Monthly Archives: October 2007
Facebook vs. MySpace
I’ve been putting it off and off but this month, with my willpower in tatters, I bit the bullet and signed up for a Facebook account.Since I wrote an article about MySpace last year people have been telling me to give Facebook a go but I hoped it was just a phase they were going through and that I would be fine keeping my social networking site membership to just the one; MySpace.
Social networking is the current 21st century buzzword as it allows computer users to keep in constant contact with friends and family both quickly and easily.It works by getting you to create an online profile of yourself and from here you can then search for people that you know.Once located you request that they add you as a friend and then when approved you can then view their profile and just as importantly, their friends.The ability … Read the rest
Computing Myths #2
Last week I started a list of my most hated computing myths and began setting the record straight.Unfortunately there were simply too many of them to fit into a 600 word article so we’re back again this week to hopefully complete the list.
Unnecessary Screen Savers
Screen Savers have been redundant for many years now but yet many users still insist on having them on their machines.The idea of a screen saver stemmed from the days of monochrome monitors; these had a tendency to suffer an incurable ‘burn in’ if a still image was left on the screen for an extended period of time.Fortunately modern monitors, especially TFT’s, don’t suffer from this affliction so there is absolutely no reason to have your screen saver turned on.A better idea would be to have your PC automatically switch the monitor to standby mode after a set period of time as this would … Read the rest
Computing Myths
Back in the day when I used to repair PC’s I used to hear some fantastically misinformed facts regarding PC’s and thought that when I retired from that industry and switched to selling consumables that these days would be over.Unfortunately, I then invited my good friends at Switch Computer Support to share our building and now I simply hear these myths from their customers rather than mine.
I have heard a great number of these myths in my time so I’m afraid that debunking them will involve a two part article which will continue next week.
Turning off your PC daily to save power shortens its life.
This is possibly the most popular myth floating around and, as such, it’s the one that makes me most irate.The logic behind the argument is that if you turn your PC on and off again on a regular basis that the constant cooling … Read the rest
Benchmarking
Whilst it is usually possible to get a rough idea of how well a computer will operate by simply looking at the system specification sheet, this doesn’t always give a true reflection of the machines performance.For that reason, those that want to get an accurate idea of the speed of their computer will often run a piece of benchmarking software.
Benchmark programs work by testing performance characteristics of individual sections of your computer; for example the number of calculations per second of your processor, the access time of your memory and the number of polygons per second that your graphics card can draw.The results can then be used to produce an individual score for each component along with an overall score for the entire system; such results can be helpful for those who want to identify weak spots in their computer and work on improving them.Fortunately this week I learned … Read the rest
