Desktop PC Buying Guide

When buying a new computer you may consider what you want to use your new desktop for and your budget. Are you an avid photographer looking for a speedy but cost-effective platform for editing high-resolution photos? Are you just a basic computer user, surfing the net and checking e-mails everyday and making some reports and presentation?  There are three major categories of desktop, each with its own range of price and performance: compact PCs, all-in-one PCs, and classic tower PCs (budget, mainstream, and performance). Each style of machine has different strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the one that’s best for you depends largely on how you plan to use it.

1. Compact PCs

As the smallest members of the desktop computer family, compact PCs often omit features to deliver computing power in a space-saving package. The combination of energy-efficient components, quiet operation, and small size makes compact PCs ideal for people who want a nonintrusive machine

2. All-in-One Desktops

All-in-One PCs are self-contained: components are mounted behind a display, with screen sizes ranging between 18- and 27-inches. With no cords to manage or peripherals to juggle, setting up your new all-in-one PC can be as simple as pulling the machine out of the box and plugging it in.

3. Budget PCs

A budget tower desktop carries standard desktop components, older hardware or inexpensive, low-end processors. Typically, these PCs are minitower systems, with fewer drive bays than a full tower has.

4. Mainstream PCs

Higher up in the desktop chain, you’ll find machines aimed at mainstream users and carry at least 500GB hard drives and about 4GB of RAM. Powered by dual-core and lower-end quad-core processors, they deliver better performance than budget desktops, without breaking the bank.

5. Performance PCs

Occupying the high end of the spectrum are performance desktops.  Most performance PCs are full tower systems, equipped with a slew of drive bays and expansion slots. Designed to tackle challenging tasks, they come equipped with the latest and greatest Intel and AMD dual- and quad-core processors, 6GB or 8GB of RAM, and at least one discrete graphics card.

Kingston Launches HyperX External USB 3.0 SSDs

The HyperX MAX 3.0 has a read speed of up to 195MB/sec., and a write speed of up to 160MB/sec., when paired with a USB 3.0 compatible device. It is also fully compatible with USB 2.0 devices, but the speed defaults back to USB 2.0 capability.

How to Turn Recent Items On or Off in Windows 7

Recent Items is a list of your recently used files on the right side of the Start Menu, Taskbar Windows Explorer icon link, in the Navigaton Pane Recent Places, and in Jump Lists. This will show you how to turn Recent Items on or off in Windows 7.

C:\Users\(User Name)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent Items

If you go to the Recent Items folder location above and you have a yellow folder named Recent instead of one named Recent Items with a icon, then right click on the Recent folder and click Delete. Type shell:recent in the white line (Start Search) area of the Start Menu and press Enter. Logoff and logon, or restart the computer, to rebuild the folder back to the default Recent Items. Recent Items will not function correctly if is not set as the default Recent Items folder.

 Turn Recent Items On or Off

1. Right click on the Start button and click on Properties.

2. To Turn Recent Items On.

A) Check the Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar box.
(See screenshot below step 4)

 NOTE: If you just turned on Recent Items, then it may take a bit after opening the recents items a few times before they actually show up.

B) Go to step 4.

 3. To Turn Recent Items Off

A) Uncheck the Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar box. (See screenshot below step 4)


4. Click on OK. (See screenshot below)

Add or Remove Recent Items from the Start Menu

NOTE: This will allow you to add or remove the Recent Items button from the right dark side of the Start Menu. If you add it, then you will need to turn on Recent Items on OPTION ONE above to have them listed.

1. Open the Start Menu Customize window.

2. Scroll down a bit, and check the Recent Items box, and click on OK. (See screenshot below)

3. Click on OK.

Asus' Sabertooth P67 Mobo Has a Tactical Vest

  

Asus revealed some of its upcoming motherboards and one of them in particular caught our eye.
It's an upcoming P67 that'll support Sandy Bridge CPUs, and it has what Asus calls the "Tactical Vest."

USB 3.0 Is Even Better Now

USB 3.0 devices can deliver data to and from PCs in a hurry. But you already knew that. What makes these new USB 3.0 devices even better?

1. Cirago CDD2000 USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station.

- Works with SATA drives

- Stays cool

- Nice design

- Excellent transfer speeds

- Quick set up

- No activity LED

2. Iomega eGo

- Lots of storage space

- Rubber bumper

- Good transfer speeds

- Included software and encryption

- Three-year warranty

- Clunky and heavy

- Requires extra slot for power for USB 2.0

3. Cirago CST6000

- Sleek aluminum case

- LED transfer light 

- Light

- Small capacity

- One-year warranty

- Slow

- Separate power cable for USB 2.0

4. Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Flash Drive

- Rugged design

- Doesn’t require separate power for USB 2.0 transfers

- Five-year warranty 

- Fast

- Heats up

- Chunky case

5.LaCie 2big USB 3.0

- Beautiful design

- Three RAID modes  

- Fast

- Three-year warranty

- Comes with USB 3.0 card and software

- Gets warm

The new gaming keyboards

The new gaming keyboards from Logitech, Razer, SteelSeries, Thermaltake and Gigabyte. Five will enter, one (or maybe two) will leave.


1. Logitech Gaming Keyboard G510

 

 2.Thermaltake Challenger Pro

 3. Gigabyte GK-K8100 Aivia

 

 4. Razer BlackWidow Ultimate Mechanical

 

5.SteelSeries 6Gv2 Mechanical

Googler Offered $3.5M to Turn Down Facebook

It's a common trick of the trade. You're looking for a raise but your employer won't give you one. So, you tell them you're going to go work for a competitor, hoping they'll so scared of losing you to the competition, they'll offer you more money to stay. Well, I don’t know if that was this Googler's plan when he told his employer that he had been offered a job at Facebook, but he definitely got offered a very handsome bonus to stay in Mountain View.

TechCrunch reports that Google recently offered a staff engineer $3.5 million in restricted stock to stop him leaving for Facebook. It's not clear whether or not this person had already received a job offer from the biggest social network in town, but Michael Arrington writes that he was being "heavily romanced" by Facebook.

TC reports that this isn't the first time this has happened. In fact, though the search giant won't make a nice counteroffer for everyone trying to leave, Google will often go to great lengths to stop staff leaving for the likes of Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn. By the sounds of things, this particular deal is bigger than the rest. That $3.5 million in restricted stock will vest over time, so it's not surprising to learn that the engineer reportedly accepted and stayed at Google. Wouldn't you?

Read more about Google's method of retaining engineers and other valuable members of staff on TechCrunch.

Source: TechCrunch

Nvidia Powers China to Get Fastest Supercomputer

Hopefully the battle of which nation has the fastest supercomputer will become the new space race, though we doubt that there will be as much public interest this time around.

China is now home to the world's fastest supercomputer (30 percent faster than the best in the U.S.), and it's partially thanks to Nvidia.

Revealed at HPC 2010 China is the new supercomputer called Tianhe-1A, which has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today.

Tianhe-1A couples massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, using 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs. Nvidia is proud of its GPU contribution as it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone.

More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient -- the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year.

Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. The system is housed at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin and is already fully operational.

"The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs," said Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. "The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results."

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.

"GPUs are redefining high performance computing," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. "With the Tianhe-1A, GPUs now power two of the top three fastest computers in the world today. These GPU supercomputers are essential tools for scientists looking to turbocharge their rate of discovery."

Palit GTX460 Sonic 2GB

Palit Microsystems Ltd. introduced the GTX460 Sonic 2GB, its latest entry in the GTX 460 series. As the name implies, the card provides 2GB of GDDR5 high speed memory clocked at 3.6 GHz on a 256-bit memory bandwidth. The card also has a factory-overclocked core speed of 700 MHz--25 MHz higher than the reference speed.

What is Windows XP Safe Mode?

What is Windows XP Safe Mode and why is it needed? Windows XP Safe Mode is a way for Windows XP to load when there is a problem that prevents it loading normally. It allows you to trouble shoot Windows in order to determine what is preventing Windows XP to load properly.

When windows XP cannot load properly it may prevent you using some of the utilities such as System Restore that will return the system to a previous state. Booting in Windows XP Safe Mode bypasses the loading of a lot of programs, one that may be causing your problem.  You may have just installed a program that has caused you windows to load incorrectly. Booting in windows xp safe mode gives you the opportunity to recover from this by de-installing the program.

So how do you get into Windows XP Safe Mode? To get into safe mode reboot your computer. As the computer is booting keep pressing the “F8 Key”. You should find this usually in the top row on your keyboard. Doing this should eventually bring up the “Windows Advanced Options Menu” as shown below. You will find your mouse is inoperative so you will have to use your keyboard arrow keys to move to “Safe Mode”. Press the enter key on your keyboard to invoke Windows XP Safe Mode.

Windows Advanced Options Menu
Please select an option:

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Safe Mode with Command Prompt

Enable Boot Logging
Enable VGA mode
Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)
Directory Services Restore Mode (Windows domain controllers only)
Debugging Mode

Start Windows Normally
Reboot
Return to OS Choices Menu

As your computer is booting up in Windows XP Safe Mode, you will get the option either to go to the System Restore menu, or continue to boot to the safe mode of windows xp. To exit Windows XP Safe Mode all you have to do is restart your computer.

There are a few options for booting up in Windows XP Safe Mode, they are:

Safe Mode

This is the basic Windows XP Safe Mode option and is what most users will want to choose when troubleshooting their computer. In this mode you can perform basic Windows operations such as using the control panel.

Safe Mode with Networking

There are times when you may need access to the Internet to download drivers to replace one that is causing problems or other software.

Safe Mode with Command Prompt

This Safe Mode boots and allows you to use the command prompt. (MS-DOS prompt). This should only be used by advanced users.

You should practice booting in Windows XP Safe Mode so you get familiar with it. You do not want to be caught short if something happens to your system and then find you have problems entering it. Don’t worry you can’t stuff anything up practicing this.

Now you know how to invoke Windows XP Safe Mode and have fixed your problem you may want to learn how to defrag your hard drive.

What is hard disk cloning?

 We have all heard about cloning animals and somewhere even humans have been tried. But what about cloning the hard disk drive of your PC. Cloning is creating an exact copy of your hard disk onto another hard disk. With hard disk cloning you can copy your PC's hard disk, every last bit of it, and then use that disk as if it was the original.

Hard disk drive cloning is something that you need to do to safeguard not only your data but your complete operating system as well. Hard drives go bad sometimes, and other times you may want to upgrade to a bigger hard drive or even move to a more powerful PC. Either way, wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a new hard drive and make it an exact replica of your old one. Cloning your hard disk drive will do this for you.

The easiest way to clone a hard disk drive is to use a good hard drive cloning software. If you use cloning software, all you have to do is install the disk, follow its instructions and then it will start the cloning process.

Your other option then is to store it on a DVD, if it can fit, or the hard drive you actually plan on copying it to. To do this you need to have the disk in a disk USB enclosure or actually installed in your PC.

The hard disk drive cloning procedure is preferable to just a simple backup of your data. If the disk fails and you only have a data backup you would have to reinstall Windows and all the applications you had installed. With a cloned disk drive you not only have a replica of you original disk but you can even retrieve individual data and files from it if you have accidentally deleted.

Periodically cloning a hard disk drive means that you would always have an up to date hard drive clone. So if anything should happen, you can just boot from your other hard drive.

Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750

Logitech release the new and futuristic keyboard. A keyboard that powers itself whenever there’s light using integrated solar panels — no power bricks or charging cables needed. But, even though it’s powered by light, the keyboard can operate for up to three months in total darkness.