Home & Small Office Computer Guide

… but it’s not connected to anything

by Stuart Livesey 

A strange PC came into the shop last week. It was branded Lenovo-IBM so it was obviously built by IBM after the PC division of the company was sold to the Chinese company Lenovo.

The owner had bought it locally and had specified at the time he bought it that he wanted it so he could play some games on it. The salesman assured him that this computer would do the trick and he could even upgrade the graphics if he wanted to because it had a PCI slot.

After a couple of weeks he decided that he did want to upgrade it and the place where he obtained the computer suggested that he bring it down to Fraser Coast Computers so that a PCI Express graphic card could be fitted.

Rick fitted the card, rebooted the machine and it failed to recognise the card. Rick changed the graphic card thinking that perhaps the first card was faulty and still nothing happened.

Rick tinkered for quite some time before finally admitting defeat and phoning Lenovo-IBM. Imagine his surprise when the techs there told him that the motherboard may well have a PCI slot fitted but they weren’t actually wired into the motherboard because the motherboard fitted to those computers did not support PCI slots.

When Rick asked the obvious question all the tech could do was to give the telephone equivalent of a shrug of his shoulders.

It does make you wonder.

Our favorite antivirus software is now available for mobile phones.

While it’s extremely unlikely that you will ever pick up a virus from a phone call there is nothing to stop viruses being transferred to high-end phones when they’re being sychronized with a PC.

The new Kasperksy Anti-Virus Mobile monitors wireless connections and scans text messages and data transfered during synchronization.

Why am I not surprised

by Stuart Livesey

A team of British security experts have tested 15 different antivirus programmes on Vista and four failed. One of the failures was Microsoft’s very own antivirus software package, Live OneCare.

Another failure was McAfee’s antivirus package but McAfee claims that the security experts failed to use the latest release in their tests.

One that passed the test was the one that I use and recommend -  Kaspersky

You can read the more about the test here

If you like reading ebooks but find the reader a bit hard to see at times then this could be for you. 

by Stuart Livesey

Early last year Sony released the Sony Reader but, unlike other ebook readers the Sony Reader incorporated a new technology developed by the E Ink Corporation. The result is a reader that users often describe as looking like “black ink on white paper”

Follow this link to read about the marvel that is E Ink and follow this link to read a review of the Sony Reader by someone who found that they are much tougher than they look.