Be prepared to give me sympathy because this week has been pretty poor for me on the health side of things; it seems that whenever I meet anyone who’s feeling the slightest bit poorly that I attract the illness like a magnet and manage to cling on to it for weeks on end!I try not to let these things get to me although it did start me thinking of the health resources that are available to us in the UK on the Internet which I’d never considered before.The most obvious website is NHS Direct (www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk) which is, quite obviously provided by … Read the rest

Having been using Windows XP for as long as I can remember, when I installed Windows 98 on an old machine the other day I noticed the complete lack of multimedia support provided by the software supplied with the Operating System – Windows Media Player.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way since the update to Media Player is available for free from the Internet for all users of Windows 98, ME and 2000.Obviously the new features that you acquire via the upgrade vary depending on the version of media player that you’re upgrading from but this week I plan to show … Read the rest

Online food shopping has been gradually growing in popularity for the last couple of years; something I have yet to fully understand for a number of reasons.In my opinion, if you were going to go shopping then personally I think it would be a better idea to actually drive to the shops, have a look around, get some fresh air and check out the special offers and quality of the produce before purchase.In addition, online shopping for food doesn’t take significantly less time than doing it in person, you have to wait around the house for the goods to arrive and you usually … Read the rest

You may remember a few weeks ago when I reviewed an alternative to PC computing; the Apple iMac. In similar contrast, there is also a range of Operating Systems for the PC that serve as an alternative to the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems, the most popular of which is generally considered to be Linux. This product is particularly popular with the Internet community as it is written in a way so that anybody can get hold of the code for free and modify it to correct any problems they may find which can then be put back into the public domain for others to use. This means that you can get hold of a stable and fast Operating System for very little or even no money.

Unfortunately however most Linux releases have not been able to establish themselves as a viable alternative for the majority of home users for a … Read the rest

One of the first articles I wrote for the Herald Express focused on new Anti-Virus software that was available on the market and the benefits that they could provide to the average user.As an alternative to going out and buying the software I briefly mentioned a website I’d recently discovered that allows you to scan your PC for free over the Internet.This website was put at the back of my mind for the last year or so until last week when I had a customer whose PC had a virus but as a result the machine wouldn’t allow me to run Norton Anti-Virus.Although there are a number of workarounds such as … Read the rest