Home Computer Talk

When I moved to Australia I had a laptop computer with all my music from years of downloads on it. Unfortunately, not long after I arrived it stopped working. The power supply was the problem that we couldn’t seem to fix and Mr. JM provided a different laptop for me to use. He tried to swap over the hard disk but the IBM didn’t want to know about it.

So I downloaded what I could and found other music from his collection, but there was always the hope that I could get back my music. But time passed, we got married, I worked on Fiction Scribe, Write Anyway, Book Stacks and Long Relationships and eventually Web TV Hub - but every so often I missed my music.

A little while back, Mr. JM went looking on eBay for a USB hard disk enclosure so he could access my old HDD and get the music for me. Along the way he came across something much better. (Yes, he did get the HDD enclosure and uploaded my music for me. Yay!)

On eBay, under the description ‘Portable 2.5″ HDD DivX Player USB MP3 TV DVD MPEG-4 CD’ was an awesome idea. It is a Media player that talks to PC, DVD or video player or TV. It plays all kinds of multimedia, including Xvid & DivX, MPG’s, MP4’s, VOB’s, VCD & SVCD files as well as MP3 files. (For those who are a bit confused, these are all types of video standards, except the MP3, which is a compressed sound file.)

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Computers have become ubiquitous in our lives. In the 20th century, there was an explosion of knowledge across many fields and many pundits described it as an exponential growth. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to riding in luxurious cars at a pace that would frighten our ancestors. From using leeches to suck blood to a myriad of drugs and surgical treatments to treat the ills foisted on us by our modern life.

In ‘1984’ and other classic books, the future was seen as dark and totalitarian and the computer was seen by many as the harbinger of doom that would enable the enslavement of society. While many of the ‘dark’ predictions have come to pass, (steadily increasing numbers of laws to regulate us, statements from government that mean the exact opposite of what they say, new media that simply parrots what the powers-that-be want to tell us) the computer turned out to be a tool of hope for people.

It may change soon with the coming of ‘Internet 2’ which passes far more control back to officialdom, but when computers arrived, it meant a smart person could match it with the big boys – and they did. Originally just a plaything of tech types, the PC quickly became a mainstream tool.

The original IBM PC came with a 360KB floppy disk drive, (no hard disk) and a massive 640KB of memory. For colour screen you could choose green text or sometimes amber text.

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Let’s face it, notebooks are sexy.
They get the advertising, the cool folk have them
and you can show them off wherever you go.

But… do you need one?

The PC industry is based around getting people to buy things they don’t need. For that matter, the entire western economy is based around the principle, but as in the car industry, the computer world has made an art form of getting users to buy the latest, the most powerful, the… well, you get the idea.

In fact, the PC world now has you buying product that isn’t even ready yet, then they release the fixes after you tell them what’s wrong. Imagine if Ford didn’t put brakes on the new model and waited for customers to tell them before they decided to fit them?

For more info on the pictured laptop, check Apple Reporter

Do you need a notebook? Even one as sexy as the MAC Air? If you travel and need to work as you go, you can justify it. If you only need to access your email while on the move, with an occasional web access, buy a phone. The new ones provide all kinds of goodies and you don’t need a shoulder bag.
Desktops, for an equivalent price, are faster, come with better specifications and will include anything from a 19 inch to 24 inch widescreen monitor. You can expand a desktop PC without having to pay a technician and usually you can simply add in the extras, not replace what you have as you need to with a laptop.

It’s very unusual for a PC technician to have to repair a dropped desktop, but a slight miscalculation as you turn around can send your sexy laptop to the morgue in a blink. They can usually be revived with an expensive injection of parts, but most companies don’t warranty against accident unless you pay a hefty insurance premium up front.

With a desktop, the most common part getting nuked by accident is the keyboard – for $20 you can buy a perfectly good replacement.

A rule to start living buy is, buy what you need, not what they want you to buy!

From the Internet…
Costello wants to buy a Computer from Abbott
ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: Thanks. I’m setting up an office in my den, and I’m thinking about buying a computer.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: No, the names Lou.
ABBOTT: Your computer?
COSTELLO: I don’t own a computer. I want to buy one.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: I told you, my names Lou.
ABBOTT: What about Windows?
COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with windows?
COSTELLO: I don’t know. What will I see when I look in the windows?
ABBOTT: Wallpaper.
COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.
ABBOTT: Software for windows?
COSTELLO: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses and run my business. What have you got?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
ABBOTT: I just did.
COSTELLO: You just did what?
ABBOTT: Recommend something.
COSTELLO: You recommended something?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: For my office?
ABBOTT: Yes.
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It can be a complex question at the best of times.

So many people trying in so many ways to make you pay for the evil intentions of some little programming nerd in a back room whose social contact consists of ordering pizza on the web, & briefly ‘not-looking’ at the delivery guy from the supermarket as he drops off the ordered groceries.

First, best & cheapest method… Don’t be an administrator on your own PC!

What does that mean? When Windows installs it asks for a user name & then installs that user with Administrator privileges – which means that default user can do ANYTHING! So, any piece of code that comes funneling back from the internet into your sacred citadel of data will have the Power of the Administrator to do anything the little backroom boy can think of – delete files, hide itself, re-write the Master Boot Record.

So, create yourself a user-level user; Give it a name & click Followed by If you use this account to log in & do your daily computing & Internet browsing, you immediately nuke any malware – it can’t actually do anything damaging to your PC.

There is a negative to this – if you want to install software, mostly you will need administrator rights to do so. This can be done by either right-click on a program installation file & choose & enter your Administrator account & password, or choosing that option when a CD or DVD pops up the Run As dialog box.

Note that you can still download software, music & video – also updates for official programs (for example the Windows Media player codecs) will still install, but to run your download programs you will need to Run As or log in as the Administrator account.

Feel free to ask questions or for more explanation. I will cover using protective software & Security Updates in posts to come.

Continued from yesterday…

MS Vista and MS Office continue on the upgrade path, yet talking to Mr JM, and by experience among friends and colleagues, nobody actually uses more than 10 or 15% of the features included. Most people would be just as productive with Windows 98SE and Office 97, yet release after release is sold and the ongoing chase for your hard-earned cash continues.

When Windows XP first released, it came with a need for 64MB of RAM and could actually be run on 32MB. With Service Pack 3 just released, (see here for details if you’re technically inclined) you’d find it difficult to get decent performance with less than 256MB of RAM and 512MB would be better.

Vista is released with a suggested minimum of 1GB of RAM, but anyone trying to run it in that configuration will be very disappointed with the performance – practical resources would be 2GB or better. Office 2007 runs reasonably in 512MB of RAM but is happier with 1GB or more.

We’ve come a long expensive way from 1MB RAM in your desktop!

So, what to do about it? Well unless you’re a gamer, or your business is high end computer use such as graphics design or video editing, simply ask yourself, ‘Is my computer doing all I need of it?’ And remember, internet browsing is distinctly NOT one of the high end reasons for a top-of-the-line computer. If your PC is doing all you require of it, stick with it. A standard desktop should last 5 years (or more) and laptops in business use commonly have a turnover time of 3 years.

If your PC does all you need but does it too slowly, bookmark this site and call back regularly – I’ll be covering things you can do to speed it up, to clean it up, to upgrade only needed parts, and to protect your PC and information from outside interference.

Remember, you can ask questions or post experiences and I will answer them – if I can’t, Mr JM will be able to help and I will pass along his experience.

Windows, Office, ungrade

This is a story of intrigue, misdirection, conning the public and money gathering that beggars the imagination. It’s also an unstoppable game being played that fits in seamlessly with our consumer society.

The Wintel Game. The game has been played now for so long that the main player can release its main product knowing in advance that it can announce a major repair of things gotten wrong and its clients will still buy the original. One player has dropped to the background a little, forced out of the forefront by the limitations of technology, or rather of physics. But Microsoft (MS) rolls on.

What is the ‘game’? It’s been running for quite some time, ever since the guy who stated that he could see no reason why anyone would ever want more than 1MB (MegaByte) of memory in their PC. That’s right, 1 MB! You most likely have 20,000 times that (2 Gigabyte) in your USB drive. Cameras commonly have 5,000 times that amount.

Then Bill Gates and Intel got their heads together and so began the Wintel Game. How it works is this… You buy a computer, whiz-bang-for-your-buck and state-of-the-art. Within a few months, MS releases a new version of Windows, or perhaps of MS Office that pushes the boundary out further. Your pride and joy now runs slower and soon you see that flashy new Intel computer being advertised and find a need to upgrade your hardware to regain the speed you had on your original machine.

One way they did this is by inserting Easter Eggs in the software. Easter eggs are undocumented codes that will run various functions (there was a flight simulator hidden in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 had a game). MS is supposed to have officially stopped inserting Easter eggs, but there was only ever one reason to do it – Easter eggs increased the size of the executable file and so brought the user closer to requiring an upgrade of their hardware.

So as we explore further into the computing world, and as you learn the tips and tricks I glean from the labyrinthine mind of a professional Helpdesk engineer, you will be better placed to decide if you want to continue playing the Wintel Game.

G’day Home Computer Talk readers!

My name is JM, and I am the new writer here at Home Computer Talk.

I have been working with computers since I was a little girl. I have always loved the potential of computers and what you can do with them. I first revelled in typing and printing my novels, but I since discovered so much more.

I have been blogging for years and have dabbled with many things to do with internet as well as offline computer programs. I even enjoy dabbling in PC gaming. I’ve built a career online, and I also write at Fiction Scribe, Long Relationships, The Book Stacks, and Write Anyway here on the 451 network.

Since moving to Australia and marrying my IT department soul mate, I’ve come to know even more about computers and what it takes to make them work. (And fix them when necessary.) He has been working with computers since the days of DOS and text gaming.

I’m looking forward to writing here, and I hope you find my posts to be informative. If there is anything you would like to see posted about here, don’t hesitate to say so.

If you’re interested in previous posts, all posts written by the previous writers have been put in the “Previous Author” folder. I’ll be creating new categories for easy navigation of my posts.

If you ever need to contact me, you can click the ‘contact me’ button on the right under the site description. Feel free to ask any questions you have about your home computer.

Cheers!

Lenovo and Toshiba have unveiled their new ultra mobile PCs(UMPCs) at CES 2008. The Lenovo device runs Linux and has a 4.8 inch screen and a camera. Toshiba’s version runs Windows Vista. Both devices offer the newest wireless internet protocol, WiMax.
Here is a video of the Lenovo device at work:

And here’s one of Toshiba’s:

Whether either of these devices will be successful remains to be seen. Existing UMPC’s carry a hefty price tag of $1,000 or more-for that price you can get a very nice laptop. UMPC’s are going to have to come down in price and prove their value before they become any kind of threat to laptops or digital media players.

computers, toshiba, lenovo, UMPC, linux, vista, CES 2008

The 2008 CES(Consumer Electronics Show) is underway and unveiling the hottest new gadgets and electronics due to be introduced in the coming year.
Here are a few videos from the event. First is one of Bill Gates’ keynote speech, and below it an overview of the best of the best electronics and gadgers introduced at the show.

computers, CES 2008, Bill Gates

If you have a laptop you know how hot they can get. What you may not know is that heat can be lethal to your motherboard and hard drive. The solution is to get yourself a laptop cooler pad. These come in different varieties-some have actual fans on them, others just raise your laptop up and allow greater air circulation. Here’s a video review of one popular brand, Targus. Their cooling pad has actual fans on it plus some extra usb ports.
Take a look and let me know what you think!

computers, laptops, notebooks, notebook coolers, laptop accessories

A new malware making the rounds offers a new twist-it takes over your desktop and won’t go away unless you pay $35! It’s being called ransomware. It locks the user out of their desktop and displays a full screen, poorly spelled warning telling the user their anti-virus/anti-spyware license has expired, and goes on to a grammatically nightmarish explanation of what could happen if their supposed “license” isn’t renewed. Clicking on “Click to activate new license” prompts the user to call a 900 number in order to fork over their $35, and offers two international numbers in case they have any problems. The 900 number appears to belong to a payment processor used by porn sites. Unfortunately, while the bad spelling and grammar are a clear tip off that it’s a scam, by the time any of you are viewing the “warning” it’s too late. The only way to regain control of the infected system is to pay the $35.
Yikes! You read that right-you really do have to pay up to get your system back. It’s not yet known if reformatting the hard drive would do the trick, but you can’t even get access to the command prompt to try with this thing. It literally locks you out of your system. The best way to fight back is with prevention. Keep your anti virus and anti-spyware software up to date, don’t click on links in emails from people you don’t know, and visit only well known, familiar websites.

malware, internet security, anti virus, spyware