Starting off with Vista; those of you with this Operating System would be advised to download the Service Pack from www.microsoft.com or via Windows Update as along with fixing hundreds of little bugs [...]]]> We have two things to discuss today; Vista Service Pack 2 and cheap broadband.

Starting off with Vista; those of you with this Operating System would be advised to download the Service Pack from www.microsoft.com or via Windows Update as along with fixing hundreds of little bugs and glitches it also adds a number of new features. Most notable changes include support for Via Technologies new Nano 64-Bit CPU, support for Bluetooth 2.1, BluRay writing directly from the Operating System and improved performance for WiFi connections.

This update is 348mb in size meaning that you would really need to be on a broadband connection to consider the download; this leads me neatly on to my next point.

I was contacted this week by a reader who was still using a dial up connection. I had assumed that this hardcore group of users had disbanded and joined the 21^st century but it appears that I was mistaken. Try as I might, I cannot rationalise in my own head why someone would still be using dial-up; it’s slow, temperamental, ties up your phone line, and if you use it for more than a handful of minutes a week it can actually work out quite costly.

In order to reach out to these users (and indeed anyone currently on an overpriced broadband package) I thought it prudent to overview the cheapest broadband packages on the market; these represent a perfect stepping stone from dial-up. The following recommendations are suited primarily to light Internet users and as such I would not recommend them for intensive use such as gaming or heavy downloading.

Sky TV – Sky TV customers can get free 2Mbps Broadband with a 2GB usage limit when they also subscribe to Sky Talk (the most basic of which is free) for the phone calls. Of course you still have to pay your line rental to BT, as you would with dial up. While 2GB isn’t a particularly large bandwidth limit it will satisfy most home users and is in excess of what could be feasibly downloaded via dial-up in a month.

Talk Talk – Talk Talk is £6.49 a month in addition to your usual line rental and includes 8GB Broadband, a 40GB usage limit, free local calls and free national weekend and evening calls. The company has had a fair amount of bad press over the last couple of years mainly due to its unprecedented growth since its incorporation in 2003 but things seemed to have improved of late. If the planned merger with Tiscali goes ahead, Talk Talk will have become the largest residential broadband provider in the UK.

Tiscali – For £14.99 a month including your monthly line rental you can get up to 8GB broadband and unlimited free weekend calls. As BT would usually charge you around £12 for your line rental you are essentially getting a capable broadband package for less than £3 a month.

PlusNet – If you don’t fancy the idea of having your telephone calls handled by your broadband provider, the PlusNet Value package at £5.99 a month is an extremely competitive standalone package. With speeds up to 8Mbps, a 10GB daily download limit and an unlimited evening download limit the PlusNet deal is also surprisingly fully featured.

Before committing to a broadband package it might be an idea to first check out www.moneysupermarket.com to compare a number of other deals on the market. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t levy a set of charge all of them will provide the equipment you require and many of them will even chuck in a free wireless router; there really is no reason to stick with dial-up.

Once you’ve worked with computers for even a moderate amount of time, there’s one thing that you’ll notice time and time again – Software never works correctly the first around. If you were to buy a car from Audi, you wouldn’t expect to have to take [...]]]>

Once you’ve worked with computers for even a moderate amount of time, there’s one thing that you’ll notice time and time again – Software never works correctly the first around. If you were to buy a car from Audi, you wouldn’t expect to have to take it back to the garage every couple of months to have it updated for numerous glitches, for example to stop a bug that makes the car become unstable when used in conjunction with a certain type of stereo. Computers are a different kettle of fish however.

A typical version of Microsoft Windows when it is released contains tens of thousands of bugs, some of which they know about and some of which they are yet to discover. If they were to wait until every last one had been rectified then we’d be waiting for an eternity for the product to be released which is why dynamic updating has become so popular in todays Internet society.

The manufacturers of most computing products now make a list of any bugs and defects that have been discovered in their software since the launch date and set about correcting them. Once a solution to a particular problem has been discovered, the correction is often put onto their website for members of the public to download for free.

Microsoft is probably the best example of a company that uses such a piece of technology. If you connect to the Internet and then open up Internet Explorer in the usual way then do the following: Go to ‘Tools’ and then ‘Windows Update’, after a short delay a web page will appear, now click on ‘Scan for updates’ and Internet Explorer will now go off looking for specific updates for your computer to fix known issues that have been discovered. After a minute or so, you should now select any updates that you wish to apply (if you have free Internet access then I suggest you download them all) and then click download. They will all now install onto your machine automatically, and who knows, that annoying glitch you’ve been experiencing for a while may be a widely documented problem that Microsoft corrected a long time ago.

Microsoft Office can be updated in the same way by clicking on ‘Office Update’ on the web page that first appears. Probably the best thing about both of these updates is that no information is sent to Microsoft whatsoever and so they are unable to determine anything about your computer or any personal information. Even if you are not experiencing any difficulties then I suggest you still update your machine anyway as there may be a potentially serious problem of which you are currently unaware (an Internet security vulnerability, for example).

Other, non-Microsoft software can benefit from these kinds of updates as well. For example, the Norton range of products use a program called ‘Live Update’ which does pretty much the same thing.

In addition, if you have any form of Anti-Virus software then I suggest you update this every month or so that your computer can detect the newest viruses that are continually being released. Even if the program in question doesn’t have an update program then try going to the manufactures website and having a look around to see if you can spot anything to update your software.

Finally, hardware devices (e.g. scanner, graphics card, modem etc.) are the things that benefit most from having their controlling software (known as a driver) updated. A driver is a program that lets the computer know how to control a piece of hardware that is interfacing with it; imagine it like your dad giving you instructions on how to use your legs to walk or how to use your arms to throw a ball when you were a kid. Without a driver, you could have the printer quite happily connected to your computer although the machine wouldn’t have a clue how to even start using it. The easiest way to go about updating these drivers, which will allow your hardware to run with more stability and often at a greater speed is to find out who makes individual components of your computer and their particular model numbers (the people you bought it off will be able to tell you). Once again, you can now go surfing the websites of these manufacturers looking for the updated software or head to www.driverguide.com.

To summarise, don’t underestimate how much of a change can be gained from updating all the software on your computer. Last year, when I used to live back in Devon I’d often take a customers hardware away for a couple of hours and update all the drivers and software over the Internet and if they’d never done it before, the resultant increase in stability and speed was staggering for something that you could do completely free of charge. Updating isn’t for the light-hearted however, so if in doubt please read a more detailed guide from the Internet or write in and I’ll do a more detailed follow-up in the forthcoming weeks.

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