –f h:
When the process is complete then you can exit the program and can use flash drive as bootable drive.
Resource Box: Nouman Umar
Saturday, October 11, 2008
How to Make a Success of Your Software Project?
Outsourcing in the Virtual World
With outsourcing becoming the most preferred business strategy in recent times, several small and big businesses have reaped huge benefits in terms of costs, quality and speed. The outsourcers make a bee-line for cheaper countries like India which have abundant English speaking skilled programmers and other professionals and the quality of services delivered is comparable with the best in the world. Plus it is available at minimal prices.
Thanks to the World Wide Web, we now have the cyber marketplaces for outsourcing in the virtual world. These are basically web portals which act as a dedicated point of contact between the outsourcers/ buyers and service providers/freelancers to strike a deal. They enable the service buyers to find the kind of professionals they need and the freelancers to find buyers for their services. All kinds of services are traded here ranging from copy writing and a simple logo design to hardcore programming like C/C++, Java, .NET and software development!
Projects
The buyers or the project managers as they are often called, convey their need for outsourcing by posting their projects on a web portal. Qualified freelancers come and bid their prices for those services. The project manager then chooses the best bid and closes his project. The chosen freelancer and the buyer are then put in contact with each other by the web portal.
Every project posted attracts several bids, leaving the project manager spoilt for choices as well as a little confused over who to choose. But it is not as easy as it sounds. Not all projects are carried out to their successful completion for various reasons, a few get mired in disputes, sometimes the bidding period expires and the project gets frozen without the project being awarded to any freelancer. How to avoid such situations? And how to make a success of your project? These are some of the issues we shall try to deal with in the following lines.
What goes into the making of a successful project?
A project can be certified as successful only when the project manager is satisfied and happy with the end-result! Success of a project is established in six consecutive steps:
1) You have a clear and realistic set of expectations from posting the project
2) You prepare your text for posting accordingly and post the project
3) The project attracts the kind of freelancers it needs
4) The most deserving freelancer wins the project
5) The project is completed under the supervision of the project manager in time.
6) The end-result is a quality product.
How to post a Project?
Before a project manager posts a project, he must analyze his own requirements carefully. Posting a project should not be viewed as an end in itself. It is rather a means to achieve the end of-- being able to select the freelancer you need. Understand the whole process of your project thoroughly and finally settle on a realistic set of expectations. Only then go ahead with the posting.
A posting is good and effective when it serves its purpose of attracting your targeted freelancers and has enough details for the freelancers to make an informed bid on the whole project. So, you’ve got some work to do here! After all, your posting is going to speak on your behalf. It must communicate clearly and effectively. So, the content should be lucid, to the point and easy to read and understand. Typically a good and effective posting covers the following areas:
· Your introduction (Usually, this portion is skipped by most managers. Or, this could be short and terse. A project manager can choose as per his/her individual approach and preferences.)
· Job type (Here, you mention the basic skill-set needed to carry out the job. e.g. C/C++, SQL, Graphic design etc.)
· Necessary job specifications (You give details about the job
aspects. e.g. “we need you to handle x, develop y and create z as a part of the project.” The purpose is to give the bidders a clear idea about all the work involved in the project so that they make an informed bid.)
· What are your time constraints? (Your can mention your expected time for project completion. Try to keep a reasonable time-frame since that would translate into a better quality for you.)
· What is your estimated budget? (Here, you quote a tentative price you are ready to pay for the said services which should ideally take in to account the skill set and expertise you are asking for, as well as the time and labor needed. You can specify the exact price or mention a range. Sometimes, the project managers mention ridiculously low prices or entirely skip any mention, in anticipation that this would lead to great cost savings but that could also translate in to a shoddy service as well. So, one should not hesitate to pay the deserved price. Outsourcing as well as competitive bidding is already lowering your costs a great deal.)
· Project’s open time (This is the time-span of the active project i.e. from the time your project is posted till the time it expires. This time is given to the project to accumulate enough number of qualifying bids.)
· Do mention your terms and conditions, confidentiality agreements or special requests, if any.
TIP--It’s not a great idea to circumvent business ethics and deliberately make a hazy posting that doesn’t give the bidders a fair idea about what they are signing up for! Eventually, you might need the services of the same freelancers again!
Remember, a comprehensive posting about the project would prevent repetitive questioning from the bidders, would save you from any disputes later on and also cast you in the light of a sincere business person. No wonder, good postings are always flooded with qualifying bids. I hope, you are ready to post a good project by yourself!
Sort out, correspond and confirm
After you’ve posted your project, you give some time for the project to accumulate sufficient number of qualifying bids. Meanwhile, you can go through each bidder’s profile, message, bidding details, pm’s and other files they have attached. Once you’ve sorted out the bids and have sufficient suitable candidates to choose from, you can begin to correspond with the good and promising bidders through the messaging system provided by your portal. You can keep on eliminating bidders from your list when they don’t meet your expectations. You can ask questions and demand sample work in order to confirm their credentials and gauge their suitability for your project. Subsequently, before the project period expires, you need to zero in on ‘the’ one! Once you finalize the winning bidder, the project is deemed closed.
(Several portals charge exorbitant amounts from both buyers as well as service providers. Some even charge for signing you up. www.e-guru.in is the one portal that is secure and reliable, and doesn’t charge the buyer anything for posting a project. Besides it offers a host of other benefits and features for the buyers, like its secure escrow payment system which acts as a safety net for the buyers.)
Project Implementation
Now comes the time to get some work done! Since, you would be given contact details of the contracted freelancer; you can convey your needs in greater detail and co-ordinate with him/her on how to go about the project. You can communicate via a variety of means like e-mails, IM, WebEx, Net meeting etc. Now the ball is in your court. You need to be pro-active at all the project stages, in monitoring and guiding your service provider as per your requirements. I am sure that henceforth, your project would take up your desired shape with the expert help of the professional you chose.
Conclusion
Belief in business ethics, professionalism and mutually beneficial business practices go a long way in determining your long-term success as a business person. With this note, I urge you to make the most of the opportunities that are there because of the internet. You now have the tools and the insight to make your projects an astounding success. Happy Posting!!
By Jason T
With outsourcing becoming the most preferred business strategy in recent times, several small and big businesses have reaped huge benefits in terms of costs, quality and speed. The outsourcers make a bee-line for cheaper countries like India which have abundant English speaking skilled programmers and other professionals and the quality of services delivered is comparable with the best in the world. Plus it is available at minimal prices.
Thanks to the World Wide Web, we now have the cyber marketplaces for outsourcing in the virtual world. These are basically web portals which act as a dedicated point of contact between the outsourcers/ buyers and service providers/freelancers to strike a deal. They enable the service buyers to find the kind of professionals they need and the freelancers to find buyers for their services. All kinds of services are traded here ranging from copy writing and a simple logo design to hardcore programming like C/C++, Java, .NET and software development!
Projects
The buyers or the project managers as they are often called, convey their need for outsourcing by posting their projects on a web portal. Qualified freelancers come and bid their prices for those services. The project manager then chooses the best bid and closes his project. The chosen freelancer and the buyer are then put in contact with each other by the web portal.
Every project posted attracts several bids, leaving the project manager spoilt for choices as well as a little confused over who to choose. But it is not as easy as it sounds. Not all projects are carried out to their successful completion for various reasons, a few get mired in disputes, sometimes the bidding period expires and the project gets frozen without the project being awarded to any freelancer. How to avoid such situations? And how to make a success of your project? These are some of the issues we shall try to deal with in the following lines.
What goes into the making of a successful project?
A project can be certified as successful only when the project manager is satisfied and happy with the end-result! Success of a project is established in six consecutive steps:
1) You have a clear and realistic set of expectations from posting the project
2) You prepare your text for posting accordingly and post the project
3) The project attracts the kind of freelancers it needs
4) The most deserving freelancer wins the project
5) The project is completed under the supervision of the project manager in time.
6) The end-result is a quality product.
How to post a Project?
Before a project manager posts a project, he must analyze his own requirements carefully. Posting a project should not be viewed as an end in itself. It is rather a means to achieve the end of-- being able to select the freelancer you need. Understand the whole process of your project thoroughly and finally settle on a realistic set of expectations. Only then go ahead with the posting.
A posting is good and effective when it serves its purpose of attracting your targeted freelancers and has enough details for the freelancers to make an informed bid on the whole project. So, you’ve got some work to do here! After all, your posting is going to speak on your behalf. It must communicate clearly and effectively. So, the content should be lucid, to the point and easy to read and understand. Typically a good and effective posting covers the following areas:
· Your introduction (Usually, this portion is skipped by most managers. Or, this could be short and terse. A project manager can choose as per his/her individual approach and preferences.)
· Job type (Here, you mention the basic skill-set needed to carry out the job. e.g. C/C++, SQL, Graphic design etc.)
· Necessary job specifications (You give details about the job
aspects. e.g. “we need you to handle x, develop y and create z as a part of the project.” The purpose is to give the bidders a clear idea about all the work involved in the project so that they make an informed bid.)
· What are your time constraints? (Your can mention your expected time for project completion. Try to keep a reasonable time-frame since that would translate into a better quality for you.)
· What is your estimated budget? (Here, you quote a tentative price you are ready to pay for the said services which should ideally take in to account the skill set and expertise you are asking for, as well as the time and labor needed. You can specify the exact price or mention a range. Sometimes, the project managers mention ridiculously low prices or entirely skip any mention, in anticipation that this would lead to great cost savings but that could also translate in to a shoddy service as well. So, one should not hesitate to pay the deserved price. Outsourcing as well as competitive bidding is already lowering your costs a great deal.)
· Project’s open time (This is the time-span of the active project i.e. from the time your project is posted till the time it expires. This time is given to the project to accumulate enough number of qualifying bids.)
· Do mention your terms and conditions, confidentiality agreements or special requests, if any.
TIP--It’s not a great idea to circumvent business ethics and deliberately make a hazy posting that doesn’t give the bidders a fair idea about what they are signing up for! Eventually, you might need the services of the same freelancers again!
Remember, a comprehensive posting about the project would prevent repetitive questioning from the bidders, would save you from any disputes later on and also cast you in the light of a sincere business person. No wonder, good postings are always flooded with qualifying bids. I hope, you are ready to post a good project by yourself!
Sort out, correspond and confirm
After you’ve posted your project, you give some time for the project to accumulate sufficient number of qualifying bids. Meanwhile, you can go through each bidder’s profile, message, bidding details, pm’s and other files they have attached. Once you’ve sorted out the bids and have sufficient suitable candidates to choose from, you can begin to correspond with the good and promising bidders through the messaging system provided by your portal. You can keep on eliminating bidders from your list when they don’t meet your expectations. You can ask questions and demand sample work in order to confirm their credentials and gauge their suitability for your project. Subsequently, before the project period expires, you need to zero in on ‘the’ one! Once you finalize the winning bidder, the project is deemed closed.
(Several portals charge exorbitant amounts from both buyers as well as service providers. Some even charge for signing you up. www.e-guru.in is the one portal that is secure and reliable, and doesn’t charge the buyer anything for posting a project. Besides it offers a host of other benefits and features for the buyers, like its secure escrow payment system which acts as a safety net for the buyers.)
Project Implementation
Now comes the time to get some work done! Since, you would be given contact details of the contracted freelancer; you can convey your needs in greater detail and co-ordinate with him/her on how to go about the project. You can communicate via a variety of means like e-mails, IM, WebEx, Net meeting etc. Now the ball is in your court. You need to be pro-active at all the project stages, in monitoring and guiding your service provider as per your requirements. I am sure that henceforth, your project would take up your desired shape with the expert help of the professional you chose.
Conclusion
Belief in business ethics, professionalism and mutually beneficial business practices go a long way in determining your long-term success as a business person. With this note, I urge you to make the most of the opportunities that are there because of the internet. You now have the tools and the insight to make your projects an astounding success. Happy Posting!!
By Jason T
Increase Server Uptime With Automatic Defrag
In today’s computing environment, uptime is a critical factor. This is because information technology has slowly crept up from the supporting position it had years back—suddenly we look up and IT is not merely enhancing business operations, it in itself has become business operations. When a customer is placing an order, it is directly or nearly directly with a computer. When a shipment is received by a customer, the receiving signature is scanned and receipt is immediately confirmed through a computer. Messaging, quotes, accounting, inventory—they’re all done straight through automated systems that cannot afford downtime.
Now that so many servers are “front and center” and must run 24X7, time to perform tasks such as anti-virus, backups and defrag has become incredibly scarce. So scarce, in fact, that some sites put off defrag until performance is absolutely intolerable and the only choice is to bring a system down and run a manual or scheduled defragmentation.
Disk fragmentation occurs when a file is broken up into pieces to fit on the disk. Because files are constantly being written, deleted and resized, fragmentation is a natural occurrence. When a file is spread out over several locations, it takes longer to read and write. But the effects of fragmentation are far more widespread: Slow performance, long boot-times, random crashes and freeze-ups — even a complete inability to boot up at all. Many users blame these problems on the operating systems, when disk fragmentation is often the real culprit.
In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this
by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.
Jim Bernal, Senior Network Engineer with Howe Barnes Hoefer & Arnett in Chicago, Illinois, found out just how bad it can get. “We constantly had servers running slowly and getting really fragmented from constant file access and over time file access would almost halt or take minutes to access a file,” Bernal said. “We also had problems with users logging in with domain controllers sometimes rejecting users because of timeouts in communicating with our DNS servers.”
Like many sites today, Bernal’s company was running the whole gamut of services and applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, fileservers, domain controllers, print servers, Terminal Services, Live Communications servers, accounting software, SharePoint and Virtual Services servers for virtualization.
But also like many sites, Bernal’s fortunately discovered Disk Defragmentation. Only a high quality disk defragmenter utilizes only otherwise-idle system resources, so defrag takes place whenever and wherever possible. There is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation, and no scheduling is ever required. Performance is always maximized, so systems can remain up and running.
Today, taking your systems down is the same as taking part of your business down. Therefore it is always well said that its better to take care of your servers & systems before the problem becomes incurable. So go ahead & download your copy of a free Disk Defragmentation Software.
By C Toumayan
Now that so many servers are “front and center” and must run 24X7, time to perform tasks such as anti-virus, backups and defrag has become incredibly scarce. So scarce, in fact, that some sites put off defrag until performance is absolutely intolerable and the only choice is to bring a system down and run a manual or scheduled defragmentation.
Disk fragmentation occurs when a file is broken up into pieces to fit on the disk. Because files are constantly being written, deleted and resized, fragmentation is a natural occurrence. When a file is spread out over several locations, it takes longer to read and write. But the effects of fragmentation are far more widespread: Slow performance, long boot-times, random crashes and freeze-ups — even a complete inability to boot up at all. Many users blame these problems on the operating systems, when disk fragmentation is often the real culprit.
In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this
by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.
Jim Bernal, Senior Network Engineer with Howe Barnes Hoefer & Arnett in Chicago, Illinois, found out just how bad it can get. “We constantly had servers running slowly and getting really fragmented from constant file access and over time file access would almost halt or take minutes to access a file,” Bernal said. “We also had problems with users logging in with domain controllers sometimes rejecting users because of timeouts in communicating with our DNS servers.”
Like many sites today, Bernal’s company was running the whole gamut of services and applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, fileservers, domain controllers, print servers, Terminal Services, Live Communications servers, accounting software, SharePoint and Virtual Services servers for virtualization.
But also like many sites, Bernal’s fortunately discovered Disk Defragmentation. Only a high quality disk defragmenter utilizes only otherwise-idle system resources, so defrag takes place whenever and wherever possible. There is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation, and no scheduling is ever required. Performance is always maximized, so systems can remain up and running.
Today, taking your systems down is the same as taking part of your business down. Therefore it is always well said that its better to take care of your servers & systems before the problem becomes incurable. So go ahead & download your copy of a free Disk Defragmentation Software.
By C Toumayan
Online Articles Google Custom Search How to Choose Your USB Memory Stick Supplier
There are currently many suppliers of Branded and Promotional USB Memory Sticks. This makes it a fiercely competitive market, which bodes well for the consumer as this naturally leads to lower prices. However, this also puts a lot of pressure on suppliers to reduce their costs. Some suppliers take this too far so it is important to consider factors other than price when choosing your USB Memory Stick supplier, four important considerations to take into account are:
1. Speed of Service
2. Quality of USB Memory Sticks
3. Financial Stability of Company Supplying Flash Drives
4. Reputation.
Speed of service will largely depend on the company's business model. Many companies claim to have fast turnaround times, but when asked to supply large amounts of branded USB Memory Sticks they fall short on initial promises and the turnaround times go up 2 or 3 times. Other companies who have more control over their supply chain will live up to their promises and these are naturally the companies you'll want to choose.
Quality control is crucial for products that will end up representing your company. It is important to find a supplier that understands this and won't cut corners or send you defunct goods. For instance, some USB Flash Drive suppliers cut costs by using refurbished NAND flash memory. This is generally less reliable than brand new NAND Flash. It may save you money, but do you want the product you've given to a client failing? This is not going leave your company in a good light, and once they've thrown the USB Stick away they're no longer carrying your companies name around with them.
As with any company you're going to enter into a financial relationship with it's always prudent to run a credit check to make sure it's not going to go under in the next month or so, if it does you're unlikely to get your money back. As mentioned earlier, this is a very competitive industry and insolvency is not that uncommon, if your supplier goes bankrupt you wont only lose the money you paid them you'll also miss your deadline.Reputation speaks volumes, if a company has delivered similar sized orders of USB Memory Sticks in the time frame you want many times before, they can probably do it again.
About the Author
Chris Proth is an expert in promotional technology abd for promotional Branded Memory Sticks Chris Proth recommends www.USBMemorySticks.co.uk.
1. Speed of Service
2. Quality of USB Memory Sticks
3. Financial Stability of Company Supplying Flash Drives
4. Reputation.
Speed of service will largely depend on the company's business model. Many companies claim to have fast turnaround times, but when asked to supply large amounts of branded USB Memory Sticks they fall short on initial promises and the turnaround times go up 2 or 3 times. Other companies who have more control over their supply chain will live up to their promises and these are naturally the companies you'll want to choose.
Quality control is crucial for products that will end up representing your company. It is important to find a supplier that understands this and won't cut corners or send you defunct goods. For instance, some USB Flash Drive suppliers cut costs by using refurbished NAND flash memory. This is generally less reliable than brand new NAND Flash. It may save you money, but do you want the product you've given to a client failing? This is not going leave your company in a good light, and once they've thrown the USB Stick away they're no longer carrying your companies name around with them.
As with any company you're going to enter into a financial relationship with it's always prudent to run a credit check to make sure it's not going to go under in the next month or so, if it does you're unlikely to get your money back. As mentioned earlier, this is a very competitive industry and insolvency is not that uncommon, if your supplier goes bankrupt you wont only lose the money you paid them you'll also miss your deadline.Reputation speaks volumes, if a company has delivered similar sized orders of USB Memory Sticks in the time frame you want many times before, they can probably do it again.
About the Author
Chris Proth is an expert in promotional technology abd for promotional Branded Memory Sticks Chris Proth recommends www.USBMemorySticks.co.uk.
DDR memory
Double data rate random access memory, or DDR RAM, is a memory technology used for storage and high-speed retrieval of data on a computer. It builds on the now-obsolete Single Data Rate (SDR) synchronous dynamic random access memory, and enables the computer to achieve greater bandwidth by double-pumping data. That is, the transfer of information is doubly fast with a DDR RAM.
The more recent versions of DDR RAM are DDR2 and DDR3, which have faster memory bus signalling capabilities and clock frequencies. DDR2 operates at a clock frequency of over 400 MHz. The central powerhouse of your system operates faster and more efficiently on such improved memory circuitry, retrieving information faster and enabling you to run multiple applications.
It must be remembered that if you want to upgrade the memory of a computer that uses DDR1, you cannot buy a DDR2 module and use it to supplement a DDR1 chipset. The slots for DDR1, 2 and 3 are different. Some motherboards, however, have slots for all these DDR formats. The booklet on the motherboard should tell you how to install additional RAM on your computer. Sixty-four bit processors often support more than 3.5 GB of DDR RAM. A 64-bit Windows Vista system, for example, will support memory of up to 128GB.
A DDR RAM operates at a lower voltage than an SDR RAM, resulting in lower power consumption. Though it has the same architecture as an SDR RAM, a DDR RAM has 184 pins, instead of 168. It also has a single notch at the connector, not two. The bus width of DDR memory is 64 bits per channel. Most DDR-based chipsets come with matched pairs of modules and are made for processors that are 1GHz or faster.
What a DDR RAM does is, it performs twice as many operations as an SDR RAM per clock cycle. The advent of DDR RAM was hailed as a landmark development that revolutionised the technology of random access, or volatile memory, but recent developments that have resulted in revision of DDR models have been just as interesting. At the beginning of the millennium, aspersions were cast on the use of DDR memory in home PCs, but now, all those doubts are gone and one can hardly live without the reassuring pace and efficiency of a DDR RAM. A big difference in systemic performance, coupled with improved BIOS efficiency, is an undoubted result of the quantum leap from SDR to DDR.
by oempcworld
Our address is
OEMPCworld.com
2800 Bowers Ave
Santa Clara CA 95051
Tel: (408) 350-0341
TF: 1 866 839-5875
Fax:(408) 521-1888
www.oempcworld.com
The more recent versions of DDR RAM are DDR2 and DDR3, which have faster memory bus signalling capabilities and clock frequencies. DDR2 operates at a clock frequency of over 400 MHz. The central powerhouse of your system operates faster and more efficiently on such improved memory circuitry, retrieving information faster and enabling you to run multiple applications.
It must be remembered that if you want to upgrade the memory of a computer that uses DDR1, you cannot buy a DDR2 module and use it to supplement a DDR1 chipset. The slots for DDR1, 2 and 3 are different. Some motherboards, however, have slots for all these DDR formats. The booklet on the motherboard should tell you how to install additional RAM on your computer. Sixty-four bit processors often support more than 3.5 GB of DDR RAM. A 64-bit Windows Vista system, for example, will support memory of up to 128GB.
A DDR RAM operates at a lower voltage than an SDR RAM, resulting in lower power consumption. Though it has the same architecture as an SDR RAM, a DDR RAM has 184 pins, instead of 168. It also has a single notch at the connector, not two. The bus width of DDR memory is 64 bits per channel. Most DDR-based chipsets come with matched pairs of modules and are made for processors that are 1GHz or faster.
What a DDR RAM does is, it performs twice as many operations as an SDR RAM per clock cycle. The advent of DDR RAM was hailed as a landmark development that revolutionised the technology of random access, or volatile memory, but recent developments that have resulted in revision of DDR models have been just as interesting. At the beginning of the millennium, aspersions were cast on the use of DDR memory in home PCs, but now, all those doubts are gone and one can hardly live without the reassuring pace and efficiency of a DDR RAM. A big difference in systemic performance, coupled with improved BIOS efficiency, is an undoubted result of the quantum leap from SDR to DDR.
by oempcworld
Our address is
OEMPCworld.com
2800 Bowers Ave
Santa Clara CA 95051
Tel: (408) 350-0341
TF: 1 866 839-5875
Fax:(408) 521-1888
www.oempcworld.com
Thursday, October 9, 2008
12 Top Threats to your Computer
The internet is undoubtedly a fantastic resource for families and offers a rich vein of educational content.
However, there are potential dangers - welcome to the seedy world of viruses, spam, trojans, pornography, spyware and other nasties.
Here are the Top Twelve Threats No Computer User Should Ignore:
1. Viruses - A computer program that copies itself. They often disrupt your computer system or damage your data.
Viruses are usually received by email attachments so be careful opening anything from a dubious source. They can affect anyone, for example, the destructive Mydoom worm affected one out of three small and mid-sized businesses.
2. Spyware - Sends information about you and your computer to somebody else. Spyware may send the addresses of sites you have visited or worse still, transmit personal
information. With today's concerns about identify theft this is a real worry. For example, CoolWebSearch may hijack web searches, home page, and other Internet Explorer
settings. Spyware is normally received as part of shareware or freeware downloaded from the web.
3. IP Spoofing - A technique to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the intruder sends messages to a computer with an address indicating that the message is
coming from a trusted host.
4. Trojans - An apparently legitimate computer program that is really intended to disrupt and damage computer activity by sending information, perhaps even passwords onto a third party without you knowing. As an example, recent emails entitled "Osama Bin Laden Captured" attempted to download the "Trj/Small.B." Trojan if the embedded URL
was clicked. This trojan attempts to hijack the PC.
5. Spam - Unsolicited mail often promoting products of a dubious financial or sexual nature. Don't leave your email address on websites and internet bulletin boards as they
are harvested by spammers.
6. Adware - puts advertisements on your screen. These take many forms including popups, popunders and advertisements that appear later, even if your browser is closed. Some are
sent using the Windows Messenger service which allows a spammer to direct an advertisement straight to your computer by sequentially sending messages to IP addresses.
Always irritating, they are also often of a pornographic nature.
7. Diallers - for those of us still with dial up modems, dialler programs redirect calls to a very expensive number. You won't know until you get the bill.
8. Hijackers - Hijackers take control of your web browser and may reset your home page, search bar and search pages. They can redirect you to undesirable sites or stop you
going to particular sites.
9. Hackers - With so much personal data available online to anyone with a password you must be sure your password is secure. If you are using your mother's maiden name, your
cat's name or your birthday then your password is at risk. Here are two tips for making a secure password. Method One - pick two random unrelated three letter words and two
digits. Mix them up and what do you have? A secure password such as "red19cat" or "hotpin73". Method Two - pick a short sequence of words such as Now Is The Winter Of Our
Discontent Made Glorious' and you have a password of "nitwoodmg". You could even change the I's and O's to digits.
10. Phishing - Emails purporting to come from reliable sources such as Paypal, Ebay or your bank. Often wanting you to verify your account details, they can look very realistic but are generally scams to harvest usernames and passwords. Always open a new browser winder and type the address there, rather than clicking on the link provided.
11. Hoaxes - Chain letters, scams, false alarms. At best they take up time and bandwidth but at worst vulnerable can be victims of fraud. Pass it on!
12. Stranger-danger - For those of us with children - do you know what they actually do when they are online? Are they working on homework tasks, downloading illegal music or pornography? Or are they chatting to strangers in chat rooms? You should consider blocking access to undesirable sites and logging their activity with a surveillance tool.
Oh, and don't forget that where children are concerned, computers should always be kept in a family room and never in their bedroom.
Three Step Action Plan
There are three essential steps that should be taken to ensure your PC is kept threat-free.
Firstly, be sensible when opening attachments or following email instructions from apparently reputable sites.
Secondly, make sure you are using the latest service pack of Windows as Microsoft is continually closing loopholes to tighten up security.
Finally, there's a range of low cost tools such as firewalls, antivirus, spam blockers and spyware killers available. Like everything else they vary in quality and you tend to get what you pay for so always do your research first and perhaps try a free trial before getting your credit card out.
http://www.surfcontrols.com specializes in providing reviews and recommendations of top-rated tools to help protect your online experience. There's a quick reference list to dozens of top sites promoting different aspects of safe surfing packed with useful information and there's
also a great set of top tips for safe surfing.
Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to computers, software, viruses and data recovery, do please browse for more information at our websites. www.infozabout.com www.data-recovery.infozabout.com
However, there are potential dangers - welcome to the seedy world of viruses, spam, trojans, pornography, spyware and other nasties.
Here are the Top Twelve Threats No Computer User Should Ignore:
1. Viruses - A computer program that copies itself. They often disrupt your computer system or damage your data.
Viruses are usually received by email attachments so be careful opening anything from a dubious source. They can affect anyone, for example, the destructive Mydoom worm affected one out of three small and mid-sized businesses.
2. Spyware - Sends information about you and your computer to somebody else. Spyware may send the addresses of sites you have visited or worse still, transmit personal
information. With today's concerns about identify theft this is a real worry. For example, CoolWebSearch may hijack web searches, home page, and other Internet Explorer
settings. Spyware is normally received as part of shareware or freeware downloaded from the web.
3. IP Spoofing - A technique to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the intruder sends messages to a computer with an address indicating that the message is
coming from a trusted host.
4. Trojans - An apparently legitimate computer program that is really intended to disrupt and damage computer activity by sending information, perhaps even passwords onto a third party without you knowing. As an example, recent emails entitled "Osama Bin Laden Captured" attempted to download the "Trj/Small.B." Trojan if the embedded URL
was clicked. This trojan attempts to hijack the PC.
5. Spam - Unsolicited mail often promoting products of a dubious financial or sexual nature. Don't leave your email address on websites and internet bulletin boards as they
are harvested by spammers.
6. Adware - puts advertisements on your screen. These take many forms including popups, popunders and advertisements that appear later, even if your browser is closed. Some are
sent using the Windows Messenger service which allows a spammer to direct an advertisement straight to your computer by sequentially sending messages to IP addresses.
Always irritating, they are also often of a pornographic nature.
7. Diallers - for those of us still with dial up modems, dialler programs redirect calls to a very expensive number. You won't know until you get the bill.
8. Hijackers - Hijackers take control of your web browser and may reset your home page, search bar and search pages. They can redirect you to undesirable sites or stop you
going to particular sites.
9. Hackers - With so much personal data available online to anyone with a password you must be sure your password is secure. If you are using your mother's maiden name, your
cat's name or your birthday then your password is at risk. Here are two tips for making a secure password. Method One - pick two random unrelated three letter words and two
digits. Mix them up and what do you have? A secure password such as "red19cat" or "hotpin73". Method Two - pick a short sequence of words such as Now Is The Winter Of Our
Discontent Made Glorious' and you have a password of "nitwoodmg". You could even change the I's and O's to digits.
10. Phishing - Emails purporting to come from reliable sources such as Paypal, Ebay or your bank. Often wanting you to verify your account details, they can look very realistic but are generally scams to harvest usernames and passwords. Always open a new browser winder and type the address there, rather than clicking on the link provided.
11. Hoaxes - Chain letters, scams, false alarms. At best they take up time and bandwidth but at worst vulnerable can be victims of fraud. Pass it on!
12. Stranger-danger - For those of us with children - do you know what they actually do when they are online? Are they working on homework tasks, downloading illegal music or pornography? Or are they chatting to strangers in chat rooms? You should consider blocking access to undesirable sites and logging their activity with a surveillance tool.
Oh, and don't forget that where children are concerned, computers should always be kept in a family room and never in their bedroom.
Three Step Action Plan
There are three essential steps that should be taken to ensure your PC is kept threat-free.
Firstly, be sensible when opening attachments or following email instructions from apparently reputable sites.
Secondly, make sure you are using the latest service pack of Windows as Microsoft is continually closing loopholes to tighten up security.
Finally, there's a range of low cost tools such as firewalls, antivirus, spam blockers and spyware killers available. Like everything else they vary in quality and you tend to get what you pay for so always do your research first and perhaps try a free trial before getting your credit card out.
http://www.surfcontrols.com specializes in providing reviews and recommendations of top-rated tools to help protect your online experience. There's a quick reference list to dozens of top sites promoting different aspects of safe surfing packed with useful information and there's
also a great set of top tips for safe surfing.
Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to computers, software, viruses and data recovery, do please browse for more information at our websites. www.infozabout.com www.data-recovery.infozabout.com
Difference between Virus-Worms-Trojan Horses and SpyWare
The most of peoples make blunder when the topic of a computer virus arises is to refer to a worm or Trojan horse as a virus. While the words Trojan, worm and virus are often used interchangeably, they are not the same. Viruses, worms and Trojan Horses are all malicious programs that can cause damage to your computer, but there are differences among the three, and knowing those differences can help you to better protect your computer from their often damaging effects.
Computer virus
(1) Attaches itself to a program or file so it can spread from one computer to another, leaving infections as it travels. Much like human viruses
(2) Computer viruses can range in severity: Some viruses cause only mildly annoying effects while others can damage your hardware, software or files.
(3) Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program. It is important to note that a virus cannot be spread without a human action, (such as running an infected program) to keep it going.
(4) People continue the spread of a computer virus, mostly unknowingly, by sharing infecting files or sending e-mails with viruses as attachments in the e-mail.
Worm
(1) A worm is similar to a virus by its design, and is considered to be a sub-class of a virus. Worms spread from computer to computer, but unlike a virus, it has the capability to travel without any help from a person. A worm takes advantage of file or information transport features on your system, which allows it to travel unaided.
(2) The biggest danger with a worm is its capability to replicate itself on your system, so rather than your computer sending out a single worm, it could send out hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, creating a huge devastating effect. One example would be for a worm to send a copy of itself to everyone listed in your e-mail address book. Then, the worm replicates and sends itself out to everyone listed in each of the receiver's address book, and the manifest continues on down the line.
(3) Due to the copying nature of a worm and its capability to travel across networks the end result in most cases is that the worm consumes too much system memory (or network bandwidth), causing Web servers, network servers and individual computers to stop responding. In more recent worm attacks such as the much-talked-about Blaster Worm the worm has been designed to tunnel into your system and allow malicious users to control your computer remotely.
Trojan Horse
(1) Trojan Horse is full of as much trickery as the mythological Trojan Horse it was named after. The Trojan Horse, at first glance will appear to be useful software but will actually do damage once installed or run on your computer.
(2) Those on the receiving end of a Trojan Horse are usually tricked into opening them because they appear to be receiving legitimate software or files from a legitimate source. When a Trojan is activated on your computer, the results can vary. Some Trojans are designed to be more annoying than malicious (like changing your desktop, adding silly active desktop icons) or they can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system.
(3) Trojans are also known to create a backdoor on your computer that gives malicious users access to your system, possibly allowing confidential or personal information to be compromised. Unlike viruses and worms, Trojans do not reproduce by infecting other files nor do they self-replicate.
Spyware-Adware
(1) Spyware and Adware collect information about you without appropriate notice and consent.
(2) Spyware can get installed on your computer in a number of ways. One way is via a virus. Another way is for it to be secretly downloaded and installed with other software you've chosen to install. You and I both know how easy it is to skip reading all the documentation on a free program and just click "OK." That's often how they get you.
Spec-India is Software Development Company that offers Mobile Software Application Development, ASP.Net Application Development, HandHeld Computer System Development, Outsourcing Software Development and .Net Framework Application Development
Computer virus
(1) Attaches itself to a program or file so it can spread from one computer to another, leaving infections as it travels. Much like human viruses
(2) Computer viruses can range in severity: Some viruses cause only mildly annoying effects while others can damage your hardware, software or files.
(3) Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program. It is important to note that a virus cannot be spread without a human action, (such as running an infected program) to keep it going.
(4) People continue the spread of a computer virus, mostly unknowingly, by sharing infecting files or sending e-mails with viruses as attachments in the e-mail.
Worm
(1) A worm is similar to a virus by its design, and is considered to be a sub-class of a virus. Worms spread from computer to computer, but unlike a virus, it has the capability to travel without any help from a person. A worm takes advantage of file or information transport features on your system, which allows it to travel unaided.
(2) The biggest danger with a worm is its capability to replicate itself on your system, so rather than your computer sending out a single worm, it could send out hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, creating a huge devastating effect. One example would be for a worm to send a copy of itself to everyone listed in your e-mail address book. Then, the worm replicates and sends itself out to everyone listed in each of the receiver's address book, and the manifest continues on down the line.
(3) Due to the copying nature of a worm and its capability to travel across networks the end result in most cases is that the worm consumes too much system memory (or network bandwidth), causing Web servers, network servers and individual computers to stop responding. In more recent worm attacks such as the much-talked-about Blaster Worm the worm has been designed to tunnel into your system and allow malicious users to control your computer remotely.
Trojan Horse
(1) Trojan Horse is full of as much trickery as the mythological Trojan Horse it was named after. The Trojan Horse, at first glance will appear to be useful software but will actually do damage once installed or run on your computer.
(2) Those on the receiving end of a Trojan Horse are usually tricked into opening them because they appear to be receiving legitimate software or files from a legitimate source. When a Trojan is activated on your computer, the results can vary. Some Trojans are designed to be more annoying than malicious (like changing your desktop, adding silly active desktop icons) or they can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system.
(3) Trojans are also known to create a backdoor on your computer that gives malicious users access to your system, possibly allowing confidential or personal information to be compromised. Unlike viruses and worms, Trojans do not reproduce by infecting other files nor do they self-replicate.
Spyware-Adware
(1) Spyware and Adware collect information about you without appropriate notice and consent.
(2) Spyware can get installed on your computer in a number of ways. One way is via a virus. Another way is for it to be secretly downloaded and installed with other software you've chosen to install. You and I both know how easy it is to skip reading all the documentation on a free program and just click "OK." That's often how they get you.
Spec-India is Software Development Company that offers Mobile Software Application Development, ASP.Net Application Development, HandHeld Computer System Development, Outsourcing Software Development and .Net Framework Application Development
Breaking News Unleashes Malware Worldwide
Today’s world is a dangerous one, and many of us like to stay informed. It’s been said that nearly half of all individuals with internet access get their news online, and given that the majority of those with access use e-mail as well, it’s no wonder that so many find headlines delivered to their inbox a helpful idea. Unfortunately, however, having news headlines delivered to your inbox may actually harm your computer.
In early August, thousands of e-mail users began receiving deliveries to their inboxes with headlines like "CNN.com Daily Top 10", "CNN Alerts: Breaking News" and "MSNBC.com Breaking News" in their subject lines. Because of the overwhelming temptation to get the news conveniently via e-mail, many of those users chose to open those same e-mails, thus unleashing rogue programs that have damaged machines on a worldwide basis.
Why Shouldn’t I Click? I Trust These Sites
It’s unfortunate. Many people do trust respected names like CNN and MSNBC in the world of news. After all, they’re the corporate news giants many people have grown up hearing. Unfortunately, none of these e-mails were sent by these news giants. Instead, they were created to ensure malware might be downloaded to your machine, thus opening security holes for other programs to filter through.
One study suggested that 250 million of these CNN e-mails were sent in just one day. Another one said 2.5 million of these MSNBC e-mails were transmitted every hour on a given day.
What’s the Real Danger?
Opening one of these e-mails can seriously harm your computer. It downloads a file called adobe_flash.exe, which is actually a Trojan. Most sources have said it is the Trojan “EncPk-DA” or “Exchanger.mn.” Either way, once installed on your machine, you’ll be connected to another server to ensure other rogue programs are installed on your computer, putting you in a very sticky situation.
What Do I Look For?
Whether you’re getting the CNN version or the MSNBC version, all of these fake news e-mails have a very convincing subject line and a fairly official format. In the CNN e-mails, the subject line says something like “CNN Alert: My Custom Alert” or “CNN.com Daily Top Ten.” The Daily Top Ten e-mail will proceed to list the ten most popular stories on the site. Clicking on any one of them will send you to a fake link which will ask you to install a file so you can view the story. Clicking “Yes” will install the Trojan on your computer.
In the case of the MSNBC e-mails, you’ll see a subject line that says something like “MSNBC.com – BREAKING NEWS” followed by a stunning headline. Here are just a few that have been noticed over the past month:
McCain told lies to win votes
Abortion made illegal in New York
Tiger Woods to take a 2 year break from golf
I will be suing you
Bomb scare grounds thousands of flights at UK Heathrow airport
Once you open the MSNBC version, you’ll see a very official looking e-mail that looks something like the below:
Find out more at http://breakingnews.msnbc.com
=======================================================
See the top news of the day at MSNBC.com, and the latest from Today Show and NBC Nightly News.
=========================================
This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this MSNBC Breaking News Newsletter
newsletter because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you.
To remove yourself from the list (or to add yourself to the list if this
message was forwarded to you) simply go to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25384336, select unsubscribe, enter the
email address receiving this message, and click the Go button.
Microsoft Corporation - One Microsoft Way - Redmond, WA 98052
MSN PRIVACY STATEMENT
http://privacy.msn.com (http://privacy.msn.com/)
Clicking on any of the links, of course, takes you to a site that then installs the Trojan. Once you click, you get a message about your flash player. It will ask you if you want to install the file, and if you say yes, you’ve just invited the Trojan on to your computer.
Monitoring Your System
If you think you may have opened one of these e-mails, there are a few ways to tell. First, you’re immediately going to notice a slow down in your system processes. Remember, you’ve opened several security holes by clicking on that e-mail, and it’s a bit like opening the flood gates. Your computer is literally being taken over by other programs, so there’s very little room to run your web browser or even your word processing program.
Additionally, you may notice a program called Antivirus XP 2008 has been installed on your computer. Because this is a rogue antispyware program, you will probably see fake scans of your machine and frightening messages suggesting that you’ve been infected with malware. They will all suggest that the only way to get rid of it is to purchase and download the full version of the program.
You may also notice that your desktop background looks a bit different. It is now probably a warning message about your computer’s numerous infections. It may even say that you can no longer change your desktop background because of the number of infections on your computer.
What Do I Do If I Opened One?
If you did open one, and you’ve noticed the signs above, there is something you can do about it. Many people believe that simply running their currently installed virus software will solve the problem if one of these SPAM e-mails has opened security holes in your system. Regrettably, this is simply not the case. The programs one of these e-mails may have downloaded to your computer are not viruses in most instances. As a result, your anti virus solution, even if it’s been properly updated, will not be able to remove the traces of these programs from your system. The best thing to do if you have opened one of these e-mails is to run your anti spyware program. If you have yet to invest in a reputable anti spyware program, now is the time to do so. Solutions that help to tackle rogue programs and other kinds of threats to your machine, reputable anti spyware programs should be part of your computer’s security system.
Before you purchase any anti spyware program, though, carefully research your options. Talk with colleagues as well as friends and family members about the software they have chosen. Research each of their selections carefully, and evaluate each program to ensure that it will function as you need it to. Purchase the one that you think the best selection for you, download it, and scan your machine. It should remove any problem files immediately, and as long as you update it frequently and scan your machine on a regular basis, problems like these e-mails will become a thing of the past quickly.
By Mindy Matter forwww.removeadware.com.au/ - Here you'll learn about online privacy and how to remove rogue programs: www.removeadware.com.au/ - Please link to this site when using this article.
In early August, thousands of e-mail users began receiving deliveries to their inboxes with headlines like "CNN.com Daily Top 10", "CNN Alerts: Breaking News" and "MSNBC.com Breaking News" in their subject lines. Because of the overwhelming temptation to get the news conveniently via e-mail, many of those users chose to open those same e-mails, thus unleashing rogue programs that have damaged machines on a worldwide basis.
Why Shouldn’t I Click? I Trust These Sites
It’s unfortunate. Many people do trust respected names like CNN and MSNBC in the world of news. After all, they’re the corporate news giants many people have grown up hearing. Unfortunately, none of these e-mails were sent by these news giants. Instead, they were created to ensure malware might be downloaded to your machine, thus opening security holes for other programs to filter through.
One study suggested that 250 million of these CNN e-mails were sent in just one day. Another one said 2.5 million of these MSNBC e-mails were transmitted every hour on a given day.
What’s the Real Danger?
Opening one of these e-mails can seriously harm your computer. It downloads a file called adobe_flash.exe, which is actually a Trojan. Most sources have said it is the Trojan “EncPk-DA” or “Exchanger.mn.” Either way, once installed on your machine, you’ll be connected to another server to ensure other rogue programs are installed on your computer, putting you in a very sticky situation.
What Do I Look For?
Whether you’re getting the CNN version or the MSNBC version, all of these fake news e-mails have a very convincing subject line and a fairly official format. In the CNN e-mails, the subject line says something like “CNN Alert: My Custom Alert” or “CNN.com Daily Top Ten.” The Daily Top Ten e-mail will proceed to list the ten most popular stories on the site. Clicking on any one of them will send you to a fake link which will ask you to install a file so you can view the story. Clicking “Yes” will install the Trojan on your computer.
In the case of the MSNBC e-mails, you’ll see a subject line that says something like “MSNBC.com – BREAKING NEWS” followed by a stunning headline. Here are just a few that have been noticed over the past month:
McCain told lies to win votes
Abortion made illegal in New York
Tiger Woods to take a 2 year break from golf
I will be suing you
Bomb scare grounds thousands of flights at UK Heathrow airport
Once you open the MSNBC version, you’ll see a very official looking e-mail that looks something like the below:
Find out more at http://breakingnews.msnbc.com
=======================================================
See the top news of the day at MSNBC.com, and the latest from Today Show and NBC Nightly News.
=========================================
This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this MSNBC Breaking News Newsletter
newsletter because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you.
To remove yourself from the list (or to add yourself to the list if this
message was forwarded to you) simply go to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25384336, select unsubscribe, enter the
email address receiving this message, and click the Go button.
Microsoft Corporation - One Microsoft Way - Redmond, WA 98052
MSN PRIVACY STATEMENT
http://privacy.msn.com (http://privacy.msn.com/)
Clicking on any of the links, of course, takes you to a site that then installs the Trojan. Once you click, you get a message about your flash player. It will ask you if you want to install the file, and if you say yes, you’ve just invited the Trojan on to your computer.
Monitoring Your System
If you think you may have opened one of these e-mails, there are a few ways to tell. First, you’re immediately going to notice a slow down in your system processes. Remember, you’ve opened several security holes by clicking on that e-mail, and it’s a bit like opening the flood gates. Your computer is literally being taken over by other programs, so there’s very little room to run your web browser or even your word processing program.
Additionally, you may notice a program called Antivirus XP 2008 has been installed on your computer. Because this is a rogue antispyware program, you will probably see fake scans of your machine and frightening messages suggesting that you’ve been infected with malware. They will all suggest that the only way to get rid of it is to purchase and download the full version of the program.
You may also notice that your desktop background looks a bit different. It is now probably a warning message about your computer’s numerous infections. It may even say that you can no longer change your desktop background because of the number of infections on your computer.
What Do I Do If I Opened One?
If you did open one, and you’ve noticed the signs above, there is something you can do about it. Many people believe that simply running their currently installed virus software will solve the problem if one of these SPAM e-mails has opened security holes in your system. Regrettably, this is simply not the case. The programs one of these e-mails may have downloaded to your computer are not viruses in most instances. As a result, your anti virus solution, even if it’s been properly updated, will not be able to remove the traces of these programs from your system. The best thing to do if you have opened one of these e-mails is to run your anti spyware program. If you have yet to invest in a reputable anti spyware program, now is the time to do so. Solutions that help to tackle rogue programs and other kinds of threats to your machine, reputable anti spyware programs should be part of your computer’s security system.
Before you purchase any anti spyware program, though, carefully research your options. Talk with colleagues as well as friends and family members about the software they have chosen. Research each of their selections carefully, and evaluate each program to ensure that it will function as you need it to. Purchase the one that you think the best selection for you, download it, and scan your machine. It should remove any problem files immediately, and as long as you update it frequently and scan your machine on a regular basis, problems like these e-mails will become a thing of the past quickly.
By Mindy Matter forwww.removeadware.com.au/ - Here you'll learn about online privacy and how to remove rogue programs: www.removeadware.com.au/ - Please link to this site when using this article.
Corporate Antivirus vs. Residential Antivirus
Technology Seed supports the computers and networks of business and home users. In the past, I've written about some of the things you can do to stave off the most common home-user issue: virus infection. Well, if so many home-users are infected so often, what do businesses -some with hundreds of computers - do to stay virus-free?There's a big difference between the typical business computer and the typical home computer: the network it sits on. Because most business PCs are part of a large, server-based network, there are some things that we can do to protect them. Note: "server-based" means that a powerful computer/server is responsible for "serving" the needs of the network.1) Desktop Antivirus. We install antivirus software on every computer on the network. We use the same packages available to home-users. However, being part of a larger network, we can use the server to monitor the individual computers for antivirus compliance. Meaning: Using one server, we can make sure every computer on the network is up-to-date with its antivirus software - we don't need to rely on each user to install/check their software themselves.2) Email Scanning. Since many businesses use a central server to store their email, we can strip off viruses at that email server before the recipient gets it. So, if we keep that one email server updated with proper antivirus software, we can effectively strip off any virus coming over email (that, alone, solves 95% of the antivirus problem!).3) Gateway Scanning. Many home users use a router to share the internet connection with several PCs / laptops. Names like Linksys, Netgear and Belkin are very common. Business uses similar routers, but they have 2 big differences: They cost a lot more and they allow us to block certain types of content. So, we can install software on the router to block viruses from getting past the internet connection. It's the equivalent of Comcast blocking the virus before it gets to your home network!To sum it up: In a business setting, we can force computers to keep their antivirus software current, we can strip viruses out of email before they reach the recipient, and we can block viruses from entering the internet connection in the first place.Have an IT question you'd like answered? Email questions@tseed.com - we're happy to help!Kurt Simione is the owner of Technology Seed, LLC (www.TSeed.com). We provide IT Support, Business Phone System Support and Website Design to businesses across the country. 603-537-2700.
By: Technology Seed
By: Technology Seed
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Microsoft Access: Unleash the True Potential Today
Thinking of developing your Access skills? New to Microsoft Access and don't know where to start? Want to know more about what Access can do for your business?
Microsoft Access is a popular application designers often use to store and retrieve information. It is a database management software application (DBMS) used by small businesses, large corporations and by home "have-a-go' programmers.
Access has become one of the most widely-used applications of the well renowned Microsoft Office. Today's office environment often demands more than just email and report writing. As a result, skills in key office applications have become paramount for many business's success. But do we get really get the high performance results we know these applications are capable of?
Access provides powerful, easy to use design tools with relatively little effort. Its ease of use, often utilised by untrained office workers can sometimes be as much of a hindrance as a blessing as many "have-a-go' developers overlook the true power and business value it possesses, mistaking it for a limited data modelling application.
The underlying factor for this misunderstanding is largely due to lack of knowledge and training. Learning Access from dull manuals is often difficult to learn and far from enjoyable.
However, this no longer has to be the case! Many training companies are offering instructor led Microsoft Access training courses, delivered in a professional and easy to digest manner. Trainers combine their experience with real development knowledge - they really do know their stuff and are able to break down key concepts into manageable units.
The Microsoft Office Suite has come along way in the last decade and fortunately so too has the training. Gone are the days of large classes, limited training material and questionable delivery. Microsoft training is now a booming industry with a selection of course venues, availability and competitive prices to match.
These days you can expect professional Access training, delivered by Microsoft certified trainers in Microsoft authorised centres. Many of the larger training companies now offering up to three Microsoft Access public schedules courses a week at introduction, intermediate, advanced and VBA (programming) level according to the users experience and understanding.
So Access "newbies' can benefit from the introduction training level, learning important concepts such as how to use tables, fields and records in relation to simple queries, forms and views. The more advanced users will develop skills in SQL queries and how they relate to relational databases.
Students with more tailored needs can take advantage of bespoke training or even consider a mentoring approach in the form of consultancy. Consultancy can be a great choice for users who need to understand or tweak an already existing Access application. Consultancy can also help with database design or re-design and development to improve robustness, efficiency and usability.
Students may find it convenient to have classes conducted and/or tailored at their company site. This is becoming an increasingly popular approach. Public schedules, near-site, one-to-one and consultancy are also widely offered.
These days, you can choose the best time to learn. Public schedule courses for Access, run many times a month and on-site training can be scheduled around your team's workload allowing more control and focus relating to your business goals. You can also gain recognition of your Access skills by taking Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certified examinations examinations.
The future looks bright for Access students, with a plentiful supply of courses in an extremely competitive market. The Microsoft Office training industry often offers promotional rates and easy online booking. With the variety of training and competitive rates there has never been a better or easier time to develop key Microsoft Access skills.
By: Christine Harrell
Microsoft Access is a popular application designers often use to store and retrieve information. It is a database management software application (DBMS) used by small businesses, large corporations and by home "have-a-go' programmers.
Access has become one of the most widely-used applications of the well renowned Microsoft Office. Today's office environment often demands more than just email and report writing. As a result, skills in key office applications have become paramount for many business's success. But do we get really get the high performance results we know these applications are capable of?
Access provides powerful, easy to use design tools with relatively little effort. Its ease of use, often utilised by untrained office workers can sometimes be as much of a hindrance as a blessing as many "have-a-go' developers overlook the true power and business value it possesses, mistaking it for a limited data modelling application.
The underlying factor for this misunderstanding is largely due to lack of knowledge and training. Learning Access from dull manuals is often difficult to learn and far from enjoyable.
However, this no longer has to be the case! Many training companies are offering instructor led Microsoft Access training courses, delivered in a professional and easy to digest manner. Trainers combine their experience with real development knowledge - they really do know their stuff and are able to break down key concepts into manageable units.
The Microsoft Office Suite has come along way in the last decade and fortunately so too has the training. Gone are the days of large classes, limited training material and questionable delivery. Microsoft training is now a booming industry with a selection of course venues, availability and competitive prices to match.
These days you can expect professional Access training, delivered by Microsoft certified trainers in Microsoft authorised centres. Many of the larger training companies now offering up to three Microsoft Access public schedules courses a week at introduction, intermediate, advanced and VBA (programming) level according to the users experience and understanding.
So Access "newbies' can benefit from the introduction training level, learning important concepts such as how to use tables, fields and records in relation to simple queries, forms and views. The more advanced users will develop skills in SQL queries and how they relate to relational databases.
Students with more tailored needs can take advantage of bespoke training or even consider a mentoring approach in the form of consultancy. Consultancy can be a great choice for users who need to understand or tweak an already existing Access application. Consultancy can also help with database design or re-design and development to improve robustness, efficiency and usability.
Students may find it convenient to have classes conducted and/or tailored at their company site. This is becoming an increasingly popular approach. Public schedules, near-site, one-to-one and consultancy are also widely offered.
These days, you can choose the best time to learn. Public schedule courses for Access, run many times a month and on-site training can be scheduled around your team's workload allowing more control and focus relating to your business goals. You can also gain recognition of your Access skills by taking Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certified examinations examinations.
The future looks bright for Access students, with a plentiful supply of courses in an extremely competitive market. The Microsoft Office training industry often offers promotional rates and easy online booking. With the variety of training and competitive rates there has never been a better or easier time to develop key Microsoft Access skills.
By: Christine Harrell
Author is a trainer with a Microsoft Office training company. For more information on Microsoft Access training, visit www.MicrosoftTraining.net.
PHP MySQL Database Scripts - Generate Online
History of PHP
PHP (it originally was abbreviation of for Personal Home Page) was first written by Rasmus Lerdorf . These were Perl scripts to track users of his Web pages. On communication and suggestions from other people he rewrote it as a scripting language and added support for forms. As its popularity grew, a core group of developers created an API for it and turned it into PHP3. Presently we have version 5. (PHP5) and its growth is likely to continue.
Plus Points of PHP.
PHP will run on all platform, including most UNIXs, Windows(95/98/NT/2000) and Macs. As this uses the same code base, all scripts will run identically on all the platforms.
PHP is similar to C. So anyone who has experience with a C-style language will easily learnd PHP. In C-style languages we can also include Javascript and Java. In fact, much of PHP's functionality is provided by wrappers around the underlying system calls (such as fread() and strlen()) so C programmers will immediately feel at home.
PHP is extendible. This allows programmers two ways of extending PHP to do some special processing, either by writing an extension module and compiling it into the executable, or by creating an executable that can be loaded using PHP's dynamic loading mechanism.
PHP currently will load into Apache, IIS, AOLServer, Roxen and THTTPD. Alternatively, it can be run as a CGI module.
Lots of database interfaces. PHP currently will work with MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Informix, PostgreSQL and many others. These are binary level interfaces, and ODBC is also provided for those situations where the database is not supported.
If a PHP user wants to interface to particular library, then it is easy to write an interface for it, and many have done so, and contributed to the main PHP source repository. So you can find modules for graphics routines, PDF files, Flash movies, Cybercash, calendars, XML, IMAP, POP and a host of others. If the library you need is not supported, you can either write one yourself, or employ your favourite programmer to do it.
PEAR. The PHP Extension and Add-on Repository. Similar to the CPAN network for Perl, although still in its infancy, the idea of PEAR is to provide a set of PHP scripts that would be installed by default with the PHP installation
Fast. PHP is normally used an Apache module and this makes it very fast. It is entirely written in C and is quite small, so loads and executes quickly with small memory footprint.
PHP is Open Source. Therefore programmers are not dependent on a particular manufacturer to fix things that don't work.
What are the main disadvantages of PHP?
A scripting language has advantages and disadvantages. PHP also has some disadvantages. Some are direct disadvantages and some are indirect regarding functionality. PHP's main drawback is Error Handling. PHP has a very poor ability in this regard, but even this disadvantage can be over come using a feasible advantage solution.
By: satya If you desire a PHP MySQL database script in quick time visit www.multidbscripts.com where you can generate online in under a minute a PHP MySQL database script along with the associated html pages once you have entered your fields
Submitted by: Article Submitter
PHP (it originally was abbreviation of for Personal Home Page) was first written by Rasmus Lerdorf . These were Perl scripts to track users of his Web pages. On communication and suggestions from other people he rewrote it as a scripting language and added support for forms. As its popularity grew, a core group of developers created an API for it and turned it into PHP3. Presently we have version 5. (PHP5) and its growth is likely to continue.
Plus Points of PHP.
PHP will run on all platform, including most UNIXs, Windows(95/98/NT/2000) and Macs. As this uses the same code base, all scripts will run identically on all the platforms.
PHP is similar to C. So anyone who has experience with a C-style language will easily learnd PHP. In C-style languages we can also include Javascript and Java. In fact, much of PHP's functionality is provided by wrappers around the underlying system calls (such as fread() and strlen()) so C programmers will immediately feel at home.
PHP is extendible. This allows programmers two ways of extending PHP to do some special processing, either by writing an extension module and compiling it into the executable, or by creating an executable that can be loaded using PHP's dynamic loading mechanism.
PHP currently will load into Apache, IIS, AOLServer, Roxen and THTTPD. Alternatively, it can be run as a CGI module.
Lots of database interfaces. PHP currently will work with MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Informix, PostgreSQL and many others. These are binary level interfaces, and ODBC is also provided for those situations where the database is not supported.
If a PHP user wants to interface to particular library, then it is easy to write an interface for it, and many have done so, and contributed to the main PHP source repository. So you can find modules for graphics routines, PDF files, Flash movies, Cybercash, calendars, XML, IMAP, POP and a host of others. If the library you need is not supported, you can either write one yourself, or employ your favourite programmer to do it.
PEAR. The PHP Extension and Add-on Repository. Similar to the CPAN network for Perl, although still in its infancy, the idea of PEAR is to provide a set of PHP scripts that would be installed by default with the PHP installation
Fast. PHP is normally used an Apache module and this makes it very fast. It is entirely written in C and is quite small, so loads and executes quickly with small memory footprint.
PHP is Open Source. Therefore programmers are not dependent on a particular manufacturer to fix things that don't work.
What are the main disadvantages of PHP?
A scripting language has advantages and disadvantages. PHP also has some disadvantages. Some are direct disadvantages and some are indirect regarding functionality. PHP's main drawback is Error Handling. PHP has a very poor ability in this regard, but even this disadvantage can be over come using a feasible advantage solution.
By: satya If you desire a PHP MySQL database script in quick time visit www.multidbscripts.com where you can generate online in under a minute a PHP MySQL database script along with the associated html pages once you have entered your fields
Submitted by: Article Submitter
Intel D945GCLF2 Dual Core Mini-ITX Carputer Motherboard
Alas, the Intel D945GCLF2, based on the Intel Atom, is finally released. One of the key features that caught my eye was the dual core Atom processor. Not only is it dual core, but its power usage is outstanding. It's estimated to use 4 watts under load while consuming milliwatts (thousandths of a watt) when idle. Being in a carputer, power consumption is a vital specification because you need to figure out how large of a power supply you will need. The power consumption spec can also give you an idea of how much heat will be disappated, because after all, the power not used for computing will dissipate into heat.
The power supply I am using is an Opus 120. It's rated for 120 watts and has powered my previous build just fine. I ran into one snag that I didn't expect, however. The motherboard uses a 12v P4 ATX connector (see pic on the actual website) as well as the standard 20-24pin ATX connector. The power supply I have (and most that I've seen) do not have this connector incorporated into their harness.
To solve this problem, you can either purchase a molex to P4 adapter, or you can mod your existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector. I chose to mod my existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector to one of the existing molex connectors. Basically, I cut off the P4 connector from a regular ATX power supply, stripped the wires, and crammed them into an existing molex connection. See the pictures on the site to see what I mean.
After everything was setup, I installed the full Windows XP Pro with SP3. I opted not to use TinyXP because I felt that it could cause issues down the road with all the drivers it has stripped out. After the installation, I installed the usual Winamp, VLC media player, SpeedFan, iGuidance, Centrafuse, and finally the drivers. Instead of configuring Windows to hibernate after the car was shut off, I chose to shutdown completely because I've had lots of issues with hibernation such as it not resuming correctly.
With 1GB of RAM and a 2.5" 80GB 4200RPM hard drive, the performance isn't too bad. You would think that a 4200RPM hard drive would be kind of sluggish, but I can hardly notice it. Windows starts up from a cold boot quickly and so do all of the programs I use. I'm never left waiting for the next song to load or a program to open.
The low power consumption of the board is also very noticeable. With my old board, the CPU temperature would always be at least 45C upon boot, and rise to a little over 60C after being used for awhile. On a cold morning, at about 55F, The Intel Atom managed to boot up at 30C and after 20 minutes, it had only risen to 35C! Now, when I open my glove box, there's no more hot air oozing out. The air inside the glove box is almost the same temperature as the air in the cabin! However, the temperatures will differ based on the ambient temperature inside the cabin, so the CPU will run hotter on a warmer day. On an 80F day, the CPU boots at 30C and rises to about 55-60C, still not bad on a very warm day.
All in all, the Intel D945GCLF2 is a great buy. At only $89.99 from Mini-box.com, you get tons of features, and best of all, a dual core processor. With low power consumption, low temperatures, and high performance it seems as if the board was made explicitly for carputer usage, in which it excels.
By: prochobo
The power supply I am using is an Opus 120. It's rated for 120 watts and has powered my previous build just fine. I ran into one snag that I didn't expect, however. The motherboard uses a 12v P4 ATX connector (see pic on the actual website) as well as the standard 20-24pin ATX connector. The power supply I have (and most that I've seen) do not have this connector incorporated into their harness.
To solve this problem, you can either purchase a molex to P4 adapter, or you can mod your existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector. I chose to mod my existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector to one of the existing molex connectors. Basically, I cut off the P4 connector from a regular ATX power supply, stripped the wires, and crammed them into an existing molex connection. See the pictures on the site to see what I mean.
After everything was setup, I installed the full Windows XP Pro with SP3. I opted not to use TinyXP because I felt that it could cause issues down the road with all the drivers it has stripped out. After the installation, I installed the usual Winamp, VLC media player, SpeedFan, iGuidance, Centrafuse, and finally the drivers. Instead of configuring Windows to hibernate after the car was shut off, I chose to shutdown completely because I've had lots of issues with hibernation such as it not resuming correctly.
With 1GB of RAM and a 2.5" 80GB 4200RPM hard drive, the performance isn't too bad. You would think that a 4200RPM hard drive would be kind of sluggish, but I can hardly notice it. Windows starts up from a cold boot quickly and so do all of the programs I use. I'm never left waiting for the next song to load or a program to open.
The low power consumption of the board is also very noticeable. With my old board, the CPU temperature would always be at least 45C upon boot, and rise to a little over 60C after being used for awhile. On a cold morning, at about 55F, The Intel Atom managed to boot up at 30C and after 20 minutes, it had only risen to 35C! Now, when I open my glove box, there's no more hot air oozing out. The air inside the glove box is almost the same temperature as the air in the cabin! However, the temperatures will differ based on the ambient temperature inside the cabin, so the CPU will run hotter on a warmer day. On an 80F day, the CPU boots at 30C and rises to about 55-60C, still not bad on a very warm day.
All in all, the Intel D945GCLF2 is a great buy. At only $89.99 from Mini-box.com, you get tons of features, and best of all, a dual core processor. With low power consumption, low temperatures, and high performance it seems as if the board was made explicitly for carputer usage, in which it excels.
By: prochobo
Visit http://www.IsYouGeekedUp.com for more carputer information
10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs A Server
Ever wonder how a server could benefit your business? LANstar offers you some free computer support information and the reasons why...
Computer ServersBecause you don't want to lose data if something goes wrong – Any reliable computer technician will tell you that backing up data stored on individual computers is not only impractical, it's unreliable. Storing all your data on a server and then backing up all of the data on that server is more likely to work properly without interruption and it is also easier to manage. Even if you decide to back-up via an on-line service, backing up one machine is typically easier and less expensive than backing up multiple computers.
Because you want your data secure – Storing sensitive accounting, human resources, or intellectual property information on your workstation or even an auxiliary storage device does not ensure that the data is restricted and protected. Sever security settings can easily and effectively limit data access to just certain people in the office.
The ability to work from home/remotely – In today's work environment, mobility and accessibility are the name of the game. With a server in your office, you can easily access all of your internal data without incurring the additional monthly cost of a router or remote access program.
Because you are running out of space to store data – Servers offer the flexibility of massive data storage on redundant and fault-tolerant drives. So, even if one of the drives fails, the remaining drives will still contain all of your data.
Because you need/want to use Microsoft Exchange - If you have numerous email addresses and/or you are tired of having to rely on your Email Service Provider to set up or delete email addresses employees come and go, Exchange may save you time and money. Exchange allows you to add, delete, or change all of your own email addresses easily and immediately without any monthly cost to you.
Because you're concerned about viruses and/or spyware on your network – The two ways to keep your computers protected are either to continually and constantly monitor each workstation or to install virus/spyware protection on a server. By using a server, protection updates are automatically downloaded to the server, which is then responsible for ensuring that every workstation connected to the network has the latest protection installed.
Because you have applications all employees must access – The most common way of sharing applications is to install it on one workstation and “share” it with other users. Unfortunately, this will ultimately slow down that user's workstation and limited to the abilities of the application's performance. This can result in poor performance and a great chance of long-term failure.
Because you need to centrally manage all employees/computers – Without a server, each employee can only log onto his/her computer, and when an employee leaves it becomes difficult or impossible to recover the password. With a server, all usernames and passwords are managed from one central location so you can add, delete, and change the access levels and passwords without needing to know the old password.
Because my computers are slow – Two of the most common causes of slow computers are an old processor and insufficient memory. Moving applications to a server can allow a user to take advantage of the improved speed and performance of a server without requiring an upgrade to the workstation. The money saved on workstation upgrades can quickly eclipse the entire cost of a new server.
Because I need a domain – A domain is the way by which a server tells every network computer which devices are supposed to be on the network and which therefore be trusted. All devices that are part of a domain are registered with the server to that it knows to allow access and and from certain domain devices. A domain is often required by many centralized database applications so that the server can properly communicate with each workstation, but it is also another valuable layer of security.
By: Joel Ray
Computer ServersBecause you don't want to lose data if something goes wrong – Any reliable computer technician will tell you that backing up data stored on individual computers is not only impractical, it's unreliable. Storing all your data on a server and then backing up all of the data on that server is more likely to work properly without interruption and it is also easier to manage. Even if you decide to back-up via an on-line service, backing up one machine is typically easier and less expensive than backing up multiple computers.
Because you want your data secure – Storing sensitive accounting, human resources, or intellectual property information on your workstation or even an auxiliary storage device does not ensure that the data is restricted and protected. Sever security settings can easily and effectively limit data access to just certain people in the office.
The ability to work from home/remotely – In today's work environment, mobility and accessibility are the name of the game. With a server in your office, you can easily access all of your internal data without incurring the additional monthly cost of a router or remote access program.
Because you are running out of space to store data – Servers offer the flexibility of massive data storage on redundant and fault-tolerant drives. So, even if one of the drives fails, the remaining drives will still contain all of your data.
Because you need/want to use Microsoft Exchange - If you have numerous email addresses and/or you are tired of having to rely on your Email Service Provider to set up or delete email addresses employees come and go, Exchange may save you time and money. Exchange allows you to add, delete, or change all of your own email addresses easily and immediately without any monthly cost to you.
Because you're concerned about viruses and/or spyware on your network – The two ways to keep your computers protected are either to continually and constantly monitor each workstation or to install virus/spyware protection on a server. By using a server, protection updates are automatically downloaded to the server, which is then responsible for ensuring that every workstation connected to the network has the latest protection installed.
Because you have applications all employees must access – The most common way of sharing applications is to install it on one workstation and “share” it with other users. Unfortunately, this will ultimately slow down that user's workstation and limited to the abilities of the application's performance. This can result in poor performance and a great chance of long-term failure.
Because you need to centrally manage all employees/computers – Without a server, each employee can only log onto his/her computer, and when an employee leaves it becomes difficult or impossible to recover the password. With a server, all usernames and passwords are managed from one central location so you can add, delete, and change the access levels and passwords without needing to know the old password.
Because my computers are slow – Two of the most common causes of slow computers are an old processor and insufficient memory. Moving applications to a server can allow a user to take advantage of the improved speed and performance of a server without requiring an upgrade to the workstation. The money saved on workstation upgrades can quickly eclipse the entire cost of a new server.
Because I need a domain – A domain is the way by which a server tells every network computer which devices are supposed to be on the network and which therefore be trusted. All devices that are part of a domain are registered with the server to that it knows to allow access and and from certain domain devices. A domain is often required by many centralized database applications so that the server can properly communicate with each workstation, but it is also another valuable layer of security.
By: Joel Ray
After 10+ years of computer network experience, including 6 years of employment in the network department of an enterprise-size local company, Joel Ray, MCSE, CNE formed LANstar, LLC in 2000.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Software Making- You get the best quality of the free products!
Do you ever feel that you just get the latest software package to do something marvelous with your computer and as soon as you spend the money it's obsolete? Do you feel like you just want to stop progress for a few minutes so that you can catch up to innovation? Probably that's not a realistic wish, but there is a way you can take advantage of the latest technology without spending a fortune in purchasing the products you want and use. Just consider using one of the free software sites to find the latest products and try them out. For example, if you need software to perform defragmentation quickly you must visit to www.instant-software-products.com and efficiently, just enter the term 'defrag' in the search box on a free site and you will find dozens of possibilities. Most are for specific operating systems, but you can limit the results even further by defining the search terms you require. You can make sure you get the best quality of the free products by looking at reviews prepared by previous users. It is probably also true that different users will get different results from the same product, because of the way in which it is used.
If you are looking for a product to use in burning your CDs and DVDs why not look for the free tool that provides you with the ease to burn DVD and CD images. This popular tool is known as imbrue. This tool supports all the major drives that are currently out there. This includes the ability to do book type and bit setting on many of the drives. If you are looking for a product to facilitate burning CDs and DVDs and you don't want to spend anything--consider the excellent tool found with imbrue. It's easy to download and it's easy to use for your own applications. Perhaps you've been looking for additional protection and detection tools. Another free tool that is available as a free product is spigot search destroys. Those who have been using the product regularly since its beta launch in 1999 swear by the quality, effectiveness and ease of use.
Spigot search destroy tools search out all the little modules used by many of the programs to display ads. If you don't want them reporting your internet surfing activities, use this software to remove them. This type of tool is extremely popular for anyone who wants to improve privacy and protection of their surfing habits from prying eyes. There are many other tools that are available at no cost to you when you use one of the free sites you can check it out from www.newbies-guide-to-making-software.com These sites are maintained and developed by companies who are looking for beta testers for their products and for individuals who see a need and work to create a solution to fill the gap. You can find reviews on the newest products plus comments responding to the reviews. Often the reviews and comments provided by users will help the product to get improvements or revisions that will make it even better.
www.newbies-guide-to-making-software.com
www.instant-software-products.com
If you are looking for a product to use in burning your CDs and DVDs why not look for the free tool that provides you with the ease to burn DVD and CD images. This popular tool is known as imbrue. This tool supports all the major drives that are currently out there. This includes the ability to do book type and bit setting on many of the drives. If you are looking for a product to facilitate burning CDs and DVDs and you don't want to spend anything--consider the excellent tool found with imbrue. It's easy to download and it's easy to use for your own applications. Perhaps you've been looking for additional protection and detection tools. Another free tool that is available as a free product is spigot search destroys. Those who have been using the product regularly since its beta launch in 1999 swear by the quality, effectiveness and ease of use.
Spigot search destroy tools search out all the little modules used by many of the programs to display ads. If you don't want them reporting your internet surfing activities, use this software to remove them. This type of tool is extremely popular for anyone who wants to improve privacy and protection of their surfing habits from prying eyes. There are many other tools that are available at no cost to you when you use one of the free sites you can check it out from www.newbies-guide-to-making-software.com These sites are maintained and developed by companies who are looking for beta testers for their products and for individuals who see a need and work to create a solution to fill the gap. You can find reviews on the newest products plus comments responding to the reviews. Often the reviews and comments provided by users will help the product to get improvements or revisions that will make it even better.
www.newbies-guide-to-making-software.com
www.instant-software-products.com
Partition Recovery Is Not Merely For Business
Caring for your precious data is becoming an ever increasing issue as more and more storage devices you have come to bank on so willingly and each one has its own memory.
The trouble is that we are merely becoming too self-satisfied with the procedure we manage our valuable data and rarely amuse backing it up awaiting that crucial day when it is no longer accessible to us.
Online backups are the most widely used concept and are readily available from a number of companies. The backups allow you to restore your data in a quick and easy way after data loss.
Just on your laptop or PS alone, you might have important documents, emails, spreadsheets, images, sound and music files, videos, financial records and many similar. So with the risk of losing these files, if you have not considered backup yet, then you should consider as quickly as possible.
Luckily, the capable data recovery companies offer powerful data recovery solutions to handle data loss cases after accidental deletin, hard drive formatting, partition loss, file system corruption and the like.
In cases of file system corruption, partition loss etc, the data recovery is possible with the help of partition recovery software. Partition recovery software are the third party applications which allow you to have Do It Yourself data recovery in an easy and effective way.
There is a wide range of partition recovery software available in the market, developed by various data recovery companies. All these partition recovery software come with a different set of features and price tags.
Partition recovery in case of file system corruption is somewhat different from other cases and complicated too. General partition recovery software can not perform the recovery in such cases. It requires something which is extremely powerful and uses outstanding scanning mechanism.
Stellar Information Systems Ltd is the leading and the foremos provider of data recovery solutions. The company has the most excellent track record of offering sophisticated partition recovery software to its customers all across the globe.
Stellar’s partition recovery software are available for all computer operating systems including Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, Linux and Novell and are supportive to all of their corresponding file systems. These software are powerful enough to carry out successful partition recovery even in case of file system corruption.
This partition recovery software applies tremendously influential scanning algorithms for effectively scanning the affected hard drive and extracting all of the data from it. Due to interactive and intuitive user interface, these software are very easy to use and do not demand any sound technical knowledge from users’ side.
The trouble is that we are merely becoming too self-satisfied with the procedure we manage our valuable data and rarely amuse backing it up awaiting that crucial day when it is no longer accessible to us.
Online backups are the most widely used concept and are readily available from a number of companies. The backups allow you to restore your data in a quick and easy way after data loss.
Just on your laptop or PS alone, you might have important documents, emails, spreadsheets, images, sound and music files, videos, financial records and many similar. So with the risk of losing these files, if you have not considered backup yet, then you should consider as quickly as possible.
Luckily, the capable data recovery companies offer powerful data recovery solutions to handle data loss cases after accidental deletin, hard drive formatting, partition loss, file system corruption and the like.
In cases of file system corruption, partition loss etc, the data recovery is possible with the help of partition recovery software. Partition recovery software are the third party applications which allow you to have Do It Yourself data recovery in an easy and effective way.
There is a wide range of partition recovery software available in the market, developed by various data recovery companies. All these partition recovery software come with a different set of features and price tags.
Partition recovery in case of file system corruption is somewhat different from other cases and complicated too. General partition recovery software can not perform the recovery in such cases. It requires something which is extremely powerful and uses outstanding scanning mechanism.
Stellar Information Systems Ltd is the leading and the foremos provider of data recovery solutions. The company has the most excellent track record of offering sophisticated partition recovery software to its customers all across the globe.
Stellar’s partition recovery software are available for all computer operating systems including Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, Linux and Novell and are supportive to all of their corresponding file systems. These software are powerful enough to carry out successful partition recovery even in case of file system corruption.
This partition recovery software applies tremendously influential scanning algorithms for effectively scanning the affected hard drive and extracting all of the data from it. Due to interactive and intuitive user interface, these software are very easy to use and do not demand any sound technical knowledge from users’ side.
Author: Simpson
Digital Photo Restoration Software
Digital image file recovery utility is used to retrieve your weddings albums, birthday’s photographs and memorable snaps which have been missed or erased due software corruption, accidental deletion, virus attack or any human error. Lost digital picture rescue tool recovers deleted or corrupted images, photos and animated files from all type of removable USB drives like picture cards, pen drive, digital camera, multimedia cards etc. Erased digital photo restoration software rescues lost or undetectable photographs, pictures and digital albums from damaged or inaccessible windows FAT NTFS partitioned hard disk or other removable storage drives. Digital pictures retrieval tool provides facility to salvage corrupted image files from all major USB storage brands such as Kodak, Casio, Olympus, Nikon, Sony, Canon, Konica etc. You can successfully get back your erased or damaged gif, jpg, tif, tiff, riff, png, jpeg format files from logically crashed storage devices. Deleted digital photographs restoration tool salvages missing or lost photos albums, animated files, snaps from emptied recycle bin or bad sector affected hard disk drives. Features: * Digital photograph recovery software quickly recovers erased or lost important images, snaps, pictures from damaged compact flash card, memory cards or multimedia cards. * Lost digital photo restoration utility salvage encrypted or undetectable digital image files from formatted hard disk or removable storage media. * Erased digital image retrieval tool supports all major brands of USB storage drives like Canon, Toshiba, Sony, Konica etc available in all different capacities. * Digital picture retrieval software can also restore all formats of digital image files such as gif, jpg, tif, tiff, riff, png, jpeg etc. * Digital photo restore utility supports all windows operating systems including Vista. * Digital image file rescue tool does not need to have technical skills to install or uninstall.
http://www.24hr.in/24hr/dig-pic-rec.html
http://www.24hr.in/downloads/DigiPhotoRecDemo.exe
http://www.24hr.in/24hr/dig-pic-rec.html
http://www.24hr.in/downloads/DigiPhotoRecDemo.exe
The Facts about Data Loss and Data Recovery
In modern organizations, computers have become indispensable tools for commerce. The computer facilitates greater output in lesser time. For example, accountants need computers to speed up their work on financial statements. Architects and engineers use software for making their designs perfect. Each professional, at one time or another requires becoming accustomed with computer.
But along with the prospects, come liabilities. The computers are subject to deterioration. But most likely the biggest threat to computers is the individual who is using it. Yes, me and you. Human errors posed the major troubles to computers.
It won’t be a pretty sight to open the computer one day and find out that it was not running any longer. Some nasty viruses have entered in it or a mechanical problem occurred. All your valuable files are lost. And you end up, spending valuable efforts and time of the company in recovering the lost data.
The data recover could be tedious. The good news for the data recvery victims is that the data recovery is possible in all circumstances. The data recovery can be performed in either of the two ways: using data recovery software or through data recovery service.
The data recovery software can help you in retrieving your lost valuable data in all logical cases of data loss. The data recovery software are Do It Yourself tools to carry out easy and quick data recovery without having a sound technical knowledge.
The data recovery service can do more than the data recovery software and perform data recovery in physical cases of data loss. Data recovery service is more extensive and need more technical knowledge.
The data recover experts clone the damaged hard drive to a new one, then work on the cloned one. As for the damaged components, they repair or replace them. The data recovery service is oftentimes a lengthy process and more expensive as compared to the data recovery software.
The harder fact about the data recovery solutions is that only the powerful and effective ones can guarantee you of the highest success rate. The poor quality data recovery software or data recovery service can ruin the situations and could separate your data for the life.
Stellar Information Systems Ltd is the market leader of the data recovery industry and offers both of the solutions. The company has the most excellent track record of providing sophisticated data recovery software and data recovery service since 1993.
The data recovery software of the company are highly developed and the most influential. These are available for all computer operating systems counting Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, Linux and Novell and are supportive to all of their corresponding file systems.
The personalized hard drive recovery service of Stellar is the best of data recovery industry and is offered in controlled and clean environment of Class 100 clean Rooms by the experienced and highly knowledgeable data recovery professionals. The tools and techniques, applied by the data recovery experts to end up at perfect data recovery, are superior and best in the quality.
Author: spears
But along with the prospects, come liabilities. The computers are subject to deterioration. But most likely the biggest threat to computers is the individual who is using it. Yes, me and you. Human errors posed the major troubles to computers.
It won’t be a pretty sight to open the computer one day and find out that it was not running any longer. Some nasty viruses have entered in it or a mechanical problem occurred. All your valuable files are lost. And you end up, spending valuable efforts and time of the company in recovering the lost data.
The data recover could be tedious. The good news for the data recvery victims is that the data recovery is possible in all circumstances. The data recovery can be performed in either of the two ways: using data recovery software or through data recovery service.
The data recovery software can help you in retrieving your lost valuable data in all logical cases of data loss. The data recovery software are Do It Yourself tools to carry out easy and quick data recovery without having a sound technical knowledge.
The data recovery service can do more than the data recovery software and perform data recovery in physical cases of data loss. Data recovery service is more extensive and need more technical knowledge.
The data recover experts clone the damaged hard drive to a new one, then work on the cloned one. As for the damaged components, they repair or replace them. The data recovery service is oftentimes a lengthy process and more expensive as compared to the data recovery software.
The harder fact about the data recovery solutions is that only the powerful and effective ones can guarantee you of the highest success rate. The poor quality data recovery software or data recovery service can ruin the situations and could separate your data for the life.
Stellar Information Systems Ltd is the market leader of the data recovery industry and offers both of the solutions. The company has the most excellent track record of providing sophisticated data recovery software and data recovery service since 1993.
The data recovery software of the company are highly developed and the most influential. These are available for all computer operating systems counting Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, Linux and Novell and are supportive to all of their corresponding file systems.
The personalized hard drive recovery service of Stellar is the best of data recovery industry and is offered in controlled and clean environment of Class 100 clean Rooms by the experienced and highly knowledgeable data recovery professionals. The tools and techniques, applied by the data recovery experts to end up at perfect data recovery, are superior and best in the quality.
Author: spears
Monday, October 6, 2008
Why are Driver Scanners Useful for Inexperienced users
Inexperienced computer users commonly suffer problems on the installation of the right device drivers for their machines. Since they are not familiar with how device drivers work for a specific platform or why it is necessary to install only those that are compatible with the driver, this often leads to complications hindering the functionality of the system.
A solution to this problem is the use of third-party applications bundled with hardware programs called driver scanners. A driver scanner has the following characteristics/functions:
1. Driver scanners use the active Internet connection on the user's machine to connect to the remote server of the hardware manufacturer. The application will retrieve the list of drivers for the installed hardware and will automatically download and launch without requiring user input.
2. Other driver scanners show users the list of device-compatible drivers and give them the choice to choose a specific driver to download for their hardware. These are often categorized according to version, the operating system used, functionality, patches, bug fixes, and so on.
3. Driver scanners sports an easy-to-understand, navigable GUI (Graphical User Interface) that can allow the user to set configurations for scanning the devices in their system and setting the parameters for downloading and installing the said program.
Driver scanners are often bundled with the hardware device. Some can be downloaded from the Internet as an add-on program to support the functionality of the device according to the platform used. Manufacturer-based driver scanners are often attributed to the following devices:
• Display Adapters (Video Cards)
• Printers
• Scanners
• Chipset (for on-board peripherals)
There are driver scanners individually developed to cover all these devices. These can be downloaded from the Internet for free, though the most advisable ones are those from credible software companies requiring a license to use the said application. Freeware driver scanners are mostly attributed to malware infections as claimed by a few users.
Third-party driver scanners scour the machine for installed hardware. After scanning, it will retrieve the ID for each device and subsequently connect to a remote server in order to search for compatible drivers and applications for it. These programs will look for drivers compatible with the user’s operating system.
After the search, the driver scanner application will prompt the user of any updated driver it found and will prompt the user for installation. The installation process may require further verification, like agreeing to the license agreement, configurations and application settings, location for the driver installation, and so on.
A tool which I personally recommend to anyone, guru or newbie, and even intermediates is DriverScanner by Uniblue. This piece of software updates your drivers automatically without you having to worry if you misplaced your HP scanner's CD or the Creative sound card's driver. DriverScanner as the name implies makes a free driver scan of your existing drivers against their extensive list of thousands of drivers fresh from the device manufacturer's ovens in order to check for outdated drivers, lets you back your driver up in case some conflict occurs so that you can restore the previous functioning firmware with ease and quickly update them to the latest version with the touch of a button. Updating your device drivers helps the perfomance of your computer Now that's what I call silver service!
A solution to this problem is the use of third-party applications bundled with hardware programs called driver scanners. A driver scanner has the following characteristics/functions:
1. Driver scanners use the active Internet connection on the user's machine to connect to the remote server of the hardware manufacturer. The application will retrieve the list of drivers for the installed hardware and will automatically download and launch without requiring user input.
2. Other driver scanners show users the list of device-compatible drivers and give them the choice to choose a specific driver to download for their hardware. These are often categorized according to version, the operating system used, functionality, patches, bug fixes, and so on.
3. Driver scanners sports an easy-to-understand, navigable GUI (Graphical User Interface) that can allow the user to set configurations for scanning the devices in their system and setting the parameters for downloading and installing the said program.
Driver scanners are often bundled with the hardware device. Some can be downloaded from the Internet as an add-on program to support the functionality of the device according to the platform used. Manufacturer-based driver scanners are often attributed to the following devices:
• Display Adapters (Video Cards)
• Printers
• Scanners
• Chipset (for on-board peripherals)
There are driver scanners individually developed to cover all these devices. These can be downloaded from the Internet for free, though the most advisable ones are those from credible software companies requiring a license to use the said application. Freeware driver scanners are mostly attributed to malware infections as claimed by a few users.
Third-party driver scanners scour the machine for installed hardware. After scanning, it will retrieve the ID for each device and subsequently connect to a remote server in order to search for compatible drivers and applications for it. These programs will look for drivers compatible with the user’s operating system.
After the search, the driver scanner application will prompt the user of any updated driver it found and will prompt the user for installation. The installation process may require further verification, like agreeing to the license agreement, configurations and application settings, location for the driver installation, and so on.
A tool which I personally recommend to anyone, guru or newbie, and even intermediates is DriverScanner by Uniblue. This piece of software updates your drivers automatically without you having to worry if you misplaced your HP scanner's CD or the Creative sound card's driver. DriverScanner as the name implies makes a free driver scan of your existing drivers against their extensive list of thousands of drivers fresh from the device manufacturer's ovens in order to check for outdated drivers, lets you back your driver up in case some conflict occurs so that you can restore the previous functioning firmware with ease and quickly update them to the latest version with the touch of a button. Updating your device drivers helps the perfomance of your computer Now that's what I call silver service!
Remote Computer Repair. Is it Safe?
Remote computer repair is still a new idea to many; however it’s been available to you for years now. Rather than an expensive on-site visit, technicians connect securely to your computer using an advanced screen sharing program. This in turn, allows you to have your computer fixed right away, and at a lower cost due to the lower amount of overhead costs to the companies. But is it really safe?
The short answer is yes. Let me explain why… First, you remain with your computer at all times. When you drop your computer off at the store, you will be asked to return in a week or whenever they finish it. During this time, who knows if anyone is reading or copying your files? Can you be sure they haven’t taken or switched some piece of hardware? Will they even do anything to it before recommending you purchase their new model on isle 9? When having your computer repaired remotely, you’ll be able to watch the repair taking place as it is happening. Your tech should be available for questions through a chat window or the phone if you need him, however no one will know if you are watching or not thus ensuring the techs integrity. Ask your local super store geek if you can sit and watch them fix the computer and see what they say.
With on-site repair, not only do you have to pay very high fees, but you have to wait for the tech to fit you into the schedule when you need your computer working now! Then you must allow a stranger into your home. I’m reminded of a recent news story regarding a national on-site support chain and a camera phone left in a bathroom. If you want to watch what the on-site tech is doing you’ll have to literally watch from over his shoulder because he or she will be sitting in your seat.
With remote computer repair, you must pay with a credit card. Some people still have reservations on using credit cards online. The fact is that credit card companies want you to use their card online for everything. Ask your card company if you’ll be responsible for any fraud or stolen activity. You’ll likely be happy with their response. Plus if you think you are getting ripped off by the online computer repair service, you can use your credit card company to dispute the charge. Note: that a bank debit cards with a Visa or MasterCard usually don’t offer dispute services.
Because this new option for residential computer repair is so popular, a lot of new companies are sprouting up constantly. There are a few important things to look for in a remote computer repair service. Are they in the same country as you? This important because if laws are different, you’ll have a tough time disputing a problem with them should you come to have one. Do they have a No Fix, No Fee guarantee? Many per minute or hour services charge you for their time and do not guarantee to fix anything. What does that say about their trust and training of their own techs? Finally, be cautious of an insanely low price. In my experience, low pricing always means inexperience or a scam. You can expect to get a better deal than any in-shop or on-site service however.
So the next time you have a computer problem, give the remote approach a try. If you find a no fix, no fee guarantee companies then you truly have nothing to lose and such a convenience to gain.
This article was written by the folks at RemoteComputerRepair.org. Visit them at www.remotecomputerrepair.org or by calling 1-888-392-2785.
The short answer is yes. Let me explain why… First, you remain with your computer at all times. When you drop your computer off at the store, you will be asked to return in a week or whenever they finish it. During this time, who knows if anyone is reading or copying your files? Can you be sure they haven’t taken or switched some piece of hardware? Will they even do anything to it before recommending you purchase their new model on isle 9? When having your computer repaired remotely, you’ll be able to watch the repair taking place as it is happening. Your tech should be available for questions through a chat window or the phone if you need him, however no one will know if you are watching or not thus ensuring the techs integrity. Ask your local super store geek if you can sit and watch them fix the computer and see what they say.
With on-site repair, not only do you have to pay very high fees, but you have to wait for the tech to fit you into the schedule when you need your computer working now! Then you must allow a stranger into your home. I’m reminded of a recent news story regarding a national on-site support chain and a camera phone left in a bathroom. If you want to watch what the on-site tech is doing you’ll have to literally watch from over his shoulder because he or she will be sitting in your seat.
With remote computer repair, you must pay with a credit card. Some people still have reservations on using credit cards online. The fact is that credit card companies want you to use their card online for everything. Ask your card company if you’ll be responsible for any fraud or stolen activity. You’ll likely be happy with their response. Plus if you think you are getting ripped off by the online computer repair service, you can use your credit card company to dispute the charge. Note: that a bank debit cards with a Visa or MasterCard usually don’t offer dispute services.
Because this new option for residential computer repair is so popular, a lot of new companies are sprouting up constantly. There are a few important things to look for in a remote computer repair service. Are they in the same country as you? This important because if laws are different, you’ll have a tough time disputing a problem with them should you come to have one. Do they have a No Fix, No Fee guarantee? Many per minute or hour services charge you for their time and do not guarantee to fix anything. What does that say about their trust and training of their own techs? Finally, be cautious of an insanely low price. In my experience, low pricing always means inexperience or a scam. You can expect to get a better deal than any in-shop or on-site service however.
So the next time you have a computer problem, give the remote approach a try. If you find a no fix, no fee guarantee companies then you truly have nothing to lose and such a convenience to gain.
This article was written by the folks at RemoteComputerRepair.org. Visit them at www.remotecomputerrepair.org or by calling 1-888-392-2785.
Basic information of copying CD’s
CD copiers are used to make copies of database from original CD to blank CD. They are made of 12 disk drives, one of which is called the parent CD. The CD copier is designed in such a way that it can copy one CD or several CD’s at a single point of time. These copiers are used in homes and offices where there is a need to replicate a CD for distribution purposes.
They are of different types. Here is a brief description of some of the common CD copiers-
Single CD copier - This kind of CD copier is made of two CD drives in which one holds the blank CD and another holds the original CD. The models based on single CD copying can do CD writing, re-writing and CD reading. A single CD copier does not require any computer interface or driver software to process CD copying. The single CD copiers can be used as external CD-R/ROM/RW drives.
Multiple CD copier - Another popular CD Copying hardware available in the market for duplicating the CD is called multiple CD Copiers. As the name suggests it contains several empty CD slots where a single slot is meant for the duplication of original CD. This one CD slot is arranged in the form of tall tower. A multiple CD copier can also serve the same purposes as that of a single CD copier by providing quality CD writing, rewriting and CD reading services.
In order to buy a quality CD copier, the buyer should check the product review, charges and functions of the copier. Here are some important tips that the buyers must remember while choosing a copier-
Speed of the CD copier - When purchasing a CD copier, have a proper check on its speed. It must be able to duplicate the CD at a fast pace. You must choose a CD copier having speed of 52X or more for a speedy recording. Always remember that a fast CD copier can easily duplicate a 650MB CD within three minutes.
Check the form of CD - In order to duplicate the CD conveniently without making use of computer, one can choose a standalone CD copier. The one, which can easily fit into a CPU’S drive bay and provides hassle free CD burning.
For further information on CD Copier,CD Duplication and CD Packaging. Please contact A1 Duplication Ltd directly on +44 (0)20 8748 0440 or visit at www.a1duplication.co.uk
They are of different types. Here is a brief description of some of the common CD copiers-
Single CD copier - This kind of CD copier is made of two CD drives in which one holds the blank CD and another holds the original CD. The models based on single CD copying can do CD writing, re-writing and CD reading. A single CD copier does not require any computer interface or driver software to process CD copying. The single CD copiers can be used as external CD-R/ROM/RW drives.
Multiple CD copier - Another popular CD Copying hardware available in the market for duplicating the CD is called multiple CD Copiers. As the name suggests it contains several empty CD slots where a single slot is meant for the duplication of original CD. This one CD slot is arranged in the form of tall tower. A multiple CD copier can also serve the same purposes as that of a single CD copier by providing quality CD writing, rewriting and CD reading services.
In order to buy a quality CD copier, the buyer should check the product review, charges and functions of the copier. Here are some important tips that the buyers must remember while choosing a copier-
Speed of the CD copier - When purchasing a CD copier, have a proper check on its speed. It must be able to duplicate the CD at a fast pace. You must choose a CD copier having speed of 52X or more for a speedy recording. Always remember that a fast CD copier can easily duplicate a 650MB CD within three minutes.
Check the form of CD - In order to duplicate the CD conveniently without making use of computer, one can choose a standalone CD copier. The one, which can easily fit into a CPU’S drive bay and provides hassle free CD burning.
For further information on CD Copier,CD Duplication and CD Packaging. Please contact A1 Duplication Ltd directly on +44 (0)20 8748 0440 or visit at www.a1duplication.co.uk
Buying a new Mouse: Guide
There are many kinds of mouse you can find in the market nowadays, which are varying in price and function. You may wonder which one you should buy, which one would suit to your need.
Here is some information to help you get more understanding what are you going to pay for. I hope that it can help you find the best one that you are looking for.
Step I.
First of all, you should take a look at the back of your computer case and find the port. Normal PC should have a PS/2 port which has a shape like the picture shown below.
The green one is PS/2 port for mouse
But for laptops, most them don't have this connector. They use the USB port instead. The USB port has a shape like the picture shown below.
The USB port and connector
Nowadays, the used of USB port is keep increasing rapidly. Sometimes you may find that it hard to find a PS/2 version of the mouse that you want to buy. However, there's a PS/2-USB adaptor available in the market.
Step II.
Wheel, Optical or Laser?? You may wonder what is different between these kinds of mouse. For wheel mouse is kind of outdated in present. It's quite hard to find one in the market nowadays so I wouldn't mention it and I won't recommend you to buy it. The different between Optical mouse and Laser mouse is that the Optical mouse uses an infrared to track the movement of patterns on the surface. It need a mouse pad to work well. For laser mouse, it uses an invisible light instead. It can be used on surfaces with less defined texture such as metal or dark woodgrain desktops without mouse pad needed. For example, try using an optical mouse on a piece of high gloss photo paper and it'll probably not move while a laser mouse is still able to see surface detail. But the price of laser mouse is, of course, higher than the optical one.
Step III.
Corded or Cordless?? I've made a post of this question already. Please take a look.
Here is the link ... Corded VS Cordless Mouse
Step IV.
Next, you should decide that which kind of job that you want your new mouse doing for you.
* For basic users - I'll recommend that you should buy any mouse that has a reasonable price, acceptable durability in a color and style that you like. But you should concern about the size as well, choose the mouse that has a suitable size with your hand.
* For internet users - I'd recommend you to buy a mouse that has a scroll wheel button. It's a must !!
* For advanced users - You'd know quite much about these mice. The thing I'd recommend is find a mouse that have many buttons which you can bind it to perform specific task, it' ll save you a lot of time. Just find one that suit to your working style.
* For gamers - There are many mice that design for gamers available in the market. I' ll make a post of these mice in details later. The link will be placed here soon.
Step V.
For advanced users and gamers. The things you should know before select the mouse is:
DPI or Dots Per Inch - The DPI is the amount of Dots per inch the optical sensor can read. The Higher DPI means more sensitive the mouse can be. High and adjustable DPI mouse is suits for gamers, especially Action or FPS(First Person Shooting) gamers.
A good gaming example would be in a first person shooter when many gun types are used. When roaming free you will want a high DPI on your mouse so that a quick movement can be performed with ease. However when sniping a lower DPI will help with a much slower movement giving greater accuracy in this instance. If you do a lot of gaming or have reason to believe that changing the DPI will be beneficial to you then a mouse with on-the-fly DPI changing will be a great use.
Step VI.
Choose brand, color, and style.
I'll make a post of mouse brands analysis in details later. The link will be placed here soon.
Step VII.
Make a decision and buy one !!
Hope this post will help you, and enjoy with your new mouse ^^
iGofx
More articles available on my blog.
http://danewblog.blogspot.com
Here is some information to help you get more understanding what are you going to pay for. I hope that it can help you find the best one that you are looking for.
Step I.
First of all, you should take a look at the back of your computer case and find the port. Normal PC should have a PS/2 port which has a shape like the picture shown below.
The green one is PS/2 port for mouse
But for laptops, most them don't have this connector. They use the USB port instead. The USB port has a shape like the picture shown below.
The USB port and connector
Nowadays, the used of USB port is keep increasing rapidly. Sometimes you may find that it hard to find a PS/2 version of the mouse that you want to buy. However, there's a PS/2-USB adaptor available in the market.
Step II.
Wheel, Optical or Laser?? You may wonder what is different between these kinds of mouse. For wheel mouse is kind of outdated in present. It's quite hard to find one in the market nowadays so I wouldn't mention it and I won't recommend you to buy it. The different between Optical mouse and Laser mouse is that the Optical mouse uses an infrared to track the movement of patterns on the surface. It need a mouse pad to work well. For laser mouse, it uses an invisible light instead. It can be used on surfaces with less defined texture such as metal or dark woodgrain desktops without mouse pad needed. For example, try using an optical mouse on a piece of high gloss photo paper and it'll probably not move while a laser mouse is still able to see surface detail. But the price of laser mouse is, of course, higher than the optical one.
Step III.
Corded or Cordless?? I've made a post of this question already. Please take a look.
Here is the link ... Corded VS Cordless Mouse
Step IV.
Next, you should decide that which kind of job that you want your new mouse doing for you.
* For basic users - I'll recommend that you should buy any mouse that has a reasonable price, acceptable durability in a color and style that you like. But you should concern about the size as well, choose the mouse that has a suitable size with your hand.
* For internet users - I'd recommend you to buy a mouse that has a scroll wheel button. It's a must !!
* For advanced users - You'd know quite much about these mice. The thing I'd recommend is find a mouse that have many buttons which you can bind it to perform specific task, it' ll save you a lot of time. Just find one that suit to your working style.
* For gamers - There are many mice that design for gamers available in the market. I' ll make a post of these mice in details later. The link will be placed here soon.
Step V.
For advanced users and gamers. The things you should know before select the mouse is:
DPI or Dots Per Inch - The DPI is the amount of Dots per inch the optical sensor can read. The Higher DPI means more sensitive the mouse can be. High and adjustable DPI mouse is suits for gamers, especially Action or FPS(First Person Shooting) gamers.
A good gaming example would be in a first person shooter when many gun types are used. When roaming free you will want a high DPI on your mouse so that a quick movement can be performed with ease. However when sniping a lower DPI will help with a much slower movement giving greater accuracy in this instance. If you do a lot of gaming or have reason to believe that changing the DPI will be beneficial to you then a mouse with on-the-fly DPI changing will be a great use.
Step VI.
Choose brand, color, and style.
I'll make a post of mouse brands analysis in details later. The link will be placed here soon.
Step VII.
Make a decision and buy one !!
Hope this post will help you, and enjoy with your new mouse ^^
iGofx
More articles available on my blog.
http://danewblog.blogspot.com
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