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Maybe You Already Have Wireless and Don’t Know It?

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:26:16 +0000

More and more laptops and desktop computers are coming pre-equipped with wireless networking devices — it’s so cheap that they might as well put it in, to have another thing to list in the system specifications. It is easy to tell if a desktop computer has wireless enabled. Have a look at the rear panel for a small antenna. If its there then you have wireless. Laptops a much more difficult to diagnose.

If you’re anything like me, though, you probably don’t even know how much memory your computers have, never mind whether any of them came wireless-enabled. When you don’t know what wireless networking is, it’s easy to ignore it in a computer’s specifications, and never take the time to set it up and get it working. Here are some things to look for if you want to check your computer’s wireless capabilities.

Intel Centrino

If your laptop came with something called ‘Intel Centrino mobile technology’, then it’s good news for you! Computer manufacturers seem a little bad at explaining what this technology is or does, but it basically means that your laptop has wireless networking built right in, without you needing to do a thing. It is a marketing name for a combination of the Intel Pentium M processor and Intel’s Pro/Wireless card.

Your computer should have a ‘Centrino’ sticker on it somewhere if it is Centrino enabled. If you think you might have taken the sticker off, you can check the name of your processor by right clicking the My Computer icon on your desktop (or in the Start Menu) and choosing Properties from the menu that appears. Take a look at what it says after the word ‘Computer’ on this screen.

If you’re interested, Centrino technology also increases battery life and allows computers to be smaller. Don’t worry, though, if you didn’t buy a Centrino laptop — as long as your laptop has a free card slot, installing wireless on it will be no trouble.

Desktop Computers

If you’re not sure whether your desktop computer has a wireless connection, the easiest thing to do is to turn it around and look at it. If a wireless connection is present, you should usually be able to see a small aerial sticking out of the back of the computer, towards the bottom.

If there’s nothing there, then it’s still possible that you have a wireless device in the computer, especially if you bought it recently and you think you do. It’s not a good idea to try to open up your computer just to check something, though, so you should probably try and figure it out using Windows.

Checking in Windows

Instead of fiddling around with your computer hardware to see what you’ve got, you can check easily enough using Windows’ Device Manager. To use it, right click My Computer, and choose Manage from that menu. Now click Device Manager.

You should see a list of all the different kinds of things you can install on your computer. Take a look under ‘Network adapters’. Ignore anything that says ‘10/100′ or ‘Ethernet’ — they’re normal network connections, but not wireless ones. If there’s anything else there, it could be a wireless device.

If you think you have a wireless device, but it has a yellow warning sign next to its name in the Device Manager, you should take a look at it to see what’s wrong by double clicking its name. Windows should tell you why the device is not working at the moment, and may suggest that you go through its troubleshooter program. Do that before you do anything else.

If it turns out to be a driver problem, you should insert the drivers CD that came with your computer. Of course, as is always the way, you probably won’t be able to find that CD — but don’t worry, you should be able to find drivers online. First, you should look on the website of the computer’s manufacturer, and then you should try searching for the name that the wireless device had in Device Manager.

Of course, you might find after all this that you don’t have a wireless device after all. Hard luck. It’s better to figure that out now than to buy wireless equipment and then realise you had some already, though, isn’t it? Of course, even if you did find a wireless device in one of your computers, you probably still need more. Don’t worry either way — they’re getting cheaper all the time!

By: Tony Fitz

Used Laptop Computers Finest Product For Students!

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:11:01 +0000

Changes in New Educational Environment give youth this thought to only grab their Laptops and join class; nobody needs plenty of paper, pens, erasers, pencils, notebooks and highlighters except your own Laptop. It is gift of today’s fast speed technological world.

Used laptop computers:

The student of present needs the handy laptop; the desktop computers are not convenient anymore. Some of the features incorporated in a laptop are not unconditional and are negotiable. There are different students who will have need of different memory, graphics and accessories.

The main feature that is to be discussed is the Memory. The standard ram and hard drive will be more than enough for the common college going student. Hence, if you are studying in computer graphics or any course related to programming you might necessitate much more high-tech memory system. Electro computer warehouse (http://refurbishp4.com/)guides you according to your educational need.

The following features might required in your system:

DVD R/RW
CD-RW
Wireless
USB Ports
1 SD Port
1 Fire wire Port

1 or 2, 2 GB USB jump drives:

Even though the USB jump drives are not to be 2 GB, it’s a very suitable size to instigate with and keeping two will be very practical approach. These USB drives are very functional for transferring data from one to another place.

MP3 Player or iPod:

The mp3 player is one of the latest and most recent study utensils with multiplicity of uses. The most significant use is to record lectures and then listen anywhere you want to. It’s also helps you to download music, data and your favorite videos.

1 or 2, 4 GB SD Memory Cards:

Store your information on SD Memory cards for trouble-free access and portability. SD cards take tiny space and can be elated very easily from one place to another, consider getting a micro SD with an adapter it will useful for laptop, your mp3 player and the digital or web camera.

The Scientific Calculator:

If you are science student, mathematics or pre-medical you defiantly need a scientific graphing calculator. Don’t go for plain calculators or other scientific calculators. You only required a graphing calculator.

This Article provides enough help for students to get their own Laptops now! Good luck for all…

3 Home Wireless Network Points

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:21:39 +0000

Now a days having a wireless network available to you is more normal than abnormal. Many reasons have led to this change, one being cost. It is very cost effective so set up a wireless network as opposed to a wired network.

Because of the rise in wireless network popularity, more and more computer manufacturers are equipping their systems with the right wireless networking hardware. I am going to discuss 3 big points, wireless networking in laptops, desktops, and also the software on these machines

So we start off with a very important question – Is your laptop or home computer wireless enabled? This is how you can check if your computer has wireless capabilities or not.

Laptops

Many newer laptops have wireless networking capabilities already built in to them. If you laptop came with the hardware built inside of it, then all you need to do is make sure it is enabled and the button on the front (usually) of the laptop is lit up. If a wireless PCMI card is needed in the laptop computer, then make sure it is compatible with your brand of computer first. When you install it, make sure you have the driver disk associated with the hardware, and that it’s driver matches what version of Windows you have.

Desktop Computers

If you need to check to see if your desktop computer has a wireless connection, turn off the computer and turn it around and look for a rod sticking out near the bottom of the tower. This would be the wireless antenna just like an antenna would be on a radio. If you see nothing like this then your desktop probably does not have a wireless card installed in the PCI slot. So buy one that matches the version of Windows that you have on the desktop.

Windows to check the Wireless Capacity

Once everything is installed on your laptop or desktop you want to use windows to check the wireless capacity to make sure the settings are correct. Open up the Device Manager in Windows. Look for the network adapters + sign and click it. Look for something under there that should have the term “wireless” attached to it. If you see that there then you know everything has been configured correctly and all you need to do is connect to the available wireless network.

By: mark dewolf

Is Cloud Computing anything new?

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:10:40 +0000

Cloud Computing is a buzz word that has recently taken the web hosting industry by storm, but is Cloud Computing really anything new? The basic concept of Cloud Computing is to remove the burden of heavy processing and memory consumption from the client or end user systems and take care of the heavy tasks “in the cloud” using a very dynamic cluster server. Dynamic meaning that the cluster server may be comprised of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of machines. A downed machine can simply be removed and replaced without affecting the daily operations and file storage of the cloud. The method by which this is achieved is certainly new. The concept however is a return to the days of old before the PC revolution came into full swing.

Throughout the 70’s and 80’s computers were more often quite large centralized machines. This is in a time when super computers did most of the work. These super computers were monstrous and a single computer would easily fill an entire room. More often than not employees who did work on computers would use low end systems or “dumb terminals” that had little number crunching power of their own. These dumb terminals would simply provide an interface to the computing monstrosity in the next room. This was a necessity at the time since the more powerful desktop computers of the day often lacked the resources to handle the tasks necessary in daily work. These super computers or “mainframes” housed the expensive large quantities of memory, hard disks and processing power. This allowed businesses to minimize costs by purchasing dumb terminals at a fraction of the cost of the more capable workstations and still get the job done.

Of course technology improved and the PC revolution swept into our homes, schools, offices, and into our daily lives. Research into computational technology, memory and storage devices improved and miniaturized computers exponentially year after year after year. It become more expensive to maintain the “big iron” than it was to create large numbers of significantly powerful workstations or home and office PC’s. As it became more expensive to maintain fridge sized 16 and 32 processor mainframes (sometimes more) experts tried to build a cheaper solution consisting of networked home computers working together on the same tasks. These home built multi-computer systems became known as cluster servers. At this point in time most work anyone needed done could be handled by their rather industrious home PC’s. However as these fields became more advanced there was again that requirement for an outside super computer to take the reigns of the processing. Thankfully cluster servers were ready to step up to the plate.

Anyone with enough skill could build their own cluster server in their home with enough old computers laying around. Home computers had become powerful enough that when clustered, several moderately powerful computers could pull together more CPU power than a mainframe costing many times more to produce. Cluster servers soon held record breaking computational power and began to break documented records from the latest expensive single machine super computers. Clusters had the advantage of being easily expandable simply by adding another PC to the network that was set up to become a node in the cluster. This would soon revolutionize data centers around the world. Cluster servers became widely used in “render farms” for 3D animation or for studying mathematics, physics, cryptography and began taking on tasks too back breaking for even the most powerful home PC’s.

With the recent recession many people are thinking twice before spending a few thousand dollars on a machine that will be outdated within the year. Many settle for lesser computers for under a thousand dollars. These machines don’t pack the punch needed for high end gaming or productivity but they’ll do fine for school and office work most of the time. On top of that we’re seeing new initiatives for cheaper computers particularly with ambitions to create “the hundred dollar laptop” and to put a laptop in the hands of every child on the planet so that all have the ability to learn and be part of the digital age. To create these cheaper computers we’re coming full circle back to a time when the expense and power of individual machines can’t be justified among the masses. These cheap computers would ultimately be impractical for all but the simplest tasks but thanks to the concept of Cloud Computing they are quickly becoming a reality.

These new machines bare some resemblance to the idea of old dumb terminals. In some ways Cloud Computing is just todays buzz word for a “mainframe” except that Cloud Computing is across multiple machines in any number of locations whereas an old mainframe is a single mega-machine. For example an old mainframe existed in one location and you would never think of relocating it. The mainframes could only scale in terms of power and processing as much as their motherboards had room for. With Cloud Computing the cluster can scale in theory to any number of machines. Those machines don’t even have to be in the same room or the same country. A modern version of a mainframe might consist of hundreds or thousands of individual computers networked together and they may be working together from several different locations across the globe. If one data center goes out the Cloud keeps running minus a few horsepower.

Cloud Computing may not be as new an idea as the industry would have us believe, but it does provide some innovations and open some doors that old mainframes never could. Cloud Computing is only going to grow as many businesses try to find their niche and revenue by providing cloud hosting or cloud based applications. Google remains on the forefront of this with their constantly innovative suite of on line tools including Gmail, Google docs, and many more. One of Googles biggest Cloud Computing ambitions however is to bring Africa and the 3rd world into the information age.

All you will need is a cell phone, or a PDA, or a cheap netbook with an Internet connection. The cloud will take care of the heavy processing while the tools and storage will exist on line removing the requirement for the masses to own expensive hardware of their own.

While some may find reason to hang on to their expensive PC’s, in the future many more casual computer users and light weight users will find that Cloud Computing fulfills their needs while leaving their desk space free. Even those with high end machines may need to run applications in the cloud sometimes. In some cases the demands of an application are too high for their home computers. Or it may be since Cloud Computing is making it faster and simpler to share data with others as one can with Google Docs. Regardless it is apparent that the Cloud Computing revolution is here to stay and could one day be known as the revolution that put the 3rd world on line.

By: Gary Klingsheim

Your next portable computer – netbook or laptop?

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:19:15 +0000

Netbooks are a popular, cheaper alternative to full size notebook and desktop computers. While some netbooks ship with Linux, most consumers are opting for Windows XP-based netbooks. What makes a netbook different from a notebook or desktop computer? The primary difference is size – netbooks fall somewhere between the smallest notebook computers and a large smartphone. Netbooks are also less powerful PCs – to reduce the cost. As a result most netbooks can’t run Windows Vista and ship with Windows XP (and in a few cases Linux). To save even more money some consumers install OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Netbooks are available from many manufacturers including Acer, Asus, HP, MSI, Dell, OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), Medion, Kohjinsha, Lenovo, Toshiba and others.

Netbooks have even caught the attention of Google – the search engine company – who are working with computer manufacturers on a next generation netbook based on Google’s Android platform. And Microsoft is looking for Windows 7 as its sequel to Windows XP for netbooks.

So where does that leave consumers? Should you race out and buy a netbook today with Windows XP or wait until later this year or 2010 for the Android / Windows 7 based netbooks? Or should I instead pay a bit more (likely $100 – $150) and get a full-size notebook?

Here are some things to think about:

Speed – if you are planning to run anything beyond email, basic Internet browsing and basic text document creation you should get a laptop; for the basics a netbook is good enough. And pretty much forget about gaming on a netbook – and likely most high quality Internet video. Power Typer- if you are power typer take some time to type on a netbook in a store – are you really going to put up with the smaller keyboard? If you are just tapping out Twitter updates or email messages you’ll be fine – but if you are writing your next novel the netbook’s smaller keyboard might be frustrating. Vista Experience: if you like or are used to the Windows Vista experience, look and feel and features then you only have two choices – get a full-size notebook now or wait until Windows 7 enabled netbooks come out later… and heres a catch – Windows 7 may be limited to basics for netbook use (details from Microsoft still pending). Compatibility: Linux-based netbooks have pretty much disappeared from the shelves of retailers because Linux doesn’t allow you to run popular applications like Microsoft Office. Google’s Android-based netbooks will likely have the same restriction. So if you use Microsoft Office at all stay clear of netbooks that aren’t running a Windows-based operating system (for now that means XP, later this year Windows 7).

One thing that isn’t different are problems. At support.com we deal with thousands of computer problems every day including netbook and laptop problems.

Netbook computers can be affected by the same problems as a full-size notebook or desktop computer. Because netbooks aren’t as powerful, anything impacting computer performance (like a virus or spyware, or too many installed programs) will be even more noticeable.

Common problems include:

Slow startup and/or shutdown time Frequent crashes or lockups Help getting printers and other devices / peripherals to work Problems upgrading netbook BIOS to the latest version USB devices are not accessible after being plugged in Problems transferring data to my used computer Unable to synchronize an iPod, iPhone, Treo, Centro, Windows Mobile or other portable device Problems accessing media content (pictures, videos, music) in Windows Media Player Windows Update errors preventing the latest security updates from being applied Errors with Flash, Java / Javascript, ActiveX Help connecting a used computer to a home network Frequent pop-ups and/or warnings that my PC is infected with a virus No audio or choppy audio / sound problems Problems installing and configuring anti-virus / anti-spyware software CD-ROM drive unavailable error

My advice is don’t jump out and buy a netbook just because it is $100 – $150 cheaper – it may be a great deal if you are the right kind of user. Take the time to really use a netbook in a store, understand how you will use it at home and make sure you can live with the limitations. If you can, netbooks are a great deal – if you can’t, you’ll just be returning the netbook and, at some stores, paying a restocking fee.

By: James Morehead