SAN FRANCISCO - These days, most of your electronics have miniature computers built-in: Home-theater gear, handheld devices, phones, and even appliances now have embedded smarts in the form of a microprocessor, memory, and software. And just like computer software, firmware–the software that runs on your gadgets–needs periodic updating.

Believe it or not, many new gadgets aren’t 100 percent complete when you buy them. Though a spiffy electronic toy may perform its basic functions, some of its promised features may be absent or incomplete. And to keep up with ever-changing kinds of content, your devices may require software enhancements to give old hardware new features.

To avoid antagonizing customers who might spend hundreds of dollars on a cool piece of hardware only to find a few months later that it no longer worked, manufacturers design much of their gear to allow updates. You won’t be able to get every feature of the latest and greatest product via downloadable updates, but firmware revisions can make your old equipment run faster and crash less often.

What Is Firmware?

Firmware is software stored in persistent memory–usually either flash memory or programmable, rewritable ROM (read-only memory)–that’s built into the device. Unlike apps loaded into your PC’s RAM, firmware doesn’t get erased when you power the system down. Firmware may store just the basic software needed to start up the system–like a PC’s BIOS–or it may store the entire operating system and applications suites, as with smartphones.
Why Should I Update?

Users often wonder why they should update their firmware. The real answer is “it depends.” Many PC manufacturers and motherboard makers recommend that users not upgrade a system’s BIOS, for example, unless an actual problem arises, such as memory compatibility issues, or unless the user is installing a new, unsupported CPU.

On the other hand, a Blu-ray player needs to be updated frequently, because new features on the content discs may render them unplayable on old firmware. So before you rush out to update your coffeemaker’s firmware, check the manufacturer’s recommendation first; otherwise, you might risk bricking your device (turning it into a useless assemblage of silicon and plastic) for nothing.

Of course, if you’re running third-party firmware (as in the case of a “jailbroken” iPhone), all bets are off. In this article we don’t consider updates that break the manufacturer’s warranty, so if you’re installing custom, user-created firmware, you’re well beyond the scope of this story.
Let’s start with PCs and laptops, and then move on to other computing gear, handheld devices (including smartphones), and other consumer electronics.

General Rules of Thumb for Updating Firmware

A few general rules for updating firmware apply to all devices. They’re simple, but critical:

• • Confirm that you have reliable power. For standard PCs and other electronics that you plug into a wall, power isn’t a big issue. If you’re paranoid, you can connect a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to your device before proceeding.
  • Make sure that the hardware is plugged in. Never rely on battery power when updating your laptop’s BIOS or your phone’s firmware.
  • Create a backup of your current firmware. Not all devices allow you to do this, but if you can, you should. If the new firmware introduces a bug, you may need to revert to an older version.
  • Log your changes. Some firmware updates will reset your device’s settings to their default values, so document any adjustments you may have made before updating. That way, you can restore them properly. If the device allows it, save off settings to a file (this is common in routers, for example).
  • Warn other users before updating your router. If you’re updating a network device, be sure to let all users know in advance that the network may go down briefly.

Okay, now let’s move on to the updating process itself.

PCs and Laptops

Today’s PC firmware falls into two categories: the traditional BIOS (Basic Input-Output System), and a newer kind called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). EFI is much more capable than the old BIOS routines, which are still mired in the 16-bit world. On the Windows PC side, most systems still use BIOS, while servers generally use EFI. Apple MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros use EFI as well. Earlier Intel-based Macs use a firmware architecture built around the SMC (system management controller); but in recent Macs, EFI has superseded that arrangement.

Current PCs typically permit updating through the BIOS setup screen. Copy the BIOS update file to a USB flash memory stick, and then plug the USB stick into the system that you want to update. When you start up the system, press a key that launches the BIOS update application. Alternatively, press a keyboard key (usually Delete, but in some instances another key such as F2 or F10) to enter the BIOS setup program.

At this point, you’ll need to navigate to the device that contains the firmware update. To do this (typically), select the file name and press Enter to launch the update process.

Updating the BIOS from an executable file is even easier. All Intel-built motherboards are updatable through a Windows-based application. Some other motherboard makers make this feature available, too, in which case you download the BIOS update app and launch it from the desktop.

A few motherboard makers include apps for updating the BIOS over the Internet. If the prospect of a wonky Internet connection failing in mid-update makes you nervous, don’t worry: Usually the site will download the entire update before the update process starts.

Laptop and desktop systems with much older motherboards may require you to start up from a bootable floppy disk containing the BIOS update. The update may start automatically when you boot, or you may need to type a command at the command prompt; for details, print out the readme file for the update before you boot from the floppy.

To update a Mac, simply download the appropriate firmware update for you system and launch it from the Finder. The update will take a few minutes, and you must ensure uninterrupted power during that time.

Routers and Peripherals

Some PC peripherals, including hard drives, network-attached storage, and high-end monitors, may have updatable firmware. The instructions for installing updates vary considerably, so pay careful attention to the manufacturer’s documentation.

Wi-Fi routers are perhaps the easiest peripherals to update; most have the capability built into their router management interface. We’ll use the update screen from a Netgear WNDR3700 as an example.

The Netgear interface tells you what the update may fix when installed, and it gives you the option to back out if you don’t think you need the update. Network-attached storage devices use a similar interface for firmware updates.

Monitors rarely need updates. In fact, most monitors don’t allow firmware updates, though I did perform an update on a high-end monitor a few years ago–from within a Windows app.

These days we’re starting to see more firmware updates for hard drives, especially solid-state drives, and these can be nerve-wracking to install. Before making any changes to a critical storage device, back it up! In at least two instances that I’m aware of, SSD firmware updates could brick the hardware, resulting in permanent loss of any data the drives might contain. Because the firmware updating process can be arcane, you should carefully study the documentation before updating.
As an example, updating an Intel X25-E solid-state drive involves downloading an ISO image, burning it to a CD, and then booting from the CD to install the firmware update. So you must be comfortable burning the CD and booting from it before you get to the firmware update process.

Perhaps the oddest firmware update I ever installed was for a Razer Mamba wireless mouse. The process involved unplugging the USB cable from the docking cradle and plugging it directly into the mouse–no updating over the wireless connection.

Sometimes even expansion cards need firmware updates. I’ve had to update graphics card firmware and network interface card firmware. In both cases, I had to run the updates from a command-line prompt, but was able to do so from within Windows.

One last rule of thumb: Whenever you update a PC peripheral, reboot the peripheral after installing the update (assuming that the device doesn’t restart automatically).

Smartphones

Mobile phones are usually very easy to update, and doing so is generally worthwhile: The updates may include critical security fixes, performance enhancements, and neat new features.

iPhones are easy to update: Plug your iPhone into your Mac or PC, and make sure iTunes is running. If a firmware update is available, click yes when asked whether you want to update.

Windows Mobile devices have become easier to install firmware updates on, but the process can still be somewhat esoteric.Many Windows Mobile updates may completely erase your phone, so be sure to do a sync to back up your contact, calendar, and other data from the phone before you proceed. Some phones update through ActiveSync; others rely on a dedicated app. First connect your Windows Mobile phone to your PC via USB to back up (sync), and then update. Read all dialog boxes carefully, and follow instructions carefully.

The update processes for Android phones are all over the map. Though you can manually download the firmware and update it, waiting for your cellular network to roll out the update may be a better approach. If you want to download and manually update the phone, start by downloading the latest version and copying it onto an SD card or to the phone’s storage via USB. Depending on the phone, performing the update will involve pressing some combination of phone buttons.

BlackBerry owners looking for an update should go to RIM’s BlackBerry Device Software page and follow the instructions there, though Mac users must install the BlackBerry Desktop Software first.
GPS Units, Digital Cameras, Media Players, and Handheld Gaming Devices

Normally, GPS devices are updated when new mapping data becomes available. Most off-the-shelf GPS units come with free updates for a set period of time; after that, you may have to pay for each update. GPS data tends to be quite massive, and updating the device may take an hour or more.

I recently upgraded my Garmin Nuvi handheld GPS unit. You can check for an update by downloading a Web browser plug-in that will determine whether your device needs an update (the GPS unit must be plugged into your PC via USB), or you can check by entering the device’s serial number. In either case, you then download a very large file that is both a Windows app and mapping data. Attach your GPS unit via USB, run the app, and let it update your firmware

Gaming devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP update automatically over their network as needed. All you need is access to Wi-Fi. Though you can update these devices wirelessly, attaching them to wall power is preferable. If you go the wireless route, make sure that you have a healthy battery charge.

Digital cameras occasionally need firmware updates, whether they’re simple point-and-shoot cameras or professional-level digital SLRs. In most cases, to update the camera’s firmware, you download the update, copy it to a flash memory card, and insert the memory card into the camera. (Alternatively you can copy the update directly to a memory card in the camera, if it’s connected to your PC.) Then either select an entry from the camera’s built-in menu or press some combination of buttons to load the update. Usually, you’ll have to copy the firmware file to the top level (root) of the memory card, not to a subfolder.

To update a media player like Apple’s iPod or Microsoft’s Zune, attach the player to your PC and run the appropriate app (iTunes or Zune software.) Then updates occur almost automatically; just click Yes if prompted to update. Zune updates are almost always required if you want to continue to use the Zune store; iPod updates are optional in many instances.

Other music players, such as the Archos, typically copy the downloaded firmware file to the device over a USB connection, at which point you disconnect it and the update occurs automatically. In some cases, you may have to run a Windows app.

Firmware Updates for Your Home Theater

Firmware updates are relatively new to the world of living-room electronics. After all, you don’t typically think of “booting your TV”–you just turn it on.

But as consumer electronics gear becomes smarter and more capable, it also has a greater need for firmware updates. The two primary candidates for upgrades are Blu-ray players and HDTVs; but as other gear (such as A/V receivers) become networkable devices, firmware updates become available for them, too.

For example, I recently updated the firmware in my Onkyo TX-NR3007 A/V receiver, which solved an HDMI sync problem the unit was having. Such updates sometimes even fix problems you might have assumed were just a quirk of your HDTV set–problems with audio/video on certain ports cutting out, unexpected freezing and power cycling, image-processing errors, and more.

Most consumer electronics equipment is updated in one of the three following ways (though other techniques, such as updating through a serial port, also exist).

ISO file burned to CD: Some older Blu-ray players didn’t have a network capability and lacked USB ports. The only way to update them was to burn the downloaded firmware file to a CD and then install them via either a menu selection or a combination of remote-control button presses. Even some premium DVD players from a few years ago required this type of updating.

Despite talk (as the standard was being fleshed out) of using actual Blu-ray content discs to automatically install firmware updates, this feature seems not to have been realized in actual products.

Firmware copied to USB flash drive: This updating method is most common in situations where a network connection is unavailable or unreliable. I have updated several HDTVs via flash drive.

Firmware directly downloaded from the Internet: This is an increasingly prevalent method for updating firmware. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

You can set up a Panasonic DMP-BD85 Blu-ray player to automatically inform you of new firmware updates, as long as it’s connected to the Internet. However, the actual update screen is buried in the menus inside of the ‘others’ main menu selection–it’s not in the ‘network’ menu selection.

In the case of the Onkyo TX-NR3007 receiver, the update firmware menu is appropriately listed in the ‘Hardware Setup’ part of the setup menu.

Game Consoles

Quite a few users have game consoles as part of their home theater setups. Updating the firmware on current-generation units is simple, because it’s required. For example, the Xbox 360 needs to have an always-on connection to the Internet in order to make available most of its services, though you can play single-player games without a connection. When the console detects a new system update, a dialog box pops up and informs you that you’ll be logged off the network if you don’t install it.

These updates can add some fairly significant features–Microsoft revamped the whole user interface with the New Xbox Experience patch, and Sony added 3D gaming support to the PS3 (with 3D Blu-ray support coming in September)–so it’s a good idea to stay on top of them.

Final Thoughts

If you’re at all concerned about updating the firmware on your device, it’s worth cruising some key online forums to see whether the updates are working–or are useful. With devices such as smartphones, you might want to take a wait-and-see attitude. Apple supports iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G, for example, but users have reported significant performance decreases following the firmware update.

As we’ve seen, the process of updating your gear’s firmware can be easy or complicated, depending on the age and design of the hardware. Nevertheless, it’s usually worthwhile to perform the update, because you’ll get bug fixes and, often, new features. So the next time a message pops up on your Blu-ray player or handheld device prompting you to update your firmware, give serious consideration to saying yes.

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By Patrick Miller
PC World (US)
August 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook’s new Places feature lets you share your current location by “checking in” from your smartphone. Whether you never really got into earlier location-based social networking services like Gowalla or Foursquare or just want to know what it is (and how to turn it off), read on for everything you need to know about Facebook Places.

Keep in mind that Places isn’t available everywhere just yet–early reports indicate that it’s United States-only, for now, but with significant gaps at the moment–so you may just have to wait.

CHECKING IN VIA SMARTPHONE OR PC

Before you can share your location with your Facebook friends, Facebook needs to know where you are. Just open touch.facebook.com in your Web browser (or use the Facebook for iPhone app on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad), and you’ll see a tab under “Inbox” called “Places.” For the iOS app, it’ll show a new icon in the middle of the home screen.

Tap Places, and you’ll see your recent check-ins as well as your friends’ check-ins. From here, you can find out more details about the places your friends are checking into (map location, description, directions, comments, and other check-ins), or you can check yourself into a nearby location by pressing the Check In button at the top-right corner of the page.

If you can’t find the right place to check in from, you can browse more nearby locations by pressing the right arrow button under the Places tab until you find it (if you’re using the iPhone app, just scroll all the way down and press Show More Nearby Locations).

The list of available locations comes from other people’s check-ins and listings from Bing’s mapping engine, so you might have to add your location yourself–just press Add, and it will take you to a page where you can fill out a name and description.

Once you tap Check In, you’ll be presented with a list of nearby locations where other people have checked in. Tap the one you want to check into, and you can choose to comment on what you’re doing there or add your Facebook friends to your check-in (Press the What are you doing? and Tag Friends With You buttons, respectively). Next, press the big Check In button, and it will show up on your News Feed.

While Places is mostly meant for smartphone users, it doesn’t depend on a GPS device to find your location–you can check in from a laptop or iPod Touch, too. Just go to touch.facebook.com in your browser (you’ll need Internet access, of course), and you can check in from your desk or café.
Checking In With Friends

Unless you’re on Facebook just to show everyone what a loner you are, you’ll eventually want to add the friends you’re hanging out with to your Facebook Places check-in. All you have to do is choose the Tag Friends With You option while checking in.

Once you’ve added your friends and checked in, it’ll show up on their News Feed as well. If they haven’t used Facebook Places yet, it won’t show up on their feed until they’ve approved the check-in; they’ll see a little alert the next time they log in, asking them to allow or deny the check-in.

You can add friends only when you’re checking in, so if you forget about adding someone and want to add them later, you’re out of luck.

This can be rather tricky for users concerned about privacy–while researching this piece, I checked several of my PCWorld colleagues into local bars at about 11am on a workday–so if you want to use Facebook Places without letting your friends check you in, you can disable it by turning off Friends Can Check Me Into Places in the privacy settings (click the link for detailed instructions). Once this is disabled, your friends can still try to add you at check-in time, but it won’t display on the actual check-in.

OWNING YOUR FACEBOOK PLACE

While anyone can add a Facebook Place, business owners can turn the listing in Places into a proper Facebook Page, with Likes and a Wall and all that other fun stuff. (Don’t forget to read “Three Ways Business Can Take Advantage of Facebook Places.”)
Start by checking in from your Place (or adding it, if it doesn’t show up in the list of nearby Places), and click the link on the bottom of the page that says Is this your business?

Facebook doesn’t want people cybersquatting on someone else’s business listing, so you’ll have to check a box certifying you’re an official representative of the business and click Proceed with Verification to continue.

Next, you’ll have to provide your business’s contact information, including your Federal Employee ID number (if applicable) and some kind of official documentation (Certificate of Formation, Articles of Certificate of Incorporation, a local business license, or a BBB accreditation).

Once you’ve submitted that information and received the okay from Facebook’s User Operations team, you’ll be in full control of your new Place. No word on what happens if you’re caught impersonating an employee, and we don’t recommend trying it.

HOW TO TURN OFF FACEBOOK PLACES

Dabbled with Facebook Places and decided it isn’t for you? There are a handful of settings you’ll have to change to fully deactivate it. Start by going to Account, Privacy Settings, and click Customize settings under Sharing on Facebook.

From here, you’ll need to change the settings for Places I Check In, People Here Now, and Friends Can Check Me into Places (under the Things Others Share heading).

You’ll need to change one more setting: Go back to Privacy Settings, choose the Edit your settings option under the Applications and Websites heading, and click Edit settings for Info accessible to your friends.

Uncheck the Places I’ve Visited box, and you’ll be good to go. For a more detailed explanation of what each option does and where to find it, check out, if you haven’t already, “Facebook Places: How To Adjust Your Privacy Settings.”

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
August 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Several keys on skyDX’s keyboard stopped functioning. He asked the Desktops forum for help.

If your flute comes out lute, your pluck merely luck, and your bonanza a banana, try cleaning your keyboard. That might not fix the problem, but it’s the best place to start.

Shut down the PC. Turn the keyboard upside-down (if you have a laptop, keep it open and turn the whole thing upside-down) and gently tap on the back so that crumbs and dirt fall out. Then use a can of compressed air (you can buy this at any computer store for a few dollars) to blow out whatever is still stuck. Be sure to read the instructions on the can, first. Then turn the PC upside-down and tap it gently again to get the last bits out.

If you have a desktop, you might consider unbending the end of a paperclip, and using that to fish out the junk below the keys. There’s an element of risk in doing this–it could damage the keyboard (although it hasn’t yet for me). That’s why I strongly recommend against this for laptops, where a broken keyboard is a much more serious problem.

If that doesn’t work, you need to figure out if the problem is with your keyboard, your computer, or your operating system. (It’s almost certainly the keyboard, but it’s worth a try.) First, try another keyboard. If you don’t own one, borrow one. If you have a laptop, you can still plug in a USB keyboard. (In fact, I’m typing this on an external keyboard plugged into my laptop; I prefer it for ergonomic reasons.)

If the borrowed keyboard works fine (and it almost certainly will), you’ll need to replace the old one.

This is cheap and easy if you have a desktop. I’ve seen USB keyboards selling for as little as $15, although if your concerned about ergonomics, you may want to pay more. Go to a local store and try out various models until you find one you like.

Installing the keyboard is a simple matter of turning off the PC, unplugging the old keyboard, plugging in the new one, and booting the PC.

Things get uglier with a laptop. You have four options here, none of which are ideal:

1) You can go the official route and have it repaired by the manufacturer or a manufacturer-licensed shop. This is the safest choice–your chances of it not working are minimal. But unless your laptop is still under warranty, it could cost a fortune. I’ve seen prices as high as $400.

2) Use a local repair expert that isn’t licensed by your manufacturer. This can cost much less–$75-$100 in the estimate of one repairman I know. But you need to find someone you can trust.

3) Do it yourself. Repairing a laptop may seem scary, but people–and not just professionals–do it successfully. See Rick Broida’s instructions.
4) Buy an external keyboard, plug it in, and accept that you now have a small, light-weight desktop.

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By Galen Gruman
InfoWorld (US)
August 18, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Sure, the iPad is a great device for Web surfing, book reading, and movie watching. But it’s also getting a lot of interest in corporations as a possible business device for field forces, nurses and doctors in hospitals, and knowledge workers in the office and on the go.

That interest is obvious from the top iPad downloads from the Apple App Store, where Citrix Receiver, an app that makes the iPad a portal to server-based apps such as Microsoft Office and SharePoint, has stayed in the top five almost every day. Also in that top-downloads list are Apple’s iWork productivity trio (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) and two Microsoft Office-compatible productivity apps (Quickoffice Mobile Connect Suite and DataViz Documents to Go Premium).

[ See how business and personal smartphones are merging into a single device. | Get the best iPhone and iPad apps for pros with our business iPhone apps finder. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

I decided to see how well the iPad could fit into a business environment. The short answer: awkwardly, but with lots of promise. (Note that all the apps mentioned here are available through InfoWorld’s “no-junk business iPhone and iPad app finder” Web page.)

The iPad is very portable and has long battery life (six to eight hours in my experience, although the more networking you do via Wi-Fi, 3G, or Bluetooth, the less time you get). So it is very appealing as a laptop replacement, at least for short trips. For many users, it can indeed replace a laptop. Which users? Certainly those whose lives revolve around email, Web access, and basic office productivity work. For other users, it depends greatly on the software availability for your work tasks.

Here’s what you can do, and what could get in your way.

THE IPAD SOFTWARE ISSUE

If you’re editing or commenting on documents, reviewing and adjusting spreadsheets, and reviewing and updating presentations, you’ll find that either the $15 Quickoffice or the $15 Documents to Go will do the trick. But outside of dire needs, I wouldn’t suggest you try to create complex documents, spreadsheets, or presentations with either; the tools aren’t there and the lack of mouse support makes fine control difficult. Apple’s $30 iWork suite is harder to use due to a too-spare interface, plus only its Pages app can export to an Office-compatible format for your colleagues’ use.

If you do need to run the real Microsoft Office suite or other corporate apps for which there is no iPad version (IT management tools, route-delivery planning apps, electronic medical records access software, credit-scoring apps, and all those kinds of vertical programs), that’s where the free Citrix Receiver app comes in. It’s a thin client app for Citrix-based terminal services, so you need a Wi-Fi connection to work with it. (You can use 3G but it is slower.) If your company has already deployed Citrix thin clients for remote access to secured applications, using it on an iPad is a no-brainer. The app does a good job translating touch movements to mouse movements, although because Windows and its desktop apps weren’t designed with touch in mind, you may have difficulty accurately clicking buttons and other controls — you may have to zoom in for controls such as the close box, for example.

o The iPad software issues, continued
o The iPad data-access issues
o The iPad input and output issues: monitor, keyboard, mouse, printing, and dock
o The iPad network issues
o The iPad power issues

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By Elias Plastiras
PC World Australia
July 16, 2010

SYDNEY - Selecting components to build a fast PC for everyday office and multimedia tasks is never an easy undertaking, no matter how well you know your stuff. You have to make a large number of decisions about components, and the longer you take to research what you can get within a certain budget, the more likely it is that prices will have changed by the time you finally choose what you want. Sometimes that can work in your favour, but Murphy’s Law means that more often than not, prices will go up if you take too long to pounce on a good current deal. (Sure enough, component pricing has gone up slightly in the last month.)
Go for a component bundle

One option that shouldn’t be overlooked when you’re sourcing components for a new PC is a CPU/motherboard/memory bundle. Why sift through a large number of products to find the right combination when you can pick store-selected bundle designed to offer good value for money? Not only that, you’ll save yourself a few dollars at the checkout compared to buying the same products separately, and you’re almost guaranteed that the selected components in the combo deal will work well.

Everything but high-end gaming

For this exercise, we wanted to build a fast PC that will be used for common tasks at home: watching videos, ripping DVDs, using office software, editing high-resolution photos, running multiple browser windows simultaneously, storing and playing a large number of music and video files, compressing multimedia files — and performing a number of these tasks simultaneously. The only thing we left out is gaming capabilities, since not everyone is interested in playing the latest first-person shooter.

Buying good quality parts on a budget

To get started, we’ve compared two PC configurations comprised of combo deals from Aus PC Market. We think the combo deals are fantastic value for money for anyone who’s in the process of configuring a new desktop PC. We also selected a supporting cast of components that we think will give you a good quality system for the best price. Often people will skimp on the quality of their PC, opting for a cheap case and power supply, for example, in order to keep the costs down. But we’re going to attempt to build a high quality PC with good components for as close to $1500 as possible (without a monitor, keyboard or mouse). As is the case in the real world, budgets blow out, so we’re giving ourselves a little wriggle room above this point.
What follows are the configurations we’ve come up with for equivalent AMD- and Intel-based PCs. They’re as closely matched as possible, with only the motherboard and CPU differing in each system.

Intel vs AMD

Herein lies the conundrum of any system builder: do you go for AMD or Intel. At a similar price point, you can buy either a quad-core Intel Core i5-750 CPU, or a six-core AMD Phenom II 1055T CPU. The clock speeds differ by around 140MHz, with the AMD being faster at 2.8GHz, compared to the Intel’s 2.66GHz, but it’s the AMD’s two extra physical CPU cores and more cache memory that clinch it for us. It means you get much better multitasking capabilities, allowing you to do more in the foreground while running processor-intensive tasks in the background.
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T combo: $649

This bundle from Aus PC Market includes the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T CPU, 4GB of Corsair Twin3X, 1333MHz PC-10600 DDR SDRAM (2x 2GB), and a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H. Bought separately, the total would be $675 (including delivery), so you’re saving $26 by opting for the combo deal.
The Gigabyte motherboard runs AMD’s 890GX chipset, which includes an integrated ATI Radeon HD 4290 graphics adapter. The board has DVI, HDMI and D-Sub connections and supports two monitors (using either DVI or HDMI, plus D-Sub). This graphics chip can muster a score of around 2200 in 3DMark06, which means it isn’t very powerful, but it’s perfect for running Windows 7’s graphical user interface, as well as displaying Full HD content. You can’t play the latest games on it, but it will run older games (such as Grand Theft Auto 3, for example) without any problems. For our purposes it’s perfect, and it means we won’t have to spend any money on a separate graphics card.

The other great features of this motherboard are USB 3.0 ports and 6Gbps SATA ports.

Intel Core i5-750 combo: $706.20

This bundle from Aus PC Market includes the Intel Core i5-750 CPU, the same 4GB of Corsair Twin3X, 1333MHz PC-10600 DDR SDRAM (2x 2GB), and a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P motherboard. Bought separately, the total would be $729.30 (including delivery), so you’re saving $23.10 by buying the bundle.

Like the AMD board, this one has USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA, so it’s up to date and should last you many years, but it uses Intel’s P55 chipset, which doesn’t have the ability to use the Core i5’s integrated graphics. We’re going to pair this motherboard combo with a $66, 512MB Gigabyte Radeon HD 4350 PCI Express x16 graphics card, which is the closest match to the integrated graphics of the AMD motherboard.

Money saved when choosing the AMD option over Intel = $123.20

By going with the AMD platform, we’ve saved a good chunk of change that can be put towards buying good quality components to surround the CPU, motherboard and RAM.

Tip: if you use the audio drivers that come with the motherboard, you won’t get optimal performance. In fact, one thing you may notice is stuttering audio performance in music and videos while you are simultaneously using the Internet. This stuttering can be fixed by updating the Realtek audio driver to version to R2.44 from Gigabyte’s Web site.

Storage

There are many different scenarios to consider when it comes to storage, but we’re going to keep things simple and purchase two 1TB drives. We’ve gone with Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drives, which are the latest in Seagate’s line-up and have a SATA II interface, a 7200rpm spin speed and a 32MB buffer. These drives cost $115.50 each when purchased separately, but Aus PC Market’s combo deal, which includes two drives, costs $209, which is a saving of $22.
With a combined formatted capacity of 1862GB, the cost per formatted gigabyte of our chosen drives is just 11.2 cents.

We’ve also opted to go for a 22x Samsung SH-S223C SATA DVD burner for $42.90. When it comes to DVD burners, opt for the cheapest drive you can find because the performance difference between most models is negligible.

Power supply

To efficiently deliver electricity to our components, we’ve opted for a Seasonic 520W M12II modular power supply. The 520W rating is more than enough to drive our PC and it offers plenty of headroom for upgrading (unless you plan on installing two high-end graphics cards in a CrossFire configuration). This power supply is modular, which means you only have to use the cables you need and can remove the excess ones. By removing the excess cables you minimise clutter and improve airflow. Aus PC Market sells it for $154.

You can use the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator online to give you an idea of the type of power supply you’ll need to buy.

Using the eXtreme calculator, our systems will consume well under 300W, which leaves us plenty of room to install up to four more 7200rpm hard drives in the future, and even a high-end Radeon HD 5970 graphics card.

Mid-tower ATX case

We’ve always been fans of Cooler Master cases so we chose the Cooler Master CM-690 II mid-tower ATX case to house our brand new components. It’s a heavy steel case with plenty of room for expansion and has a filtered mesh design to keep all your components cool. The only drawback of this design is that it won’t muffle noise from the fans, so it could be irksome if you plan to leave the PC on while you sleep. Aus PC Market sells it for $148.50.

The Cooler Master CM-690 II is big, but it offers plenty of room for expansion and will keep your components well ventilated.

The case requires no tools for the most part — although you’ll need screwdrivers to attach the motherboard and power supply. Its six internal hard drive bays face outward, which makes hard drive installation a cinch, and it has four 5.25in bays. It ships with three fans, but you can install more, and its I/O panel has two USB, one FireWire, one eSATA, and microphone and headphones ports.

Tip: The Coolermaster CM-690 II has an eSATA dock in which you can slide a 3.5in SATA hard drive. In order to make this hot-swappable, be sure to configure the SATA ports as AHCI, rather than IDE, before you install Windows 7.

Total costs

When we add up all the components we’ve selected, the AMD system costs $1196.40, while the Intel system costs $1319.60. If we add an OEM version of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, which costs $213.40, the costs are $1409.80 and $1533 for the AMD and Intel systems respectively.

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
July 7, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The wrong program opens when Marvin double-clicks a .docx file. He asked the Answer Line forum how to fix this.

Windows can associate multiple programs with various file extensions (.docx, .jpg, and so on), with only one program being the default application–the one that opens when you double-click the file. Somehow, on your PC, Windows has the wrong program associated with that particular file type.

And believe me, you don’t want your files associating with the wrong type of application.

The instructions below work in Windows 7, Vista, and XP. The exact wording of the menu options and prompts varies between these three Windows versions, but they’re close enough.

Right-click a file of with the badly-associated extension and select Open with, then Choose default program. Make sure Always use the selected program to open this kind of file is checked. Double-click your program of choice or click Browse to find something else.

This will open the file in the program you selected. More importantly, double-clicking any file with that extension will open it in this program from here on in.

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By Neil McAllister
InfoWorld (US)
July 7, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The PC as you know it is obsolete. So sayeth Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who took the stage at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference in June to talk about what he sees as the coming “post-PC era.”

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks,” Jobs explained. “But as people moved more toward urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.” What they will want instead, according to Jobs, are iPads — and devices like them — which do away with traditional desktop PC metaphors in favor of more intuitive, touch-based experiences.

[ Will the launch of the iPad ultimately be perceived as one of the top turning points in tech history or as one of tech's all-time flops? | Test your knowledge of the house that Jobs built with InfoWorld's Apple IQ Test. ]

Depending on whom you ask, the iPad will save journalism, rescue the book publishing business, transform the movie industry, change the way we communicate, and make the perfect omelet. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that at least some of these predictions will prove overly optimistic. Even more dubious is the idea that the iPad signals a true sea change in computing. Here are 10 reasons why we think the rumors of the PC’s death may be greatly exaggerated.

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By PC Advisor staff
PC Advisor (UK)
July 7, 2010

LONDON - Windows 7 , Microsoft’s latest PC operating system, has proven popular. A stable, good looking OS with a host of bells and whistles. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge, there are seven things you should consider before you download and install Windows 7.

1. Decide on a version of Windows 7

While Windows 7 does not have the bewildering range of options which blighted Microsoft Windows Vista, there are still several flavours to choose from, principally Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Which version you should plump for will depend on your needs. If you’re a Vista user and the level of functionality you have is sufficient, you’ll generally want to move to the equivalent edition. So, if you have Windows Vista Home Premium, you’d move to Windows 7 Home Premium. Indeed, all but power- and business-users will probably find that Home Premium suffices.

2. 32- or 64-bit?

If you have a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or Windows XP, you’ll need to install the 64-bit edition of Windows 7. To find out whether you are running a 64- or 32-bit OS, if your PC is running Windows Vista or Windows 7: click the Start button, right-click Computer, and then click Properties. The edition of Windows Vista is displayed under Windows edition near the top of the window. If your PC is running Windows XP: click Start. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties. The edition of Windows XP is displayed under System near the top of the window.

3. Check system requirements

Here’s what your PC needs to run Windows 7:

32-bit: 1GB of RAM, 1GHz processor and 16GB of hard drive space. 64-bit: 2GB of RAM, 1GHz processor and 20GB of hard drive space. (For Aero visual effects you need a 128MB graphics card with support for DirectX 9.)

4. Run Windows Upgrade Advisor

The bare system requirements tell only half the story. To find out how your PC will handle Windows 7, read this story: Is your PC ready for Windows 7?

5. Decide on a custom or upgrade install

There are two ways to install Windows 7 on a PC: a custom (or clean) installation or an upgrade installation. The table below shows the type of installation you’ll need to do based on the version of Windows you have and the one you want to install. Here’s the difference between the two methods:

A custom installation erases everything on your hard drive. So you’ll need to back up all your files, photos, music, and settings on an external hard drive or on CDs or DVDs and then transfer them back to your PC after you install Windows 7. You’ll also need to reinstall all your programs from their original installation disks. If you have Windows XP, you need to do a custom installation.

With an upgrade installation, Windows 7 will simply replace Windows Vista without affecting anything else on your PC. You can do an upgrade installation from many editions of Windows Vista depending on which edition of Windows 7 you want to install.

6. Locate your data in a secure place

Regardless of the type of installation, storing your data in a secure place will make your life a lot easier. Read this story to find out how: How to install Windows 7 quickly and easily.
7. Download and install Windows 7

The easiest, safest and most secure way to purchase and install Windows 7 is via the PC Advisor Software Shop.

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By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Computerworld (US)
July 5, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Back when I was a younger man, I was a Beltway Bandit . What that means is that I worked as a technical contractor for the federal government. In my case, I worked for several years for NASA and NAVSEA (Naval Sea Systems Command ). Then, I worked with numerous bright developers, network engineers and system administrators. Unfortunately, we often worked with federal staffers who were often, ah, clueless. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Much worse.

Then, we usually only had to contend with managers who didn’t understand the technology, but were capable of giving us realistic goals. For example, one NASA executive knew that the agency wanted a way to keep track of the current status of all telecom and datacom links to the STS (Space Transportation System, or space shuttle to you), but he didn’t know how we would do it — a combination of C and Datatrieve running on VAX/VMS and AT&T Unix systems, as it turned out — and as long as we delivered the goods, he was happy.

That was when things worked well. Am I glad I’m out of the consultant/contractor game these days.

For starters, a U.S. Senate committee has approved a cybersecurity bill , the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act , that appears to say that the president can have the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Actually, Sen. Joe Lieberman has said that what he wants the bill to do is put limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” during war, which had already been given the presidency in the Communications Act of 1934.

OK, so it’s not quite the “Internet kill switch” that earlier reports suggested, but tell me exactly how the president, or anyone else, is going to shut down even a significant part of the Internet on demand? We’ve come a long way since 1934.

Sure, you can wreck parts of the Internet for hours or days at a time with a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack . And you can try to block parts of the Internet, as China does with its so-called Great Firewall of China . But if you know what you’re doing, you can walk around the Great Firewall without too much trouble. Heck, even, Google , while backtracking on its stance toward China’s censorship , was able to jump right over it by directing to its uncensored Hong Kong Web site.

But for practical purposes, there’s no good way you can “turn off” even part of the Internet. It’s silly to even think that there is.

Still, that’s just a dumb idea. If it makes the Congress-critters happy to think that they can legislate the power to the Internet off and on or to make the value of pi equal 3 , let them continue to dream on.

What’s far, far more serious is the suggestion that the government be allowed to set up a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace . This sounds good. The plan is to create an Internet-based identity ecosystem, “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”

It would work by issuing everyone security tokens such as a state-issued “smart identity card,” or perhaps a digital certificate on our PCs and smartphones. This token would contain all of the identity information about a person.

Can you say national identification card? I knew you could. I hate this plan.

This one would, technically speaking, be easy to implement. It’s just that it’s also an incredibly bad idea for a democracy. I do not like the idea of the federal government being able to track my every online step one little bit.

Sure, they might say that they wouldn’t do that, but we’d always be one change of government away from an all-knowing, all-prying Big Brother. Besides, if you think we have trouble with online privacy and identity theft now, just wait until someone hacks their way into the identity ecosystem, or just into the mechanisms we’ll need to log in to online services with out smart identity cards.

The saying goes that “to err is human but to really screw up you need a computer.” I’d suggest an addition: “And to screw up things beyond comprehension, add the government.”

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By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
June 2, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Reader Anibal is looking to outfit his PC with a Blu-ray drive and wants to know if there’s any good, low-cost (or free) software for watching Blu-ray movies.

In a nutshell: no. I mean, you have choices when it comes to software, but plan on spending anywhere from $40 (the current price for Corel WinDVD Pro 2010) to $95 (for CyberLink PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D). A third option, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 3 Platinum, sells for around $90.

That was a little more palatable when standalone Blu-ray players were selling for upwards of $400, but now that you can find them for as little as $100, it really begs the question of whether a PC-based Blu-ray solution makes sense.

For one thing, you have to buy the drive. A quick check of sites like Newegg shows an average price tag of around $100. (On the plus side, some drives do come with one of the aforementioned Blu-ray programs, though usually an older version. Windows 7 compatibility is not a given.)

Then you have to make sure your PC and video card can manage a Blu-ray-optimal resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), and that the latter supports HDCP, the form of copy protection employed by Blu-ray discs.

Your monitor needs to support that protocol as well. And let’s face it: Blu-ray is overkill for watching movies on the average 22-inch LCD. Unless you’re connecting your PC to a big HDTV (I’d say 42 inches or larger), I really don’t see much point in having a Blu-ray drive.

Based on personal experience, I think watching Blu-ray movies on a PC is more hassle than it’s worth. It’s costly, frequently aggravating (I had to jump through considerable hoops to find the right driver for my video card before any movies would play), and just plain inconvenient compared with a standalone Blu-ray player.

Agree? Disagree? Hit the comments and let me know your thoughts.

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By Spencer Dalziel
PC Advisor (UK)
May 28, 2010

LONDON - The ability to create music on a PC has opened up a world of possibilities beyond the confines of the recording studio. With suitable equipment, a PC can take care of every stage of production.

In the following workshop, we’ll outline what you need to start creating music on a PC and help you determine whether your machine is sufficiently powerful. We’ll also show you the basics using the free Audacity.

Creating a tune on your PC is a resource-intensive task, but isn’t as demanding as video-editing. We wouldn’t use a machine with less than a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM, but a dual-core processor will suffice. You don’t need the exceptional might of an Intel Core i7 processor.

You shouldn’t need to buy additional storage, either. Most computers now come with large enough hard drives to store your recordings. Social networks, personal websites and music-sharing sites are also useful for storing and sharing audio.

If you’d prefer to create hard copies and distribute your music on disc, use your disc-burning software’s CD-R or Audio Disc output option. You should also find the necessary tools for creating cover art here.

A decent set of speakers will allow your music to live up to its full potential. A 5.1-channel set (five speakers and a subwoofer) such as Creative’s Inspire T6160s will do the job. If your budget doesn’t stretch this far, aim for at least a 2.1 set.

Picking up acoustic nuances and retaining audio fidelity can be difficult. Get around this by experimenting with the positioning of instruments during recording (every setup will produce a slightly different timbre) and by using a unidirectional microphone with a flat frequency response. Shure’s SM58 is still the industry standard for vocals, and no other technology can match the rich and beautiful tones of a natural-sounding acoustic or classical guitar.

You’ll also need a pair of headphones for use during recording or the microphone will distort quality as it picks up audio though the speakers.

Make music with Audacity

Step 1. Download and install Audacity. Select the audio source you want to record or import an audio loop. Note that Audacity can’t play or edit Midi files. If you want to use this soundless data that triggers synthesiser sounds, download a Midi-to-audio converter.

Step 2. If you’re creating a new piece of music, a click track will help you keep time. The tempo of the metronome can be adjusted to suit your needs. A click track is a vital addition for recording analogue drums because it keeps drummers at the same pace, thus keeping the entire track in time.

Also see:
Digital Home Advisor Audio and music software reviews
Step 3. Highlight the track you want to control. You can stop, rewind, forward, play, pause and record using the Control Toolbar. Holding down Shift changes the play button to a loop option. Now you can replay a selected track on a loop so you can start deciding how you want to edit the section of track.

Step 4. The editing bar at the side of the Control Toolbar gives you a selection of editing options for cutting, copying and pasting audio. Right-click and drag the mouse across the section of track you want to work with. Using the editing bar you can now modify individual samples and time-shift tracks to the left or right.

Step 5. Copy and paste come in useful if, for example, you want to add a drum sample or you don’t want to play drums for the entire track. Select a section of the drum track, then hit Ctrl, C to copy it and Ctrl, V to paste it to the main track. Most music-production programs work with repeated loops, making editing much easier.

Step 6. Whether you’re recording vocals or instruments, each should be recorded at optimal volume. If the source recording is poor, there’s little you can do about it later. Too loud and the track will be distorted; too quiet and it won’t be heard. Monitor the sound levels as you record the audio.

Also see:
Digital Home Advisor Audio and music software reviews
Step 7. Use Audacity’s Envelope Tool to gradually change the volume of a tune - handy for intros and outros. The Envelope Tool can be applied anywhere on the track. Select a small section of track, click the Envelope Tool in the edit bar and right-click and hold the mouse. Move up to increase volume and down to decrease.

Step 8. It’s important to ensure you select exactly the right amount of track to work with. We chose part of the track where we liked the bass and highlighted a four-second loop. We then opened the edit menu to select Trim - alternatively, hit Ctrl, T. This removed the rest of the track, leaving only our four-second bass loop.

Step 9. The Snap-To tool literally ’snaps’ your tracks to the nearest beat to make sure every instrument is playing in time. This is essential for digital or electronic music but can make analogue music sound too cold and robotic. Here, we’ve snapped the drums to the nearest beat. You can amend the timings to mix things up.

Step 10. Embedding metadata (descriptive data) in each track is important - particularly if you want to distribute your tunes online. Click the Project Tab and choose the ID3 edit tag function. A small window will pop up where you can insert or change the title, artist, album, year and genre.

Also see:
Digital Home Advisor Audio and music software reviews
Step 11. Audacity supports unlimited undo and redo. You’d be surprised by how useful this is. The function sits at the top right of the interface and takes the form of forward and back arrows. If you’re experimenting and don’t like your changes, use undo to return to a point from which you’re happy to progress.

Step 12. If you’ve downloaded several audio samples, there’s a good chance they’ll be in different keys. Audacity lets you transpose each sample, while keeping them at the same tempo. There’s also an EQ (equaliser), a delay function and a wah-wah effect that’s fun to experiment with. Some effects can be previewed.

Step 13. When you’ve finished adding and editing individual tracks, you’re ready to mix them into a single one. Other programs have more extensive mixing options, but Audacity has just one. Click the Project tab and choose Quick Mix to combine your individual tracks into a single track.

Step 14. You’re now ready to save and export your track. Audacity uses a proprietary .aup audio format, but we recommend using the Export function instead. Choose File, Export As MP3. All that’s left is to unleash your musical genius on to an unsuspecting world, whether that’s over the web or on audio CD.

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By Ian Paul
PC World (US)
May 14, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Are you using your smartphone to its fullest? Probably not–smartphone owners typically push their devices up to only about half their potential. Here are 14 smartphone apps to help your Android handset, BlackBerry, or iPhone become all that it can be.

For more ways to enhance your phone, see “13 Sites and Services to Supercharge Any Phone” and “13 Tips to Supercharge Your ‘Dumb’ Phone.”

Get Free Turn-by-Turn GPS on an iPhone

When Google brought free turn-by-turn GPS functionality to Android, many iPhone users were envious. In March, however, iPhone users gained their own free GPS app with turn-by-turn capabilities, courtesy of MapQuest.

Recently MapQuest added voice-guided directions to its free iPhone app, called MapQuest 4 Mobile. Reviews of MapQuest 4 Mobile for iPhone are mixed, however, with some critics pointing out that the app is not as full-featured as TomTom U.S.A. ($60). The big gripe concerns MapQuest’s rerouting feature, which is not automatic (as TomTom’s is) and requires you to restart your navigation manually if you stray from MapQuest’s planned route. Nevertheless, if you want to try a free voice-guided navigation app for the iPhone, MapQuest 4 Mobile is worth a look.

Turn Apps Into a Social Activity

App-obsessed Android users will love AppBrain. Want to show off all your apps to your friends? Interested in how other Android users rate the apps they have downloaded? AppBrain is the service for you.

AppBrain also creates a personal app catalog that you can share with other AppBrain users. You can peruse the apps of your AppBrain friends and other users, as well. Wondering what Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani has on her Android phone, for instance? You can check it out on AppBrain.

Never fear, Apple lovers: Similar services exist for the iPhone, too. Download AppsFire or Appfinder from the iTunes App Store to start sharing your favorite apps.

Communicate With Everyone via Fring

A unifying social networking platform for your mobile phone, Fring allows you to use one app to communicate across multiple social networking platforms, including AIM, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Skype, Twitter, and Yahoo Messenger. Fring eliminates the need to download specialized apps for each social network or communication tool–now you only have to worry about which friends you want to reach. Fring is available for iPhone, Android, and Nokia devices.

Make Your Android Phone Location-Aware

The smartphone app Locale for Android lets you set automatic preferences for your phone based on your location. If, say, you tend to forget to turn your ringer off when you reach the office, just customize your phone using Locale to switch your ringer to vibrate whenever you get to work. Or have it go to silent mode whenever you’re at the neighborhood movie theater. It’s simple, but clever.

Get Around Town

Hopstop is one of the best ways to plan bus and subway routes in cities with massive (and often confusing) transit systems. Hopstop is available in 16 U.S. cities, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

The Hopstop service is available as a mobile Web application compatible with any smartphone that has a browser. For Apple handset users, the Hopstop iPhone app includes phone numbers for taxi services. An SMS version is available for directions, as well.

New Yorkers might want to check out the CabSense app (for Android and iPhone), which helps you find the best location to get a taxi based on the time of day, location, and day of the week.

Find Wi-Fi in Your Area

Apple may have cut Wi-Fi stumblers out of the App Store, but you can still turn to Wi-Fi directories such as JiWire’s Wi-Fi Finder to discover over 280,000 hotspots in 140 countries worldwide. JiWire also has an app for Android.

A similar service, WeFi, can also help you find a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot; in fact, Fring recently released a WeFi add-on.

Master Automated Menus

Dial Zero is a service that promises to deliver the best phone number or strategy for getting a human being on the phone when you’re calling a company’s toll-free number. Just as Fonolo.com allows you to skip automated menu services for big companies, so does Dial Zero. The major difference is that Fonolo.com automates the process, limiting the number of companies it works with. Dial Zero, in contrast, offers instructions and tricks on how you can reach a real person. You can also read user comments (sometimes vulgar) about specific frustrations, as well as tales of success in dealing with phone menus.
Dial Zero is a free application for Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone.

Next: Compare Prices With ShopSavvy

Compare Prices With ShopSavvy

You can find many applications out there that turn your smartphone into a bar-code reader, but the best one I’ve found is ShopSavvy. This app quickly scans any product bar code to do price-comparison shopping online and at local stores. You can also create wish lists or set up price alerts based on your scanned items. ShopSavvy is available for Android, iPhone, and Nokia devices.

Browse Android Apps Easily

If you’re thinking of switching to an Android device but you need more information about the Android Market catalog than you can find on Google’s official site, head to DoubleTwist’s Android app site. It will help you find virtually any Android application available in the Market.

Use Your iPhone as a Mouse

For iPhone users, Logitech offers a handy free app called TouchMouse that turns your iPhone into a wireless mouse by way of your Wi-Fi network. This could be great if you wanted to sit back on the couch and control a laptop hooked up to a TV, for instance. All you need is the iPhone app and the desktop software for Windows or Mac.

Tip: If you find TouchMouse difficult to control, adjust the ‘Scrolling Speed’ option under Settings on the iPhone app.

Slip Away With Fake-A-Call

Sometimes the only way out of an awkward in-person encounter is to get a well-timed phone call. Now you don’t have to pray for a phone call to come in–just make it happen with the help of Fake-A-Call. This free application for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices lets you schedule an interruption or create a phony phone call on the fly. Grab this tool to save yourself from any sticky situation you end up in.

Control a Jailbroken iPhone With a PC or Mac

Veency allows you to view and control a jailbroken iPhone via a Mac or PC using a Wi-Fi connection. The tool is an interesting application to try out if you want to control your iPhone’s iTunes interface while it’s connected to a set of speakers across the room, for example. Or how about typing notes into your device through the Notes app from a full keyboard? Not bad at all.

iPhoneHacks.com has a nice tutorial on how to install the software and run it for both Macs and PCs. You can find a number of VNC clients, such as TightVNC and UltraVNC for PCs and Chicken of the VNC for Macs.
Get a Personal Trainer

The huge range of smartphone fitness apps has made it easier than ever to track your exercise habits. I use RunKeeper on my iPhone to track my weekly jogs, including my speed, distance, and routes; I can even share my workouts via Facebook or Twitter. I also use Lose It to track my daily calorie intake, and for fun I use the GymFu apps to guide my push-ups, crunches, and pull-ups. Check out your smartphone’s app catalog to see what’s available for your device.

Don’t Pay for Ringtones

Android users can use Ringdroid to create their own ringtones, but iPhone users can easily create their own ringtones simply by using iTunes. For more, check out PCWorld’s step-by-step instructions on how to turn any MP3 into an iPhone ringtone.

Tip: This method also works for non-DRM-protected iTunes downloads in AAC format.

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
May 5, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Danw12321 asked the Answer Line forum how to rip video from a homemade DVD to a PC.

Copying from a homemade DVD is a lot easier than doing it from a commercial one. It’s also a lot more legal. Commercial DVDs come copy-protected to keep you from doing this.

The copy protection isn’t very strong, and was broken soon after DVDs became commercially available. But that doesn’t make it legal to copy protected DVDs, and whatever I think about the issue (I think you should be able to make copies for personal use), I don’t use Answer Line to promote illegal behavior. So I’ll stick to unprotected, homemade DVDs.

And you might not even have to rip a video from a homemade DVD–at least if it was made in your home. The source material from the camera, or from whatever media the camera records onto, will almost certainly look better than the DVD, and can’t possibly look worse. If you don’t already know how to port the video from your camera to your PC, check your camera’s manual for instructions.

But if it’s a homemade DVD made elsewhere–for instance, a video of your daughter’s ice skating competition or your brother’s home movies–that’s not an option. If you want to create your own edit, watch it on your phone, or simply view it without the disc, you’re going to need to rip the DVD.

Don’t look to Microsoft’s Movie Maker programs–the ones that come bundled with XP and Vista–to do this job. True, the current, unbundled-but-free Movie Maker Live can import video from DVDs, but it’s so clumsy at the job you’re better off just skipping it.

So I’m recommending the free version of Digiarty Software’s WinX DVD Ripper. It’s another one of those simple, no-cost programs that just does what it’s supposed to do, and does it easily, saving any of the video programs off a DVD to one of several formats, including AVI, MPEG, and MOV. The $40 Platinum version–on sale for $30 as I write this–allows you to rip to various portable devices (including iPhones) and can rip without quality loss. (I found the quality loss in the free version acceptable.)

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• My Keyboard isn’t Working

By Patrick Miller
PC World (US)
May 5, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Using your PC to store your photos, videos, and music might save you the trouble of having to dust off photo albums and alphabetize your CD collection, but it can still be a pain to keep your media converted, stored, tagged, and uploaded.

Here’s how to automatically download, convert, and sync your video files, dump your photos to Flickr, and take the pain out of tagging your music library.

Automatically Convert Your Videos (and Sync)

Built-in Webcams, phone cameras, pocket camcorders, HD video on point-and-shoot cameras–you can take a video with pretty much any gadget lying within arm’s reach. However, depending on what you plan on doing with those videos, you’ll need to convert them into different formats, which can be a fairly time-consuming task for your PC.

If you just need to convert a folder of videos into a certain format (to play on your iPod Touch, for example), Videora iPod Converter can do this basic task. Select the setting recommended for your device, play around with the quality sliders as you see fit, and click the One-Click Convert button at the bottom-right of the screen to bring up a dialog box that will let you drag to select as many files as you want.
Unfortunately, some of Videora Converter’s more advanced features don’t work well. While it’s possible to tell Videora to watch a certain directory for new files, automatically convert them, and add them to iTunes, I couldn’t get the directory-watching to work at all, and the iTunes-adding seemed to work infrequently.

I wanted my PC to find the new videos, convert them, and sync them to my iPod Touch without requiring me to do anything, which meant I needed to switch tools. Instead of Videora, I opted to use Handbrake, another popular video conversion app.

Handbrake doesn’t make it easy to set up an automatic batch conversion from the graphical user interface (you have to manually add each item), but it does include a separate command-line app that we can work with.

Dust off your DOS skills, ladies and gentlemen–we’re going to write a quick batch file (.bat) that will tell our PC to take all the files in the immediate folder (or any nested folders), pass them off to Handbrake to convert into an iPod-friendly format, name them (”filename-ipod.mp4″), and then hand them off to iTunes, which will add them to the iTunes library and sync with my attached iPod.

Automatically Convert Your Videos, Continued

An app called Alert and Convert that works with Handbrake tries to do the same thing as the batch file described here, but I wasn’t able to get it to work 100 percent of the time.

So we’ve posted a batch-file template in the PCWorld Downloads library, called Automatic Batch Video Conversion. Note that batch files can do lots of things to your PC, and if you’re not careful you might be converting a lot of videos.

Right-click on the convertvideotemplate.bat file and select Edit to open it up in Notepad. You should see this:

@for /r %%F in (*.[filetype], *.[filetype]) do (
“[location of handbrake CLI]” -i “%%F” -o “%%~pnF-ipod.mp4″ –preset=”iPhone & iPod Touch”
move /-y “%%F” “[location of processed videos dir]“)
@for /r %%X in (*ipod.mp4) do
(move /-y “%%X” “[location of Automatically Add To iTunes folder]“)
start “” “[Location of iTunes app]”
pause

In order to adapt this batch file to work on your PC, you’re going to need to fill out each of the bracketed expressions with your own information: For [filetype], put the three-letter suffix of the kinds of files you want Handbrake to process. If I put in (*.mp4, *.flv, *.3gp, *.avi), that means Handbrake will look for all MPEG-4, Flash Layer Video, 3GP, and AVI files.

For [Location of Handbrake CLI], you’ll need the path to the Handbrake CLI app. It’s typically in the same folder as the Handbrake GUI app, so just right-click on the Handbrake icon in your Start Menu and copy the location. You should end up with something like “C:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe”.

If you’re converting your video to something other than an iPod Touch/iPhone format, you’ll want to replace the –preset=”iPhone & iPod Touch” with a different set of encoding instructions. Here’s a list of Handbrake’s different preset encodes.

We want to put the original files somewhere else once they’re done being processed, or else this script will convert them again on the next go-round. I made a folder on my desktop called “Processed Videos” and pasted that into the [location of processed videos dir] section.

iTunes 9 and later has a folder called Automatically Add To iTunes; we’ll use this folder to add our new movies to the iTunes Library. You can find it by going into your User folder and selecting Music, iTunes, iTunes Media, Automatically Add To iTunes. Copy this file path into the [location of Automatically Add To iTunes folder].

Finally, find the path to the iTunes application itself–typically “C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe”–and paste that in the [Location of iTunes app] spot. Assuming your iPod Touch is synced to your PC, iTunes should automatically sync on launch.

Once completed, your script should look something like this:

@for /r %%F in (*.mp4, *.flv, *.3gp, *.avi) do (
“C:\Program Files\HandBrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe” -i “%%F” -o “%%~pnF-ipod.mp4″ –preset=”iPhone & iPod Touch”
move /-y “%%F” “C:\Users\pmiller.PCWORLD\Desktop\Processed Videos”)
@for /r %%X in (*ipod.mp4) do
(move /-y “%%X” “C:\Users\pmiller.PCWORLD\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Automatically Add to iTunes”)
start “” “C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe”
pause

Now, we have a script that will grab all the videos of a certain type, pass them off to Handbrake, and add them to iTunes when they’re done–try and run it with some sample files if you haven’t already. Make sure to put the script in the directory you want it to watch for new videos before proceeding any further.

Next, we just need to get it to run automatically. Enter Windows Task Scheduler, which you can find in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Task Scheduler.

Start by clicking Create Basic Task on the right-hand side. Give it a quick name and description, click Next , and specify how often you want this task to run–we’ll say Daily–and a time you want it to run (ideally a time when you’re not using the computer, so you don’t have to worry about the CPU getting bogged down by converting video).

Click Next again, leave it on Start a program, click Next , and paste the name of the directory you want the batch file to watch over in the Start in (optional) field. (You may need to put the path in quotes if there are spaces in any of the folder names.)

Stay on Top of Your Video Podcasts With Miro

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use one app to keep yourself updated on your Youtube subscriptions, video podcasts (iTunes and otherwise), and Web/TV series? Grab Miro and stay tuned with minimal hassle.
For example, I’ve been using Miro to keep up with a few of my Youtube subscriptions because I hate checking the Youtube pages, and sometimes I want to watch them on my iPod Touch during my morning commute.

Open up Miro, go to the Sidebar menu and click Add Feed, then paste the following text into the URL: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss.

Now Miro will automatically download the latest videos as soon as they go up.

Combine that with the auto-convert batch file we just configured, and you can get your Youtube subscriptions delivered to your portable video player of choice every morning.

Miro also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, so you can use your preferred RSS-friendly BitTorrent search engine (LegalTorrents.com is the default option) to stay subscribed to your favorite (legal) TV and Web series.

Just add the RSS feed for the search as a video podcast feed, and Miro will handle the downloads like any other file manager. While it’s not as robust as uTorrent or other dedicated BitTorrent clients, you can still configure BitTorrent-specific settings (seed ratios, bandwidth limits, and so on) in the Preferences menu.
Miro works with iTunes podcast subscriptions, too–both video and audio. Open up iTunes, right-click on Podcasts (on the left-hand side of the main window), choose Export, and choose OPML as the format. In Miro, choose Import Feeds (OPML) from the Sidebar menu and select the file you just exported from iTunes.

Keep Flickr Updated With Foldr Monitr

Keeping up with your Flickr uploads can be a pain, especially if your home Internet connection doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle a bunch of big JPEG files. You can fix this with Foldr Monitr, a neat little app that can watch a directory for images and automatically upload them to your Flickr account.

Just download Foldr Monitr, run the Setup.exe app to configure it (you’ll need to enter your Flickr account information and authenticate it on the Flickr Web site).

Click the Browse button to specify a folder to watch, and check the “Include Subfolders” box if you want it to search all the sub-folders as well. You can set Flickr Monitr to upload your photos to sets according to subfolder name, too–you can do this in the Options menu.

Once everything is configured, Foldr Monitr can just hang out in your System Tray and upload images in the background. If you want it to stick to times when you’re not at home (so it won’t stop you from using your Internet connection), just set up a task in the Task Scheduler, as we did for video conversion in the video section, that runs at night or during work hours.

You can also incorporate Foldr Monitr into other workflows using your images. If you use Photoshop Elements, you can batch-process a folder full of images by selecting Process Multiple Files from the File menu.

Just define what you want Photoshop to do (apply the Auto Levels and Auto Contrast filters, then resize to 606 pixels wide, and convert to a high-quality JPEG, say) and use the folder that Foldr Monitr is watching as the Destination folder. Once your images are cleaned up, they’ll be automatically uploaded onto Flickr.

Use Mp3tag to Organize Your MP3s

Even the most vigilant music maniac can end up with a few dozen MP3s named “Track 1″ from “Unknown Album,” which is why there are quite a few apps out there that can help you keep your music library tagged, sorted, and properly album-arted. However, we keep on coming back to Mp3tag because it’s really good–and it’s free (well, donationware).

Just give Mp3tag a directory, and it’ll list all your media files for your editing convenience. From here, select a group of files (an album, perhaps) and pick a tag source from the Tag Sources menu–freedb, MusicBrainz, Amazon, or discogs.

You can also pick up album art from Amazon (U.S. or Germany). If the standard ID3 tags aren’t enough, you can also edit extended tags (iTunes podcast metadata, for example) in the View menu.

Mp3tag also gets a shout-out for including the oft-ignored Invert Selection option (Control-Shift-A, or choose it under the Edit menu) for those times when it’s easier to pick out the three songs you don’t want to tag than the 439 that you do.

Bear in mind that Mp3tag is a powerful tool, and you could readily design an organization scheme straight out of High Fidelity. However, if you’re syncing your PC’s music library to your MP3 player or smartphone, you may find that your reverse-alphabetical-by-drummer’s-maiden-name tag system doesn’t work too well with a 2.5-inch display. Keep your system simple, and it’ll be easier to maintain later.

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• My Keyboard isn’t Working

By Patrick Miller
PC World (US)
April 30, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Your PC will crash, your camera will break, your network will fail, and your printer will chew up paper. Before you spend valuable time and money waiting for tech support or paying for a professional technician, read our handy guide to basic repairs for your PC, home network, printer, digital camera, and smartphone.

How to Fix Your PC

Considering how many different software and hardware components need to work correctly for a modern PC to turn on, it’s a small wonder that they work as well as they do. We can’t give you a panacea for all of your computer ills, but we can provide a guide to getting out of the most common PC disasters. Here are some useful strategies.

If your PC won’t turn on: Try plugging it into a different outlet or power strip; if it’s a laptop, try a different battery and power adapter, if you have another one handy. For desktops, make sure that all your internal plugs and cards are properly seated–graphics card, RAM, everything.

If none of this helps, it’s probably a problem with your motherboard or power supply, and unless you’ve got spare parts handy, you’re probably best off calling the manufacturer’s tech support line.

If your PC turns on, but won’t successfully boot into Windows: First, start booting up, and press F8 repeatedly during the boot process. This may allow you to access a menu that lets you select different boot options with your keyboard, one of which is “Safe Mode”.

Select Safe Mode, uninstall the last thing you installed, update all your drivers (if you need to download new ones, you may need to select the “Safe Mode With Networking” option instead), and open up the System Restore app (Start Menu, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore) to roll back to an earlier point when your PC could successfully start up.

Safe Mode not working? Your hard drive might be failing. Get your rescue drive or manufacturer recovery discs, boot up from it, and save whatever data you haven’t backed up.

Then run your disk diagnostic app–you can always run Check Disk, which is built into Windows, by right-clicking your hard drive, selecting Properties, clicking the Tools tab and selecting Check now… under the “Error Checking” tab. There’s no cure for bad sectors–you’ll have to replace the drive.

If you hear your PC emitting a set of beeps during the startup process, it’s most likely your BIOS trying to tell you that you have a motherboard-level problem with your PC–your processor fan might be unplugged, for example, or your power supply might not be working.

The beep patterns aren’t standard, so you’ll have to get on a different PC and check out your BIOS manufacturer’s Web site to figure out what’s wrong.

If Windows successfully boots, then crashes soon afterwards: Start by updating all your drivers–first, the essential drivers provided by your PC manufacturer, then the drivers for your peripherals and extra devices. Don’t forget to update your BIOS, too.

If your PC is crashing soon after startup, try uninstalling anything you recently downloaded and checking your startup apps and background processes to see if something is going wrong.

You can view the processes in the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc and clicking the Processes tab–and you can use ProcessLibrary.com as a reference for figuring out the obscure ones. For startup items, search for msconfig and click on the Startup tab to see what’s going on. If something you recently installed shows up in there, it might be your culprit.

If your crashes aren’t so easy to reproduce, try running a scan for viruses and malware with your preferred security suite (or pick one from our Top 10 Internet Security Suites chart).

On the other hand, if you recently installed a new security suite and started seeing problems, try uninstalling it and then use a different one. Security apps typically get deeper into the guts of your system than other apps, meaning they’re more prone to incompatibilities.

Still can’t figure it out? Google can be your best friend when it comes to troubleshooting, especially if you have an error message handy–even if the official support sites haven’t covered your specific problem, odds are that someone has posted on a tech forum about it (such as our own Answer Line forum).

Search for the specific error message–in quotes–for best results, and if you can’t find an immediately obvious error message, try looking in Control Panel, Problem Reports and Solutions (Vista); or, for Windows 7, open Control Panel, Action Center, Maintenance, View reliability history, and click on View all problem reports at the bottom of the window.

If you can’t find any leads, you might have to do a clean Windows reinstall. Back up your data, reformat, and install from scratch. For more troubleshooting tips, check out our “Top Free Troubleshooting Tools for Windows.”

How To Fix Your Network

Troubleshooting networking and Internet-related problems can be tricky and time-consuming, especially if your ISP is prone to network outages. Read on for some quick networking fixes.

If you can’t find your shared PCs or devices on your local network: There are several reasons why you might not be able to see a certain PC on your network, but checking your firewall, your sharing, and your workgroup settings should be a good place to start. For more details, check out “How to Troubleshoot Your Home Network.”

Networks with Macs and PCs, or PCs running different versions of Windows (or Linux builds), have their own difficulties–features such as Windows 7’s HomeGroups, for example, make networking much easier among Windows 7 PCs but are not quite as easy for other OSs to play along with.

If you can’t update all your PCs to run the same version of Windows, read “Set Up Your Home Network: Windows 7 Edition” to see how you can get Windows 7 to play nicely with your network.

If none of your PCs can access the Internet: Turn off your modem and router, and then turn them back on. If that doesn’t work, try plugging your PC directly into the modem via ethernet.

If it doesn’t work, either, you may have a router problem. If not, your connection is down, and you probably need to call your ISP’s tech support line.

If only some of the computers on your network can access the Internet: You’re dealing with an issue on your network, and the connection to your ISP is working fine.

First, open the command line (Start Menu, Accessories, Run, then type in cmd); type in ipconfig /renew. This will tell your PC to get a new IP address, a step that can clear up several network issues.

If that doesn’t work, try checking the networking settings on each of your PCs by going to Control Panel, Network and Sharing Center, Change Adapter Settings and opening up the panel for the networking device (Local Area Connection for wired networks, or Wireless Network Connection for Wi-Fi, usually) that you’re trying to use, and click Details.

From here, you should find clues to what might be going on.

If it says “No” under “DHCP Enabled,” then your PC is trying to use a preexisting IP address, subnet mask, and DNS server information to connect to your network.

Normally, most home networks use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to automatically assign addresses to new PCs on the network, so all you have to do is plug in (or connect via Wi-Fi), and you’re good to go.

Close the Details window and click Properties; click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), then Properties. From here, just switch the radio buttons from “Use the following IP address” and “Use the following DNS server addresses” to “Obtain an IP address automatically” and “Obtain DNS server address automatically.”

If your IPv4 address starts with “169.254.”, your PC is trying to use DHCP to get an IP address and Domain Name Server information for that network automatically.

However, an IP address starting with those two numbers means either that the DHCP server on the network (typically the router, in small home networks) isn’t working, or that it’s not enabled, and you’ll need to manually enter the IP address, subnet mask, and DNS server information on your own.

You can do this by going into the Network Connections window, right-clicking on the network interface you’re trying to use, and selecting Properties.

From here, you should select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4); click Properties, and then both the Use the following IP address radio button and the Use the following DNS server addresses radio button to enter them in.

However, you’ll probably need to get that information from whoever set up your home network; most home networks use DHCP to cut down the hassle.

How To Fix Your Printer

Printers can break, jam, and drop print quality suddenly. Here’s what you can do about these common printing headaches.

If your printer jams: You’re going to need to get that paper out of your printer before you do anything else. It pays to check your printer’s documentation to make sure you extricate the paper in a way that does not damage your printer’s internal mechanics.

Specifically, check the manual for advice on how to get to where the paper is stuck (an access door or release lever), and how to remove the sheet–ideally, in one piece, as removing smaller bits can be a real pain.

If you can’t find your manual, the basic rule of thumb is to pull gently on the paper in the direction that it would be exiting–i.e., forward, not backward, in the paper path. If you can’t get the whole piece of paper, look carefully for the stray scraps and extract them with tweezers, as they could cause another jam.

When it comes to paper jams, they’re easier to prevent than to fix. Start by taking good care of your paper–make sure it is stored smooth, dry, and flat. Do not feed folded, dogeared, torn, or otherwise less-than-perfect paper into your printer.

Also, don’t let paper sit for more than a day in vertical-feed trays, as the pages can bend slightly (affecting their ability to feed smoothly) and the pressure of the paper on the rollers might affect the rollers’ functionality.

Finally, adjust your paper tray to fit the paper you’re using. A carelessly set width or length guide can affect how the paper feeds and possibly cause a jam.

If you’re having problems with print quality: Start by checking your printer drivers for the following settings:

o Paper type: Make sure your paper type matches what you’re using. Paper weight, for instance, can affect how a printer adjusts its rollers to pull the paper through, and also how long a laser or LED printer “bakes” the page. Using “plain” vs. “photo” paper will affect how much ink an inkjet uses to create an image.
o Quality level: the different levels of print quality, from “best” to “normal” to “draft,” affect the speed, precision, and ink usage of the printer. Using draft mode would be reasonable (and economical) if you’re just printing something casually for brief or internal use–such as a map, or a document you wish to proofread. Print using the “best” setting for documents you plan to show to the public, or for a formal letter or nice photo.
o Document type: Some printers let you specify whether you are printing a memo, a newsletter, or a photo, and automatically adjust settings to fit.

Also, most printers these days have their own maintenance functions that will realign and clean the printer heads. Run through those once or twice and see if that helps.

If your printer is printing slowly: A handful of different factors could be slowing down your print speed. Here’s what to look for.

First off, check to make sure you’re not printing in a high-quality or “best” mode, which will take longer than a default or draft mode.

Depending on what you’re printing, your connection to your printer might be bottlenecking the print rate. Wireless connections can be affected by distance from the printer, airwave interference, and physical barriers, and USB connections have narrower bandwidth than ethernet connections.

If you print run-of-the mill documents, largely text and some photos, than a wireless or USB connection should be adequate. If you print complex or high-res graphics or have a lot of people trying to use the printer, ethernet is better suited for bigger or busier traffic.

Also, most consumer printers rely on your PC to process the print job, so if your PC’s memory and processor are already heavily taxed your jobs will take longer to process.

If a printer does have its own memory (usually one designed to work in an office), check to make sure there is enough memory to handle the complexity and quantity of jobs you are sending to it.

Did problems begin after you started to print a lot more than usual? Check the printer’s monthly duty cycle to see how much it’s designed to push out.

If you started off with a consumer-level printer designed to print perhaps up to a few dozen pages a day, but you are now printing a hundred or more pages a day, your old printer is probably struggling to keep up. If you are printing 25 percent or more of the monthly duty cycle spec, then you should probably get a printer with a higher monthly duty cycle.

How to Fix Your Digital Camera

While you can’t open up a camera or camcorder and fix it quite as you can with a PC, you still have a number of ways to prevent camera or camcorder issues from ruining your perfect shot or cinematic masterpiece.

If your memory card isn’t reading or writing properly: Some memory cards–usually SD cards–have a small notch that can lock the card in “write-protected mode.”

If your card has that switch, try flipping it back and forth–it might be stuck. If the switch is broken, however, you can’t do much besides buying a new card.

Sometimes cameras have problems using memory cards that have been formatted for use in other cameras. In that case, back up your data on the card and reformat it in the new camera; you should then be good to go.

If you’re having image-quality problems: Repairing a point-and-shoot camera’s lens or image sensor typically isn’t worth the time, effort, or technical expertise needed, so if yours was damaged you’re probably looking at getting a new camera. However, you can try a few other things before buying a new camera.

First off, wipe the lens with a soft dry rag (don’t do that thing where you breathe on it first–the moisture can fog the lens over time) to clean it.

If you’re seeing a lot of “noise” in your images, see how a few shots at a lower resolution come out; if your camera has a smaller lens and a high-megapixel image sensor, you might be better off shooting at a lower resolution unless you absolutely need high-res images for large prints. Also, check your ISO settings (if your camera lets you tweak them)–read “Eliminate Noise From Your Photos” for more tips.

If your audio feed is crackling: Your external mic connector might be loose. Secure the connection, and try again.

How To Fix Your Smartphone

Lots of things can go wrong with a phone. We can’t fix your network reception or your billing complaints, but we can help you get the most out of your smartphone.

If your phone won’t turn on: Pop out the battery and try another one, if possible, or try connecting it to a power adapter or powered USB port. It’s not always a power-related problem; if you unlocked your phone or flashed it with custom firmware, that can interfere with the normal boot process, but not with its “PC mode” functions, which might let you restore the original firmware.

If you can’t connect to your service network: You might just be in a dead zone–and you can’t do anything about that. However, if your voice service is working just fine but your data service won’t connect, try switching your phone into Airplane Mode (for Android phones, you can usually just press the power button once to bring up a menu and select Airplane Mode), and then back into regular mode to reset your data connection.

If your phone is slow or crashing: More apps and more data on your phone mean more problems. Both BlackBerry and Android users will want to grab a process viewer/task manager app and a file manager app to help keep your phone as clear as possible.

Android users can check out ASTRO File Manager (it’s both a task manager and file manager), while BlackBerry users might want to try PB TaskManager ($5) and File Manager Pro ($5).

If your battery is draining too quickly: Batteries don’t live forever, and if you’re using your smartphone to play music, keep up on Twitter, and give you driving directions while you’re taking a call, it’s not going to last long at all.

However, it might also be running down prematurely because you have unused apps and processes running in the background, so a task manager app will help you eke a little more juice out of your phone.

Also, turning off services like GPS and Wi-Fi when you’re not using them will help, as will sticking to Wi-Fi for Web browsing when you have a usable network.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Fix a Windows 7 System That Randomly Freezes
• Update Firmware On Your HDTV, Camera, Smartphone, PC
• Keep Your PC Awake, Install Apps Fast & More–Free
• Use Facebook Places
• My Keyboard isn’t Working

By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
April 21, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Sue Koost wants to get video from her PC to display on her television.

This could be very easy. It could also be impossible. It all depends on what connectors you have on both the PC and the TV. Here are your most likely options, from the best to the worst.

HDMI to HDMI: If both devices have HDMI connectors, you’re in luck. One simple cable will give the best picture and sound that your TV can handle.

If you don’t get any sound, you may have to change Windows’ audio output device settings. In Windows 7 or Vista, right-click the speaker icon in the system tray and select Sounds. Click the Playback tab and select Digital Audio (HDMI).

PCI to HDMI: If your computer lacks an HDMI connector, it might still have PCI. With the right adapter or cable, this will work just fine. I’ve seen adapters for as little as $10.

These two standards send and receive identical digital video streams, making them easily compatible. The only differences: DVI carries no audio signal, and the connector looks funny.

The adapter takes care of the funny-looking connector, but you probably can’t get sound from your computer to your HDTV if you’re going over DVI. The television was built on the assumption that an HDMI signal would carry its own audio, so there may be no audio inputs associated with the HDMI connectors.

The solution is to bypass the TV speakers. If you have a separate receiver (a good idea in a home theater), plug your PC’s audio output into that. You may need a Y-adapter audio cable with a one-eighth-inch stereo mini plug (like the one used by your headphones or earbuds) on one end, and two standard RCA audio connectors on the other. Or you can set up some computer speakers.

VGA to VGA: If your PC lacks HDMI and PCI outputs, it almost certainly has a VGA connector. And I have yet to see an HDTV without a VGA port (which it may identify as RGB, PC, or RGB PC). VGA can send any signal your PC and HDTV can handle.

At least, it can if you get it to work properly. Getting a good VGA signal on a television involves tweaking settings on both the PC and the TV. Start by reading the VGA section of your HDTV’s manual.

How successful you’ll be, and how much work that success requires, depends on your TV. My experience is that newer sets are pretty much plug-and-play in their VGA connection, but older ones give you grief. Some simply cannot give you a decent picture.

Not all HDTVs supply an audio input associated with the VGA connector. If yours doesn’t, see the last paragraph of the PCI to HDMI section above.

S-Video to S-Video: If both devices have an S-Video connector, and they share nothing better, buy an S-Video cable and connect them. Then use a Y-adapter audio cable to connect your PC’s audio to the audio inputs associated with the TV’s S-Video connector.

This is a strictly analog, standard definition setup. Your TV will get nothing digital, and nothing HD. But it’s simple and it works.

None of the above: If none of these matches work for you, you’re out of luck. You’re not going to get that particular PC working with that particular TV. Sure, you can buy a VGA to S-Video connector; I’ve tried several. I’ve yet to find one that worked.

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By John Rizzo
Macworld.com
April 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - There are three good ways to share a single hard drive between Macs and PCs for general storage and backup: You can trade a USB hard drive between them; you can use a network-attached storage (NAS) device (such as Apple’s Time Capsule); and you can also use file sharing to back up data on one system to an external drive attached to another system.

Swap a USB Hard Drive

Macs and PCs both have USB ports to which you can connect a removable hard drive. The only sticky issue is formatting.

If the drive is formatted for the Mac (using HFS Extended or a variant), Windows won’t recognize it. You can fix that by installing Mediafour’s $50 MacDrive 8 on the Windows system; it enables Windows to use a Mac-formatted drive natively.

If the hard drive is formatted in the Windows NTSF format, it will mount on the desktop when you plug it into the Mac, but you won’t be able to copy files to it. OS X can read NTFS drives, but it can’t write to them. You can fix this by installing Paragon Software’s $32 NTSF for Mac OS X. If you’d prefer to save money–and if you’re adventurous–you can try two free programs: NTFS-3G for Mac OS X and MacFuse, which must be installed together.

There is a third format that both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write to natively: FAT32. It’s also the format that most USB flash drives use. FAT32 has some limitations: It can’t store files bigger than 4GB, you can’t boot a Mac from it, and it’s slow. If you want to use FAT32 on a shared USB drive, use Mac OS X’s Disk Utility to erase and reformat a hard drive in what Disk Utility calls MS-DOS (FAT).

Connect to NAS

Macs and Windows PCs can use almost any networked-attached storage drive over a wired or wireless network; Apple’s Time Capsule is actually one of the best choices for shared backup.

Time Capsule is formatted as a FAT32 drive, so Macs and Windows PCs can both read and write to it. For file transfers, it supports the SMB protocol (used by Windows and Linux systems) as well as the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP).

The Time Capsule installer CD-ROM includes Windows versions of AirPort Utility and the Bonjour Printer Wizard, so the PC can set up and manage the Time Capsule and any printer attached to it. No Windows version of Time Machine exists; any Windows backup program should do.

Most non-Apple NAS devices are also formatted as FAT32, but you should check before you buy. You may be able to reformat an NTFS NAS device later. Non-Apple NAS devices usually support SMB file sharing only. If you can’t see such a device in the Finder, try typing its network address–smb://ipaddress–in the Connect To Server dialog box.

Share an External Drive

The third way to share storage between Macs and PCs is to plug a USB or FireWire drive into the Mac, and then have the PC back up to it over the network using file sharing.

The only difference between this and the file sharing described earlier is that you must specify the external drive on the Mac while the drive is connected.

To do so, open the Sharing pane in System Preferences. Select File Sharing in the left column. Click Options, make sure SMB is selected, then click Done. Back in the Sharing pane, click the plus-sign (+) button under the Shared Folders column. In the left panel under Devices, select your Mac, then select the external USB drive. Click the plus-sign button. You can now set the read/write privileges for the shared drive as you would for any folder.

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
MArch 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Kurt asked the Answer Line forum about buying a PC for his home theater
If your PC will stay in the home theater, get a desktop. Price and expandability will be more important than portability.

Beyond that, pretty much any medium-priced desktop should pack enough power. My test PC–a low-end custom-built job made last summer–does the job just fine. And it has only integrated Intel G45/G43 graphics and 2GB of RAM. At the very least, go for a Windows 7 Windows Experience Index of 3.5 (mine is 3.7). To find a PC’s index in Windows 7, click Start, right-click Computer, and select Properties. Click the Windows Experience Index link.

One feature your PC must have for hassle-free home theater service: an HDMI connector. That shouldn’t be too much trouble; they’re pretty standard these days–at least on desktops.

For an operating system, go with Windows 7 Home Premium. Why? Windows Media Center, that’s why. With a very TV-like interface, it gives you a DVR, Netflix-on-demand, television programming from assorted Internet stations, and other goodies.

Speaking of a TV-like interface, you’ll need a remote control. Generally speaking, PC remote controls are three-piece affairs: you get the remote itself, a USB-based receiver you plug into the PC, and software. If you stick strictly to Windows Media Center, you probably don’t need the software. SnapStream Media’s Firefly Mini remote is pretty nice.

What else you need depends on what you want to do with your PC. A USB tuner like Hauppauge’s WinTV-HVR 950Q will allow you to record over-the-air and basic cable broadcasts, turning your PC into a DVR. Two such tuners will let you record two programs at once. However, you can’t use a PC to record satellite or premium cable programming.

You can also add a Blu-ray drive to your PC for about $65. I have to admit that I haven’t tried this myself, so I can’t compare the experience to using a regular Blu-ray player. Past experience, however, suggests to me that it wouldn’t be as trouble-free an experience.

Which brings up a whole other issue you may want to consider: A great many new Blu-ray players, such as the Samsung BD-P3600 and the LG Electronics BD370, come with support for various Internet video services. You can generally watch Youtube, Netflix-on-demand, and one or two pay-per-view services. Some Sony players come with support for all sorts of services, many of which you’ve never heard of. You might want to consider buying one of these instead of a PC. You won’t get every Internet video source, like you could with a browser, but a player is cheaper and much easier to set up and use with a remote control.

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By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
March 17, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Practically any modern PC can handle the functions of almost every piece of hardware in a typical home theater: cable box, DVR, Blu-ray player, even stereo amplifier. What’s more, the PC can do things that no cable box can–streaming Netflix movies, playing your entire music and photo libraries, burning recorded TV shows to DVD, and much more.

It all starts with a having a system that runs any version of Windows 7 other than Starter; all such versions of the operating system include Microsoft’s powerful Windows Media Center software–a couch-friendly home-theater interface that beautifully complements your HDTV. Once you’ve made established the necessary connection (see “Stream Media From Your PC to Your HDTV” if you’re not sure how to do this), you have the makings of a killer entertainment center. Now you just need a few accoutrements.

Add a CableCard for Cable TV

Windows Media Center has always had an Achilles’ heel: It can’t tune in premium or HD cable channels. Enter CableCards, which give you all the functionality of a cable box in the form of a compact card that slips into a special tuner. Until recently, though, it was hard to find one of those tuners to add to a PC.

But things are changing. Vendors like Ceton and Silicondust are starting to roll out user-installable CableCard tuners. Ceton’s Digital Cable Quad-Tuner Card ($399), for example, lets you record up to four shows at once, including premium channels. Because it’s a PCI Express card, you’ll need an available expansion slot on your PC–and the skills to venture inside with a screwdriver.

We’re also jazzed about the Silicondust HDHomeRun CableCard ($249), an external dual-tuner device that connects to your home network, enabling you to share premium-cable goodness with all of the Windows 7-powered PCs in your home.

While you’re waiting for these tantalizing products to reach store shelves near you, you can tune in to over-the-air HD and/or basic cable channels by using any of a number of available tuners from AverMedia and Hauppauge. Two good bets: the AverMedia AVerTV Hybrid Volar Max and the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q.

Grab a Blu-ray Drive

Windows 7 lacks native support for Blu-ray movies, but that doesn’t prevent you from installing a Blu-ray drive. A couple of caveats, though: Your video card needs to have the horsepower to run smoothly at 1920 by 1080 resolution, and it needs to have an HDMI port or HDCP-compliant DVI port. Otherwise, Blu-ray movies won’t play.

Suitable software is another requirement. Both Corel WinDVD Pro 2010 ($60) and CyberLink PowerDVD 9 Ultra ($80) offer Windows Media Center integration, meaning that they add a Blu-ray option to the standard menu system. With such integration in place, you won’t have to get out your mouse or keyboard and shut down Media Center just to play a Blu-ray movie.

As for the drives themselves, internal models are available from the likes of LG, Lite-On, Plextor, and Sony for less than $100. Any of these drives should be able to replace the DVD drive already installed in your PC. If you’d rather go external, drives from Plextor (like the PX-B310U shown above) and Velocity Micro are good bets; any of these models plugs easily into a USB port. Plan on spending closer to $200 for an external model.

Don’t Skimp on the Speakers

No man-cave home theater is complete without a world-class (or at least den-class) audio system. Smaller rooms can get away with traditional speakers, but a larger room needs a amplifier/speaker combination. Either way, make sure that your PC has an SPDIF output so you can enjoy true digital sound. If it can’t handle SPDIF, consider upgrading your sound card–an operation that can be as simple as plugging in a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Amiga USB Sound Card ($40), which adds a digital output to any PC.

If you’re outfitting a smallish room, the plug-and-play convenience of PC speakers such as the Logitech Z-5500 ($400) is pretty compelling. This 5.1-channel setup (translation: five satellite speakers and a subwoofer) pumps out an amazing 505 watts of surround-sound power–more than enough to blow your hair back (and forward again) during screenings of Inglourious Basterds.

If you want more power and versatility, you’ll have to spring for a home-theater receiver–and of course, speakers to go with it. We don’t have space here to look at the endless options and permutations available, but you should be able to find the gear and the advice you need at your local home-theater store. (Note: Any modern receiver you buy will have SPDIF inputs, the one essential criterion in making the media-center connection.)

Extend Windows Media Center With Your Xbox 360

If you’d rather not make a big, bulky desktop PC a permanent part of your living room décor, consider working instead with the Xbox 360 that’s already there. Right out of the box, Microsoft’s game console can double as a Media Center Extender, reproducing the entire Media Center experience–TV, music, photos, and all.

The interface looks and operates exactly as if you were sitting in front of your PC. And there’s no added The only overhead is the one-time setup procedure linking Xbox and PC.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to watch Blu-ray (or even DVD) movies via your Xbox. (Thanks, DRM.) Also, you can’t use PC speakers with an Xbox–so if you want killer audio, your only practical option is to add a receiver to the mix. And finally, your Xbox will need a wired connection to your home-network router; wireless just doesn’t cut it, especially for streaming high-definition video.

Don’t Forget the Remote Control

Ready to hit the couch? You still need one crucial accessory: a remote. We’ve long been partial to the Logitech Harmony One, which incorporates a color touchscreen for performing multitask activities (such as turning on the TV while switching the receiver to the proper mode). It works especially well with Windows Media Center, since many of its buttons map perfectly to the interface.

If your PC lacks an IR receiver, however, you’ll need to add one. Our advice: Head to eBay and search for “Windows Media Center remote.” For as little as $15, you should be able to find a bundle that includes a remote and a receiver. You can use the former if you want or stick it in a drawer as a backup.

Finally, if you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can go the app route. For just $5, HippoRemote Pro provides full control over Windows Media Center. You don’t even need an IR receiver–just a small Windows utility that permits your Apple device and your PC to communicate over your Wi-Fi network.

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By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
March 10, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Imagine my horror the other day when I saw an otherwise sharp friend of mine shut down his laptop by holding down the power button until the system turned off.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” I cried. “Why’d you do that?”

“What? I was just turning off my PC,” he replied innocently.

Sometimes I forget that some of the stuff I take for granted isn’t common knowledge. So in case you’ve been committing this same heinous shutdown crime, allow me to enlighten you.

That is not, repeat, not the proper way to shut down a PC. The proper way is to click Start, Shut down. (I know, it’s ridiculous that after all these years, Microsoft still forces you to use the Start button to end your computing session.)

Alternately, you can press (and immediately release!) the power button, which will either shut down your PC or put it in sleep/hibernate mode, depending on how Windows is configured. (To change that configuration, see Change the Function of Your Laptop’s Power Button.)

The only time you should press and hold the power button is if your computer is locked up and otherwise unresponsive. A five-second press will usually force a “hard” power-off, after which you should wait another five seconds before turning the machine back on.

But if you do this all the time, Windows won’t be able to perform its necessary shut-down housekeeping stuff, and ultimately you’ll muck up the OS.

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By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
February 10, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - I routinely use my local coffee shop as a temporary office–and judging by the number of other laptop users I see there, I’m not alone.

Invariably I end up needing something on my home PC–a file, an e-mail stored in Outlook, a Web link I bookmarked, or whatever. If only I could access that system from afar!

I can. In fact, there are many solutions that afford remote access to other PCs, but I’ve yet to find one I like better than oldie-but-goodie LogMeIn Free.

All you do is download and install the small LogMeIn utility (which is available for both Windows and Mac), set up your account and password, then leave your PC running when you leave the house.

To connect from afar, just open up a browser (on any Internet-connected PC), head to the LogMeIn Web site, and sign into your account. Click the big green Remote Control button, enter your password, and in a few seconds you’ll see your home PC’s desktop right inside your browser. (The first time you do this, you’ll need to install a browser plug-in, which is quick and painless.)

You can now interact with your home PC just as if you were sitting at it. (I recommend maximizing the LogMeIn window within your browser so you can enjoy a full-screen interface, which is much easier on the eyes.) Keep in mind that everything will seem a bit slower than usual, which is simply a by-product of remote access. Also, graphics may look a little splotchy, as LogMeIn intentionally reduces Windows’ color depth to improve performance.

If you do maximize the LogMeIn window, you’ll need to move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen (near the center) to access its toolbar.

I can’t tell you how many times LogMeIn has come to my rescue. I’m also a fan of the LogMeIn Ignition app for iPhone, which provides the same incredible remote access right on my handset. (Alas, it’s a little pricey at $29.99.) Confession: I’ll sometimes fire up the app to remotely shut down my downstairs PC, just so I don’t have to run the stairs.

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By Reynaldo R. Vicente
Computerworld Research Director

AMID the prevailing harsh business climate resulting from the global economic crunch, the country’s largest technology users – the Premier 100 – continued to spend more on technology. Although cost considerations and changing market conditions influence the group’s investment decisions, many enterprises opted to acquire new or additional hardware to meet their requirements and to stay competitive this year.

Based on the results of the IT infrastructure installation survey conducted by the Computerworld Philippines Research Group from August to October 2009, the Premier 100 reported a combined hardware installations of 216,007 nodes, consisting of 161,236 desktop personal computers (PCs); 36,661 terminals, thin clients and personal digital assistants (PDAs); and 18,110 notebooks/laptops. The group had a server installed base of 9,475 nodes, of which 42% were found in the sites of the 19 banks included in the list. Based on these figures, the Premier 100 posted a node-to-server ratio of 23:1, which meant that, as of end-October this year, they had 23 units of either PCs, terminals, thin clients and PDAs for every server installed. Five establishments reported five-digit computing nodes, four of which even surpassed the 10,000-node level. Forty-six companies on the list had hardware installations numbering in four-digit figures while 49 had less than 1,000 nodes.

The Computerworld Philippines’ Premier 100 is based on an annual survey of computing resources among the country’s top corporations. Survey forms are sent to these corporations, but only those that send back the accomplished forms and agree to be interviewed are included in the annual ranking. The rankings of these users are determined by the number of their computing devices or nodes, which represents the number of personal computers/workstations, notebooks/laptops, and terminals, personal digital assistants, and thin clients installed in the company.

BANKS: STILL MAJOR IT USERS
The banking sector, represented by 20 banks, continued to be the dominant technology user among the sectors, reporting total computing nodes of 83,912 to account for 38.85% of the Premier 100’s aggregate nodes. These devices consisted of 64,040 desktop PCs, 17,570 units of terminals, PDAs and thin clients and 2,302 notebooks/laptops. The sector also accounted for the biggest server installations at 73,983 units. Consisting of 34 companies, the manufacturing sector placed second with nodes totaling 43,919, composed of 26,657 desktop PCs, 10,165 terminals, PDAs and thin clients and 7,097 notebooks/laptops. The information technology sector, with six organizations on the list, was third with hardware count reaching 26,010 units. The wholesale and retail sector was fourth biggest IT user with IT installations base of 13,712 nodes. The Ayala-owned Bank of the Philippine Islands maintained its position as the country’s top IT user despite an unchanged in its hardware inventory level. The bank posted hardware installations totaling 17,200 nodes, broken down as follows: 5,000 desktop PCs, 200 notebooks/laptops, and 12,000 terminals and thin clients.

From fourth position last year, Banco de Oro Universal Bank, one of the country’s largest universal banks, placed second after its computing resources rose to 16,000 nodes this year, from last year’s 12,000 units.

While Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. retained its third position with 13,000 computing nodes, the government-owned Land Bank of the Philippines climbed one step higher to fourth place with hardware count reaching 10,200 nodes. Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co. took the fifth slot with a PC installed base of 10,000 units. While Home Development Mutual Fund, Philippine Airlines and ICT Group retained their previous year’s ranks, the country’s top utility firm Manila Electric Co. and storage producer Fujitsu Computer Products Corp. of the Philippines (FCPCP) lowered their ranks. Meralco, with 6,030 nodes was relegated to the ninth position, from second last year, when its hardware installations were slashed by 45% from 13,400 units last year. FCPCP, which ranked ninth last year, down one notch lower to tenth slot with 6,000 nodes.

IT PENETRATION
An important indicator of IT penetration is the node-to-employee ratio which shows the extent to which IT has pervaded the organization. This, of course, depends on the number of employees or users an enterprise or a sector has. With only two firms representing it, the non-bank financial intermediary sector led in terms of IT penetration, having three computing nodes for every employee. Next in rank was the real estate industry with two nodes distributed for each employee. On the other hand, the agriculture; community, personal and social services; and the transportation and storage sectors bring up the rear with a node to employee ratio of 1:2, which means that a node is being used or shared by two personnel.

Among company users, Home Development Mutual Fund, or the so-called PagIbig Fund, has the biggest IT penetration ratio of 4:1. The company has in its possession 4,550 terminals and thin clients, 4,500 desktop PCs and 200 notebooks/laptops being operated by its 2,500 workers. Second was the Coca Cola Export Corp. with an IT penetration ratio of 3:1, justified by its computing installations totaling 1,050 nodes that are currently utilized by 300 employees.

On the other hand, Del Monte Philippines, Inc., with 7,000 personnel and 1,150 computer nodes, registered the lowest node-to-employee ratio of 1:6. It was followed by HBC, Inc. and Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. with the same node-to-employee ratio of 1:3. A total of 30 firms reported that the number of PCs (both desktop and notebooks/laptops) deployed in their organizations exceeded the size of their workforces. The group was led by the country’ telecommunication giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company which has a total PC installations of 12,800 units. In terms of PC penetration, however, it was JDH (Phils.), Inc. which reported the highest with a ratio of 2:1. JDH (Phils.), with 200 workers, deployed 400 PCs in its worksite.

ONLINE BUSINESS
Boosted by the mounting opportunities provided by the World Wide Web, Internet penetration still receive the greatest importance, with 99% of users already connected to the ‘Net. The Intranet technology was also adopted by 88 companies to have a faster sharing of information within their organizations. Through Internet connection, 72 firms disseminate data by way of virtual private network (VPN) while 81 establishments in the Premier 100 utilize the remote access technology. Twenty six companies have installed extranets to connect them to their customers, suppliers and partners. More than one-third of the Premier 100 was enticed to conduct business online, whether it is through business-to-business or business-to-consumer transactions.

Meanwhile, majority or 67% of the biggest technology investors are connected to the Internet thru leased line; digital subscriber line (DSL) was the choice of 35% while four percent uses the E1 connection. Other Internet connections being utilized by users include dial up, cable and proxy server. Both local and wide area networks were widely distributed among the Premier 100, particularly in banks and manufacturers, which connect them to their branches and other offices as well. Other IT environments deployed in the Premier 100 include the following: voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) which was installed to 57% of users; virtualization, which allows users to perform tasks with less hardware and costs, was utilized by 34%; while Web conferencing was used by 33%.

PLATFORMS & APPLICATIONS
The Premier 100 deploys a mixture of operating systems, databases and messaging platforms in their worksites. However, the survey indicated that most enterprises favor Microsoft more than any other brands. Microsoft Windows was still the most common operating system (for both workstations and servers) in use among the biggest IT users. Among client OSes, Windows XP was the most popular as 95 firms use it; Windows Vista came second with 51 establishments patronizing it while 45 users had Windows 2000 installed in their offices. Windows 98 was still the preference of 28 entities while Linux is currently in use in 17 firms. Windows NT was still present in 10 companies. Windows XP was prominent in the sites of both the banking and manufacturing sectors.

In the server OS segment, 89% of the top users preferred Windows 2003. This OS was mostly installed in banks and manufacturers. Coming in second with 53 users was Windows 2000 which continued to hold a substantial share of the market. With 30 users, Linux OS was third in terms of preference, followed by Unix with 20 firms utilizing it and Windows NT, installed in 16 organizations. Versions of Solaris, Novell Netware, OS/2, AS/400, and MacOS were being used by a smaller number of firms. In the messaging system category, it was a toss up between two Microsoft versions, with MS Exchange coming out as the most widely used. MS Exchange was utilized by 44% of the Premier 100 as against the 31 users of MS Outlook. Twenty nine companies employed IBM Lotus Notes, while 12 firms installed IBM Lotus Domino. For the database management software segment, the competition between MS SQL and Oracle in terms of user-base remained tight. Although MS SQL was adopted by 83%, Oracle was not far behind as it was used by 54 entities. IBM DB2 was reportedly installed in 21 firms while MS Access was still supported by 13 users. Other DB management platforms that are currently deployed in the Premier 100 were Sybase (7%), Informix (3%), Progress (2%), and Adabas (1%).

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
Meanwhile, the most widely installed network technology among the top IT users was the gigabit Ethernet, a network infrastructure which is capable of transferring 1,000 megabits per second. As of November this year, this technology was installed in 69 establishments. Switched Ethernet, a network which runs through a high speed switch that can dispatch 10 megabits per second, was supported by 60 firms while fast Ethernet was still in use by 51 companies. Fast Ethernet is an Ethernet capable of transmitting 100 megabits per second.

Wireless LAN was currently adopted by 46 enterprises while Ethernet network technology was still gaining acceptance from 34 companies. From among the e-mail antivirus/antispam software inthe market, Trend Micro was the popular choice of 41% of respondents. Symantec came next with 27 user-companies while McAfee was preferred by 15 firms. Other antivirus software being utilized by the Premier 100 include Kaspersky (7%); Sophos (5%); Norton (4%); and Fortigate (1%).

IN THE PIPELINE
Meanwhile, survey respondents revealed that they are likely to deploy new technologies because of the pressure in businesses to drive for a new level of operational efficiency but with reduced IT spending. Represented by 25% of the Premier 100, these users will deploy virtualization technology which allows them to perform tasks with less hardware and thus, less electricity consumption. Virtualization can run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, thus increasing the utilization and flexibility of the hardware.

Both consolidation and open source technologies got the approval of 18% of users, saying they will install it in their sites in the next 12 months. While 16% will support business intelligence in the future, data center will be deployed by 12% of users. Other technologies which are likely to be deployed by users are Service-Oriented Architecture (9%); Software-as-a-Service (7%); Green IT (5%); and Voice over IP (1%). On the other hand, 33% of respondents said they still have no plans of deploying new technologies in their worksites.

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By David Murphy
PC World (US)
December 14, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Like the Vaio LV180J all-in-one that it replaces, the new Vaio L117FX/B has great performance, a Blu-ray drive, an HDTV tuner, a media center remote control, and a gorgeous 24-inch display. But this time around, Sony has included a multitouch screen, Windows 7, and a design that’s sleek and modern.
The Vaio L117FX/B starts at $1300; we tested a high-end, $2000 (as of December 8, 2009) configuration. At that price, you could score a standard tower desktop that has greater performance and upgradability, but such is the nature of all-in-one PCs.
This Vaio ratchets up the Intel processor to one step past that of the 2.33GHz quad-core chip found in the Gateway One ZX6810-01–a $1400 23-incher that also has a multitouch screen and a TV tuner (but no Blu-ray). However, despite its combination of a 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q8400S processor, 6GB of DDR2-800 memory, and a 1TB hard drive, this Sony AIO in some ways doesn’t surpass the Gateway in performance.
Both systems earned a WorldBench 6 score of 105, the best general performance by an all-in-one without an Apple logo. For comparison–as tested using 64-bit Windows 7 and Boot Camp–the $2200 Apple iMac (27-inch/Core i7) scored 128 in WorldBench 6, while the $2000 iMac (27-inch/Core i5) notched 123.
The Vaio also delivers strong gaming performance for an all-in-one, but falls behind the Gateway and the iMacs. Still, its 69 and 41 frames per second in our Unreal Tournament 3 tests (at 1024-by-768 and 1680-by-1050 resolution, respectively; high quality) make it better suited for gaming than most all-in-one-desktops.

The Vaio’s picture quality is as lush in its saturation as it is strong in its contrasts within a scene. That’s partly thanks to the screen’s glossy finish, which does much to amplify the perceived richness of the images–almost too much. It’s very easy to catch a reflection of yourself in this display, let alone any nearby light source. Meanwhile, the built-in speakers definitely sound better than your average laptop. It won’t shock and awe you, but it’s a sweeter sound than what most competing all-in-one desktops can offer.

External port connections are extensive. The side of the screen has two USB and a FireWire 400 port, plus separate slots for a Memory Stick and a standard SD card. Three more USB ports are on the back, along with one optical audio output, a gigabit ethernet port, an RF connector, an HDMI input, and a composite video input. Sony clearly wants this system to become an essential part of your living room setup, which is possible to do in a wireless fashion thanks to the Vaio’s integrated wireless-N connectivity. An included Blu-ray reader/writer rounds out the system’s high-definition multimedia capabilities. Except for a faster connection standard like eSATA, it’s difficult to think of other pertinent connections that the Vaio could offer. On the other hand, you may wish for more upgradability: You could upgrade the hard disk in the previous Vaio all-in-one, but this time around you’re limited to notebook-style RAM upgrades.

The bundled keyboard and mouse are mostly generic, but are styled to match the Vaio’s dark color and straight edges. They’re both wireless, and the keyboard has extra buttons to access PC functions such as volume controls, sleep mode, and zooming. The keyboard can also tuck away in the gap provided beneath the display.

Sony’s Vaio VPCL117FX/B matches the cheaper Gateway One ZX6810-01 in general performance, and both have a TV tuner. The Vaio is larger (a 24- versus a 23-inch multitouch screen) and includes a Blu-ray reader/writer. But the Gateway comes out ahead in gaming performance, and it costs $600 less. If money is not an issue, however, then by all means feel free to splurge.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
November 18, 2009

ALBAY, BICOL - Investing in PC refresh every three years, rather than waiting for the hardware’s end-life, is optimal for most firms to get the most value out of their investment, an executive from chip innovator Intel Technology Philippines urged Friday.

Speaking at the Synergy 2009 Forum jointly organized by Intel and HP in Cagraray Island, Albay, Bicol, Ricky Banaag, Intel Philippines country manager, said three years is the ideal time frame for a refresh strategy because most warranties phase out after that designated period.

“Most devices are already out of warranty after the third year, driving support costs up and heightening operational costs in the process,” Banaag explained. Among many support cost drivers due to a lag in the refresh cycle include out-of-warranty repair, deployment of new applications, service packs, updates and patches, and hardware and software malfunctions.

Banaag said most companies are missing out on potential benefits of newly-developed computing technologies if they refuse to upgrade their hardware systems after the optimal timeframe. “New PCs can be a lot more secure, protecting companies from security incidents that add to the risk factor of firms,” he stressed.

According to independent data from Wipro Consulting shared by Banaag during the forum, security risks usually increase by the fourth year of the product life cycle, escalating to as much as 87% by the fifth year.

Innovations such as Intel’s vPro technology, Banaag shared, shield PC’s from potential risks brought by the increasing number of threats each year. “vPro’s inherent proactive security, embedded manageability and energy efficiency will help the computing environment more secure,” he noted.

More importantly, Banaag emphasized, refreshed PCs help firms save costs by delivering business functions at a faster and more efficient rate. “Companies can save as much as $3 million and reduce operational costs by 50% if they make the decision to upgrade on their third year versus the fourth year,” he said.

The same data from Wipro Consulting reveal that companies are sticking to their normal refresh rates, or are speeding it up, even in the midst of the global economic downturn. At least 60% of companies polled—composed of 106 firms in North America & Europe—said they have not altered their refresh policies, while a small yet significant 8% said they are speeding up their refresh rates.

“Companies are taking advantage of new technologies that deliver better TCO, that’s why they are investing on a refresh despite the downturn,” Banaag suggested. “Tech refresh offers a viable scenario for sustaining growth during the crisis.”

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Now here’s a multi-tasking tablet with a youthful style. Sporting a clean white finish with an orange outline, the Genius EasyPen i405 is both professional and trendy. A graphic tablet especially made to make drawing and painting easy with a working area measuring 4″x5.5″, the EasyPen i405 is convenient for writing, sketching and even signing emails.

EasyPen i405 works with both PC and Mac. It features 1024 level pressure sensitivity with the pen tip moving precisely with your hand so you can control the thickness to suit your purpose. The pen is storable. There’s a clip on the right side of the tablet where you can attach the pen when you’re not using it.

EasyPen i405 has 28 programmable shortcut keys, which you can set to do instant-access on your Office or Internet functions. So whether for creative design or for signing important documents, EasyPen i405 is perfect for you.

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By Sumner Lemon
IDG News Service (Singapore Bureau)
July

SINGAPORE - Shipments of graphics chips surged during the second quarter, bucking seasonal trends as hardware makers gear up for an expected uptick in PC sales.

On a quarterly basis, sales of graphics chips jumped 31.3 percent, to 98.3 million units sold, analyst firm Jon Peddie Research said Monday, noting that graphics chip sales usually decline during the first two quarters of the year ahead of a mid-year slowdown in PC sales. Normally, graphics chip sales don’t start to pick up until the third quarter as hardware makers gear up for the year-end selling season.

“This year preparation seems to have gotten off to an early start,” the research firm said in a statement.

Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia both saw strong gains in second-quarter shipments of graphics chips, but Nvidia saw its overall share of the market slip while AMD’s grew larger. AMD’s market share increased to 18.4% from 17.1%, while Nvidia’s share dropped to 29.2% from 31.1% during the period, Jon Peddie Research said.

Intel, which sells chipsets that include integrated graphics cores rather than stand alone graphic chips, saw its share of the overall market grow to 50.3% from 49.7%.

“It’s clear the channel is gearing up for what it thinks is going to be a robust back-to-school season,” the statement said, pointing to the upcoming release of Windows 7 and the Snow Leopard version of Apple’s MacOS X as factors that will help drive PC demand higher.

Windows 7 is due in October, while Snow Leopard will ship in September.

The surge in shipments of graphics chips is yet another sign that PC sales may regain their footing after being knocked flat when the global economy slowed last year. IDC, which released preliminary numbers for second-quarter PC shipments last week, said it expects computer sales to continue growing during the second half of this year.

“New product launches in the second half of the year combined with seasonal growth and greater economic confidence resulting from factors such as government stimulus, a more liquid housing market, relatively stable stock market and interest rates, and progress in the auto and financial industries, should support the expected return to growth by year-end,” IDC said in a statement.

Even as IDC expects PC shipments to rise higher, they believe a recovery will be uneven. Much of the demand for PCs in recent months has come from consumers, with most companies still refraining from buying new computers or replacing old ones.

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By Ronald James P. Panis
Computerworld Philippines
July 23, 2009

THE Intel and the Commission on Information and Communications Technology or CICT’s joint initiative to upgrade espousal of personal computers locally has just undergone an upgrade.

Presently dubbed as “Nettop Ng Bayan 2.0,” this more than a year-old partnership of the Philippine government’s lead ICT agency and chip manufacturer giant carries nettops (simplified desktops purpose-built for Web surfing, streaming videos, researching online, or even playing online games, among others) that are now powered by Intel’s Atom N720 processor. Primarily found on mobile devices, the Atom processor is lauded for providing high performance at low power consumption.

The program proponents also bolster this energy efficient platform by replacing the CRT monitor previously used during the first phase of Nettop Ng Bayan with a 15” widescreen LCD. These, while bundled with a 80GB hard disk, a 1GB memory, keyboard and mouse as well as options for additional memory, accessories and operating systems – all of which at an SRP as low as P10,800, a similar pricepoint as that of last year.

Noting the technology touch up, Intel Technology’s Philippines country manager Ricky Banaag believes how it aids their goal to “provide a solution to help bridge the digital divide [locally] by increasing the rate of PC adoption in urban and rural areas.” With the lower costs proposed by the Atom processor and the LCD monitor, Banaag explained that they expect to attract first-time PC buyers as well as mature buyers and avail themselves of Nettop Ng Bayan 2.0 units, hence helping boost PC penetration in the Philippines.

“We feel that first time PC buyers will use this for educational purposes, or communicating with relatives abroad, and so forth. This is a cost-efficient, affordable vehicle to do that. [The same goes] for mature buyers as well, who are looking to add another PC at home for the kids… This feels like a relevant solution for such situations,” Banaag said.

The Intel executive also noted that they intend to be as broad as possible when it comes to their target market.

According to CICT Chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, albeit the mobile phone industry continues to be a “runaway success story here” and the Philippines remains the SMS capital of the world, Internet penetration is among the country’s biggest challenges. “We remain to be one of the lowest in the region and the whole world. Broadband penetration is much worse. Tied-in to this is PC penetration – [we are also among the lowest] in Asia Pacific,” Roxas-Chua reported.

“Nettop ng Bayan 2.0 comes into play here because the target is to make PCs more affordable… Hopefully if the price continues to drop, PCs will be a staple in every home,” he said.

Business development manager for Intel Carlo Subido also highlighted the importance of Nettop ng Bayan 2.0’s inexpensive tag, which he opined as similar to the price of new cellular phones, a 21-inch TV or even a Magic Sing microphone for karaoke sessions, a Pinoy pastime. “What we need to tell the public is how useful it is to have a PC at home. They don’t want to buy PCs not because it is not affordable – but they think it is not worth it. We are hoping that people will be attracted by the price and be curious enough to buy,” Subido noted.

“There are a lot of benefits that can mitigate the cost of having a PC. The more people are aware of the benefits, the more investments will be made. We are also hoping to drive the costs so low that they will finally invest on it,” Roxas-Chua added.

The CICT Chairman also pointed out that Nettop Ng Bayan 2.0 fits like a cog in the agency’s ICT advocacies, particularly that of the Convergence 2009 Road Show, which aims to promote the Next Wave Cities within the Philippine Cyber Corridor. “The whole point of the Road Show is to create an ICT ecosystem [in the Philippines]. We want to bring Internet access to the community and one of the projects is the Community e-center program, which will provide online access to people for free or for a very cheap fee. Nettop Ng Bayan 2.0 is going to be part of this initiative because we want to make PCs more affordable so that everyone who want to be connected can afford to do so,” he said.

With a beefed up number of reseller-partners nationwide, from last year’s 10 to a current total of 26, Banaag indicated they are ensuring a nationwide coverage for this initiative.

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