Well the Election is nearly upon us; I have my postal vote filled out and ready to go however I wouldn’t be too surprised if many of you were still undecided on whom it was you were thinking about voting for.So that you can make an informed decision do bear in mind that the Internet is always on hand for you to look up manifestos or research the party you are thinking about giving your vote to this year – As the TV adverts have been telling us ‘If you don’t do politics, there’s not much you do do’ so let’s all try and get out to vote this May 5^th.

There are four main parties standing that we can vote for here in the south-west, Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative and UKIP – I’m choosing not to feature the last party in this list due to our differing … Read the rest

It has been a quite a while now since I last got up on to my soap box and banged on about the advantages of broadband and how all but the most infrequent Internet users should consider making the move.A lot has changed over the last months and broadband rollout across the UK is continuing at a commendable rate with the speeds and availability of the technology continuously increasing.It has been said that by summer 2005 99.6% of the UK will have the ability to connect to broadband if they so desire.

I believe that when writing my last article I submitted it by e-mail to the Herald Express on my 512kb connection and today I will be sending it via a 1mb (1024kb) connection which doesn’t cost me a penny more; I am essentially getting double the speed that I was getting before for exactly the same cost.Along with … Read the rest

I’ve spent most of this week explaining to people why they are required to spend a small fortune on cartridges for their printers as amazingly they are genuinely surprised that when you buy a Lexmark machine for £19.99 that the cartridges that come with the machine are not only half filled but also expensive to replace.

It is amazing the hostile reaction I get as usually these people have been referred to my company by a friend with an Epson printer who bought his last replacement for a couple of quid although I suppose from a customers point of view if I can supply an Epson compatible cartridge for £1.49 then why is a Lexmark or Hewlett Packard remanufactured cartridge between 7 to 10 times more expensive?They both look the same…..

I remember Dell offering me a brand new printer some time back for £9.95 including postage.When you consider that … Read the rest

One of the biggest growth areas in the computing industry of late has been the proliferation of Voice over IP packages and the resulting popularity of them amongst Internet users.For those of you unsure exactly what this technology is all about, keep reading as I could be about to save you a fortune.

The Internet is handy as it allows us to carry data into other countries pretty much free of charge; you can instantly e-mail to a friend in America for example rather than writing a letter which would take days.This is fair enough but often e-mail just isn’t suitable for a number of reasons – Perhaps you want a more personal touch or if the call is of a business nature you may need to discuss ideas which would be a lengthy process over e-mail.Using Voice over IP software allows us to carry our voices across the Internet … Read the rest

Over the past few months I’ve mentioned the Mozilla Firefox browser several times because it is a worthy alternative to Internet Explorer not least because as well as being free it also is in my opinion a faster and more stable browser than the Microsoft equivalent.

It seems only natural then that I should digress and discuss the e-mail client available from the same people so it would compliment Firefox perfectly.I would probably pitch Mozilla Thunderbird as a viable alternative to Outlook Express as to be honest the product isn’t feature rich enough to compete on a level playing field with the expensive Microsoft Outlook 2003.Such a comment isn’t an insult to the programmers as I think it would be unreasonable to expect a free 5.8mb download to compete against a program that is dozens of times its size and comes as part of an expensive office suite.

The main … Read the rest