Home & Small Office Computer Guide

A blog like Home and Small Office Computer Info is never going to delve too deeply into anything related to its subject simply because it’s here to give you an overview of a very broad-ranging topic.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t point you in the direction of some blogs that do delve deeply into more narrowly defined topics.

If you are interested in the new Windows operating system that is due for release next year, once known as Longhorn but now known as Vista then there is no better place to start that the Windows Vista Weblog.

Microsoft have huge number of projects set to roll out in the next 18 months and if you want to keep up with all those goodies then keep in touch with the Unnofficial Microsoft Weblog.

Both blogs are run by John Evans, lover of homeless sea gulls and all things related to Windows

If you’re in the market for a graphics card where you’re emphasis is on gaming then you probably know that you can seriously destroy your bank balance when it comes time to part with your hard-earned cash.

But a recent release from Nvidia might help to slightly improve things on the financial front and improve the gaming graphics on your computer.

The GeForce 7800 GTX is capable of making most of those system intensive games that are so popular today run smoothly and it can also handle high definition video without a problem. To achieve that sort of performance the card carries 246mb of onboard GDDR3 RAM.

The card comes with dual heads so you can run two monitors from the card but it is PCI Express only so check with a computer expert to make sure that it will run with your other hardware before parting with your cash.

And it does cost real money in the US the card retails for $599 - but the performance is wonderful.

Many of you will have heard of keyloggers - those nasty little trojans that sneak into your machine and record every key you press, convert it to code and then email it to some far away place so that people can steal your secrets.

Well keylogging has just taken on a whole new look and has moved into the realm of the almost unbelievable.

It seems that the sounds from typing on a computer keyboard are distinctive enough to be decoded. That means that you don’t access to someone’s computer to know what they’re typing. All you need is a microphone close enough to pick up the sounds if the keys being depressed.

Researchers at the University of California are claiming an accuracy rate of 96% and that includes overcoming background nose from music, talk, ringing phones etc.

Now on one level that raises some very interesting security concerns but on another level I wonder how many people hit the backspace key more frequently than any of the other keys?

It has to be one of my favourite keys

Everybody wants a faster Internet connection but at the moment DSL or even 56kb is just a pipe dream for many. However things may be getting close to changing and that fast internet connection that you’ve always dreamed of may be no further away than your nearest wall socket.

Several years ag0 a company in the UK experimented with connecting subscribers to the Internet via the power lines but problems arose and the experiments were shelved. Then last year Aurora, the electricity supplier in Tasmania tried again and found that it was Internet connections via the power lines were quite possible and the download speed was described by one person as ‘blisteringly fast.”

Since then all has been quiet up until just recently when Google got involved. It has now entered into a joint venture with another company to fund the roll out of BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) across the USA.

So it could be soon grasshopper … soon.

The latest edition of Australian Computer Magazine is suggesting that Microsoft “has effectively conceded that a pirated copy of Windows is as good as the real thing” and anyone silly enough to use a pirated copy can now come in from the cold.

It is going to cost you of course but for $238 Microsoft will now sell you a serial number for Windows XP Pro. It seems that the purchase option is offered when someone using a pirated copy goes to Microsoft to download updates.

If you’re hanging out for the latest Xbox from Microsoft the release date has finally been announced.

Tuesday, Nov. 22 in North America, Friday, Dec. 2 in Europe, and Saturday, Dec. 10 in Japan

And what about Australia?

It seems that back in June Steve Ballmer - the number 2 at Microsoft and well-known hurler of chairs - was speaking at a meeting in Sydney and made this bold prediction:

“In the next six months, we’ll catch Google in terms of relevancy”

Knowing Microsoft’s ability to keep to deadlines I think we shouldn’t really expect anything like that in the foreseeable future.

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft but just lately I have been slowly moving towards appreciating Microsoft more and more.
This strange transition started not long after I downloaded and installed Firefox as my browser of choice. I have to say that at first I loved Firefox - it has some fantastic features that make life very easy for someone who makes his living from working on the Internet. And those features were missing from IE.

However, it also had one or two quirky little problems that I was learning to live with. For example, if you went to a site to stream a movie Firefox could not do it. The best you could hope for was to download the movie to your own machine and watch it from there.

But that was ok until just recently when I, and others, began to notice that Firefox was becoming even more buggy with each update. For example, when you are looking at this page in IE it will look very different to what you would see in Firefox. In Firefox the text would be bigger and the link colors would be darker.

If I try to make the text bigger for IE viewers then it becomes so big in Firefox that it can display in very bizarre ways that I won’t bore you with here.

And then came this morning. I went to a blog to download a podcast and found that the blog owner had provided several links so that I could either stream the podcast direct from his site or download it - as I wanted to do. So in Firefox I clicked on the download link … and found that it began streaming. And when I clicked on the streaming link … you guessed it. It began to download.

Ok, maybe the blog owner got the links wrong so I checked it in IE and in IE the download link downloaded and the streaming link streamed.

That may not seem like such a big problem but when you have a tool that you use for business then you want that tool to work the way it is supposed to do. It’s a productivity thing - time is money etc. etc.

Internet Explorer may not have all the bells and whistles that Firefox has but at least it works the way it’s supposed to work so maybe it’s time to go back to the tried and tested tools. Just because they carry the Microsoft brand doesn’t mean they don’t work.