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Vista SP2 and Cheap Broadband

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:07:41 +0000

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.

Podcasting

admin — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:30:52 +0000

Another common 21^st century buzzword is ‘podcast’ which is a curious portmanteau of the words iPod and Broadcast; the iPod being, of course, a popular portable MP3 player developed by Apple. The term is used to describe a technology that allows a user to automatically download an audio file of some description for listening to later, and is no longer specifically related to the iPod as many software and hardware combinations can potentially be used.

The roots of podcasting most likely lie in the blogging world as it is the natural progression to broadcasting information via the written word. I’m sorry for chucking another buzzword in the form of ‘blogging’, but with technology suddenly becoming cool there are dozens of new ones making their way in to our vocabularies. A blog, for those of you that don’t know, is an online journal that is frequently updated and intended for the general public. I should also just mention a technology known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which provides a continuous feed detailing updates that have been made to a particular data source; a podcast site for example.

Traditional mediums such as television, radio or streaming Internet media give users little control over the time when they hear a recording whereas Podcasting allows users to download content directly on to a compatible device so that it can be listened to later. This is one of the reasons that it has become popular so quickly as in the modern world we like everything to be on demand and tailored to fit around our lifestyles, not vice versa.

Let’s say for example, that I catch the bus to work and I want something new and interesting to listen to everyday. By heading to a podcast directory such as www.podcast.net I can choose to subscribe to as many podcasts as I want from a list that runs in to the tens of thousands. Then, whenever I synchronise my iPod of other generic MP3 player with my computer any new downloads available from my podcast list will be downloaded for me to listen to later. The list of subjects is extensive and includes everything from the arts and entertainment to politics, computing, music, religion and the news.

Unless you want to download and manually copy podcasts on to your MP3 player as and when they are released, you will need some software such as the free program ‘Juice’ (http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net) to allow you to automate the process. Once the software is installed you are free to add as many podcasts as you feel that you will have time to listen to and Juice will from then on ensure that you’re kept up to date. Fortunately there are versions of Juice to run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS – it is very much a cross platform compatible application which is very much in keeping with the podcasting ethos of access for all.

A subject as diverse and with as much content as Podcasting cannot really be convincingly covered in one article so the best tip I can give you is that if you are at all interested then download the software, visit the directories and take some time to see what’s out there. Yes, there is a load of absolute rubbish but all you ever have to do is hit the unsubscribe button; as with many things in life you have to sift through the chaff to get at the wheat.

I do have one last tip I feel I should share – Subscribe to the Chris Moyles podcast; it’s fantastic!

Facebook vs. MySpace

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:30:14 +0000

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 21^st 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 to see friends who are already added to their profile results in a pond ripple effect as you’ll often find others that you know in this fashion and before long you have a huge group of socially intertwined people all communicating together.

Naively I hoped that things would remain simple and that the established and popular MySpace would continue to reign supreme to avoid my having to set up another profile and search for my friends again from scratch. I assumed that with such a relatively simple concept that there wouldn’t be any real difference between the two but remarkably, there is. I’m now one of the converted and this week I’ll be giving you reason to follow me:

Profile Pages

Whilst MySpace does offer the user a larger degree of customisation due to the fact that HTML code can be used to create a truly individual page unfortunately this is also its undoing. If everybody in the world was a natural web developer with programming skills then our website design company Refresh Creations would be pretty short of work however luckily for us, this isn’t the case. MySpace pages are extremely inconsistent and often poorly designed; for the record choosing to put black italic text on a dark purple background makes for extremely hard reading.

Because Facebook doesn’t allow this degree of customisation, pages are always black text on a white background – the way they should be. Facebook does allow a large amount of non visual customisation by allowing users to add and share small applications which can enhance your profile page and these range from the genuinely useful to the completely pointless.

Advertising

I am sympathetic to the fact that people need to make money, however, MySpace appears to have turned in to one great big advert just recently. With Facebook there is one advert which is always in the same place and as such it doesn’t affect the user experience or make you feel constantly targeted.

Community

Unfortunately MySpace appears to now be a breeding ground for spammers; practically every day a random scantily clad woman requested to be my friend. Whilst I would sarcastically say this kind of behaviour is normal in my life when I’m around the opposite sex, these women were all blatantly advertising sites of an adult nature and so I was forced to reject them all. Since Facebook doesn’t allow users to add friends in bulk you don’t tend to suffer this problem and the focus appears to be more on connecting to, and staying in contact with genuine friends rather than simply winning an online popularity contest. Facebook keeps you up to date with anything that your friends have added or updated whereas MySpace relies on you laboriously checking each and every one of your friends profiles individually in order to stay up to date.

I haven’t had space to cover all of my reasons for preferring Facebook, so sign up for a free account at www.facebook.com to see for yourself. Whilst I still appreciate that MySpace is a good social networking site unfortunately unless they make some changes they will continue to see users flock to Facebook in their droves.

ISDN Lines

admin — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 14:55:53 +0000

For any of you that have been on the Internet recently, you may of noticed that it is seems surprisingly slow. You’d have thought that in the 21^st Century, when our computers are now thousands of times faster than they were only 15 years ago that we’d have come up with something far more inventive than the sluggish 56k modem to connect to the Internet with.

You see, even though adverts for processors such as the Pentium 4 make claims that the Internet will be faster than ever before if you buy their product, this idea falls down quite quickly when you consider that your speed to the Internet will still be stuck at the incredibly low speed of your modem.

There are several alternatives to this speed restriction which are slowly becoming available and it’s these which I plan to discuss today.

Option 1: BT Home Highway –

BT Home Highway is powered by ISDN which allows you to have three numbers in total for your household, although you can only use a maximum of two of these lines at any one time. This allows you to make a call on one line whilst using the other line to either go on the Internet or to allow someone else in the household to make a second phone call.

The main advantage is that the line that is designated for data is capable of transferring information at 128kbps digitally which works out about 3 times faster than a 56kbps analogue modem. Most people using this service stick to the standard 64kbps speed as this means that they can still use the second line free of charge and can make use of one of the many ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) that allow you to dial up a freephone number for a monthly subscription.

In terms of pricing, BT Home Highway currently costs around £75 for a conversion from an existing BT line and then £24 per month total line rental for all three lines. This £24 per month includes £2.80 worth of free calls every month.

Home Highway isn’t available in all areas of the county so you are advised to give BT a call to check availability in your area and it might be necessary for an engineer to pop by to confirm that you can receive the service.

Option 2: BT ADSL –

ADSL is a much faster technology than ISDN as you can get incoming data speeds up to 500kbps, although it’s availability around Torbay is very limited due to the massive delays in rolling out the new service across the UK.

Those lucky enough to be in an ADSL covered area will be looking at paying around £150 to convert from a standard or ISDN BT phone line and then a monthly line rental of £39.99 per month. This is obviously the more expensive way of getting online, especially when you consider that unlike Home Highway, you only get one number. The service is justified when you consider that for the time being, this is the fastest but still practical way of getting online. On top of these charges, you will also have to pay your call charges unless you get an un-metered, subscription based ISP such as BT Internet.

There are a number of other service providers willing to offer you similar services to BT, such as NTL or Eurobell however there are a few drawbacks regarding these that you should be made aware of. Principally, Eurobell is not supported by many of the un-metered ISP’s such as BT Internet or Freeserve which means that you will have to pay for your call costs whilst you’re connected which could soon mount up if you spend a moderate amount of time online. NTLs service is good nationwide although seems to be very restricted in the southwest.

Computer Viruses

admin — Sat, 27 Jan 2001 13:45:18 +0000

Following on from last weeks article relating to potential threats to your children when it comes to them using the Internet, I thought I would continue the theme of Internet safety by identifying one of the key areas that could affect your computer on the web; Viruses.

In order to get a better understanding of what people consider to constitute a virus, I looked the word up in a dictionary and discovered the meaning for an organic based virus or viruses is as follows.

‘Viruses – Viruses do not respire, nor do they display irritability; they do not move and nor do they grow; however, they do most certainly reproduce, and may adapt to new hosts.’

Now to compare that definition to the computer style of virus, the last statement is certainly the most important – ‘They do most certainly reproduce and may adapt to new hosts’.

A computer virus is a man made program designed to infect a machine, cause a desired side effect; destructive or otherwise and then replicate itself into any other files it may come into contact with. The user of the computer could then pass on this file, completely unaware that it is infected.

Once the infected file is run, the virus then again has a chance to self-replicate and to be passed on. Much in the same way a human virus can cause the person to sneeze to pass itself on, a computer virus can trigger the computer to send out an infected file to as many other computers as possible, often e-mailing itself to everybody in your e-mail address book for example.

So why do people make viruses since there is no way to extract gain from it since even admitting to constructing a virus with intent to cause harm could land you in court? The answer is because they enjoy the challenge, a chance to be acknowledged by fellow hackers and the fact that they can possibly do it without getting caught – basically 21^st century vandalism. No one likes a vandal though, and so luckily there are many good programs that are available on the market that allow you to even the playing field.

Simply speaking, there are two options, you can either buy a Virus Scanner package from a computer store or use a Virus Scanner program for free over the Internet. In the first instance, you won’t go far wrong if you look at the sites for Doctor Solomon’s Anti-Virus, McAfee VirusScan or Norton Anti-Virus, the addresses for which are at the end of this article. These programs not only scan all the files on your computer for viruses, but also look at files coming onto the computer by e-mail, floppy disk, CD-ROM etc., so that a virus doesn’t even get the chance to strike. Typically, these programs will cost in the region of around £20-£30, and can be easily updated for free off the Internet in order to keep informed about the dozens of viruses that are released daily.

The other option, as I mentioned above is to use a virus scanner over the Internet, essentially free, although you don’t get the same level of protection as a purchased virus scanner, as it will only detect viruses on the computer, and not warn you if a virus is sent by e-mail or attempts to load itself onto the system from an removable drive, such as CD-ROM or floppy disk. This isn’t such a big problem in my opinion, as typically viruses lay dormant for a period of time before triggering and causing damage, so as long as you give your system a quick sweep over the Internet every couple of weeks, you should have no problems, however not all viruses will act in this way and so this tactic is not foolproof by any means.

One of my favourite web-based virus scanners can be found at http://housecall.antivirus.com/pc_housecall/. The software will typically take a couple of minutes to download, but you will be sure to always have the most up-to date version.

Other than that, there are a number of simple common sense steps you can take to ensure that you minimise the possibility of a virus strike. For example, don’t download files from sources that you do not trust or e-mails from addresses you don’t recognise. In addition, many websites continually check the files stored on them for viruses and so always try to download files off these if possible. Finally, be sure to let anybody that uses your computer know that these steps should be followed and your Internet experience should be free of troubles.

To round off, it is ultimately up to you to decide which solution you want to opt for, I suggest that just to get used to principle of a virus checker, you check out the above link for the web-based virus checker and read the articles published in the links below and then make your decision based on how concerned you are with the threat of a virus and how important the data is that you are protecting.