As you may already know, the “evil” telecom companies want to squeeze every cent they can out of you by making up fees. SMS or Short Message Service is what is usually described as texting by your carrier. In the last decade before the explosion of smartphone, SMS used to fill a gap where there was little to no connection to the Internet. SMS functioned though SMS centers hence requiring its own infrastructure.
Nowadays, this is completely irrelevant as most smartphones typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP. Meaning, if you have a smartphone, it is very likely you are being charged for something that should be covered by your data plan alone. Of course, I am not familiar with pricing from all cell phone companies; however, if you are on a “bundle” plan and texting is part of it, most likely they are just getting a bundle of money from you. Otherwise, if it is clearly spelled out as a separate fee, you might want to consider just not paying for it and using alternatives that require your data plan alone.
There are several apps out there, each one with its limitations, but with more features than SMS. So far, Kik is my favorite cross platform messaging app as it is free and it is available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and WP7. The makers of Kik are currently being sued by RIM, the maker of BlackBerry Messenger Continue reading »
As with most technologies, SSD is actually becoming affordable. There are several entry level drives that vary from $80 to $120 in price and 20GB to 60GB in size. However, I strongly advice to step it up to a bigger drive because you are going to run into several issues and annoyances if you go with a small capacity SSD.
First of all, since the drives are so small, the OS will most likely take half the space of the drive. You then install Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, or any other big app that will benefit from the performance gains and you’ll start running out of space.
Putting media in a mechanical drive should go without saying. Then take a look at hibernation, if you are not on a laptop, you might want to consider disabling it. Hibernation uses an amount of space equivalent to the amount of RAM you have on your computer. 4GB is pretty common and 8GB is starting to become the norm, meaning that would be space you will have to live without. To disable it in Windows 7, open a command prompt and type
powercfg -h offNext, if you already have something in place to regularly back up your computer, consider disabling system restore. Go to the Control Panel, select to view by Large Icons instead of Category, pick System, and then System Protection. There, you can click on the Configure button, and you will be able to disable System Restore for your booting drive.
After that there is Pagefile.sys, a file in Windows that acts as virtual memory. If you have a large amount of RAM, you can easily do away with this file, make it smaller, or move it to another drive. Simply, go to System again, click on Advance System Properties, in the Advanced tab, click on the performance section the settings button. That will open the Performance Options window where you should click on the Advance tab, then on the Change… button in the Virtual Memory Section. Some sources advocate these changes for small performance gains or to extend your drive’s life, but the jury is still out on that. For certain, they will save you space in your drive.
However, the latest intel chipset on the market, Z68, has a clever way to handle these small drives. It will allow you to use Smart Response Technology (aka SSD caching). It acts as cache for a mechanical drive. It will speed up your system automatically without having to deal with all the nuisance of a small SSD maintenance or SSDs in general.
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This build is for people who want a good quality system but do not want to research the components themselves. There is nothing taken into consideration for future upgrades. This is a PC for 2 to 3 years that will perform well and play games decently.
I have decided to pick an Intel CPU since for most purposes it outperforms AMD and I like Z68 chipset features. As you may notice there is a small SSD drive on this build. This will allow you to use Smart Response Technology (aka SSD caching). It will speed up your system automatically without having to deal with all the nuisance of small SSD maintenance or SSDs in general.
I want to provide an overall great experience so I still want good quality on all components. There are plenty of areas where money can be saved like input devices but they make PC usage more enjoyable. Most people skimp on a good UPS but I strongly recommend getting one especially for areas with a lot of thunderstorms. It helps and increases your components’ lifetime. The whole enchilada comes down to about $1450.
Components list after the break:
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If you don’t remember the days we rolled down car windows, watched the Thundercats, or actually had to remember stuff because of lack of smartphones, you might have wondered (or not!) why your main drive on a Windows box is assigned the letter C:\. Anyways, I will tell you that the letters A: and B: were usually reserved a decade or two ago for floppy drives and sometimes for removable media such as tape drives. Apple was the first one to release a desktop without it and it is usually credited with the floppy’s demise. However, it would be common to have a 5 1/4 inch A: and a 3 1/2 inch B: drive. Now, this raises the question, why aren’t USB thumbdrives assigned these letters? Hence, they have to fight with optical drives and secondary hard drives for other letters. It is sometimes a guess to figure out which letter my thumbdrive is assigned to (or not!).
Having trouble finding a quick and simple way to customize and add images to pushpins? I came up with the following.
The stardard pushpin looks pretty bad, as you can see, it is just a black square with a pointing arrow.
The easiest way to get rid of it is to set the template of your pushpin to null.
Pushpin myPushpin = new Pushpin();
myPushpin.Template = null;
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Running out of room to backup some of my stuff. I went to Best Buy to pick up a 2TB external hard drive but then I realized that hard drives nowadays have NTFS partitions on them. This was not always the case, it used to be drives were partitioned with FAT32. PS3s however are not able to read or even see NTFS drives. It might have something to do with the fact that Sony does not want to pay licensing fees to Microsoft. Sadly, Microsoft won’t make it easy for you to format your drive to FAT32. The only options you get from the GUI are NTFS or exFAT, and neither will work on a PS3.
If you go to the command line and do the following command (assuming I: is the drive you want to format) this will only format drives up to 32GB which is a limitation set up by Microsoft on Windows 7 rather than FAT32 itself.
format I: /fs:FAT32
After a little searching I found the solution to this dilemma in this little guy called fat32format that can format drives up to 2TB with no problems. I copied this file to my C: drive and I just typed:
fat32format I:
I was finally able to backup the 500GB drive in my PS3 to an external drive 
For more info on this program check out http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
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